http://revcom.us/a/1266/donovan-jackson-chavis-verdict.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/07/12/police.beating.officer/index.html
http://www.knbc.com/video/1547338/index.html

The first frames of the video show a skinny young kid lying face down on the asphalt, handcuffed, utterly still. Four beefy cops surround him. They yank his limp body off the pavement by grabbing the silver chain around his neck. He is choked unconscious. They slam him hard face-first onto the trunk of the black-and-white. The blow jolts him awake. The camcorder zooms in on his face: His mouth is red-wet, and the blood smears across his cheek. His jaw is slack and his eyes can’t focus. He tries to lift his head, but it falls back down. The four cops are close around him, an unforgiving wall. Officer Jeremy Morse, on the Inglewood force for three years, grabs the back of the kid’s head and turns it to the right, spending a few seconds to position it just so. He smashes his clenched fist into the youth’s face, then wraps his hands around his throat. On the video, you can see Morse’s face clearly: contorted by a grimace, teeth bared in a snarl, he truly does look like a beast.

The LEO in question was found to have had a history of abuse (at least 2 cases, see above article where one of his victims was in a coma for 5 days).

The below comments from a news bbs summarizes it best:

T*O*P*I*C Discussion Started: 07-10-2002, 2:54 PM
Attorneys for a teen who was videotaped while an Inglewood police
officer slammed him onto a squad car plan to file a lawsuit over the
incident as public pressure mounts and various law enforcement agencies
launch separate investigations. Meanwhile another man claims he too was
beaten by Inglewood police officers. What do you think about the police
brutality situation in Inglewood? Elsewhere? What, if anything, do you
think the videotape proves?

don87654 07-16-2002, 3:27 PM
Southern California cops are just plain crooked, period! I was once a
State of California Correctional Peace Officer at the California
Institute for Women at Frontera. We were taught in the Academy at Galt
how to formulate evidence to make ourselves look good and victims to
look bad. I refused to cater to this treatment and was fired by an
abusive Lieutenant that was in charge of Internal Affairs at the time.
Later because of my outspoken stances on this, charges were levied
against me involving vehicle tampering and simple assault and I was
convicted of this by what appeared to be paid police witnesses. My
attorney at the time, one of the best criminal lawyers in southern
California, told me to pack my bags and leave town, which I did. It took
him 8 long years to get my conviction erased from court records and to
get the warrant for my arrest dropped by the court so I was no longer
“wanted”. It does not matter where they are at….these California cops
that completed the Academy in Los Angeles, or for the State, are just
plain crooked–they are taught to be that way

Jbp912 07-10-2002, 6:21 PM
I am a disabled military veteran. I am in my senior years and I have
become cynical of police officers and the entire judicial system. There
has been too much lying, cover-ups, and irresponsible behavior by law
enforcement persons. It seems there is a lack of proper training, poor
recruitment, and too much hubris. The bottom line is bad management and
no accountability, but we live in an age of extreme mediocrity.
Thank you, JBP

Patriottoo 07-10-2002, 4:20 PM
This is a clear cut case of a rabid, over zealous, adreinaline pumped,
and I’m suprised his eyes weren’t bulging out of his head cop! The teen
was OBVIOUSLY in custody when he was BRUTILIZED with the UNNECESSARY
FORCE of SLAMMING his head on the trunk lid of the police car and then
PUNCHING him FIST CLOSED in the face, by the this cop. I don’t care who
a person is, or what they have done, NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY deserves
to be treated in that manner. Once the ‘cuffs’ are on, all force that
was necessary to place a suspect in custody MUST STOP! I hope this
maniac of a police officer is prosecuted to the fullest extent that the
law allows, and receives the maxium penalty for his crimes! Only when
the courts get serious and start holding those in the police agencies
around the country who would engage in this type of brutality, fully
responsible for thier crimes will we see an end to it!
Patriot Too

I find it OUTRAGEOUS that the so called LEOs (”to protect & serve” emblazened on their patrol cars) are actually the criminals. America sounds like a 3rd world country.

There was the famous case of Frank Serpico, who exposed massive corruption in NYPD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico

“10% of the cops are corrupt, 10% of them are honest..the other 80% WISH THEY WERE HONEST”
..was his testimony to Congress

Connect the dots. Los Angeles, NY, Baltimore. The renowned “Code of Silence” (a “closed system” which doesn’t allow corrective feedback) allows the crap to happen.

I remember the commission report on the 1968 Democratic Convention:

“It was a police riot”

The famous video of a cop striking a guy (college student) full face with a baton, & the student striking back.

“You don’t need a lawyer..JUST GOTO THE MEDIA”

..my lawyer friend told me. Youtube is an extension of the Freedom of the Press (a sacrament in American Constitution) for citizen journalists, which can be the negative reinforcement against bad cops.

Everyone, carry your camera cellphone (w/video capability) to protect yourself.

In retrospect, those kids were pretty smart, their technology savviness beat that dump cop. Cops have police unions and lawyers to back them up, which explains the outrageous end game of the Morse-Jackson/Inglewood case: Morse gets 1.6 million settlement for racial discrimination (!?). The cellphone video/Youtube effect is a powerful tool for justice: the Court of Public Opinion.

On the other hand, there may be a perfectly reasonable and exculpatory explanation as to why a man of Officer Rivieri’s age and girth was assigned by his superiors to troop around in public in a colorful, matching shirt ‘n shorts outfit.

More facts are required. Inquiring minds want to know.

Anything nice or bad to say?

(2) Authority? Authoritarianism? Power trips? I was previously Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at Cypress College, reporting to the Chairman of Physics and Astronomy who got his PhD from Greg Benford (who recommended me for the job, as did Physicist/ sometimes Astronomer Caltech VP/Provost Steve Koonin), I never had my contract extended to full-time Tenure Track, because the “Equivalence Committee” of bureaucrats decided that if I had at least 210 publications, presentations, and broadcasts about Astronomy and the Space program some of them Science Fiction with the likes of my coauthors Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, and Heinlein, then I must be far too busy writing to have enough time for teaching students.

(3) I took a big pay cut to do substitute teaching to the most challenged and challenging students in the Pasadena Unified School District, including those teenagers on the cusp of expulsion for gangs, drugs, alcohol, weapons, sexually transmitted diseases, or other problems. By a plethora of advanced techniques, including spending an order of magnitude more time and energy than a teacher is expected to do, I’ve been able to provide classroom structure (based on mutual respect and rigorous confiscation of skateboards, cellphones, iPods, iPhones, and hand-held computer games) and then debug the false axioms and fallacious algorithms with which they’d been burdened by bad teaching in the past, and then regress them to the point before they went off track, and then put them back on the right track. As my mentor and co-author Richard Feynman (who died exactly 20 years ago as of 15 Feb 1988) put it: anyone can teach Physics to people who don’t know it. The hard thing is to teach Physics to people who think they know it, but wee taught wrongly in High School.

(4) Don’t ever talk back to a cop in Pasadena, California. There is quite an amazing self-published pamphlet explaining why.

Bobby Fischer Dead at 64
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2008/01/bobby_fischer_dead_at_64.php
Category: Chess
Posted on: January 18, 2008 8:21 PM, by Jason Rosenhouse

Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer has died of kidney failure at the age of 64. The New York Times has an informative article here.

For chess fans Bobby Fischer was the classic example of the need to separate the art from the artist. Away from the board Fischer was an emotionally disturbed misfit, entirely unable to take care of himself or deal with the world in a reasonable way. His incoherent,
hate-filled rants against Jews and America made him more an object of pity than of anger.

But at the board he’s the best there ever was…

[truncated]

Comments:

[truncated]

I met Bobby Fischer on the Promenade, Brooklyn Heights, when he was a teenager and I in single digits. He and I both moved to Pasadena, California, where I did better (Caltech Life Alumnus) than he did (”I was tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse!” by Bobby Fischer). That document was the last book he wrote, though not, technically speaking, a Chess Book.

The Nabokovian (The Defense, 1930) irony of his dying at 64, the number of squares on a chessboard, was instantly obvious to all chess professionals.

(5) Don’t ever talk back to a cop in Pasadena, California, Part II.

When an undergraduate at Caltech, I once was riding my Peugeot bicycle near campus. Since it was 3 a.m., good weather, and there was essentially no traffic, I did not brake and re-accelerate but ran a red light. I was ticketed by a traffic cop in a suddenly powered-on but formerly dark patrol car.

I challenged the ticket in traffic court. The cop spoke first. “… at which point defendant ran through the red light, without even slowing down, with his Peugeot…”

My turn came next. “Guilty with an explanation, Your Honor. The aforementioned Peugeot was a Peugeot bicycle…”

Judge: “Is that correct, Officer Bob Doggett?” [name slightly changed to protect the authoritarian, who by the way was a former Pig farmer, I kid you not]

Doggett: “Yes, Your Honor.”

Judge: Case Dismissed [bangs gavel]. And if you ever pull that crap again, Doggett, it’ll go in your personnel file!

There may be (very reasonable) laws against skateboarding in certain places (especially without helmets), but there’s no law against being “disrespectful”. Of course, I think it’s clear that the kid wasn’t being all that disrespectful. That’s just how teenagers talk. If you’re okay with them talking like that, they respect you a lot more (even though it may not seem like it).

Very bad lesson for the kids, and a terrible example of policing. And that whole “someone’s gonna kill you” comment… *way* out of line.