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27 July 2009
New Taser can shock three people at once
I know that if you check out the recent post on the Oakland Copwatch's blog, you'll notice that there are a bunch of new stories about the police abusing EVERYONE with tasers. however, after reading this, I have had enough. How is it that law enforcement has not seen that taser KILL people. There's data people. And now you make it so it can shock, possibly kill 3 people at once??? No muss, no fuss. The story below can describe t better than I can. Please read it and repost far and wide.
Peace with the police
Story by Agence France-Presse of The Raw Story.com
Manufacturers of the Taser stun gun on Monday unveiled a new handheld weapon on Monday which is capable of shocking three people without having to reload.
Arizona-based Taser International said in a statement the company’s new X3 “electronic control device” was the first new handheld weapon since 2003 and featured enhanced safety details.
Taser International chief executive Rick Smith said the new multi-shot Taser would “increase officer safety through the ability to recover from a missed shot or even simultaneously stop up to three separate targets.”
The company said the new weapon included a “pulse calibration system” for allowing electricity to be distributed across the outer layers of the skin of the target rather than deep into the body.
A video demonstration of YouTube showed three volunteers being floored by three successive shots before getting to their feet apparently unhurt.
Human rights activists have criticized Taser stun guns, challenging manufacturer claims that they are safe and non-lethal.
A December 2008 report from Amnesty International said 334 people had died after being shocked by Tasers between 2001 and August last year.
Peace with the police
Story by Agence France-Presse of The Raw Story.com
Manufacturers of the Taser stun gun on Monday unveiled a new handheld weapon on Monday which is capable of shocking three people without having to reload.
Arizona-based Taser International said in a statement the company’s new X3 “electronic control device” was the first new handheld weapon since 2003 and featured enhanced safety details.
Taser International chief executive Rick Smith said the new multi-shot Taser would “increase officer safety through the ability to recover from a missed shot or even simultaneously stop up to three separate targets.”
The company said the new weapon included a “pulse calibration system” for allowing electricity to be distributed across the outer layers of the skin of the target rather than deep into the body.
A video demonstration of YouTube showed three volunteers being floored by three successive shots before getting to their feet apparently unhurt.
Human rights activists have criticized Taser stun guns, challenging manufacturer claims that they are safe and non-lethal.
A December 2008 report from Amnesty International said 334 people had died after being shocked by Tasers between 2001 and August last year.
25 July 2009
Media mostly ignoring claims of Harvard police racism
This is what the liberal or any level headed human being has been screaming for days. The police are there to protect rich white people. Professor be damned. It's just a shame that as a country we can't see this for what is really is. But it's not at all surprising.
From The Raw Story.com
The corporate media, inflamed by President Obama's assessment that Cambridge, Mass. police "acted stupidly" when arresting black historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has seemingly forgotten recent history.
Just run a Google News search for "S. Allen Counter". There is, as far as I can tell, only one publication with a memory long enough to bring up his case with regards to the controversy at hand.
Mr. Counter, notes College News, is a black professor of neuroscience at Harvard: One of Gates's peers at the university. He was confronted by Harvard police in 2004 while walking to his office, reportedly because they suspected this black member of faculty was a burglar.
Sound familiar?
But the allegations of profiling by the Harvard police do not stop there. In fact, in August 2008, the university launched a probe of the police department's handling of race-related issues following a long string of complaints from black students and faculty members.
More, from MIT's paper The Tech:
President Drew Gilpin Faust announced Tuesday that she has appointed an independent, six-member committee to review the diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts of Harvard police, the first review of its kind in more than a decade. In recent weeks, black student and faculty leaders have been pressing the university to address what they view as racial profiling by the predominantly white campus police force, which Harvard oversees.
[...]
Earlier this month, she noted, officers confronted a person using tools to remove a lock from a locked bicycle. The person, whom others familiar with the case have identified as a black Boston high school student working on the Harvard campus this summer, owned the bicycle, and was trying to cut the lock because the key had broken off in the lock. The two officers involved have been placed on administrative leave, pending a separate investigation into the matter, said a source familiar with the case.
Faculty and students say previous incidents have fanned tension with police.
In spring 2007, officers interrupted a field day on the Radcliffe Quad sponsored by two black student groups. Police asked whether the young men and women were Harvard students and whether they had permission to be there, even though they had a permit.
And in 2004, police stopped S. Allen Counter, a prominent neuroscience professor, as he was walking to his office across Harvard Yard because they mistook him for a black robbery suspect.
Earlier this month, in response to inquiries from the Globe, Police Chief Francis Riley said through a spokesman that the department has begun conversations with the black student organizations to address “bias incidents” but would not respond to a request for statistics on how often black students and faculty are stopped.
WBZ CBS 38 adds:
The committee, led by former Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin, will investigate complaints that officers have unfairly stopped black students, professors and other members of the Harvard community.
"Police are supposed to be here to protect us and make sure we're safe. I might be targeted for a reason that has nothing to do with the person I am," sophomore Anselm Beach told WBZ.
In an e-mail to Harvard administrators, President Faust writes, "All of us share an interest in sustaining constructive relations between our campus police and the broader Harvard community, in order to provide a safe and welcoming environment for all faculty, students, staff and visitors."
The fact of the matter is, right-wing and corporate-controlled media would much rather talk about race issues to further faction up America's poor. And in that discussion, outlets like Fox would much rather focus on the white officer who they are making out to be the victim of the president's allegedly racially-motivated (h/t: Rush Limbaugh) assessment of his actions. It's cold, calculated, political propaganda in an effort to further corral whites toward Republicans, in fear of the angry black man.
Just like the "birthers" and their debunked nonsense.
The president today struck a careful middle-ground in what I'm sure he hopes to be the last he will have to deal with this matter. His words were not an apology, but Obama still struck a conciliatory tone. Saying he should have "calibrated" his assessment differently is certainly a concession, but he saved face by maintaining his position that the police overreacted.
It appeared, to me at least, an earnest attempt to shift the media's focus back to what really matters: The health and financial well-being of the poor and many over the quibbles of the wealthy and few.
That's not to minimize the very serious and real issue of racial profiling among the nation's police.
But, with such seemingly dogged insistence in the media the past few days to pit whites against blacks, especially among right-wing outlets, perhaps skeptical news consumers should be asking themselves why these venues would casually forget to mention there's a history of racial profiling at this wealthy, white-majority university.
Meanwhile, let's all just forget that over 40 million Americans cannot see a doctor when they are sick.
I think political hip-hop artist Immortal Technique put it best when he said the following ...
"As different as we have been taught to look at each other by colonial society, we are in the same struggle and until we realize that, we'll be fighting for scraps from the table of a system that has kept us subservient instead of being self-determined.
"[...] As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat, and it's sinking, while these boughie motherf**kers ride on a luxury-liner. And as long as we keep fighting about kicking people out of a little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole."
-- Stephen C. Webster
Editor's Note: This version corrects an error in the first sentence -- that President Obama had said the Harvard police had "acted stupidly" (It was the Cambridge police) -- and has been modified to expand upon the similarities between Harvard professors Gates' and Counting's cases.
From The Raw Story.com
The corporate media, inflamed by President Obama's assessment that Cambridge, Mass. police "acted stupidly" when arresting black historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has seemingly forgotten recent history.
Just run a Google News search for "S. Allen Counter". There is, as far as I can tell, only one publication with a memory long enough to bring up his case with regards to the controversy at hand.
Mr. Counter, notes College News, is a black professor of neuroscience at Harvard: One of Gates's peers at the university. He was confronted by Harvard police in 2004 while walking to his office, reportedly because they suspected this black member of faculty was a burglar.
Sound familiar?
But the allegations of profiling by the Harvard police do not stop there. In fact, in August 2008, the university launched a probe of the police department's handling of race-related issues following a long string of complaints from black students and faculty members.
More, from MIT's paper The Tech:
President Drew Gilpin Faust announced Tuesday that she has appointed an independent, six-member committee to review the diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts of Harvard police, the first review of its kind in more than a decade. In recent weeks, black student and faculty leaders have been pressing the university to address what they view as racial profiling by the predominantly white campus police force, which Harvard oversees.
[...]
Earlier this month, she noted, officers confronted a person using tools to remove a lock from a locked bicycle. The person, whom others familiar with the case have identified as a black Boston high school student working on the Harvard campus this summer, owned the bicycle, and was trying to cut the lock because the key had broken off in the lock. The two officers involved have been placed on administrative leave, pending a separate investigation into the matter, said a source familiar with the case.
Faculty and students say previous incidents have fanned tension with police.
In spring 2007, officers interrupted a field day on the Radcliffe Quad sponsored by two black student groups. Police asked whether the young men and women were Harvard students and whether they had permission to be there, even though they had a permit.
And in 2004, police stopped S. Allen Counter, a prominent neuroscience professor, as he was walking to his office across Harvard Yard because they mistook him for a black robbery suspect.
Earlier this month, in response to inquiries from the Globe, Police Chief Francis Riley said through a spokesman that the department has begun conversations with the black student organizations to address “bias incidents” but would not respond to a request for statistics on how often black students and faculty are stopped.
WBZ CBS 38 adds:
The committee, led by former Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin, will investigate complaints that officers have unfairly stopped black students, professors and other members of the Harvard community.
"Police are supposed to be here to protect us and make sure we're safe. I might be targeted for a reason that has nothing to do with the person I am," sophomore Anselm Beach told WBZ.
In an e-mail to Harvard administrators, President Faust writes, "All of us share an interest in sustaining constructive relations between our campus police and the broader Harvard community, in order to provide a safe and welcoming environment for all faculty, students, staff and visitors."
The fact of the matter is, right-wing and corporate-controlled media would much rather talk about race issues to further faction up America's poor. And in that discussion, outlets like Fox would much rather focus on the white officer who they are making out to be the victim of the president's allegedly racially-motivated (h/t: Rush Limbaugh) assessment of his actions. It's cold, calculated, political propaganda in an effort to further corral whites toward Republicans, in fear of the angry black man.
Just like the "birthers" and their debunked nonsense.
The president today struck a careful middle-ground in what I'm sure he hopes to be the last he will have to deal with this matter. His words were not an apology, but Obama still struck a conciliatory tone. Saying he should have "calibrated" his assessment differently is certainly a concession, but he saved face by maintaining his position that the police overreacted.
It appeared, to me at least, an earnest attempt to shift the media's focus back to what really matters: The health and financial well-being of the poor and many over the quibbles of the wealthy and few.
That's not to minimize the very serious and real issue of racial profiling among the nation's police.
But, with such seemingly dogged insistence in the media the past few days to pit whites against blacks, especially among right-wing outlets, perhaps skeptical news consumers should be asking themselves why these venues would casually forget to mention there's a history of racial profiling at this wealthy, white-majority university.
Meanwhile, let's all just forget that over 40 million Americans cannot see a doctor when they are sick.
I think political hip-hop artist Immortal Technique put it best when he said the following ...
"As different as we have been taught to look at each other by colonial society, we are in the same struggle and until we realize that, we'll be fighting for scraps from the table of a system that has kept us subservient instead of being self-determined.
"[...] As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat, and it's sinking, while these boughie motherf**kers ride on a luxury-liner. And as long as we keep fighting about kicking people out of a little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole."
-- Stephen C. Webster
Editor's Note: This version corrects an error in the first sentence -- that President Obama had said the Harvard police had "acted stupidly" (It was the Cambridge police) -- and has been modified to expand upon the similarities between Harvard professors Gates' and Counting's cases.
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