RALLY AND MARCH AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY

did anyone ever read that young terrance has an extensive drug and violence history? Maybe the officers were investigating, and he fought with them. I read that he had taken one of their guns...maybe he shouldn't have done this....

Bob, did you ever read that Terrance was woken up in the middle of the night and killed by the cops in his bedroom? I find it doubtful that he had his wits about him enough, after the cops woke him up, to grab a cop's gun.

If you were to do some research about deaths nationwide at the hands of the police, say by checking out stolenlives.org, you might see that people who die at the hands of law enforcement often die twice:

1. they are killed without judge, jury or trial. Killed at the "scene" by the cops or prison guards
2. they are smeared in the media. The media looks for any little "bad" thing about the person's history. Sometimes the media is fed false information about what happened when the person was killed.

Most of the people who are documented by the Stolen Lives Project were either killed because they were "suspected" of something like being involved in the drug trade or they were having a mental health crisis.

Sometimes there are cases that are someplace in the middle, such as the case of Mark Garcia, who was killed several years ago by the SFPD. He was walking around in the street naked, asking for help (he had apparently lapsed back into use of crack after having been in recovery for quite some time). Instead of sending someone who was prepared to deal with Mark, such as a trained paramedic, 911 sent in cops, who beat him, hogtied him, and threw him in the back of the police wagon, unsupervised (against their policies), to die. The cops took the long way to the hospital and Mark stopped breathing on the way.

Or there is the example of my late friend Michael Roehl, who was killed in Orange, CA this year. There were 2 different versions of "why" the cops killed him published in 2 different newspaper articles. Couldn't the cops get their story straight? Was he pointing a toy gun at the cops (cops are trained to recognize toy guns), or did he refuse to take his hands out of his pockets? Obviously something is a bit fishy about that one.

What October 22nd and Stolen Lives do is they put these stories out there, with all the personal imperfections and questions, and show that there is a nationwide epidemic of cases like these. It doesn't just happen in Oakland or San Francisco. It happens in Orange, CA, it happens in New York City, it happens in Chicago and North Carolina and Texas and everywhere in between. The problem isn't just people allegedly reaching for cops' guns, or people being high or freaking out because they lack access to proper mental health care, or people selling drugs or living on the street or robbing banks or passing out in their cars. The problem in this case is the cops, who represent a brutal state (the US).

Why is it that whenever someone is killed by the police, it is automatically the police who is wrong? Several different sources have published that "young Terrance" did in fact take the gun from the police....If this was the case then it was indeed his life ending decision, forcing the police to shoot him. Anyone can sit back and say...after the fact...oh well the officer should have done this, or the officer didnt try this. Has anyone ever thought that a decision to shoot takes a milli-second. Lets get real...the story of this garcia fellow who had a plastic gun, if he pulled his "toy gun" from his pocket at night, and it is painted up like a real gun, then how is a police man supposed to take the time to decide whether or not to shoot. I would shoot, because you don't get a second chance. If the gun is real, you are dead. These officers didn't get a half hour (like most television cops) to decide to shoot, they only had a brief second. I for one am haooy neither one of them got killed. What would these indy papers be writing if that had happend? I'll tell you what....NOTHING, because that's not news for them. They just throw some story out about some innocent "young black man" assasinated by the police. He was a dope dealer, who had dope on him, and who terrorized the community where he set up shop. My regards for the family, but if they REALLY felt bad for their son, they should have taken the dope away from himn, and pointed him in the right direction....Sorry...

FBI let innocents get death sentences: report
By Fox Butterfield
November 22, 2003

The FBI used murderers as informants in Boston for three decades, even allowing innocent men to be sentenced to death to protect the secret operation, a government report has found.

The FBI's policy "must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement" and had "disastrous consequences", the report by the House Committee on Government Reform said.

More than 20 people were murdered by FBI informants in Boston from 1965, often with the help of FBI agents, it said.

But no FBI agent or official has ever been disciplined, the report said.

Separately, it said that William Bulger, then the president of the University of Massachusetts, gave "inconsistent" testimony to the committee last June about whether the FBI had contacted him in its search for his fugitive gangster brother, James Bulger, who is on the bureau's most wanted list.

James Bulger, known as Whitey, headed an underworld gang in Boston and was one of the FBI's star informants before he fled in 1995 after being tipped off by a bureau agent that there was a secret indictment against him.

While critical of Mr Bulger, the report stopped short of saying he had committed perjury.

Mr Bulger's lawyer, Thomas Kiley, said the committee's findings were "a total vindication on everything that matters" for his client.

The bureau, in a written statement, said: "While the FBI recognises there have been instances of misconduct by a few FBI employees, it also recognises the importance of human source information in terrorism, criminal and counterintelligence investigations."

To avoid future problems, the statement said, "the FBI has taken significant steps in recent years regarding the management and oversight of human sources of intelligence".

The FBI's policy of using murderers grew out of a belated effort by a former director, J. Edgar Hoover, to go after the Mafia, which Hoover had earlier denied even existed, the report said. So, in the early 1960s, the bureau began recruiting underworld informers in its new campaign.

The report focuses heavily on one episode, the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan, a small-time hoodlum who was killed by Jimmy Flemmi and Joseph Barboza, who had just been recruited by an FBI agent in Boston, Paul Rico.

The FBI knew the two men were the killers because it had been using an unauthorised wire tap and had heard Flemmi ask the Mafia boss, Raymond Patriarca, for permission to kill Deegan. A few days later, Deegan was shot dead.

The FBI was so intent on protecting its new informants, the report said, that it passed up a chance to try Patriarca for his involvement in the killing.

Instead, four men who had nothing to do with the killing were tried and convicted, with two sentenced to death and two to life in prison.

Two of the men died in prison and two had their sentences commuted and were freed after serving 30 years behind bars.

Hoover was kept fully informed about this murder and the wrongful convictions, the report said.

The New York Times

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/21/1069027333534.html

F*ck U All YOU DON'T KNOW BUT NOW IM ABOUT 2 PUT U ON IT MY BIG BROTHER WAS DEAD BEFORE THEY SHOT HIM THEY BEAT HIM TO HE DEAD SO HE WAS DEAD BEFORE THEY SHOT HIM NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT. U B*tches