Be aware an apiarist (white man ~52) who resides in/near Olympia with hives in the Matlock area is selling tainted honey from the back of his pickup truck on the north side of Martin way near the veterinarian clinic/hospital west of Ensign Rd. When questioned about his methodology of controlling varroa & tracheal mites, he admitted he left the strips between the frames until harvesting the honey.
The mite pesticide chemical in these strips is extremely toxic to humans. For that reason, regulations require they be removed prior to the nectar gathering season of the foraging honey bees, not after the honey has already become tainted. Unfortunately, the State never tests for the presence of this poisonous chemical and the man sells it from his truck by the side of the road in any event.
The guy became belligerent when I pointed out the regulations to him and offered information regarding non-toxic alternatives. My wife was with me as the guy became so agitated we left for our own safety.
Don’t risk your and your family’s health. Know the source of the honey you buy and make certain you can trust it. This guy’s unethical practices putting the public at risk with tainted honey is common in the industry because the strips are expensive and the State does no testing for the presence of the toxins in the honey.
Cumophos is one of the poisons used in the pest strips. Read about it.
To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.
“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition.” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.
History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.
But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.
There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.
That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.
The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:
It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.
In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.
Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the prevention and detection of crimes.”
It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.
It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”
New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.
American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor’s office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.
Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren’t yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.
The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, swat teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.
Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.
When Humanitarian Aid Is Considered A Crime
To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)
Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah’s chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the “whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances.” African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia’s chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force’s training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.
Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.
More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. “By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision,” Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. “The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.”
Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California’s, began as “highway patrols.” Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. “One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners,” its new chief said.
The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation’s borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants’ protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film “Intolerance,” imagined relics of an unforgiving age.
Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.”
As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” the “frontline soldiers” in Johnson’s war on crime—Vollmer-era policing all over again—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. “If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum,” Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. “We ain’t rioting agains’ all you whites,” one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. “We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality.” In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.
Johnson’s Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria.” James Baldwin attributed its “irresponsible ferocity” to “some pale, compelling nightmare—an overwhelming collection of private nightmares.” The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.” During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency—the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed “the international dimension to the Administration’s War on Crime.” Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.
In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.
The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book “Varieties of Police Behavior,” and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called “community policing.” (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the “service functions” of the police—“first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like”—which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a “radical college professor,” and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end stress arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. stress defended its methods. “We just don’t walk up and shoot somebody,” one commander said. “We ask him to stop. If he doesn’t, we shoot.”
For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. “Crime is a national-defense problem,” Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.
Partly because of Biden’s record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.
In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that “our members believe he will make America safe again.” Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. “We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment,” Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. “We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”
Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king’s men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn’t a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.
Those changes won’t address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can’t be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too. ♦
Olympia, WA (7-12-20) — A patriotic group of good samaritans try to shepherd cars past BLM & ANTIFA protestors blocking the intersection in front of Olympia City Hall. Suddenly, the street thugs attack the bald man in the light green shirt and red suspenders who was helping shepherd drivers through the blocked intersection with what looked like a steel baton seen lying on the pavement and the man’s head wounds. The police did nothing to prevent the violence and the side arms carried by some of the samaritans did nothing to prevent harm from coming to the hospitalized member of their group with his head split open. The Olympia police, as usual, took a report but made no arrests and appeared to have the names of no suspects.
Two people were arrested Sunday after a man was assaulted during a protest near Olympia City Hall.
About 3:45 p.m. Sunday, protesters who had gathered outside of City Hall moved into the intersection on Fourth Avenue and Cherry Street to block cars headed east. Counter protesters led by Peter Diaz, who had gathered in the Meineke Car Care Center parking lot across from City Hall, tried to shepherd the cars rerouting them through the lot and onto Cherry to free the drivers from the blockade. BLM-ANTIFA protestors attempted to interfere by blocking the drivers exiting from Meineke’s.
As the two groups got closer, yelling at one another, shouting insults and curses, a man from the group at the Meineke property was pepper sprayed in the face, according to Olympia Police Lt. Paul Lower. The man was then chased and viciously assaulted by three BLM-ANTIFA protesters. The man was beaten on the head with an extendable steel baton, bloodying him, then punched multiple times by a second protester and hit with a cardboard sign by yet a third protester, Lower said. The victim lost consciousness and was hospitalized
The police finally arrived from inside the PD portion of the adjacent Olympia City Hall seen in the background, then protectively barricaded the man while volunteers gave him medical attention. He was taken by ambulance to Providence St. Peter Hospital.
Peter Diaz, who organized the counter-protest, said he’s a friend of the victim, but said the man “is not as tactful” as some in the counter-protest group. The victim is seen in a video recorded by Diaz shouting at some of the BLM-ANTIFA group’s protesters.
Diaz said Monday his friend has been released from the hospital but has a busted lip and now has to use a straw to eat.
Two people were arrested in connection with the assault and the police are currently looking for a third, whom they have identified.
A 20-year-old man with Olympia residence was arrested on second-degree assault charges for allegedly using the extendable steel baton on the man. The police found the suspect in an alleyway near City Hall, changing his clothes after he had dumped the baton in a trash bin, Lower said.
A juvenile also was arrested on misdemeanor fourth degree assault charges, Lower said.
As is so often the case, ANTIFA’s criminal street tactics have special appeal to the violent mentally unstable, cognitively challenged, and sex offenders who are easily manipulated to do the group’s dirty work.
Sex Offender Registers As Transient in Thurston County
A 19-year-old level 1 sex offender recently registered as transient in Thurston County, the sheriff’s office announced. Shaelyn A. Reed, on Sept. 11, 2017, pleaded guilty in Thurston County Juvenile Court to one count of second-degree rape of a child. He was sentenced to 80 to 100 weeks commitment to the custody of the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration. The conviction stems from Reed, at the age of 17, sexually assaulting a known 13-year-old girl.
Reed recently registered as transient with the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. He will be residing in the Thurston County area. He’s described as a white male, standing 6 feet, weighing 260 pounds and with brown hair and brown eyes. Anyone with questions about Reed, or with sex offender registration in Thurston County, may call 360-754-2894 or by logging on to www.co.thurston.wa.us/sheriff/.
Shaelyn A. Reed is the convicted sex offender believed to have been arrested for beating the victim on the head with a steel baton show in the video clip above.
Lacey Halleck (37) and Katie Schilling assault (threaten), bully, and intimidate elderly journalist photographing children at play in Tumwater Historical Park until he moves to defend himself, whereupon they morph into their full Karen mode screaming “Pedophile!” as they vainly try to organize an impromptu lynch mob until the police arrive.
The Tumwater Police do explain the journalist’s 1st Amendment rights (photography is not a crime; children have no more right to privacy in public than adults) but quietly indicate common cause with the assailants and refuse to refer the journalist’s criminal complaint against the perpetrators to the prosecuting attorney, Lacey Halleck can be heard screaming and shouting smashing the camera strapped to the journalist’s neck isn’t “violence”, but admits her assault and violation of his civil rights on camera–and then publishes it on her FaceBook page in an ongoing campaign of criminal harassment to “make you famous,” she says.
Lacey’s true intent, demonstrably, is to organize a virtual lynch mob online to continue the criminal harassment until the journalist is murdered or frightened into submission to her will–the very essence of coercion and terrorism increasingly common on our streets often directed at journalists.
The Karens clearly understand what they are doing as they continue to organize their online lynch mob now circulating amongs thousands of hysterical drama queens and kings:
BEFORE YOU KILL A DOG, FIRST YOU CALL IT “PEDOPHILE”!
It worked, in principle, on Emmet Till. ANTIFA finds it equally useful using the term “Nazi” to justify attacking their street victims.
All one need do is slander the victim’s character to diminish their stature to sub-human proportions–your basic war propaganda strategy. Prosecuting attorneys successfully and routinely use this tactic when they don’t have sufficient evidence to convict.
Because of the lethal potential of the Karen’s ongoing online campaign of criminal harassment, an unusual condition will be applied to this post/video. Comments were closed, at least on Youtube, because the most scurrilous are difficult or impossible to remove there. but not here.
Rational non-threatening posts accompanied by responsible identities will be accepted here and regular updates will be posted, as litigation (including criminal prosecution of the Karens) winds its way through the courts seeking a rather large sum from the defendants which looks like it will include FaceBook. Stay tuned. Constructive suggestions are appreciated.
Mason County officials accused of illegal actions related to proposed gravel mine
by Christopher Dunagan
Belfair, WA (7-3-20) —
In a class-action lawsuit filed against Mason County, a dozen North Mason property owners claim that County Commissioner Randy Neatherlin and other county officials illegally benefitted a private gravel company in violation of county zoning laws.
“On June 30, 2017, Mason County and the named individual defendants gifted a private company, Grump Ventures, LLC, with a valuable right to operate a 66.5-acre surface mine in a residential zone where mining is prohibited,” the lawsuit alleges.
The civil-rights case, filed Monday in U.S. District Court, goes on to say that Neatherlin tried to cover up the “unlawful and unconstitutional” acts by “hiding” county documents at his house.
A lawsuit demanding the missing records led to a $30,000 settlement, with a payment from Mason County government going to North Mason resident Brad Carey, who filed a separate lawsuit under the state’s Open Public Records Act.
In a telephone interview, Neatherlin said he couldn’t talk about the substance of the case until after he discusses the matter with legal advisers. Tim Whitehead, chief deputy prosecutor for Mason County, said he plans to meet with Neatherlin and others next week.
Neatherlin, who is running for his third term as county commissioner, said he had been working hard to “put the pieces together” and find a way to make the gravel mine work for everyone, including residents of the area. “I help everybody,” he said. “If people ask for my help, I give it.”
The lawsuit filed Monday asks the court to vacate the county’s improper endorsement of the 66.5-acre gravel mine being planned on a hillside above Hood Canal, some 4.5 miles from Belfair on North Shore Road.
The county’s approval of the gravel operation was expressed in “Form SM-6,” a document signed by David Windom, director of Mason County Community Services. His signature came as a result of improper pressure from Neatherlin, according to the lawsuit. The approval was then submitted to the Washington Department of Natural Resources, which must issue the permits needed for surface-mining operations.
This past January, the county rescinded its SM-6 approval, but Grump Ventures appealed the rescission to the county hearing examiner. A hearing on that appeal is pending. That’s why the property owners moved ahead with the class-action lawsuit on behalf of everyone who would be adversely affected by the gravel mine, said attorney Dave Bricklin, who filed the lawsuit.
Bruce Carter, one of the landowners bringing the case, said the lawsuit was the result of a “grassroots uprising” against the gravel pit and a county process that has been corrupted.
“The effects of the traffic with 100 dump trucks a day, water pollution, air pollution and noise would totally infringe on the lifestyle we have on the north side of the canal,” Carter said.
The SM-6 approval was needed to ensure that the project complied with county zoning laws. The application submitted by Grump Ventures and approved by Windom specified that 66.5-acres met the zoning regulations. That approval, however, went against the advice of county planner Michael MacSems, who had urged Windom in a memo not to sign “until the acreage is changed to 1.87 acres.”
Although the land is currently zoned residential, a gravel mine is allowed to continue as a “non-conforming use,” provided that it stays within its historical boundaries, according to MacSems, who calculated the historical area as 1.87 acres. He said larger parcels owned by Grump should not be counted as part of the original gravel mine area.
According to the lawsuit, Neatherlin not only pressured Windom to sign the SM-6 document but he also pressured MacSems to withdraw his written objection to the larger area. “Commissioner Neatherlin became a persistent advocate for Grump’s mining application, telling staff at least five times, “How do we get to yes?’ …,” the legal complaint says.
In support of the mining operation, Neatherlin provided the planners with an aerial photo taken in 1963 and given to him by Jack Johnson, another gravel mine operator who was assisting Grump with permitting issues. Grump and its registered agent Russell Scott were named in the lawsuit as other defendants (“necessary parties,” as described in the complaint).
Neatherlin reported to the planners that the aerial photo showed evidence of mining activity, according to the lawsuit, and Windom then signed off on the SM-6 approval. But area property owners insist that the photo shows no evidence of mining, only open areas caused by trees blown down during a windstorm — the historic “Columbus Day Storm” of 1962.
Johnson contends that the historical evidence supports the gravel mine operating on 25 acres of the Grump property, and legal doctrine supports the use of the full continuous 66.5 acres. Neatherlin, he said, is an “upstanding person” who was not trying to take sides but only to reach the right conclusion.
Filing the lawsuit so close to an election is clearly an effort to “assassinate Randy’s character,” Johnson said. “He is a good man, and he has done a lot for Belfair.”
After Form SM-6 was signed, Neatherlin allegedly took home the aerial photo and MacSems’ memo along with other documents. Thus county officials failed to produce all the records in the case when a formal request was made, leading to the $30,000 legal settlement paid by the county.
By granting the SM-6 approval for the 66.5-acre gravel mine in an area not zoned for such, the county essentially “gifted” a property right to Grump Ventures, the lawsuit says. Carter, one of plaintiffs, reported that Neatherlin told him that he was supporting the Grump application because Johnson asked him to support it, according to the pleadings.
In permitting issues, such as the Grump proposal, Neatherlin and the county commissioners do not play a direct role in decisions, since the issues are decided by planning staff and the county hearing examiner.
The lawsuit raises questions about Neatherlin’s relationship with Johnson and whether Neatherlin failed to meet an “appearance-of-fairness” standard when he visited Ireland with a group that included Johnson and others at a time when the SM-6 application was pending.
Brian Petersen, a Belfair chiropractor who helped organize the trip, said it was somewhat accidental that both Neatherlin and Johnson ended up joining Rob Drexler, co-owner of John L. Scott Realty in Belfair, and Drexler’s son-in-law Chad Harrison. Petersen said they had each heard about the “guys’ trip” and wanted to go to Ireland with the group. Neatherlin traveled separately. Petersen backed out of the trip when another chiropractor was unable to fill in at his practice.
Johnson also denied any impropriety in the trip. And he said he was surprised to see the lawsuit because there is so much more permitting left to be done by state agencies. Johnson said his company, Peninsula Topsoil, is interested in the sand and gravel that could be extracted on the Grump site, which is why he is assisting with the permitting.
Johnson stressed that when the permitting process — including an environmental review — is complete, the project will include mitigation measures to avoid the type of damage that appears to concern residents of the area.
The civil-rights complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, alleges that, as a result of actions by county officials, area property owners were “deprived of rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution and federal laws” and “deprived of property rights without due process of law.”
Listed plaintiffs in the case are Dale and Barbara Brown, Brian and Wendy Comfort, Patrick Yates and Linda Hebish, Earl Iddings, Joel and Angie Kramer, Michael Kovar, Pat McCullough, and William Anspach. Others eligible for the class-action lawsuit are “several hundred property owners” who would be affected by the gravel mine or have had to spend money fighting the allegedly unlawful project.
Should the internet/social media have a real/virtual wall erected barring all adults save those accompanied by a child? Lacey Halleck, Ashley Yiannatji, Katie Schilling, et ux would have you believe so. Lacey is actually circulating a petition to that affect for all public children’s playgrounds.
RE: BEFORE YOU KILL A DOG, FIRST YOU CALL IT ‘PEDOPHILE’! TO: Pete Kmet, Mayor (360)754-4120 fax:(360)754-4138
Tumwater City Council & Manager (360)754-4120 fax:(754-4138 Melody Valiant, City Clerk (360)252-5488/(360)754-5855 x-238 Police Chief Jon Weiks (360)754-4200 fax:(360)754-4198 Police Commander Jay Mason (360)754-4200 fax:(360)754-4198 Patrol Sergeant Chuck Liska. (360)754-4200 Officer Brandt Baker, #31 Officer Stacy Brown, #24 Officer Friedrich Jaeger, #30 Officer Oran Thompson, #16 Laura Wohl, Police Admin Mngr (360)754-4213/(360)704-2740 City of Tumwater 555 Israel Rd, SW, Tumwater, WA 98501
All of you above, but particularly officers Baker, Brown, Jaeger, Thompson, and Chief Weiks (who I asked to speak to days ago) should take notice I take exception to key elements in your report of the above referenced incident because of what you mischaracterized in it, but even more for what you omitted to gratify your own biases, gender prejudices, and baseless suspicions in the face of a clear instance of now continuing criminal harassment that includes organizing a virtual lynch mob that the Tumwater PD effectively aided and abetted as seen in the evidence I’ve accumulated from my own criminal investigation of the assault and criminal harassment that occurred and was reported very shortly thereafter.
My assailant has publicly admitted she made true threats of violence against me while only a foot from my person, but argues it was lawful since she only threatened to smash the camera I had strapped around my neck into the ground for taking pictures of a park playground filled with children playing in it. My assailant also admits/claims she frightened my wife who left when Lacey Halleck approached me in a menacing manner and then threatened me. To make matters worse, a second party present with her at the time has joined her in circulating the claim I am a pedophile based on the tone, language, confidential information furnished, and demeanor the officers displayed while in her presence out of earshot.
Accordingly, I am file attaching Lacey Halleck’s public declaration of that exchange to confront the responding officers with to ask if it’s a true representation either in whole or in part.
I sincerely advise your officers to be transparent and truthful with me because Sergeant Chuck Liska was not when I called to file a criminal complaint I insisted be referred to the prosecuting attorney for Tumwater or Thurston District Court. He refused to do so, disassembling that “no crime had been committed” because, he averred, Lacey Halleck had not succeeded in stopping me from photographing the playground…which is not true and I said so.
Liska then went into his intimidating detective mode by lying to me insisting your department had received NUMEROUS complaints about ME engaging in photographing children there in the past. While that is hardly a crime, I immediately challenged Liska because I knew he was lying. I’ve never photographed children in the Tumwater park in my life except on one occasion ~10 years ago involving my own daughter and grand daughter. If this be a crime, make the most of it.
I’d welcome the opportunity to expose yet another lying cop trying to intimidate a citizen.
I’m well aware case law permits police to lie to the public/suspects, but not vice versa. Still, the majority of the public isn’t even faintly conscious of this fact when they place their trust in the integrity of LEO’s truthfullness and exercising good judgment.
Liska neatly segued into “Well, we’ve gotten a lot of complaints about photographers taking pictures of children,” to brush off being caught in such a brazen allegation against me. He repeatedly refused to refer my criminal complaint to the prosecuting attorney and sneered I’d have difficulty finding a judge to sign an order referring it under current virus sequestration.
This attitude from a 26 year veeteran police officer is cut from the same typical cop arrogance as, “Yeah, you may beat the rap–but you won’t beat the ride!”
Current events reveal the public is fed up with this kind of arrogance and double standard. As well, Karens are obviously confident they can leverage their white gender privilege against minorities and men in general. As the ANTIFA street thugs scream “Nazi” before bloodying their victims it would appear your officers are inclined to merely substitute the term “pedophile” toward the same baseless end! Shame on it.
Every one of you should know the woman officer who spoke with me for several minutes at the scene excused the Karens who had threatened me by opining she had been on the sex offender squad for 7 years and that SOME MEN took pictures of children at parks, then took the photos home and masturbated to them.
In the flush of the moment, I hardly knew what to say other than, “Well, I can’t speak for all the perverts out there. I really don’t understand them.” I went on to explain how vital journalists were to our nation (reflecting on being near the eve of the 4th of July) but were under increasing physical attack, as here, from almost every quarter with the police often turning a blind eye to it if not actually deliberately engaged in it.
Looking back on it now, I recognize the approach this woman officer took was designed to distract, embarrass, and intimidate me.
Lacey Halleck had screamed a series of hostile questions at me I’d refused to answer except one. She asked me if I liked children. I volunteered I had my own, and yes, I did like children. Was I supposed to say I hated them? Lacey chose that as a pretext to start screaming “Pedophile! This man is a pedophile,” (as can be heard in the video clips) to all within earshot to organize a mob.
May I remind the Tumwater PD a mob is tantamount to a deadly weapon. Lacey failed ONLY because there were insufficient numbers of adults to manifest as a mob. Police cannot pretend to be ignorant of the danger mobs pose. They’re fully aware of it. Moreover, these officers were advised I had been attacked by a large mob (an anarchists convention held at TESC in the spring 2013) for having a camera while trying to cover it since it was advertised as a free public event.
I did not tell your officers I have a serious heart condition, diabetes, and am on blood thinners for the rest of my life. If I am punched, I may well hemorrhage internally and bleed to death. i.e. be murdered.
Now, as a direct result of the confidential encouragement my assailant received at the hands of your officers, my photo and the video Lacey Halleck took has been circulated among thousands of internet recipients who have copied it and openly brag about the mayhem, or worse, they wish to visit upon me. I’ve included the same as file attachments for you to examine at your leisure. Inasmuch as your officers kicking the can down the road amounted to a dereliction of duty under the totality of circumstances,
How do you propose you are going to remedy this? Yeah–some things aren’t remedial, are they?–like death!
These officers are inadequately trained. I asked they explain where the boundaries of the law were and discourage the Karens from violating the civil rights of journalists. They did not do so. Instead, your officers covertly kicked the coals into the grass and fanned the flames. It has now sparked a forest fire on the internet…or, as they say, gone viral.
Did your officer run the plates of a vehicle I don’t own as Lacey Halleck claims in her online statement?–and then share the results of that with her? Did one of your officers tell Lacey Halleck I was being investigated so they could ‘do something about me’? If so, just what do you plan on doing?–making photography or failure to yield to drama queens a crime?
I want a meeting with the mayor and the Chief–in a public venue. That same park would be ideal. I want a written explanation of the misconduct I’m reporting and an admission or denial of Lacey Halleck’s claims as to what she was told by these officers furnished to me IN WRITING!
I also want to take this occasion to request a copy of any notes officers made in writing or recorded of their conversation(s) with Lacey Halleck by any means including their body cams, if any, et ux.
I’d also be interested in Liska’s explanation for lying to me rather than cooperating with my criminal complaint request.
I do hope you understand this is a watershed moment in how this matter devolves. Any further deception or lack of transparency by your staff/officers will be at the City’s own peril including referral to the U.S. Dept. of Justice and a civil rights complaint.
The evidence I’m file attaching was posted online by Lacey Halleck and Katie Schilling on their respective Facebook pages. Accordingly, I’m requesting a copy of any materials or recordings you may have stemming from their recent involvement with me or the Tumwater Police. I am currently still waiting for the audio recordings ASAP by the 911 Dispatcher called in that day of 6-30-20.
Ashley Yiannatji (31) (DOB: 12-30-88) fka: Ashley Nicole Monroe & Michael James Monroe 306 SE N ST, Tumwater, WA / 2446 Arnold St, Dupont, WA 98327 / 991 W. Lakeside Dr, Shelton 98584 3027 Gardenia Lane, SW, #8-304, Tumwater, WA 98512-6059 1601 16th Ct, SE, #B, Lacey, WA 98503 Lucas Michael Yiannatji (34) (DOB: 10-21-85) LucasYiannatji@gmail.com
The following photos are a few pictures of the dissembling Ashley Yiannatji Karen’s children she publicly distributes while simultaneously asserting photographer’s who might take pictures of them in a public park are somehow ‘dirty’ old men or ‘pedophiles’:
Rachel SiresWow what a weirdo!!!! Thank you for sharing! What ended up happening once the cops showed up? Did they make him delete the pictures? “Yes, I was taking pictures of the Scenery well and the kids”. To do what with you sick ass?!?!?!2
Lacey HalleckRachel Sires legally he was able to keep the pics. He was purposely watching the zip line because the wind would sometimes blow up some of the kids’ shirts a little and expose their tummies. Such a sicko.11
Lacey HalleckTosha Lynn Greene the ONLY reason I didn’t was because I was a juror on a case where someone’s belongings were ruined and the guy got jail time. I didn’t want to go to jail.
Sarah MastenLacey Halleck I’m proud of you for showing restraint. It couldn’t have been easy. Pisses me off how easy they make it for creeps like him to prey on kids.2
Rena SicklesWhat a pig. Why are there not laws on this? 800,000 kids go missing a year in the U.S., most likely into sex trafficking rings, and some old perv is just allowed to sit at a public playground (when he doesn’t even have kids of his own with him) and tak… See More9
Latricia KnoxEverybody needs to share this somebody should figure out who this sick disgusting pervert is I am so glad you called him out on it because maybe it will hinder any thoughts in his little pea brain because he knows that he’s on record and the police of already been called on him what a creep I’m sorry you had to go through that I can’t imagine the adrenaline rush and anxiety involved our laws are so backwards2
Patricia CornLacey I just seen this sweetheart and what an ass, I have no idea why the police didn’t take his camera. I detest abusers like this who get away with this and I am so mad he got pictures of your sweet little girl I wish Chris would of been there with you when this happened. Makes it so mothers can’t take their children to parks or playgrounds there are to many perverts out and about. Giving you a warm hug and glad you got into this jerks face and stayed with it. Unbelieveable…. 7
Julie Chadbourne ElderDid the cop go thru his camera? I’m shocked they didn’t make him delete the ones of your daughter, Shame on them if they didn’t. Who know what kind of pics are on there. What a sicko!2
Lacey HalleckJulie Chadbourne Elder nope. They can’t without a search warrant and with all the riots and antipolice stuff, they are all afraid to do anything remotely outside of the law right now. I don’t blame them.1
Candy WatsonIt done came down to this when you can’t take your kids out for a walk in the park and the policeman don’t do a thing about sick peoples watching and taking pictures of Mother’s and children, what they wait until something happens before they made a move to take action, wow this is bull, I am proud of the kind of mother you are to protect your baby girl and others children, I wish I was there with you, I would have put the fear of God in him, and I will show this to others that’s not on Facebook to be watching for him and others that might be out there in case, thanks for sharing this. I am glad you all ok.3
Lacey HalleckSandy DeFeo he had ZERO fear of the 3 dads there and one was a very large man. The only person he was intimidated by was me and I believe its because I was loud and obviously angry. The men were standing behind me the whole time while this happened.5
Shauna Chambers-WashingtonWhat baffles me is they tell you that you need permission to take a photo of someone else’s child and I get it’s in public so he can say he’s taking pictures of trees or what the heck ever but seriously, they couldn’t do anything such as banning him from that park or anything? I don’t get it and makes me frustrated that there’s people like this and no person should have their kids leave a park because of people like this instead they should be stopped and prevented. Did they at leas take a police report?3
This is so sick!! And so sad, that our precious children are no longer even safe at a friggin park?!!! Urge!!!! Gosh this makes me literally sick to my stomach! This man was not!! Held accountable for being g an OPEN!!! Pedo!!!!!!!! We need to spread awareness to this y’all!! Oh my gosh this poor mother was literally!!! Telling the cops everything and this man even admitted to taking pictures of little kids?!!!!! What in God’s name is happening to our world?! I wanna move!!!
Ummm Yalls might want to read RCW 9.41.270 which addresses brandishing an object used to intimidate another. This is a Gross Misdemeanor. I would have told the Man, with all due respect, in a non threatening manner, “Sir I will shove that baton up your A**e”
When Anastasia was a year old, I had an old man approach us as we were picking blueberries at a blueberry farm and ask if he could take a photo of her. I was still pretty ignorant about beasts like these and allowed him to. I’ve learned a lot since then that old men who want to take photos of strangers children are not so innocent in their reasons why.
Another one.. After talking to someone who had known this guy, I don’t believe this guy is a pedo.. BUT, he enjoys harrassing woman.. he is known for doing as such.. I won’t stop reposting, until he stops!! If he wants to push the envelope.. well sir, you’ve got an entire community who will go at no lengths for our children!!Show Attachment
Take notes parents and smash the effing camera- check the comments to see he had already done it previously. He walks away with your child’s image and then what? You want to change something? Change the laws that benefit creeps like this
Unfortunately it is legal to take pictures of someone who is in a public place. There is no expectation of privacy at a park. Which also means his photo and video can be circulated. That doesn’t means he’s not a sick fuck though. And the baton is brandishing a weapon and threatening idiot harm. That’s a fine line. Just remember, of you fear for your life or your kids life, you can defend yourself. Growing up I heard, never throw the first punch but make damn sure you throw the last.Show Attachment
This is disturbing and our laws need to change if this man was taking pictures and video’s of kids and the police couldn’t look at the pictures or delete them then that’s just so wrong and yet another reason I want to move out if this state
This guy has been caught multiple times taking inappropriate pictures of young women and children! This incident was at Tumwater Falls Historical Park, let’s all keep an eye out for creepers, and if something feels wrong it probably is! Be careful and watch your babies close
Restaurant workers, already living “tip to mouth,” face more hardship in shutdown
I do not own the copyright to this excellent well polished Docuvideo about the desperately poor restaurant servers who depend entirely on the tips and largesse of their customers rather than their employers.The copyright is owned by CBSN who generously made this enlightening production available to the public of a fee/subscription, though not in the public domain They consistently offer quality investigatory journalism, an increasingly rare occurrence in mainstream journalism. Viewers who appreciate as much will be well served by subscribing to the CBSN channel. I rate this production as excellent in pacing, video quality, interviewer manner, and an intimate gritty street level familiarity adding to its 100% realism. There is nothing staged in this production. It is REAL news.This video is about the daily grind and desperation of restaurant workers in 17 states that allow them to be paid as little as $2.13/hr. These employees and their families literally eat or go hungry depending on the tips they receive…or not, even having to pay out of their own pockets for the meals of some customers who leave no tip at all.
Restaurant servers who rely on customers’ tips to make ends meet have seen their livelihoods vanish virtually overnight. The restaurant industry is reeling from the financial impact of coronavirus shutdowns, and so are the workers who kept it running.
John deBary, the co-founder of Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, is concerned for the estimated 13.5 million restaurant workers nationwide affected by coronavirus closures. “On a good day, about 40% of restaurant workerslive in poverty. That number is about to go way higher, and even the ones that don’t live in poverty are really living on the edge,” he said.
For some, those tough financial straits have roots in the separate, lower federal minimum wage for tip-earning employees. Since 1991, the federal minimum wage for tipped wage earners has been frozen at $2.13 per hour, compared to $7.25 for other workers. Federal law requires restaurants to ensure all employees receive the full minimum wage and make up the difference when tips fall short, but it’s been challenging to enforce. Between 2010 to 2012, the U.S. Department of Labor investigated over 9,000 restaurants and found 84% violated wage and hour laws.
Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food and Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, described food servers — waiters and waitresses — as living “tip to mouth.” “Literally the tips you get that night, you’re using to feed your kids the next day. If you can’t go back and get more tips, you’re done. It’s overwhelming,” she said.
The restaurant industry “is always on every list of the top fastest-growing industries in America, yet it continues to be the absolute lowest-paying employer in the United States,” Jayaraman added. The U.S. Department of Labor puts out data on occupational employment and wage estimates, and “the seven lowest [median wage earners] are all in one industry, in the restaurant industry,” she explained. Some states and cities have taken action and raised their minimum wage above the federal minimum, but only eight states require paying tipped wage earners the regular minimum wage. A report released by the Economic Policy Institute found states with a higher tipped minimum wage had much lower poverty rates for tipped workers.
DeBary was fortunate to bartend in high-end bars and restaurants in New York City, but has seen the economic fragility of his community even before the coronavirus pandemic hit. Restaurant workers, he said, “are one or two bad days away from a financial catastrophe, and most of them don’t have health insurance benefits from their employer [or] any kind of sick leave.”
Nikki Books, a single mother, was working as a waitress in Kokomo, Indiana, before the birth of her son caused health complications. Even when she was healthy and working, Books was barely making enough to survive as a waitress in a national chain restaurant and sought out ways to supplement her income.
Nikki Books waited tables for a national chain restaurant in Indiana.
“I used to donate plasma, but I’ve had surgeries in the past six months, so I can’t donate plasma anymore,” she said. Books and her infant son were able to enroll in the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP), a state health coverage program for those ineligible for Medicaid or Medicare. Still, she’s unable to apply for sick leave because she wasn’t clocking in full-time hours as a food server. She doesn’t qualify for disability benefits either, as her health condition is classified as reversible.
DeBary said the structural issues of the restaurant industry are becoming acutely apparent and impossible to ignore. “Since restaurants work on such thin [profit] margins, they want to keep hours as low as possible” for the workers, he said. He acknowledged that small, independent restaurants and larger corporate groups face different issues, but doesn’t think solutions can rely on individual businesses just deciding to do the right thing. “It really does require a legislative response,” he said.
On March 18, with the nation facing widespread layoffs and business closures, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act was signed into law. It provides funds to expand paid sick leave and unemployment benefits. Still, under normal circumstances, nearly a quarter of U.S. workers don’t have access to paid sick leave, including most food servers.
Even for those with access to such benefits, Jayaraman warned, “Paid sick leave is, in most states, at maximum three to nine days. It’s not going to last us through this crisis.” And the expansion of unemployment benefits also may not be enough. Jayaraman explained food servers, bartenders and others earning a tipped minimum wage have their unemployment benefits based on a sub-minimum wage plus a rough and often inaccurate calculation of their tips.
“In a functional society, if something like this happens and you have to lay off people, you need a safety net like unemployment insurance. But when unemployment insurance is based on a $2.13 wage, it screams at why we should have ever had a $2.13 wage to begin with,” she said.
Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food and Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of the nonprofit One Fair Wage.
When Nikki Books was asked about unemployment benefits, she replied, “Even if I got it, it wouldn’t be much because servers’ wages are so low.” Books is surviving off modest but rapidly dwindling savings and has maxed out her credit cards. “If I have to buy formula and that’s all I have money for, then I’ll live off cereal.”
One Fair Wage, co-founded by Jayaraman, is a nonprofit that advocates for an end to the federal sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. It recently launched an emergency relief fund that received 10,000 requests for assistance in the first 24 hours. According to Jayaraman, many are pleading for help to feed children and make rent. The entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s nonprofit, Humanity Forward, is also partnering with One Fair Wage to help struggling families.
John deBary is concerned that the people who need the most help are the ones least able to access it, and he encouraged community members to reach out to help. “[People] who may not have proficiency with the English language, who may not have access to the web, walk them through the resources that are available for assistance.” He added, “There are people who are very desperate.”
When the worst of the crisis is over and restaurants reopen, he believes there will be no going back to business as usual. “It’s not impossible, and it’s a matter of people being able to think about their role in making a just society.”
Six people have been shot in Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone in 10 days, prompting officials to look at dismantling it A 16-year-old is dead and a 14-year-old is in critical condition in the latest of a series of shootings inside Seattle’s self-proclaimed police-free zone, known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP/CHAZ).
Initially home to hundreds of sometimes peaceful protesters, in the last 10 days, four other people were shot in the area, including a 19-year-old man who was killed.
The violence has left some officials seriously questioning the safety of the encampment and looking to take steps to dismantle it.
Officers said in a police blog that at about 3am on Monday, a white Jeep Cherokee SUV was reported near a Chop concrete barrier that surrounds the protest area. Several unidentified people then fired shots into the vehicle. “Two injured individuals, presumably the occupants of the Jeep”, were then taken to Harborview Trauma Center, according to the police blog.
One was transported by a private vehicle, while the other was taken by medics.
Police are investigating the shooting.
Chop, originally named the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or “CHAZ”, was founded about three weeks ago after a series of dangerous clashes between protesters and law enforcement during protests against police brutality sparked by the killing of George Floyd.
The clashes culminated in police abandoning their east precinct building in the area. A number of peaceful protesters filled the area with free food and community gardens, and held speeches, movie nights and teach-ins. Others assaulted, bullied, threatened, intimidated and even robbed journalists. Police were not allowed to accompany City medics to recover/rescue victims of gun battles prompting the medics to refuse to enter the barricaded zone.
Across the main road in the encampment, some people painted “Black Lives Matter” in large, colorful letters. But recently, with the barrage of nighttime gun violence, the numbers of demonstrators have dwindled dramatically.
During a press conference at the occupied zone on Monday, Carmen Best, the police chief, said the situation at Chop was “not safe for anybody” and said protesters should move out of the area.
“As an African American woman with uncles and brothers, I wouldn’t want them to be in this area,” she said. But Best did not provide additional details about when officials would begin dismantling the zone.
Jenny Durkan, Seattle’s mayor, had previously said during a meeting with protesters Friday that the concrete barricades surrounding the protest zone would be removed on Sunday, and those directly outside the police’s east precinct would be left, according to Converge Media, the only news organization allowed in the meeting. But no crews arrived Sunday to remove them, and as of 3pm Monday, the barricades were still up.
A large group of Seattle department of transportation crews had tried to remove the barriers early Friday morning, but were stopped by several people sitting or lying on the ground in front of the equipment. In recent days, some people at Chop have moved their tents away from Cal Anderson Park, so they are closer to the police precinct. But many still remain in the park.
Questions remain about how protesters will respond to the city attempting to remove barricades, and what will happen to those still in the park.
Hours after the shooting, an African American woman was reportedly pushed by the Fox News reporter Dan Springer, according to Derrick Drungo, an activist at Chop who witnessed the incident.
Drungo said Springer then got in his truck and protesters surrounded it, asking for an apology. One woman briefly climbed on top of the truck. Activists said the reporter’s personal security detail came out and tried to pepper spray them, and the group moved a concrete barrier in front of the truck to stop him from leaving. The reporter later got out of the car and another man with Fox tried to move the truck.
While driving very slowly, Drungo said the man hit him. “I got back in front of the car and the driver kept driving,” Drungo told the Guardian. “My hands were up in the air, and he hit me six times. I told him to stop,” He added.
In a statement, Nancy Harmeyer, the vice-president of domestic bureaus and the LA bureau chief at Fox News, said:
“While covering the news just outside of Seattle’s Chop zone this morning, a protester confronted Fox News Channel correspondent Dan Springer and his crew after overhearing him cancel a live report due to ‘filthy language’ in the background. The protester started yelling at him and threw a cup of coffee in his face and on his jacket.
Attempting to de-escalate the situation, the crew returned to their vehicle, which was then surrounded by protestors. Unable to drive away, the crew turned the car off and walked away from the scene.
At no point during the situation did the Fox News crew ever physically instigate or retaliate in any way against the protesters.”
In a tweet early Monday, Donald Trump said, “Seattle Looters, Agitators, Anarchists and ‘Protestors’, are now refusing to leave the ‘CHOP’ Zone. They have ZERO respect for Government, or the Mayor of Seattle or Governor of Washington State! Not good!”
Chief implores BLM supporters to stop the carnage, go home…says crime scene and murder evidence was tampered with, no suspects or arrests, cites refusals to cooperate with police investigation.
King5 possibly owns the copyright to this critical footage but the 4th estate cannot be trusted to preserve the record and make it irrevocably available to the public.
The Chief maintains poise and dignity almost effortlessly in the face of CHAZ denizens’ attempt to drown out her interview with the press–a class act all the way.
The 4th Estate has failed to report the details inn the following footage. The 5th estate has. Today, WE are the media!
Barricades being dismantled down in Seattle’s CHOP/CHAZ zone
Raw Gunshots & Tampered White Death Car w/2 Black Teen Victims
Why I left Antifa | Gabriel Nadales
“By their works ye shall know them.” -MATTHEW 7:20 KJV-
An apologist explains The Philosophy of Antifa
Original CHAZ/CHOP shooting Footage & Report 6/28-29
Street Demonstrators Record Police Violence,Targeted Reporters
A Quick History of ANTIFA, Its Genesis in Leon Trotsky
The communist movement known as Antifa (short for Anti-Fascist Action) has sparked violence across the nation. In the wake of their battling despicable white supremacist in Charlottesville, Antifa has begun to gain mainstream popularity.
But unbeknownst to much of the public, the vast majority of Antifa violence isn’t targeted at genuine fascists, but mainstream conservatives and civilians. With help from those who have encountered Antifa, including Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Lauren Southern, Jack Posobiec, and Steve Deace, conservative author Trevor Loudon guides us through the history and ideas behind the Antifa movement, starting with Leon Trotsky and going all the way through the events in Berkeley, CA and Charlottesville, VA.
“Antifa” is the third episode in the “America Under Siege” documentary web-series from Dangerous Documentaries (a project of the Capital Research Center) and Cohesion Films. Each episode profiles the influence of radical Marxists on various segments of American society.
DangeousDocumentaries.com CapitalResearch.org
Jerrad Johnson 2 years ago says:
I’ve seen Antifa in person, I was at the battle of Berkeley. They throw explosives and bricks and glass bottles at us and called us nazis, just because we support free speech.
I’m a slightly left of center libertarian native-American who is married to a hispanic girl that is the daughter of a mexican immigrant. I adopted my wife’s 2 hispanic nephews because their mom is a crack head and CPS took them away. I couldn’t be further from a nazi by their identity politics standards yet they call me one for supporting free speech (including theirs ironically).
These people are animals, I assure you. This is a spot on documentary.
