Tampa man jailed on charge for wearing clown mask

Kim Wilmath
St. Petersburg Times
February 24, 2010

An 18-year-old Tampa man was jailed Tuesday afternoon, charged with wearing a clown mask on a public road.

Deputies say Matthew David Lopez, of 7003 Ponderosa Drive, was seen with two other people walking south on N 58th Street, just north of E Fowler Avenue. What caught a deputy’s attention was Lopez’s masked face with a bright red-and-orange wig, according to an arrest affidavit.

The deputy followed the group in an unmarked car as the group walked west through a slightly wooded path behind several business offices.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/tampa-man-jailed-on-charge-for-wearing-clown-mask/

Danish Cops Prepare “Dog Kennel” for Copenhagen Protesters

Infowars
December 3, 2009

The following news article posted on the Ekstra Bladet website is translated from the Danish by Jens Angelsgaard, We Are Change, Denmark.

“The old buildings in Valby, which is intended to house the arrested protesters during the climateconference, bears all the hallmarks of a dog kennel.”

“346 people are to be held in the 37 cages in the old brewery storage facilities of world wide danish corporation Carlsberg.”

tates Ekstra Bladet a newspaper under the Politikens Hus/JP publishing corporation – which houses editor-in-chiefs such as former Bilderberg steering comitee member Tøger Seidenfaden now Trilateral Comitee Executive member and bilderberger Flemming Rose – the world known initiator of the “Mohammed cartoon crises”.

Moreover the danish parliament Folketinget recently passed legeslation – which enables the police to conduct preemptive arrests on the sole assumption – that the person has criminal intend. The danish police states that carrying an ordinary scarf or headdress in a bag – is considered an evidence of criminal intend. This is a surprise to some – beacause of the generally cold danish winterweather.

In ending it is relevant to add that the danish police – as reported by Ekstra Bladet – has announced that they will stop and arrest all passangers on busses loaded with demonstraters as far as 350 km from Copenhagen. Demonstrators against “COP 15″ are called “climate thugs” throughout the danish mainstream media.

Today the danish police held a press event due to its first purchase ever of mobile watercanons.

http://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/politik/article1264293.ece

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/danish-cops-prepare-dog-kennel-for-copenhagen-protesters/

Oakland, PA, Police Response Characterized as “Military-style Occupation”

Jerome L. Sherman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
September 28, 2009

Activists with the Thomas Merton Center and other groups today blasted the police response to a Friday night protest in Oakland following the G-20 summit, calling it a “military-style occupation” that resulted in the gassing and arrest of dozens of bystanders, including students and journalists.

During a press conference at the center’s Garfield headquarters, some activists threatened lawsuits against the city and placed responsibility for the confrontation with Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and top public safety officials.

“I’ll say it very bluntly: The mayor should be fired. The city council should hold his feet to the fire,” said David Meieran, an organizer with Three Rivers Climate Convergence.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/oakland-pa-police-response-characterized-as-military-style-occupation/

G20 Police & Military Savagely Attack Peaceful Protesters In Pittsburgh Park

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, September 26, 2009

Editor’s note: Here is an example of the sort of violent behavior the Pittsburgh police are notorious for using against non-violent demonstrators.

Update: Infowars Reporter Rob Dew Now Released After Being Arrested

Police and military units savagely attacked peaceful protesters in a Pittsburgh park last night, cracking heads with billy clubs, deploying LRAD sound cannons and shooting rubber bullets at close range, according to Infowars’ Jason Bermas. Fellow Infowars reporter Rob Dew was arrested during the melee.

Bermas called Alex Jones last night as the attack unfolded. Around 200 to 300 peaceful protesters had converged at Schenley Park for a demonstration but they were soon under assault from busloads of riot cops and military units who quickly descended on the scene.

According to Bermas, police were aggressively charging protesters and cracking them on the head with billy clubs and also shooting rubber bullets at close range, which in numerous past cases has proven deadly.

Police also deployed LRAD sound cannons once again in an attempt to disperse the protesters. Pittsburgh marks the first time that such weapons have been used against American citizens in public as before they were only used against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bermas described the scene as like something out of a movie as police attempted to block off the whole park and catch every single protester and were prepared to use violence to do so, saying that they would run up to people and crack them on the head as hard as possible.

“Everyone was just sort of standing around spectating. No one was really having an adamant protest. It was just a bunch of college kids,” witness Ben Balik told The Pittsburgh Channel.

By the end of the confrontation, around half of the entire crowd of protesters had been arrested, including Infowars producer Rob Dew and most likely We Are Change leader Luke Rudkowski.

“Varun Viswanathan, a Pitt sophomore, said he saw a police officer hitting one individual, reports Pitt News.

“I think they completely use unnecessary force on us,” he said. “They have no right to do that.”

“Pitt senior Ken Egler called the police action “one of the crazier things” he’d seen during last night’s protests, especially since he didn’t see many demonstrators in Oakland.”

“I really think it’s ridiculous,” Egler said. “We should be allowed to protest. This is needed, and they’re just basically trying to scare us.”

It is important to emphasize that the obscene behavior of cops in Pittsburgh suggests that police in America will now follow any orders, no matter how barbaric. No one can plausibly deny that the majority of cops would willingly line up American citizens and blow their heads off if they were ordered to.

Police behavior at the G20 has been widely condemned as unwarranted and the violence  metered out not to provide security but to provoke demonstrators.

“The deployment of police seems to be more geared toward suppressing lawful demonstrations than actually preventing crime,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press.

“Legal observers at the gathering saw police surrounding, chasing and arresting students who weren’t involved in the protest, said Paige Cram, spokeswoman for the National Lawyers Guild, a liberal legal-aid group. She called the show of force “an ominous spectacle,” adds the AP report, referring to a similar protest on Friday night.

“A video posted Friday on YouTube shows a group of Pitt students briefly trapped on the outdoor stairwell of a campus building, evidently exposed to gaseous pepper spray and unable to move because riot police were blocking the bottom and top of the stairs. The students had been standing on a second-floor balcony, observing the clash between police and protesters on the street below.”

As of Saturday morning, we were  unable to trace the exact whereabouts of Infowars reporter Rob Dew after he was arrested last night.

“After a long night of calls to Allegheny County Jail and the Pennsylvania Corrections Department, they keep referring us to one another saying they have no information, but that “protesters” are treated differently,” writes Jason Bermas.

We can now report that Rob Dew has been released and the Infowars crew are attempting to catch their flights back to Austin.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/g20-police-military-savagely-attack-peaceful-protesters-in-pittsburgh-park/

Military Attacks American Citizens With Sound Weapons & Tear Gas At G20

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, September 24, 2009

REUTERS UPDATE: Secret Service confirms that police are shooting #g20 protesters with “bean bags.” But check out what they look like. Via Keepshooting.com:

A 12 gauge round that direct fires a 26 gram or 40 gram bean bag projectile. Designed for single target engagement allowing escalation of force from a close distance prior to use of lethal means. It’s $9.95 per round.

A Effect on target: Incapacitation caused by loss of breath, psychological effect, and/or pain and extreme discomfort.

B. Time to Effect: Instantaneous

C. Duration of Effect: Seconds to Minutes based on power factor, distance and location of strike.

D. Effective Range: 7 yards (heavily clothed subject) to 20 yards

G20 Pittsburgh LIVE Coverage: http://reuters.scribblelive.com/Event/G20_Pittsburgh

LIVE: G-20 Protesters In Pittsburgh Streets:

http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/video/21105097/index.html

—————————————————————

National Guard, police, and other military units attacked American citizens with tear gas and deployed sound cannons today in response to an “unpermitted protest” as bedlam hit the streets on the first day of the G20 summit in downtown Pittsburgh.

The First Amendment is officially dead in the United States. If this isn’t martial law then we don’t know what is. Associated Press photographs show National Guard troops in full fatigues with active duty military running checkpoints that make the roadblocks in Iraq positively friendly. Like Iraq, America is now a conquered nation occupied by troops whose primary function is to oppress anyone who tries to express the freedoms that they once enjoyed.

It all unfolded live on The Alex Jones Show as the Infowars crew called in to the program as sound cannons were turned against protesters who police were attempting to force out of the immediate area.

“According to news agency reports, officers made their announcement over a loudspeaker telling people to leave or face arrest or “other police action,” reports the London Times. These words were broadcast live on the Alex Jones Show today along with police orders that the “unlawful assemblies should immediately disperse”.

“Protesters at one flashpoint reported the use of tear gas to disperse the crowds,” reports the Press Association.

Citing Pittsburgh criminal code, police bellowed through loudspeakers that unpermitted protests were a serious offense, an official death knell for the First Amendment.

Corporate media reports will obsess about anarchists causing nuisance without mentioning the fact that the You Tube video below clearly shows police terrorizing neighborhoods with ear-splitting sound weapons that are clearly a violation of all kinds of town ordinances related to public health and noise pollution.

Infowars correspondents reported live how police were “kettling” protesters into confined areas in an attempt to subdue them. Jason Bermas reported seeing mask wearing anarchists, who have been caught before on numerous occasions provoking violence as a pretext for the police to crackdown, throwing objects and tipping over garbage cans.

As we have previously reported, 2,500 National Guardsmen along with Marines and the Air Force are stationed in Pittsburgh to provide “security” for the G20 summit. Their primary training routine revolved around “crowd control” and dealing with civil unrest. The sight of troops on the streets of America, even for routine traffic control and “security” is now commonplace as the land of the free sinks into a militarized police state.

Watch this space for more coverage from Pittsburgh over the next few days. Images and videos appear below.

LRADS being used against protesters caught live on The Alex Jones Show.

Numerous videos of G20 protests and police actions can be viewed on You Tube as they roll in here.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/military-attacks-american-citizens-with-sound-weapons-tear-gas-at-g20/

Houston Cops Handcuff, Assault Man For Posting Obama Joker Flyers

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, September 17, 2009

A Houston man was handcuffed and assaulted by cops for posting anti-Obama flyers around his town, actions described as “criminal vandalism” by police and some local residents, despite the fact that giant pro-Obama murals are openly displayed in the same neighborhood for all to see.

21-year-old Mark Fuhre, an Alex Jones Show listener, decided to post the flyers even though the Infowars Obama Joker Poster Contest had ended, because he wanted to alert his neighbors to the cult of personality being manufactured around Obama and how the establishment is stifling any criticism of the President by constantly invoking racism.

Fuhre believed that he had a first amendment right to express his opinion, just as those that spray painted giant Obama “HOPE” murals in the same neighborhood had done without opposition. However, shortly after he began to post the flyers, a local resident voiced his anger that Fuhre had the temerity to exercise his freedom of speech and called the police.

“They slammed me against the hood of my car, cuffed me, threw me in the back of the car,” Fuhre told local news station KPRC.

He and his friend were later ticketed for criminal mischief and vandalism. The news report also quotes Kim Hammond of the Kingwood Democrats who slams the posters as “graffiti,” “vandalism” and an act of “criminal mischief”.

Watch the video clip here.

What’s deliciously ironic about the news report is that KPRC correspondent Carl Willis, while discussing Fuhre’s dastardly crime of criminal vandalism for posting anti-Obama flyers, stands in front of a huge 12 foot mural wall painting of Obama. The authorities didn’t deem this to be “criminal vandalism” or “dangerous” despite the fact that Obama himself encouraged people to display similar images on stop signs and other federal property.

As we have highlighted before in the case of a Florida teenager who received similar harassment from authorities for posting the Obama Joker flyers, there is a flagrant double standard in place which dictates that only pro-Obama images are allowed to be displayed – a chilling indication that citizens of the United States enjoy the same level of free speech rights as those in Maoist China or Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea.

In the Florida case, authorities and the local media hysterically characterized the placement of Obama Joker posters as some kind of assault on the people of Clermont, creating “victims” and leading to demands for arrests and criminal charges against the teenager who posted them, a completely contrived outrage proven by polls that later showed the majority of residents supported the teenager.

“It’s the constitution of the United States, which is being forgotten,” Fuhre told KPRC. “Everyone should have their liberties.”

It seems that everyone is entitled to their liberties, so long as they don’t use them to dissent against the government, and in particular the contrived God-like untouchable facade being manufactured around negative depictions of Obama.

Fuhre’s friend sends us an e mail to tell us that Fuhre is still being “harassed by the local community and media”.

“I’m hoping you can reach out and let his story be known to the general public, because he’s a good, strong patriot and a little outnumbered in this situation,” he writes.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/houston-cops-handcuff-assault-man-for-posting-obama-joker-flyers/

Detained in Chicago by Dept. of Homeland Security for Political Free Speech

Campaign For Liberty
September 12, 2009

Sept. 10th, 2009, Chicago, Illinois — Two concerned citizens were briefly detained by Department of Homeland Security officers for the crime of filming in a public location and attempting to document the actions of public officials, having political signs in their possession on “Federal property”, and attempting to deliver the petitions of Illinois residents to the offices of our U.S. Senators. They were subsequently released and were free to go after the brief, but outrageous episode.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/detained-in-chicago-by-dept-of-homeland-security-for-political-free-speech/

Mother Arrested for Blogging About Police

The Washington Post
August 19, 2009

A 34-YEAR-OLD woman, the mother of a 12-year-old girl, has been locked up in a Virginia jail for three weeks and could remain there for at least another month. Her crime? Blogging about the police.

Elisha Strom, who appears unable to make the $750 bail, was arrested outside Charlottesville on July 16 when police raided her house, confiscating notebooks, computers and camera equipment. Although the Charlottesville police chief, Timothy J. Longo Sr., had previously written to Ms. Strom warning her that her blog posts were interfering with the work of a local drug enforcement task force, she was not charged with obstruction of justice or any similar offense. Rather, she was indicted on a single count of identifying a police officer with intent to harass, a felony under state law.

It’s fair to say that Ms. Strom was unusually focused on the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement task force, a 14-year-old unit drawn mainly from the police departments of Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia. (Her blog at http://iheartejade.blogspot.com, expresses the view that the task force is “nothing more than a group of arrogant thugs.”) In a nearly year-long barrage of blog posts, she published snapshots she took in public of many or most of the task force’s officers; detailed their comings and goings by following them in her car; mused about their habits and looks; hinted that she may have had a personal relationship with one of them; and, in one instance, reported that she had tipped off a local newspaper about their movements.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/mother-arrested-for-blogging-about-police/

Pregnant Woman, Grandfather Get Tased by Cops

Christine Estevez
Latina
August 19, 2009

What started out as an innocent backyard celebration ended with Tasers, tears, and handcuffs for one Virginia family. Prince William County Police responded to a noise complaint at the home of Edgar Rodriguez, a 55-year-old grandfather celebrating his grandchildren’s Baptism—’cause we all know how crazy our Baptisms can get! What happened afterward is at the heart of the matter and is still not clear because the police and the family have very different accounts of the ensuing events.

Family members say that police used excessive force for no apparent reason. But police say Rodriguez refused several requests to turn down the loud music, acted “disorderly” and refused to identify himself. The family claims that the police just began to indiscriminately Taser Rodriguez, eventually resulting in Abuelito being Tasered three times and charged with public intoxication…even though he was in his own backyard!

The 25-year-old mother of the twin boys whose Baptism was being celebrated, Leticia Elias, was also Tasered. The pregnant mommy was then charged with assaulting a police officer. Her family contends that she was the one who was assaulted by the police when she ran to Rodriguez’s side in an attempt to help him after he fell to the ground. After her arrest, Elias was detained by immigration and customs officials.

Chief Charlie Deane has ordered an internal affairs investigation in an attempt to straighten out the whole mess. Excessive police force seems to be a recurring safety issue for people of color. With this latest incident occurring just weeks after Harvard Professor Henry Louise Gates Jr. was arrested, it is seeming more and more dangerous to be black or Latino in your own home these days.

What do you think: Were the police out of line or were they just doing their job? Even if the party was loud and Rodriguez was intoxicated it seems a bit unnecessary to Taser an abuelito and a pregnant mami, no?

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/pregnant-woman-grandfather-get-tased-by-cops/

Cop Tases Mom As Her Children Watch

David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
Raw Story

August 14, 2009

A police officer in the Syracuse, New York, area Tasered a 37-year-old mom repeatedly in front of her children during a routine traffic stop—and then arrested the mom, leaving the children alone in their family minivan for 40 minutes in freezing weather.

The incident took place in Onondaga County, New York, on January 31, but dashcam video of the incident only recently came to light.

According to a report at syracuse.com, what started out as a routine traffic stop “escalated quickly” when 37-year-old Audra Harmon challenged officer Sean Andrews’ assertion that she had been talking on her cell phone when he pulled her over. Harmon disputed that fact, as well as the officer’s claim that she had been speeding—doing 50 mph in a 45 zone.

An article at MSNBC.com describes the situation:

Harmon had been driving home with her 15-year-old son, whom she had just picked up from wrestling practice, and 5-year-old daughter. She said she was resting her right hand on her cheek as she pulled behind a sheriff’s deputy to make a right turn onto the road where she lived. After she made the turn, the deputy pulled off the road to let her pass, then pulled out behind her with his lights flashing and siren blaring.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

When Harmon got out of her minivan to show Officer Andrews that she wasn’t in possession of a cell phone, and to ask to see video footage of her allegedly talking on the cell phone she didn’t possess, the officer ordered her to get back in her car.

“And then he pulled out his taser and said I’m under arrest,” Harmon said. “I got back in the car and he said he wanted me back out of the car now. And I said ‘Why am I under arrest?’ … He then yanked me out of the car … pulled his taser out and the first shot jolted me…”

According to Syracuse.com, “Harmon was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and going 50 in a 45 mph zone. The district attorney’s office dismissed the charges a month later—after watching the videotape, said her lawyer, Terrance Hoffmann.”

Amazingly, the officer had justified Harmon’s arrest by saying she had obstructed traffic by getting out of her minivan.

As MSNBC points out, when Harmon was arrested, her children, aged five and 15, were left by the side of the road for forty minutes.

Harmon is suing the Onondaga County sheriff’s office. Officer Andrews has been taken off street patrol and “reassigned” until an internal affairs investigation is completed, the sheriff’s office said.

This video is from Syracuse.com, posted to the Web Aug. 13, 2009.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/cop-tases-mom-as-her-children-watch/