Tone deaf to calls for NYPD reform, de Blasio stands by Bratton and Broken Windows policing

PUBLISHED : SAT, 23 AUG 2014, 04:53 PM
UPDATED : SAT, 23 AUG 2014, 08:35 PM

Politicians down-play calls for NYPD reform

As long as Bratton is commish and #BrokenWindows is policy, NYPD will keep ravaging community. @MattKozarTV @BilldeBlasio @CBSNewYork

— de Blasio Sold Out (@deBlasioSoldOut) August 23, 2014

NYPD Commish Bratton is responsible for the heavy-handed Broken Windows policing that harasses low-income and minority communities, claiming the life of Eric Garner As thousands of New Yorkers were collecting in Staten Island for a massive civil rights march seeking justice for Eric Garner, the Staten Island man choked to death by NYPD, Mayor Bill de Blasio was in a Brooklyn church, desperately spinning support for his controversial NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and the police department's Broken Windows approach to policing. "We have to make a lasting bond between our communities and our police," Mayor de Blasio said at the Kingsboro Temple of Seventh-day Adventist in Park Slope, Brooklyn. As the city and the nation reflect on police brutality, Mayor de Blasio reaffirmed his support for NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and the administration's contentious Broken Windows approach to policing, which many police reform advocates blame as the cause of Mr. Garner's murder while in police custody. Mayor de Blasio and other elected officials are deliberately down-playing the harsh police tactics that target people of color and low income communities. In New York, this state-sponsored race- and class-based approach to policing is known as Broken Windows. At the Eric Garner march in Staten Island, two elected officials, who some said attended in Mayor de Blasio's stead, former Gov. David Paterson and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both lowered the benchmarks for justice to the same political operative talking point : a successful prosecution of officers responsible for Mr. Garner's murder. To his credit, Rep. Jeffries did mention the role of Broken Windows policing, but there was no political pressure overtly exerted on Mayor de Blasio to end the policing approach, nor was there a call for the mayor to fire Commissioner Bratton in favor of a culturally competent replacement.

RELATED Protesters call for Bratton’s resignation in wake of Eric Garner death (PIX 11) Thousands turn out for Eric Garner march against the NYPD (The New York Post) The Neoconservative Roots of the Broken Windows Theory (The Gotham Gazette)

Tone deaf to #EricGarner march, @BilldeBlasio affirms support for #BrokenWindows and @CommissBratton. @MattKozarTV @CBSNewYork #OneTermBill

— de Blasio Sold Out (@deBlasioSoldOut) August 23, 2014

The mayor asks the city to place faith in due process, but the NYPD has routinely violated due process, and prosecutors do their own part to keep watering down due process Mayor de Blasio did his own part to downsize community expectations, telling congregants at the Brooklyn Adventist church, "We all believe in due process, fairness, a full investigation, a full legal process. We believe everyone should be treated equally in that process." Mr. Garner was choked to death by police on July 17. Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan has promised to schedule a grand jury to investigate possible charges against NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who had placed Mr. Garner in an illegal chokehold that killed Mr. Garner. However, the date of the grand jury's empaneling has yet to be announced. Mr. Garner's death has escalated public scrutiny on race- and class-based police brutality after Michael Brown was shot to death by Ferguson P.D. officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. In contrast to the prosecutorial investigation of Mr. Garner's death, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch initiated on August 29 a grand jury investigation of Mr. Brown death, but that was due to immense public pressure and a violent police crackdown on civil unrest following Mr. Brown's murder. In both cases, civil rights activists have criticised the role of local prosecutors to investigate brutality and murder by police officers. Police departments are notoriously politicised by mayors, and local prosecutors are publicly-elected officials, meaning that local prosecutors are encumbered by political consultants and local lobbyist insiders, who are often shared by other local officials, especially mayors, other prosecutors, and even some locally-elected judges. What is more, local prosecutors' rates of conviction depend on nonaggression relationships with police officers in order to successfully prosecute cases at trial. If local prosecutors go up against police departments, that conflict may potentially upset local prosecutors' other criminal cases. Consequently, critics of the local prosecutors have, in turn, requested that federal prosecutors lead the charge to investigate the murders of Mr. Garner and Mr. Brown. The political conflicts facing local prosecutors are known to federal prosecutors, who are regularly forced to intervene in controversial prosecution cases when cases consist of violations that involve significant political or government individuals, which pose problems for the local prosecutor, as high-profile prosecutions of police officers can be deemed. Under "Broken Windows" policing, plainclothes police officers are ordered to treat very low-level crimes as major concerns. Since policing tactics have focused on minor infractions and low-level crimes, like selling loose, untaxed cigarettes for 50 cents, like has been charged that Mr. Garner engaged in on the day he was murdered, and for walking on the street, as was the reason Mr. Brown was stopped by police on the day he was murdered, the judicial system has become over-run by complex cases that may have escalated from what are generally regarded as underlying nuisance charges. Public defenders, local prosecutors, and the court system rush through these cases, giving people of color and low-income defendants short shrift in the justice system, resulting in an inherent state-sponsored structure that criminalizes people based on race and income. It is this broken system in which Mayor de Blasio wants the community to place their faith. de Blasio gives lip service to NYPD's role of 'protect and respect,' but the mayor keeps expressing support for his culturally incompetent police commissioner and race- and class-based policing Critics of Mayor de Blasio have been asking for the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Bratton, an end to the Broken Windows approach to policing, and for a federal investigation into corruption at the NYPD and its Internal Affairs Bureau. However, the mayor and his teams of political operatives have thus far succeeded in limiting the community's conversation of Mr. Garner's murder in terms of improving police-community relations, a tactic that eventually failed former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after Abner Louima was brutalized by police officers in a bathroom at a Brooklyn police station. Advocates for campaign finance reform believe that Mayor de Blasio is continuing the Giuliani-Bloomberg crackdown on the poor and people of color as political payback to real estate developers, which are amongst the mayor's biggest campaign contributors and which desire the mass displacement caused by Broken Windows to support further, uncontrolled upward spiraling of real estate prices. Indeed, during the mayor's successful campaign, he very publicly aligned himself with corrupt real estate lobbyists. One real estate lobbyist, James Capalino, served as an organizer last year for a problematic $1 million fundraiser at the Waldorf-Astoria for Mayor de Blasio's campaign committee. Once elected, Mayor de Blasio has established a close working relationship with William Rudin, the corrupt boss of Rudin Management Company, the developer of the $1 billion luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's Hospital. More and more, the minority community and activists are coming to terms with how Mayor de Blasio exploited race implications of policing controversies just to get elected, leading one political blogger, Suzannah B. Troy, to predict that Mayor de Blasio may only be a one-term mayor. Adding to the urgency for NYPD reform is the work of the activist group, New Yorkers Against Bratton and other activists, who will not give up until there is an overhaul of the NYPD and many of the root and systemic causes of discrimination and brutality are fully addressed. As a result of delays and other problems with the broken judicial system, police become jaded and corrupt after serving in the force for a year or two, some political bloggers assert. Pressures to achieve justice outside of the dysfunctional court system and political manipulation of crime statistics converge to act to influence police officers to self-appoint themselves as judge and executioner each time police confront citizens, some critics of police claim. The militarization of police departments adds to the perverse concentration of resources to make arrests of minor infractions and very low-level crimes, but these resources do nothing to improve the socio-economic conditions of the communities being targeted for these "broken windows" crimes. As all of this injustice plays out for minority and low-income communities, large-scale political and corporate corruption go unprosecuted, and federal agencies, such as the National Security Agency and the Department of Justice, continue to erode civil liberties and other Constitutional protections, further reaffirming the impression that each of the justice system is stacked against both people of color and the poor and due process no longer means anything. The politicisation of the Department of Justice by President Barack Obama further erodes some activists' faith in federal prosecutors' ability to investigate police departments that have been weaponized by the Department of Defense and the N.S.A. Against these stark realities, the only failed solution Mayor de Blasio is offering is to cosmetically improve "police-community relations."

RELATED Mayor Bill de Blasio visits Brooklyn church during Garner march (Capital New York) Fatal Confrontation Heightens Tensions in Staten Island Police Precinct (The New York Times)

Bratton is culturally incompetent and pushes racist and classist #BrokenWindows policing. @MattKozarTV @BilldeBlasio @CBSNewYork

— de Blasio Sold Out (@deBlasioSoldOut) August 23, 2014

DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK

Instructions : How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account (Wiki How)

Will GOP Congressmen call for hearings to investigate Attorney General Eric Holder ?

False information from the Department of Justice tricked the U.S. Supreme Court into dismissing a case that challenged the N.S.A.'s unconstitutional surveillance program.

• RELATED : Two Senators accused the Department of Justice of lying about N.S.A. warrantless surveillance to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. (Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA * The Guardian)

If the House of Representatives, under Republican Party control, didn't have such a bad reputation, they should hold hearings into how corrupt the Justice Department has become under Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Holder's already been found in contempt on another matter, for failing to turn over documents sought by a committee investigation. If the House had its stuff together, the lies to the Supreme Court would be a natural way to force Mr. Holder to resign from the Department of Justice and to hold the Department of Justice to account. But the House Republicans are part of the problem, too.

FAA, clueless to help, grateful it was neither an American flight that disappeared, nor that the disappearance took place near America

Disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Torments Aviation Regulators More Than We're Being Told

Whenever a natural disaster, armed conflict, or a political crisis sparks anywhere around the world, the agencies of the United States federal government normally roll up rather swiftly, to lend their experience, to take charge, or to provide passive assistance. In the case of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, U.S. aviation officials can only stand down, because they appear to be as clueless as Malaysian aviation officials as to the lack of credible, concrete information about what happened aboard Flight MH370.

"The American investigators believe that the Malaysian government was reluctant to share information with them because they fear exposing their weak radar and satellite systems," The New York Times reported, noting that American aviation officials don't want any blowback directed their way, adding, in keeping with its Timesian tradition of parsing its analysis, "With few leads to go on, countries cooperating in the search have sometimes sniped at one another."

There's a bias in the media, or else just plain old lazy reporting, that nobody is asking why Boeing, the manufacturer of the missing aircraft, cannot explain or is not being asked to explain why the tracking systems failed on a plane believed to have continued its flight for several hours after last contact.

Flight MH370 disappeared two weeks ago while carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China, but the large coalition of nations working on the search for the missing jet have been stymied in every way possible, because for days they were operating on assumptions that had no factual basis and were, consequently, conducting searches anywhere the latest fad theory would point. In this situation, the United States, an undisputed leader in aviation technology and surveillance, has declined to assert leadership, because it, too, is ignorant of what happened to Flight MH370. What would be the difference if the communication equipment aboard the jet of an American airline had been deactivated, or if the disappearance of a jet had taken place in one of the oceans thousands of miles off of the U.S. coastline instead of the Australian coastline ? Probably not much, and that's precisely why the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing are keeping a low profile right now, and that's exactly why the media can only speculate about what might have happened.

As it stands, what should be more worrisome is that the equipment aboard an American-manufactured Boeing 777 failed. What do American aviation regulators have to say about the integrity, safety, and reliability of tracking equipment aboard the jets manufactured by Boeing ? Nothing. Why all the silence ?

As often as Malaysian aviation officials have been criticized for failing to be transparent about their lack of information, so, too, should the F.A.A. be pressed to admit that it lacks the same information. When will the media ask how the F.A.A. would handle the search for Flight MH370 if American aviation officials had been in charge of this investigation ? When will focus shift from the scrutiny of Malaysia Airlines to Boeing ?

• RELATED : The continuing uncertainty, with no evidence of what happened to the plane and the people on it, has tormented relatives of those on board and flummoxed aviation experts, including the Federal Aviation Administration. (Jet’s Disappearance Puzzles a World Under Constant Electronic Watch * The New York Times)
• RELATED : Speculation about what really happened on missing flight 370 has been rampant. A commercial long-haul pilot and an experienced cabin crew member discuss the possibilities. (What happened to MH370 ? Since aviation regulators are clueless, a pilot and a flight attendant give their views * The Guardian)
• RELATED : If the transponders had not gone silent on 9/11, air traffic controllers would have quickly realized that two jetliners en route to Los Angeles had made dramatic course changes and were bound straight for Manhattan. (Out of Control : Why Does the FAA Allow Pilots To Turn Off Transponders ? * The New York Times)

As the investigation turns to identifying criminal responsibility for the missing flight, will the U.S. government focus on the spectacular intelligence failure that appears to allow airplanes to remain vulnerable to criminality over a decade since the Sept. 11 attacks and susceptible to going missing almost five years since the 2009 accident that befell Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean ?

• RELATED : The Technology Is Out There,’ but Satellites Don’t Track Jets (The New York Times)
• RELATED : The mystery of flight MH370 : How can we track smartphones anywhere on earth, but a giant plane can go missing ? (Updated) (Extreme Tech)
• RELATED : Black boxes, air safety, and the need to know what happened to MH370 (Al Jazeera America)

For the U.S. government, which is caught up in a controversy over the indiscriminate dragnet surveillance by the National Security Administration, the blind spots in aviation safety patterns recent blind spots in foreign policy risks, such as the Russian takeover of Crimea. These blind spots are proof that real threats are not being assessed while the N.S.A. is wholly consumed with the distraction of dragnet surveillance -- a dangerous situation about which civil libertarians and journalists had warned would happen as a result of the Obama administrations's faulty obsession with collecting Internet data.

WATCH : WSJ Video Explains Possible Sabotage To Malaysia Airlines MH370, Conceivably Highjacked, CBS Reports

Malaysia Air MH370: Possible Sabotage to Communications System, Explained

After the jet's transponder was disabled, the communications systems on Flight 370 were cut off by "deliberate action," said Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. U.S. officials are investigating whether a third system, on the plane's lower deck, was also compromised, The Wall Street Journal's Jason Bellini explains in this YouTube video.

• RELATED : Official : Malaysian investigators conclude missing airliner hijacked (CBS News)
• RELATED : Search for Malaysian Jet Becomes Criminal Inquiry (The New York Times)

Flight 370 disappeared one week ago while carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China.

• RELATED : If the transponders had not gone silent on 9/11, air traffic controllers would have quickly realized that two jetliners en route to Los Angeles had made dramatic course changes and were bound straight for Manhattan. (Out of Control : Why Does the FAA Allow Pilots To Turn Off Transponders ? * The New York Times)

As the investigation turns to identifying criminal responsibility for the missing flight, will the U.S. government focus on the spectacular intelligence failure that appears to allow airplanes to remain vulnerable to criminality over a decade since the Sept. 11 attacks and susceptible to going missing almost five years since the 2009 accident that befell Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean ?

• RELATED : The mystery of flight MH370 : How can we track smartphones anywhere on earth, but a giant plane can go missing ? (Updated) (Extreme Tech)
• RELATED : Black boxes, air safety, and the need to know what happened to MH370 (Al Jazeera America)

For the U.S. government, which is caught up in a controversy over the indiscriminate dragnet surveillance by the National Security Administration, the blind spots in aviation safety patterns recent blind spots in foreign policy risks, such as the Russian takeover of Crimea. These blind spots are proof that real threats are not being assessed while the N.S.A. is wholly consumed with the distraction of dragnet surveillance -- a dangerous situation about which civil libertarians and journalists had warned would happen as a result of the Obama administrations's faulty obsession with collecting Internet data.

The N.S.A. spy programme is causing a growing diplomatic crisis for Obama

La N.S.A. Espionne Les Françaises by connaissable

Did White House officials approve the N.S.A.'s spying of 35 world leaders ?

The growing scandal of the U.S. spying on our European allies is threatening to engulf the White House, and, typically, administration officials are trying to protect the president from accountability for the scandal. "Inside the administration it has touched off behind-the-scenes recriminations between the White House and the intelligence agencies over how much detail was given to White House officials about which world leaders are being monitored," The New York Times is reporting, adding, "A senior administration official declined to say what Mr. Obama knew or did not know about monitoring of Ms. Merkel’s phone, but said the president 'doesn’t think we are in the right place.' " If it is illegal to spy on Germans without proper legal authority, did the Obama administration break German law by spying on the German chancellor ? If the Republicans weren't such a joke right now, they should be leading the charge to investigate these allegations.

• N.S.A. monitored calls of 35 world leaders after U.S. official handed over contacts ; NSA encourages departments to share their 'Rolodexes' (The Guardian)
• Angela Merkel and François Hollande lead push at E.U. summit to reshape transatlantic spying and agree new code of conduct (The Guardian)

The official U.S. response has "evolved" from accusing the N.S.A. contractor Edward Snowden of being a "spy," to denying reports that the U.S. has spied on European citizens, to trying to isolate the White House from legal and political ramifications of the unconstitutional and illegal N.S.A. surveillance programme. Since our own impotent reporters inside the Beltway appear to enable the Obama administration's expansion of the NSA espionage programme, then the only outside pressure that is going to make a real difference is going to be the foreign press, especially from our allies. Let's see if our allies have the courage to "draw a line in the sand" or to propose economic sanctions against the U.S. until President Obama dismantles the illegal surveillance state his administration steadfastly helped to build ? The N.S.A's espionage may now amount to acts of crime in the eyes of foreign nations. If American courts are not going to recognize the violations of law by the N.S.A., then surely the courts of our allies will.

Meanwhile, the political legitimacy of the N.S.A. surveillance programme continues to come under fire. President Obama's rationale for spying was that it was intended for foreigners, not Americans. Now that European leaders are complaining about the tracking of "foreigners," how legitimate is the N.S.A. surveillance programme now ?

(Updated : Friday 25 Oct 2013 8:20 a.m.)

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France In The NSA Crosshairs : Phone Networks Under Surveillance

I was unable to post this information as a status update on Facebook this morning, so I am sharing it here, hoping that I can link back to it on Facebook.

France summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to the French Foreign Ministry office on the Quai d'Orsay to protest allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency.

"If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that's totally unacceptable," French interior minister Manuel Valls told Europe 1 radio, according to a Reuters report published by The New York Times.

Meanwhile, CNN is also reporting that according to Le Monde, this is how the system worked : "When a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS (text) messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target -- or the meta-data." It wasn't immediately clear from the article if the conversations were being recorded or just the data surrounding each call. The CNN report added that the Le Monde investigation followed a separate report in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which showed that the NSA "systematically" eavesdropped on the Mexican government. It hacked the public e-mail account of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, which was also used by Cabinet members, according to Der Spiegel.

Separately, in an article published in English this morning by Le Monde, Glenn Greenwald shared a by-line in an article questioning why France has not been as critical as Germany or Brazil of the U.S. spy programme on sovereign nations. The article concludes with indication of the global nature of the U.S. spy programme : "One of the documents which Le Monde was able to consult notes that between 8 February and 8 March 2013, the NSA collected, throughout the world, 124,8 billion telephone data items and 97,1 billion computer data items. In Europe, only Germany and the United Kingdom exceed France in terms of numbers of interceptions."

(Originally Posted : Monday 21 Oct 2013 9:15 a.m.)

Guardian wins Gannett Foundation Awards for NSA and GCHQ Files Reporting

"The Guardian has won two 2013 Online Journalism Awards. At a ceremony in Atlanta on Saturday night, the Guardian accepted the Gannett Foundation Award for Investigative Journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award, both for its work on the issue of National Security Agency surveillance. Now working in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, since June the Guardian has investigated and reported upon NSA files leaked to it by the former NSA analyst Edward Snowden. The investigation has expanded to the include the operations of GCHQ, the British government's surveillance centre. The three journalists who broke the story were Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill," The Guardian is reporting.

"The OJAs are awarded by the Online News Association, the world's largest association of digital journalists, working in partnership with the University of Miami's School of Communication. Other winners on Saturday night included the Boston Globe, which was honoured for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing and other stories, the Texas Tribune and the New York Times," the report concluded.

Read more : Guardian wins two online journalism awards for NSA Files reporting : Guardian wins Gannett Foundation Award for Investigative Journalism and Watchdog Journalism Award in Atlanta

BBC NEWSNIGHT : Glenn Greenwald full interview on Snowden, NSA, GCHQ and spying

Exclusive interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald on Edward Snowden, the PRISM revelations and mass surveillance. BBC journalist Kirsty Wark conducted a deeply hostile interview on Thursday night's edition of Newsnight, and Mr. Greenwald defended his courageous role in standing up to out-of-control government surveillance.

• The NSA debate is as much about journalism as surveillance (The Guardian)

Edward Snowden PFC Bradley Manning Videos

REVEALED : Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance

Obama Video Taping Your Colonoscopy

From Salon :

"Now we know for sure: The Obama administration has presided over the most thorough expansion of the domestic surveillance state of any U.S. presidency. Even as the nation was still absorbing the news, broken by Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian on Wednesday night, that the National Security Agency has been routinely collecting phone call records for millions of Americans, the Washington Post and the Guardian published articles revealing even broader government snooping powers: Since 2007, the NSA and the FBI have had the power to watch nearly every aspect of our online life as well."