Tag: police state

Trudeau says he feels “serene and confident” over decision to freeze protesters’ bank accounts

In his testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to justify his use of the Emergencies Act to stop the Freedom Convoy protest by blacklisting and freezing the bank accounts of protesters supporting civil liberties.

Trudeau admitted that the protests were not violent but still insisted that he is “confident” with his decision to use a law that has never been used before to stop the protests.

“There was no loss of life. There was no serious violence. There hasn’t been a recurrence of these kinds of illegal occupations since then. I am absolutely serene and confident that I made the right choice in agreeing with the invocation,” Trudeau told the commission that is investigating whether the government’s decision to use the Emergencies Act was justifiable.

Trudeau said that the “responsibility of a prime minister is to make the tough calls and keep people safe.”

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Canada’s finance minister created a blacklist of trucking companies that participated in the protest for civil liberties

Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office distributed a blacklist of 201 trucking companies that participated in the Freedom Convoy Protest in February.

“Please find attached an excel sheet detailing which companies whose trucks are participating in Ottawa convoy demonstrations,” an unidentified employee at Freeland’s office wrote in an email, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.

“A total of 45 companies whose trucks are in Ottawa have accessed the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy out of a total of 201 companies whose trucks are publicly known as being in Ottawa. Three of the companies with trucks in Ottawa are US-based companies.”

The blacklist was sent the same day that the government invoked the Emergencies Act, February 14. The Emergencies Act allowed the government to order financial institutions to freeze the accounts of businesses and individuals involved in the protest without a court order.

“In doing so, [the financial institutions] will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith,” Freeland said at a press conference on February 14. She added that the government would freeze the accounts of trucking companies if their trucks are found to be taking part in the protest.

Blacklock’s Reporter also obtained internal documents showing that Freeland proposed that people who had their accounts frozen should first report to the police before their accounts are unfrozen.

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Inside One of America’s Deadliest Police Departments

At just 22 years old, Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed with a silenced assault rifle, fired from the back of an unmarked police car. That made him the 33rd person killed by the Vallejo, California, police department since 2000. 

When police responded to reports of a looting at a local Walgreens in June 2020, Monterrosa was still in the parking lot. He got down on his knees and put his arms above his head, as unmarked police vehicles approached him. 

But one of the officers on the scene, Det. Jarrett Tonn, says he mistook a hammer in Monterrosa’s waistband for a gun. He fired five rounds from the back seat of the vehicle he was in, one of which hit Monterrosa in the back of his head. 

“It looked like combat footage from Afghanistan,” said John Coyle, an attorney representing the Monterrosa family, referring to body camera footage of the incident. 

The Vallejo Police Department, which serves a city of about 125,000 in northern California, has killed more people per arrest than 97% of departments, according to the city’s Police Scorecard, which compares the department to those that serve a similar population size. And at its peak, the Vallejo PD’s rate of officer-involved shootings that resulted in deaths was about 38 times the national rate, according to an analysis from local news site KQED. The frequent killings have caused members of the community to lose faith in the department and even question whether they want to call the cops at all.  

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The UK plots to ban private messaging

UK’s media regulator Ofcom will get more surveillance powers than spy agencies under the Online Safety Bill, according to a legal analysis by the Index on Censorship organization.

The legislation would allow Ofcom to force tech companies to clamp down on “child abuse” and “terrorist content” by ending end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger and force all communications to be scanned.

Human rights lawyer Matthew Ryder, in a legal opinion commissioned by Index on Censorship, said that the powers that Ofcom would be afforded by the bill allow “allow the state to compel [tech companies] to carry out surveillance of the content of communications on a generalized and widespread basis.”

The regulator would not need prior authorization before making a demand to a tech company to scan messages and there would be no independent oversight over how the regulator uses its powers.

Ryder added: “We are unable to envisage circumstances where such a destructive step in the security of global online communications for billions of users could be justified.”

Communications by journalists, whistleblowers, and victims would no longer be safe. Additionally, it is not clear if Ofcom would make public the demands it issues or whether it would keep them secret.

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Family Receives $8 Million After Innocent Dad Executed On Video as He Begged for His Life

As TFTP has reported extensively, Daniel Shaver was the unarmed victim of an officer-involved murder whereby a guest at the hotel called 911 to report seeing a man with a gun. It turns out the gun was no gun at all. However, when a coward Mesa cop “perceived” Daniel Shaver with a gun, this gave him justification for murdering the unarmed father of two.

This execution of an unarmed innocent father was captured on video and despite all the facts of the situation, no one was ever held accountable — until now. This week, the taxpayers of Mesa, Arizona were informed that they would be paying out $8 million to Shaver’s family — Laney Sweet and their two children — not the cop who killed him.

A statement was released by the legal team of Sweet and Shaver’s children after the settlement was reached and it is damning (emphasis ours):

“Daniel Shaver lived, and will be remembered, as a wonderful, compassionate husband and father. His spirit endowed and embedded light and love to those around him throughout his much-too-short life. While on this earth he provided security, prosperity and stability to his wife and children. He brought a pragmatic, caring perspective to every problem he approached, and had a good-willed nature and charm.

His beloved widow and children miss him every hour of every day. They will never forget Daniel’s loving legacy, nor take for granted the cherished memories of the beautiful time they spent with him. No words can do justice to a life unjustly cut short, and no amount of money can undo the transgressions that cruelly removed Daniel from his family’s lives forever.

While this settlement helps Daniel’s widow and children with the financial stability to move forward, it does not erase the cruelty of his killing, or the malicious campaign by the Mesa Police Department—orchestrated and implemented by their attorneys for over 6 years of needless, malevolent scorched-earth litigation. This settlement does nothing to cure the blatant lack of accountability by all involved since the night of Daniel’s death, which stands as an irredeemable blight on the criminal justice system.

The failure and injustice of Daniel Shaver’s killing and the resulting sham criminal trial, which made a mockery of the notion of Justice predictably ended in no conviction and to this day casts an ugly shadow over this settlement. As this chapter closes, we call upon the Department of Justice to swiftly proceed with its ongoing investigation and announce the federal criminal charges of officers involved, and bring justice where the state of Arizona has failed.”

As we reported at the time, when Brailsford and his partner arrived, they began a standoff with Shaver for no reason and ordered the innocent father to crawl toward them on the hotel floor. Shaver was begging for his life, crying, crawling on his belly, then on his hands and knees. He was eventually shot to death by Brailsford when Shaver reached back to pull up his shorts which were falling down from the crawling.

As Shaver pulled up his shorts, Brailsford perceived that Shaver was reaching for a non-existent gun thereby justifying the brutal execution of an innocent father.

Mesa PD fired Brailsford — not for murdering Shaver — but upon learning the inside of his AR15’s dust cover had the words “You’re F**ked” engraved, a violation of police department policy.

Subsequently, Brailsford was charged with Shaver’s murder but a jury of his peers found him “not guilty” and acquitted him of all charges. Even with undeniable footage, the Mesa cop killed an unarmed man who was begging for his life, the citizens on Brailsford’s jury were seemingly conditioned to give the officer a pass because he perceived there was a gun. In 2019, Brailsford was rehired before immediately retiring and received a pension of $31,000 a year for life!

Since Brailsford is still in his 20’s, if he lives to be 65 he will have been paid over 1 million dollars for killing Shaver, an action which supposedly now has caused Brailsford to be disabled according to the terms of his retirement — thus the angry sentiment in the statement above.

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Presidents Trump and Biden Keep John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Secret

Fifty-nine years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. These many years later, the United States government continues to hold in secret piles of information related to the assassination.

After the popular theatrical run of director Oliver Stone’s movie JFK that dramatically challenged the Lee Harvey Oswald as “lone gunman” explanation for Kennedy’s assassination, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 became law. It created the Assassination Records Review Board tasked with reviewing and releasing records held by the US government related to the assassination. While some US government records have since been released, others remain hidden away.

On December 15, the remaining Kennedy assassination records are scheduled for release. But, don’t get your hopes up. Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF) President and Kennedy assassination researcher Jacob G. Hornberger predicts in an October 21 FFF article that President Joe Biden will, like President Donald Trump did in 2017 when the deadline for release of the final materials first occurred, refuse to let the public see all the information. Indeed, Biden already did so once in 2021 when the secrecy extension period Trump had set for the remaining records passed.

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UK plans to criminalize digitally putting someone’s face on nude body

The UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill has a section that would make sharing “pornographic deepfakes” without consent a criminal offense in England and Wales. This would involve digitally putting someone’s face on a naked body.

The bill seeks to address the rise in manipulated explicit images, where a person’s face is superimposed on another person’s body.

Current legislation requires proving that the images were shared to “cause distress.”

However, the proposed law does not require the prosecution to prove that someone intended to cause harm, potentially leaving the door open for jokes to be prosecuted.

According to the government, one in 14 people in England and Wales have been threatened with their intimate images being shared online. It added that there is a global concern about deepfake technology being used to create fake pornographic images. A website that creates nudes from clothed photos had 38 million visits in 2021.

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San Francisco police consider letting robots use ‘deadly force’

The San Francisco Police Department is proposing a new policy that would give robots the license to kill, as reported earlier by Mission Local (via Engadget). The draft policy, which outlines how the SFPD can use military-style weapons, states robots can be “used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option.”

As reported by Mission Local, members of the city’s Board of Supervisors Rules Committee have been reviewing the new equipment policy for several weeks. The original version of the draft didn’t include any language surrounding robots’ use of deadly force until Aaron Peskin, the Dean of the city’s Board of Supervisors, initially added that “robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.”

However, the SFPD returned the draft with a red line crossing out Peskin’s addition, replacing it with the line that gives robots the authority to kill suspects. According to Mission Local, Peskin eventually decided to accept the change because “there could be scenarios where deployment of lethal force was the only option.” San Francisco’s rules committee unanimously approved a version of the draft last week, which will face the Board of Supervisors on November 29th.

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