Tag: police state

Senate Candidate Herschel Walker proposes social media monitoring

Georgia Senate Candidate Herschel Walker has suggested that a government agency be set up to monitor the social media accounts of young men and women in the wake of Tuesday’s mass shooting at a Texas elementary school where the shooter killed 19 students and two adults before being fatally shot by law enforcement officers.

Walker made the comments while being asked about his stance on gun control during a Fox News interview on Thursday.

Walker began the interview by blasting those “that want to continue to talk about our constitutional rights rather than talking about the person that did this shooting.” He continued by suggesting increased mental health funding, pushing back against those who want to take away constitutional rights, and suggesting that the solution is to “look into the person that did the shooting.”

However, he then followed these comments with a suggestion that extended far beyond the scope of the perpetrator – social media surveillance.

Keep reading

Officers Waited to Engage Texas School Shooter Because ‘They Could Have Been Shot’: Official

A Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) official has said officers “could have been shot” if they engaged the gunman holed up with his victims in a classroom at Robb Elementary School before a specialist tactical team arrived.

Authorities on Thursday sketched out a timeline of events from when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos crashed his vehicle to when he entered the Texas school at around 11.40 a.m. and slaughtered 19 students and two teachers.

But it wasn’t until almost 1 p.m. that Ramos had been killed and the siege was over, around 90 minutes later.

Questions have been raised amid mounting public anger and scrutiny about the response of law enforcement as more details emerge about the timeline of events.

Texas DPS spokesman Lt. Chris Olivarez said the first priority for officers in an active shooter situation is to stop the killing and preserve life.

“But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand, is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is,” Oliverez told CNN.

Keep reading

Mother trying to save children at Uvalde was handcuffed by federal marshals

After it was revealed on Thursday that not only did police delay their response to sending tactical teams into the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. amid a school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead but prevented parents from entering, the Wall Street Journal reported that one mother sprinted into the school to get her children, over objections from law enforcement.

Angeli Rose Gomez drove 40 miles to the school upon hearing of the shooting, and she arrived, said “The police were doing nothing. They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

While state officials said that police were at the school mere moments after the teen gunman entered the school, barricading himself in a classroom and opening fire on young students, they also said that officers were unable to gain access to the classroom.

Gomez said that she was only one of several parents at the school demanding that officers stop waiting around and go into the school. It was then that “federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs,” the Journal reports.

The marshals told her she was being arrested for “intervening in an active investigation.” Gomez was able to convince local law enforcement to free her, but said she also saw a father pepper-sprayed, and another tackled and thrown to the ground by law enforcement as he tried to go to the school. His 10-year-old daughter was massacred in the slaughter.

Keep reading

Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school

Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.

“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.

Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

“They were unprepared,” he added.

Keep reading

Texas officials launch investigation into Uvalde police response to school shooting: Conflicting statements over gunfight with the shooter and videos show parents being held down by cops outside while kids were trapped with the gunman

Texas officials have launched an investigation into the Uvalde police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday after conflicting statements over whether cops fired at the gunman as he made his way inside. 

Salvador Ramos, 18, arrived at the school in Uvalde at 11.30am, crashing his car into a ditch. 

A school resource officer was at the scene but he failed to stop him from making his way inside. 

Two other cops also rushed to the school at that time – Ramos had just shot his grandmother in the face at their home less than five miles away. She survived and called the police.

It was first reported that those cops exchanged gunfire with Ramos, but police now say they cannot confirm that. 

Ramos went on to barricade himself inside the classroom, killing 19 kids and two teachers, before a SWAT team breached the door and shot him around an hour later. 

Sources say police were struggling to get into the classroom and needed a key to open the door. 

Eventually, a border patrol agent was able to get inside and the shooting was declared over at 1.06pm. 

But it questions remain over why it took police so long to get into the classroom where the kids were trapped with the gunman. 

Frustrated parents were standing outside the school begging cops to go inside when the shooting was unfolding. 

Javier Cazares, whose nine-year-old daughter was murdered, says cops were ‘just standing there’ and waiting for protective shields to arrive at the scene before they went in. 

‘They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,’ he told The New York Times, adding that many were ‘just standing there.’ 

‘There were plenty of men out there armed to the teeth that could have gone in faster. This could have been over in a couple minutes,’ he said. 

He added that police were faster to escort Beto O’Rourke out of the press conference yesterday when he started heckling the governor than they were to get into the school. 

Angel Garza, whose daughter was killed, was handcuffed after trying to run into the school when he heard that a ‘girl called Amerie’ had been shot. He later found out that she was among those who died while giving medical aid to other children who escaped. 

Derek Sotelo, 26, who works in a tire shop nearby, said parents were begging to be let into the school.  

‘They were just angry, especially the dads. We were wondering, “What the heck is going on? Are they going in?” ‘The dads were saying, “Give me the vest, I’ll go in there!’ 

Keep reading

How Biden’s Menthol Ban Endangers Black Bodies

President Joe Biden’s ban on menthol cigarettes will put black communities at risk of more violent interactions with police, according to myriad experts ranging from former law enforcement to left-wing constitutional attorneys.

The Biden administration has made no secret of the fact that targeting menthol cigarettes is meant to change the behavior of the black community, alleging that a ban will help reduce racial disparities in the health care system. Criminalizing black people’s behavior, according to the Biden administration, is the best course of action.

“Black smokers prefer menthol products, and the Biden administration’s decision to ban menthol cigarettes will inevitably fuel an already well-established, lucrative, and violent illicit market,” Richard Marianos, a former senior official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, told the Washington Free Beacon.  “This will criminalize the behavior of Black communities and lead to more interactions with law enforcement, not less.”

Data support Marianos’s assertion. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealed that nearly 85 percent of black smokers prefer mentholated cigarettes, compared with just under 30 percent of white smokers.

As the Food and Drug Administration moves forward with its policy to outlaw menthols, Biden this week released an outline of his executive order to “advance effective, accountable policing and criminal justice practices.” The menthol ban stands in direct contradiction of the new policy, which has a stated goal of stamping out “systemic racism in our criminal justice system and in our institutions more broadly.”

“Why in this nation, why [do] so many black Americans wake up knowing they could lose their life in the course of just living their life today?” Biden said at a signing ceremony for his executive order. “Simply jogging, shopping, sleeping at home.”

Biden’s move to criminalize menthol cigarettes would violate his goals of eliminating disparate impact—supposedly neutral policies that disproportionately affect minority communities—in law enforcement. His executive order calls for disparate impact studies on the use of force by law enforcement and asserts that “fatal encounters with law enforcement have disproportionately involved Black and Brown people.”

Such disparate impact is why Biden’s menthol ban has earned criticism from left-wing civil liberty activists, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. An attorney for the organization in a letter last year highlighted the irony of such a ban in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

“As we approach the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd—only a few years removed from the killing of Eric Garner, a Black man killed by NYPD for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes—the racially disparate impact of the criminal legal system has captured the nation’s attention,” the attorney wrote. “It is now clear that such policies that amount to prohibition have serious racial justice implications.”

Keep reading

Court rules cops were wrong to arrest Louisiana man for criticizing them in emails

The US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana has ruled that three police officers in the state’s St. Tammany Parish violated the law when they arrested a man for criticizing them.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The man, Jerry Rogers Jr., was expressing his criticism in emails he was exchanging with the family of a murder victim, Nanette Krentel – a case that remains unsolved for five years now.

Reacting to the messages, the sheriff’s office indicted Rogers for defamation despite the fact they were told by the district attorney this would be unconstitutional. They eventually arrested him.

In addition, for the first time ever, the office issued a statement to the press to announce that Rogers was under arrest, and did another thing that was a first for the local police: filed a complaint with Rogers’ employer.

These unusual actions are taken to mean that the sheriff’s office wanted to warn citizens against criticizing them, or they might face public shaming.

In 1987, the US Supreme Court said that in a free nation individuals are free to verbally challenge the police without risking arrest and that this principle is the distinction between a free nation and a police state, Reason reported.

Keep reading

‘We Will Come for Your Family’: Child Victim Threatened by Cops for Reporting the Mayor Raped Him

Contrary to what many disinformation agents will lead you to believe child sex abuse is not reserved to the the Deep State, Democratic party, and Hollywood. Republicans are regularly caught committing the same acts and as we’ve shown, there is no difference between a blue child rapist and a red one.

What’s more, while elite politicians are caught committing these child sex crimes like former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, the scope of the problem is far greater. A potential reason this problem has reached epidemic proportions is the lack of punishment these monsters face after hurting children and law enforcement’s role in failing to prosecute or even investigate the predators.

Our archives are full of cops who escape accountability for preying on children. One could easily chock this up to their blue privilege and many times it is. But what about the cops who look the other way when their political superiors are doing the preying?

As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, the problem of child sex trafficking goes all the way to the top in the UK as well. Sir Edward Heath, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was found by the police chief to be a pedophile. Just like what happens in the US, his vile crimes against children were allegedly covered up by law enforcement for decades.

One victim recently came forward to detail his chilling accusations of his treatment by police when he reported that he’d been abused by a convicted UK politician, John Humphreys.

Humphreys is currently serving a 21-year sentence that was handed down last August for raping two young boys when he served as a primary school governor — a job similar to a school board superintendent in the states.

His sentence should have come much sooner, according to a former victim of his, but police officers from the Devon and Cornwall police departments helped cover it up. Not only did these officers allegedly cover up the crimes of Humphreys but they threatened the victim after he came forward.

Keep reading