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Saturday, January 28, 2023

Letter to Officer Tatum Regarding the Police Murder of Tyre Nichols

[Author's Note:

This letter was written as a response to an episode of "The Officer Tatum Show" which aired on A.M. 560 in Chicago, on January 27th, 2023.
Officer Tatum is the radio name of Brandon Tatum, a former police officer and football player from Texas.

The letter is in reference to Tyre Nichols, an African-American man who was severely beaten by five black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, on January 7th, 2023. He died in the hospital, from his injuries, three days later.
The officers involved - Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith - have been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression.

This letter was written before viewing the videotape - released on January 27th - showing Nichols's beating.]

Hi Officer Tatum. I heard you talk about Tyre Nichols on your show on Friday.

I was glad to hear you extend your condolences to his family. And I extend my condolences to them as well.

But please understand: Tyre Nichols’s brother wants these officers dead.
http://nypost.com/2023/01/28/brother-of-tyre-nichols-says-he-hopes-all-five-cops-die/

That might sound extreme, but if they’re convicted of murder, and given the death penalty, it would not be outside the realm of lawful possibilities.

You said on Friday that “it’s possible” that Tyre Nichols might have done something that caused him to “get what’s coming to him”.

And I agree… but only because anything is possible.

It's also possible that these officers decided to pull someone over for a routine traffic stop, and then provoke and incite and aggravate Nichols until he became upset enough to seem like he was resisting, when what he actually was, was afraid for his life.

A black man who was arrested recently, insisted on pulling over in a well-lit area, instead of where the officer wanted him to. He parked his car, and then ran away from it, explaining what he was doing and why: He did this in order to avoid possibly being murdered in the dark without anyone to witness his death.

Did he act unreasonably?

You said on Friday that “people should just comply” and they won’t get killed by officers.

Sir, “submit to me, or I will make it worse on you” is the ideology of a hostage-taker, or worse.
I know you're not a hostage-taker, but you are defending people who terrorize people into submission - often without even informing them of what crime they are being suspected of committing - and then blame their victims for not being able to submit quickly or completely.

On June 4th, 2020 in Buffalo, New York, a 75-year-old man named Martin Gugino was innocently standing on a public sidewalk during a protest (and within his legal rights), was clubbed on the head by a police. He fell to the ground and started bleeding out, sustaining a skull fracture. Miraculously, he survived.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/75-year-man-shoved-ground-buffalo-protest-files/story?id=76062143

Clearly - and I suspect that you would agree - this was a case of police brutality, and there is nothing that the old man could have done to avoid being clubbed.

But have you heard of Daniel Shaver? In 2016, in a hotel in Arizona, Shaver was placed under arrest, for having a gun. Not pointing or aiming it, or threatening anyone with it, or using it. Just having it. Someone in the hotel had called the police on him, simply for having it in his possession.

The police made him crawl on his knees towards them, giving him a series of instructions that was so complicated, he could not possibly obey all of them.

The police shot him to death twenty feet away from his family.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8

What more could Daniel Shaver have done, to comply?

You say "99 percent of police officers are not bad apples". I agree. But if that's true, then why shouldn't that mean we are free to disobey police officers' orders one percent of the time?

Tell me: Are we always supposed to obey police officers’ orders?

What about when the orders are unlawful? Do civilians have to comply with illegal orders?

What about when it’s a corrupt police officer, and he’s committing entrapment, by instructing someone to break the law in front of him, so he can have an excuse to arrest them?

A female police officer recently went on TikTok and said “If you’re in front of us, and you don’t get out of the way, we will find something to pull you over and arrest you for", giving a failed turn signal as an example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8icJ-6AzsE

They are looking for reasons to arrest us. But not just for failing to signal our turns and for having broken taillights.
They want more criminals. More criminals keep the prisons full, and provide endless contracts for companies providing resources and construction materials for such prisons.
And - as Ayn Rand observed - more laws are passed every day, which make what were previously law-abiding people into common criminals.

You asked on Friday, “What would be the point” of imprisoning the five officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death, because putting them in prison would not bring him back to life.

That is ridiculous. Do we refrain from imprisoning civilians who murder other civilians, just because putting the murderers in prison will not bring their victims back to life? No.
We put the murderers in prison (if we can convict them) because we know that the victims' families want closure and justice. And after a traumatic incident like losing a family member, they not only want closure and justice, but need them.

You cannot say that you are “tough on crime” at the same time that you are vehemently defending the right of a person to commit murder as long as they first get hired by some (read: any) American police department.
Being hired by an American police department does not make a person immune from committing a crime.
Officer Frank Serpico arrested his first fellow police officer when he discovered that the guy was not only "on the take" from criminals (i.e., receiving bribes to refrain from making arrests); he murdered a police officer before getting re-hired as a cop in Serpico's jurisdiction.
We don't just need to "get rid of the bad apples". We need to turn the good apples into great apples; into Frank Serpicos.
But how many "good cops", walking the beat today, are Serpicos? Probably not even one percent of them; judging by how infrequently a "good cop" succeeds in preventing police beatings from going too far.

I feel like you’re trying to have it both ways. We cannot extend our condolences to the family, while saying there might have been a good reason to take this man’s life, in the street, without a trial.

And you cannot be a Christian at the same time that you can excuse the taking of a human life by anyone other than God, or else "thou shalt not kill" means nothing.
When five armed police officers vastly outnumber one unarmed man, any and all attempts should be made to de-escalate things - and avoid violence, rather than to provoke and incite the arrestee - before resorting to deadly force.
To borrow a phraseology about resorting to war: Deadly force should be used only as the "last, last, last option". And only if the suspect is threatening the use of violence without being provoked by the officers into doing so, only after less violent alternatives are attempted and fail, and only during a lawful arrest.

In 1899, a Native American man named John Bad Elk shot a police officer to death. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court found – in a unanimous decision – that he was within his rights to defend himself. That’s because the police officer pulled his weapon first and tried to murder John Bad Elk during an unlawful arrest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Elk_v._United_States

In late 1900, it was illegal, in all states, for police officers to murder people during unlawful arrests.
But several decades later, New Jersey became the first state to pass a statute stating the opposite. Thirteen more states passed similar laws, which means that right now, it is only legal to resist unlawful arrest in fourteen states.

Why should this be the case? Why should people in 36 states and the District of Columbia be required to comply with unlawful – that is, illegal – orders?

Unless getting shot to death by the police the only way to get to Heaven, there is no logical answer.

We must make it legal to use deadly force to resist police officers’ attempts to murder us during unlawful arrests. If we don’t, then we do not have a civilized society, nor do we have the rule of law.

With the judge, the prosecutor, and (sometimes) the public defender all being employed by the state, there is virtually no chance of a fair trial. This virtually guarantees that police officers accused of crimes will be treated more leniently than they deserve.

That is why all cases of suspected murder by police officers should be reviewed not only by independent commissions, but non-governmental independent commissions.

We must not continue to simply give police officers discretion as to who deserves to live, and who deserves to be murdered in the streets.

We have the Fourth and Fifth Amendment, which recognize the right to be secure in our persons and effects, until we are told what crime we are suspected of committing. People have the right to go free on their own recognizance, as long as they are not actually informed that they are under suspicion of a crime and placed under arrest.
[Note: The word "arrest" literally means "stop"; a person may be detained prior to handcuffing if they are ordered to stop by police.]

We must not delude ourselves into thinking that it's fine to murder people in the street - for "resisting" - when they are only trying to block some of the officers' blows, in order decrease the damage to their own bodies.

And we certainly must not arrest people for resisting arrest, when they were not being arrested for a crime in the first place.

People have the right to go to trial before they are punished. Tyre Nichols was murdered 200 feet away from his own house. He could easily have been allowed to return to his family.

We cannot allow people to be murdered in the streets with no trial, and then simply say “let the courts deal with it”. We have tried that.

The courts allowed countless murderer police officers to go free before the George Floyd / Breonna Taylor / Black Lives Matter protests of mid-2020.

And since then, police murders of civilians have only gone up (at a rate of five percent per year).
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/06/us-police-killings-record-number-2022

What does this tell us? “The protests didn’t work”? No.
It tells us that the police want to hunt people down like animals (“like rabbits”, in the recent words of Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson), and kill us for sport, to see if they can get away with it.

Officer Tatum, people calling each other animals (the same way the Nazis called Jews "rats"), and then advocating for hunting others down as such, is not what a civilized society looks like.

It is a recipe for more police violence, more submission to authority, and a more Naziesque and totalitarian society, every day, until nobody questions any longer that they are a slave, because they know it to be true.

Until anybody who gets murdered by police, will be thought to have only been murdered because they were on drugs, didn’t comply, guilty, or – worst yet – just “wasn’t strong enough to survive”.

Sadly, that day has already come.

We need to face the truth: Some police officers are clubbing and tasing civilians for fun, to see who is strong enough to survive it. Let us not pretend that nobody has ever died from being tased.

This is how the agenda of the social-Darwinists is being implemented. They believe that “the survival of the fittest” means the survival of the strongest (instead of what it really means: the survival of those who are most capable of adapting).

This way of thinking allows the police to "shoot them all and let God" - or nature - "sort them out".

That is why the defenders of police violence, are literally Nazi sympathizers.

Or else they are completely unaware that the history of America’s use of eugenics – on Native Americans, and on black people in California and North Carolina and other states – actually predates Nazi Germany.

Not only that, the Nazis learned eugenics from American eugenicists (many of whom identified as progressives).

If someone said, “The Jews wouldn’t have gotten killed, or treated so harshly, if they had just complied”, we would not hesitate to call them a Nazi sympathizer. Anyone who has studied history knows that they tried to comply, but it didn’t work, because the people who held them captive were intent on their destruction.

Why should we delude us into thinking that America has ditched its legacy of eugenics, Nazism, authoritarianism, and police brutality?
Now, while police murders are increasing even more than before 2020? Now, while more than 99% of rapists never see prison time?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than-percent-rapes-lead-felony-convictions-least-percent-victims-face-emotional-physical-consequences/

Who do we think we are trying to fool?

We do not have a society, because we have neither freedom, nor law and order.

What we have is something different: We have legalized violence. Violence is the state’s only rule, and violence is the state’s only tool.

And, just as he who lives by the sword is doomed to die by the sword, so is the state.

Living by the rule of violence alone, the state (and its defenders) have no logical, moral, nor consistent basis from which to object to being subjected to the same type of force which it employs to enforce its rule.

Thus, the defenders of the state and its police, have no argument against the burning and destruction of police stations. To a government which is fundamentally based on violence, to be subjected to brutal force, is being beaten fair and square.

[Post-Script:

The day after the release of the Tyre Nichols beating rape, rumors are swirling that one of the reasons why these five police officers were allowed to get so violent, might stem from the fact that in 2021, a woman named Cerelyn "CJ" Davis became the chief of police in Memphis.

Davis was fired from a police department in Atlanta, Georgia, after two detectives accused her of urging them not to investigate Terrill Marion Crane, who had committed statutory rape. Crane subsequently pleaded guilty to child pornography, and Davis was fired.
It's possible that Davis is being blamed unfairly; perhaps because she's a woman, perhaps because some people are eager to connect the Tyre Nichols beating to sex crimes. But what's more likely is that, with Davis as the head of Memphis police since 2021, the privilege of Memphis police officers to commit crimes, has gone largely unchecked by their superiors.

Read more about this story at the following address:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/memphis-police-chief-cerelyn-davis-fired-from-a-previous-job-in-atlanta-after-botched-sex-crimes-investigation/ar-AA16Qsz4?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=f6ea01c161e3498aa99c7960824f0f0d]

Written and published on January 28th, 2023

Click the link below to see the complete list of articles and videos that I've published regarding policing, violent crime, and prisons:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2023/07/links-to-all-of-my-articles-and-videos.html

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Rep. Brad Schneider's Staff's Racist Treatment of Black Employee Should Remind Us of Lynching, Tuskegee, Ethnic Cleansing

Three days ago - on July 15th, 2021 - a story about racially disparaging remarks, made by an employee of Democratic Illinois Congressman Brad Schneider named Karyn Davidman, made international headlines, as the DailyMail published an article titled "Black staffer for Democrat Rep. Brad Schneider SUES his office after her white supervisor told her to 'get a rope and put it around her neck' then 'pigeon-holed' her when she complained".

The article explains that, "According to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Davidman relayed a story to [former staffer Patrice] Campbell regarding lanyards worn to secure face masks and used to guard against COVID-19 infection."

It continues, "During the March discussion, Davidman told Campbell, who is the only Black employee in Schneider's office, according to the lawsuit, "You are going to have to get a rope and put it around your neck."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9793147/Black-staffer-Democrat-Rep-Brad-Schneiders-office-supervisors-lynching-comments.html?fbclid=IwAR1BAc8gbsjwXy_Pl_xKcL7tBOYzp3CWF_Q1vuq42LckyqcElDlDMPIcT-s

Presumably, Davidman told Campbell to use that rope as a lanyard, to help secure her face mask onto her face.
Campbell considered this remark to be racially insensitive, because the comment about a rope reminded her of lynchings of black people.
http://www.rollcall.com/2021/07/15/rep-brad-schneiders-office-sued-for-hostile-work-environment-retaliation-against-black-employee/?fbclid=IwAR0PzZx1XAuzluL7C98bzr

I want to whole-heartedly condemn this reprehensible and racially (probably deliberately) insensitive behavior. No employee in the public sector should ever experience discrimination.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I ran against Brad Schneider, as a write-in candidate, in 2016 and 2020.]

Throughout mid-2020, when I attended various Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, I criticized Congressman Schneider's office for accepting money from what are arguably pro-war and racist sources.

http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2020/02/where-does-congressman-brad-schneider.html

Once at a B.L.M. event attended by Schneider, I drowned-out Schneider's speech as soon as he begun talking, with a chant of "Brad takes bribes from the Israeli lobby that trains our racist police (clap, clap)".

I said this because Schneider's campaigns, combined, have accepted half a million dollars from the Israeli lobby, and $23,000 from the top companies servicing the Military-Industrial Complex (Boeing, etc.). This money was accepted at a time when it had recently been revealed that Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.) soldiers had been involved in a program to assist in the training of police officers from New York City. Numerous journalists have criticized this training program as racist, claiming that it teaches racial profiling. (Hence my chant)

The treatment of Patrice Campbell by Karyn Davidman is especially horrifying to me, as a person who has criticized Schneider's office for racism in the past, and as someone who has studied the history of genocide and eugenics in the 20th century.

I have suspected - since early 2020 - that (while the government underreacted in some areas) when the government overreacted to the Covid-19 outbreak, it sometimes disproportionately impacted racial and ethnic minorities (as well as the poor).

For example:

1) In the early days of the pandemic, a rumor spread that African-Americans could not get the disease, or were less likely to get the disease. Soon after, scientific data showed that the opposite was true.

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/08/us-blacks-3-times-more-likely-whites-get-covid-19

2) Soon after California shut down, and six-foot physical distancing was ordered, Gavin Newsom was photographed sitting at a table with other members of the political elite, suggesting that being wealthy and powerful exempted them - but not the poor, who are disproportionately people of color - from coronavirus restrictions.

3. African-Americans may be less likely, in general, to get vaccinated, because many African-Americans remember the Tuskegee Experiments (in which the government allowed men with syphilis to go untreated, after they were being told that they would receive free medical treatment from the government).

Because Karyn Davidman told Patrice Campbell to use a rope around her neck to secure her face mask into place - supposedly "for her own good" or for the sake of her health - should remind all of us of not only the history of lynching, but also because of the Tuskegee Experiments.

The Democrats are offering us "free medical care", but only on the condition that the costs of that "free" medicine be passed onto the next generation (instead of reforming taxes and the budget to solve the funding problem). They are also obligating the states and the people to relinquish their rights to regulate medical insurance.

The Democrats also expect us all to submit to a progressive ideology that supports eugenics to every bit the same extent as the Republican Party ideology. The Democratic Party is the party of slavery, the party of conserving the environment so steadfastly (for attention) that they cease caring about humans' rights to live in harmony with nature, and the party of aborting black babies in the womb instead of solving the social and economic problems that lead people to want to get abortions.

What happened to Patrice Campbell should remind us not only of lynching, the Tuskegee Experiment, and tempting people into tolerating fascism by offering promises of medical care (as the Nazis did when Germany annexed Austria).

It should also remind us of several other events throughout history:

1) The spraying of black people with fire hoses under the orders of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor;

2) The spraying of atheist, socialist, and anarchist women in 1930s Spain, which was done by fascist, Carlist Spanish Catholics, in the name of "cleansing them of sin";

3) The Bath Riots of 1917 (during the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson), which took place at the Ciudad Juarez / El Paso border crossing. A teenage girl caused a riot after immigrant women - including pregnant women - were exposed to GASOLINE BATHS and ZYKLON-B. American border guards were also raping some of the girls and women. The women were told that they were being exposed to the harsh chemicals in order to "de-louse" them, despite the fact that the Mexican typhus epidemic ended ten years prior to this event. One of the women remarked, "Why do they think we're so dirty?"; and

4) The Holocaust during World War II, in which the Nazis used the same chemical used by Americans to "de-louse" Mexican immigrants - Zyklon-B - to murder Jews (and people who helped Jews attempt to escape, and other "undesirables") intentionally.

Nazis ordered Jews to enter shower chambers, and given bars of soap, and told to prepare for showers (which were then filled with poison gas). That shows that those Jews believed that they were being given medical treatment, in the form of a shower. But, of course, it turned out to be poisonous Zyklon-B gas (the vapor of hydrocyanic acid), and it killed them.

We must not forget that the American use of Zyklon-B predates the Nazi use of it by more than twenty years. We must not forget that people have been lured into fascism - and to their deaths - with the promises of free medical care.

Such "medical care" could include anything from therapeutic showers to being exposed to dangerous de-lousing chemicals (that either might or will kill you), to getting radiation for cancer therapy, to trying coronavirus drugs that carry high risks of heart disease, to being given Munchhausen's Syndrome, to being drugged with experimental anti-psychotic medications, to being emotionally traumatized through experimental psychotherapy, to being medically neglected, to being euthanized (euthanasia literally meaning "good death").

The Nazi twin studies, and various grotesque experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele, were done under the guise of "medical research". So were the Tuskegee Experiments, and experiments that humanized mice, and "gain-of-function" research, and so many more.

It should seem obvious to us, by now, that there is no possible way to read a white superior telling a black employee "get a rope and put it around your neck" to secure a face mask into place - other than a racially disparaging remark.

This reflects and reveals an underlying racial bias - by the public government - against African-Americans. It is evident in the enforcement of Coronavirus restrictions recently, and in the eugenicist history of progressivism and neo-liberal "democracy" generally and historically.

Schneider staffer Karyn Davidman did this because she thinks that black people are dirty, or at least more likely to pass coronavirus to her.

Karyn Davidman said this because she is a racist, and her comment confirms that the Democratic Party is, and has always been and will always be, the party of the Ku Klux Klan (which openly supported the party during the first half of the 20th century).

If Karyn Davidman wants Patrice Campbell to wear a mask so badly, then I suggest that Karyn Davidman first show herself for who she really is, by getting a hold of a white Klan mask, and securing it firmly over her own head.

If people like Davidman are going to endorse this kind of treatment of African-Americans, then I suggest they move to Arizona and become Republicans. There, Republicans want to use Zyklon-B - the same chemical used to kill Jews in the Holocaust, and "de-louse" and humiliate Mexicans - as part of execution of death row inmates.

http://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/arizona-zyklon-b-gas-chamber.html

We must not allow the government to tempt us into submission to fascism and eugenics as the "cost" of "free" medical care.

We must not allow people to pressure or order us to submit to forcible sterilization; whether that comes in the form of sterilizing Native American woman and Mexican immigrants against their will with poisonous chemicals, or merely pressuring people to use hand sanitizers (some of which contain toxic wood alcohol) and allow others to spray them with Lysol in stores for not wearing masks.

You are under no obligation to tell anyone whether you have been vaccinated, as the condition of entering private property. For one, you have a right - recognized by the Fifth Amendment - not to incriminate yourself. Second, H.I.P.A.A. laws protect doctor-patient confidentiality.
[For more information, see the following link:
http://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/february-2020-hipaa-and-novel-coronavirus.pdf
"the protections of the Privacy Rule are not set aside during an emergency."]

We must learn to recognize eugenicist behavior - and ethnic cleansing - when we see it, or we will not learn the full lessons of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement.

There is no "national body" that can get sick, and we must stop subscribing to the fascist notions (i.e., corpus mysticum, the mystical body of the state; and the "social contagion theory") that there is.
http://www.routledge.com/Contagion-and-the-National-Body-The-Organism-Metaphor-in-American-Thoug

We can't get each other sick if we stay far away enough from each other. Please stay at least six feet away from me, and if necessary, tell me to stay at least six feet away from you. Aside from that, stop telling me what to do with my body.

With the government as corrupt and discriminatory as it is, there is no need to further accustom ourselves to obeying whatever orders are given by others (that is, aside from "get away from me").

Written and published on July 18th, 2021
Expanded on July 19th, 2021
Edited and Expanded on July 26th, 2021