The Enforcement Caste's War on Women

Under what circumstances, if any, is it appropriate for two large men to throw a small woman face-down into a paved street, shattering her face? Is such an act justified because the woman is drunk and unpleasant? Does the moral nature of the assault change because of the way the assailants are dressed? 

If the woman is suspected of a non-violent crime, and wasn’t cooperative when police arrested her, are we permitted to conclude that she “had it coming”? Are police officers entitled to dispense summary punishment, or retaliatory violence, against uncooperative suspects? 

On August 10, Christina West of Tallahassee, Florida – who was under the influence of alcohol and painkillers -- drove her car off a road and into a house. Officers Christopher Ormerod and Matthew Schmidt arrived to investigate the crash. After West performed poorly on several sobriety tests, she was handcuffed and placed in a police car. The 44-year-old woman was so small that she managed to slip out of the cuffs, and when the officers attempted to shackle her again she refused to cooperate.

This led to an incident that – after being fed through the Regime’s euphemism-generation filter -- was described in the media as a “struggle,” rather than an act of gang violence.

As recounted in Ormerod’s official report, “West aggressively resisted by kicking her leg behind her and striking Officer Schmidt in the leg.” That action was violent, but resistance, by strict definition, cannot be “aggressive."

Ormerod and West then “lifted West off the car so that she could be laid on the ground to prevent her kicking.” While she was being hoisted into the air, West fired a desperate kick behind her that, according to Ormerod, hit him in the genitals. 

Since he is a police officer, we can assume that the target was quite small, which means that West’s uncanny aim belied her intoxicated condition. Ormerod explains that he and Schmidt then “pulled” West “to the ground so that she was laying [sic] on her stomach,” an action that somehow resulted in the woman suffering severe contusions and broken bones in her face.

Ormerod’s austere description doesn’t do justice to the actual event, as captured in the dashcam video. The officer can be heard snarling: “Don’t you f***ing touch me!” before slamming West’s face into the side of a police car, and then onto the pavement. 

In his daintily-worded report, the officer carefully omitted mention of that outburst, which demonstrated that by face-planting West he was engaged in retaliation or summary punishment, rather than an attempt to control a suspect. He described the victim’s reaction to the assault as “screaming in rage and violently grasping with her hands at me” in what he described as an attempt “to grab for my genital area” – without mentioning that this happened after he and Schmidt had gang-tackled the woman and slammed her face into the concrete. 

When West complained about the injury to her face, her uniformed assailant dismissively 

replied: “You’re fine.” 

A total of six officers eventually arrived to deal with the bloodied 5 foot six-inch, 130-pound woman. An examination at a local hospital revealed that West – far from being “fine” -- had a broken orbital bone around her right eye. 

Despite the fact that West’s face was wrecked, and her assailants were unscathed, the victim was charged with “battery on a law enforcement officer” and “aggravated assault on an officer.” Those charges were dropped, but the Tallahassee PD insists that tag-team face-planting of the partially handcuffed woman was “appropriate.”

It’s worth noting that Ormerod was previously cleared by the department after using a Taser to punish a teenager who had stepped in front of the officer’s patrol vehicle. When the officer yelled at the 15-year-old to be more careful, the teenager fled into his home. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Ormerod – no doubt out of zeal for the youngster’s safety – pursued the teenager into the house, tasered him, and then arrested him for resisting arrest.

This peculiar form of solicitude for citizen “safety” appears to be commonplace within Florida’s law enforcement caste. A similar display of concern by Florida Trooper Dan Cole left a 19-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state.

Danielle Maudsley was arrested in September 2011 after fleeing from the scene of two accidents. Cole handcuffed Maudsley and took her to an FHP station in Pinellas Park. While the trooper filled out some paperwork, Maudsley – who was handcuffed but not secured – dashed out of the building. Cole gave pursuit for as long as his level of conditioning permitted, which apparently was no longer than two or three seconds. Despite the fact that he was within tackling distance of Maudsley, Cole drew his Taser and shot her in the back.

The Taser strike felled the 19-year-old woman, causing her to spin one hundred eighty degrees,  then fall backwards and hit her head on the concrete sidewalk. A dashcam video captured the entire incident, including the percussive, brittle sound of Maudsley’s head colliding with concrete.

“I can’t get up,” Maudsley gasped – the last words she will ever speak. She immediately lapsed into a coma. The injury left her brain-dead, as insensible as the tax-fattened clod who left her in that condition. 

 

Danielle Maudsley before meeting Trooper Cole....

During the official inquiry, Cole insisted that it was necessary to use a Taser because “she was already outrunning me” and had to be stopped before she could dash into traffic – where, presumably, she could suffer an injury that might leave her brain-dead. This might have been prevented had the officer – who outweighed the slender girl by the better part of two hundred pounds -- been willing to break a sweat.

“Tell me that’s not excessive force,” protested Cheryl Maudsley, the victim’s mother. “I’m not saying she was an angel, but she didn’t deserve that. He couldn’t reach out and grab her? He was an arm’s length away.”

Going “hands-on,” however, posed unacceptable risks, Cole protested during an official inquiry by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

...and after being "protected and served."

“I [couldn't] just jump on her,” Cole maintained. “I’m three times her weight. If we go down, one or both of us is going to get hurt. The Taser is the intermediate weapon of choice.”

Although routinely described as a “non-lethal” alternative to firearms, the Taser is regarded as a deadly weapon when it is seized by a criminal suspect and used against a police officer. Assuming that it is properly described as an “intermediate” option in the use-of-force continuum, Cole’s decision to employ it against a tiny, handcuffed, non-violent misdemeanor suspect is an unmistakable violation of the guidelines contained in the Florida Highway Patrol’s policy manual. 

Use of a Taser (referred to as a Conducted Electrical Weapon, or CEW) by a trooper, the manual states, is appropriate only in dealing with a suspect who “(a) Has the apparent ability to physically threaten the [officer] or others; or, (b) Is preparing or attempting to flee or escape. (NOTE: Fleeing cannot be the sole reason for deployment of the CEW).” (Emphasis in the original.)

The manual also dictates that “Unless exigent circumstances exist, members shall not use the device in the following situations: (a) In a punitive or coercive manner;
(b) On a handcuffed or secured prisoner.” 

While Maudsley was obviously not “secured,” she was handcuffed. Cole’s laziness or lack of conditioning did not constitute an “exigent” circumstance. His Taser use was punitive, not defensive.

Despite the fatal consequences to a non-violent offender who posed no threat to anybody, Cole – an amalgam of arrogance and adipose tissue -- defiantly told the inquiry that he would do exactly the same thing in the future under the same circumstances. After reviewing the incident, both the Florida Highway Patrol and the Florida State Department of Law Enforcement concurred with Cole, ruling that his actions – though a violation of established guidelines -- were “justified,” as they almost always are. 

Despite the fact that she suffered terribly at the hands of Officers Ormerod and Schmidt, Christina West was spared a life-ending injury of the kind inflicted on Danielle Maudsley – something that could have happened very easily when her unprotected head was driven into the pavement by two large males. Although the injury to West’s right eye was considerable, she’s still able to see. 

Monique Hernandez of Beaumont, California wasn’t nearly as fortunate: As a result of her encounter with Police Officer Enoch Clark, will never see her ten-year-old daughter again.

On February 21, 2012, Clark conducted a traffic stop involving Hernandez after receiving a call about a domestic dispute involving two of her relatives. According to witnesses, Hernandez’s sister got into a fight with her boyfriend during a child custody exchange. When the boyfriend attacked the young woman, Hernandez intervened to protect her sister, then fled with the woman and her 2-year-old daughter. 

After Officer Clark arrived, he demanded that Hernandez undergo a sobriety test – then claimed that the Breathalyzer unit had malfunctioned. When Hernandez asked about the test results, Clark ordered her to shut up, then he slammed her head against the hood of his car. After yanking one of the uncooperative victim’s arms behind her back, the officer pulled out a “non-lethal” JPX device – a weapon that uses a gunpowder charge to fire a stream of pepper spray at roughly 400 miles an hour – and fired it at her head.

The JPX weapon is designed for use at a distance of 6 to 15 feet, and training presentations depict it being used against armed targets. Promotional literature for the JPX weapon – which isn’t categorized as a firearm, because it doesn’t fire a projectile – boasts of “devastating stopping power.”



The payload of weaponized OC spray is propelled over the prescribed distance at less than three one-hundredths of a second, making it “too fast to avoid…. The effect is immediate; there is no chance to resist.”

Clark’s attorney insists that the officer’s attack was justified in order “to gain compliance and in defense of his person.” The JPX is not designed to induce “compliance,” but rather to incapacitate a targeted person at a distance. Clark – who was armed and wearing body armor — fired it into Hernandez’s temple from less than a foot away, blowing apart her right eye and leaving the left with severe, irreparable damage.

Anyone who had undergone rudimentary training with the JPX would understand that the weapon should not be fired directly into the head or face of a non-violent suspect. Clark’s actions demonstrated that his intention was not to gain “compliance,” but rather to inflict 
summary street punishment for “contempt of cop.”

Hernandez was taken to the hospital and never charged with an offense. Following an investigation by the county Sherriff’s office, a grand jury indicted Clark on four felony charges: Assault under color of authority, assault with a less lethal weapon, use of force causing severe bodily injury, and assault with force likely to cause severe bodily injury.
Clark, who was chairman of the local police union, was initially placed on administrative leave, and then quietly fired by the department. With the help of the most tenacious defense attorneys the police union can afford, Clark has filed a series of dilatory motions and has yet to stand trial. 

Neither the presiding judge nor the DA’s office has displayed an abundance of zeal to see Clark prosecuted for a sadistic crime of violence against an innocent woman. But this is to be expected. Any time a woman is left disfigured, disabled, or dead as a result of state-authorized violence, the official view is that the victim must have done something to deserve what she received. 

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The Pine Bluff PD: From Merely Dysfnctional to Downright Deadly

No tactical genius is necessary to bring about a bloodless end to a standoff involving a 107-year-old man armed with a handgun and surrounded by police officers inside an otherwise vacant house. All that is necessary is a willingness on the part of the officers to accept a minimal amount of risk, and a time horizon longer than a half hour. In fact, only someone with a perverse appetite for gratuitous bloodshed could arrange to end that confrontation with the violent death of the centenarian suspect.

As it happens, the valiant men of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas Police Department’s SWAT team were equal to that task. That’s why 107-year-old Monroe Isadore was killed in a torrent of gunfire on the evening of September 7.

“It was a lot,” one witness told KHTV news, referring to the number of shots fired by the SWAT team in the home where Isadore had holed up. “I can’t even count on my hands.” Another witness said that at least thirty rounds had been fired during the fatal fusillade.

Isadore reportedly fired a couple of desultory shots at the SWAT operators who inserted a tear gas grenade into the house, and then a few more after the entry team flung a flash-bang grenade into the bedroom. Pauline Lewis, who owns the home where Isadore was killed, told reporters that the police “didn’t have a choice but to shoot him after they had put teargas in and everything. He refused and he shot first.”

 

Pine Bluff SWAT operators at a recent police funeral.

That “choice” was a result of the SWAT team’s preference for escalation, rather than containment. 

Isadore allegedly pointed a pistol at Lewis and another housemate after Lewis – who had allowed the old man to live there for a few weeks – suggested that he should find another apartment. By the time police arrived, Lewis and her friend were no longer in danger. This was not a hostage situation, and the 107-year-old suspect was not a threat to engage in a killing spree. There was no reason why the SWAT team couldn’t simply lock down the house, and wait out the suspect – apart from the fact that tactical officers are trained to deal with such situations as military engagements that end when the “enemy” is “taken out.”

SWAT teams attract people with an appetite for kicking ass, preferably in situations involving minimal risk. Where real danger exists – as at Columbine, for example – SWAT operators will be judicious to the point of paralysis, dithering and equivocating until the shooter has sated his depraved appetite and taken his own life. Charging a bedroom occupied by a mentally unbalanced 107-year-old armed with a small-caliber pistol is a task better suited to the skill set and valor of the typical SWAT team. 

Long before its SWAT team brought a needlessly bloody end to its standoff with Monroe Isadore, the Pine Bluff PD had displayed a propensity for overkill. For example: In April 2012, Officer Anthony Brown, who was assigned as a school “resource officer” at Jack Robey Junior High School, unleashed a chemical barrage to clear a hallway when students were a bit sluggish in returning to class after lunch. 

Three students were sent to the hospital with respiratory problems. The mace assault would have been treated as a terrorist attack had it been committed by a Mundane. Officer Brown was “punished” by being docked eight hours’ pay. Neither Brown nor any of the other three Pine Bluff cops assigned as “school resource officers” had any specialized training for that role. This helps explain why his instinctive response to trivial adolescent defiance was to deploy a chemical weapon.

A few years ago, a Pine Bluff officer moonlighting as a security guard at a local big box retail store attacked and arrested a handicapped shopper named Scott Mouser, then charged him with “obstructing governmental operations” for being insufficiently submissive during the assault. The man had forgotten his cane and provoked the officer’s suspicion by using a shopping cart to assist him while shopping. 

In addition to being a danger to the public it supposedly serves, the Pine Bluff PD in recent years has been at war with itself.

Tolstoy famously said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In a similar vein it could be said that every corrupt and abusive police department – the only variety on offer, as it happens – has its own distinctive form of institutional dysfunction. Police culture encourages a pathological sense of entitlement, and in the case of Pine Bluff that tendency appears to have catalyzed latent ethnic antagonisms. 

Apparently, nobody employed by the Pine Bluff PD can be fired without immediately filing a civil rights lawsuit alleging various forms of invidious discrimination. Those lawsuits provide a fascinating composite portrait of an organization that seethes with racial resentments, percolates with petty political intrigues – and offers no evidence of being populated by the kind of judicious, disciplined people capable of waiting out a 107-year-old barricaded suspect.

Pine Bluff is an impoverished town of 47,000 people that punches well above its weight where crime is concerned. About 75 percent of the population is black, and a little more than 21 percent are white. Until the administration of former Chief Brenda M. Jones, those proportions were roughly reversed. Jones was fired earlier this year by newly installed Mayor Debe Hollingsworth, and promptly filed a lawsuit claiming that she was “discriminated against on account of her race and sex, and in retaliation for having opposed discriminatory practices.”

During her nearly three-year tenure as Pine Bluff Police Chief, Jones narrates in her lawsuit, “The percentage of white officers decreased from 75% to 52% … which caused animosity and racial resentment amongst some of the white officers … chiefly amongst them Chris Powell, who served as President of the Police Officers Benevolent Association (PBA).” 

Last year, Powell’s union approved a no-confidence vote on Jones, which obviously did nothing to endear him with the chief. Powell also publicly supported the mayoral candidacy of Hollingsworth, who was “one of two white candidates running for mayor, out of a field of approximately nine candidates, the rest of whom were African-American.” 

Taking advantage of a crowded field and a divided “African-American” turnout, Hollingsworth was elected with a little less than half of the votes that were cast – and in her first official act as Mayor, she fired Jones. According to the ex-Chief, this was done in the interest of appeasing “many of the white officers employed by the Pine Bluff Police Department, and much to the satisfaction of Chris Powell.” 

Powell was also fired earlier this year after an internal investigation concluded that he had sexually harassed and intimated a young female police recruit named Keyonna Penister. Shortly thereafter, Powell – in keeping with local customs – filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that he was the victim of race and sex discrimination. Powell claims that he was the victim of a racist conspiracy “to violate [his] constitutional rights … including his right to be free from discrimination based upon his sex of male, and race of white.” 

According to Powell’s version of events, Miss Penister falsely accused him of sexual harassment as part of a plot carried out by then-Chief Jones and Assistant Chief Kelvin Sergeant. This was allegedly done “for the sole purpose of punishing him because of his support [for] Mayor Hollingsworth and because he was white.” 

The harassment complaint “was first investigated by Lt. Joann Bates[,] a white female who was assigned to the internal investigation unit and she did not sustain the complaint,” claims Powell. “A second investigation was conducted by two Deputy Police Chiefs who were African-American and not assigned to the internal investigation unit as required by Police Department policy.” Powell insists that “The City of Pine Bluff systematically excluded whites from the Review Committee” created to conduct the second investigation of Penister’s charge.

Powell asserts that the decision to fire him was “arbitrary and capricious… and a motivating factor was [his] race and gender…..” He also claims to be the victim of disparate treatment, because “Black members of the Pine Bluff Police Department who have committed sexual harassment have not been terminated.” Among them, allegedly, are Ivan Whitfield, an assistant Chief of Police, and Officer Ed Johnson, who “was not terminated” despite supposedly conducting an affair while on the clock. Powell also claims that a black officer named Treadwell “threatened other officers and was not fired,” that Officer Billy Bradley “was arrested and found guilty of DWI, leaving the scene of an accident, and making a false statement and was only suspended; and that Lt. James Golden remains on the payroll despite being found “drinking on duty.”

Current Chief Jeff Hubanks.

Pine Bluff Police Chief John Howell, who was fired by then-Mayor Carl Redus in Mach 2010, filed his own lawsuit the day after he lost his job. Howell insists that Redus fired him in a fit of incoherent rage when the Chief expressed concerns about a proposed gun turn-in program in which police would void traffic tickets on behalf of citizens who surrendered their firearms. Powell also claims that Redus improperly intervened in criminal cases, sometimes to the extent of questioning witnesses before allowing them to talk to the police.

Redus claimed that he fired Howell for insubordination. The ex-chief described the termination as an act of age and race discrimination – and said that by choosing Brenda Jones, a 48-year-old black single mother, Redus validated that claim.  

Howell’s suit was dismissed by a federal judge in December 2010. While Powell and Jones continue to pursue their lawsuits, the office they once held is occupied by Jeff Hubanks, who was lured out of retirement by Mayor Hollingsworth. 

The Mayor introduced Hubanks “to a cheering crowd of police officers, many of whom had waited in the parking lot of the civic center for more than an hour,” reported the Pine Bluff Commercial. Powell – who at the time hadn’t yet been shown the door – exulted that by firing Jones and appointing Hubanks, Mayor Hollingsworth had demonstrated that “the era of tyranny is over.” 

Hubanks was warmly embraced by his troops, but the public has legitimate cause for concern: Before retiring as a Lieutenant, Hubanks served as commander of the department’s SWAT team for more than a decade. At least some of the operators who carried out the execution of 107-year-old Monroe Isadore were probably selected and trained by him. Once merely dysfunctional, the Pine Bluff PD has become downright deadly. 

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Pelosi: Willing to "Protect" Syrian Children To Death

It's hard to tell which of these two is worse.

Whenever the ruling elite wants to engage in another bout of humanitarian slaughter, it will have its media auxiliaries soften up the public by barraging it with images of innocent people – particularly children – who are suffering and dying. Every “humanitarian” war makes those images go away. Children are still being mangled and murdered, of course – but those who control the state-aligned media are no longer interested in showing them.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently deployed the “It’s for the children” trope in a debate that she had – and lost – with her five-year-old grandson over the impending war with Syria. Since the child has not yet been processed through the government mind-laundry, he retained both his native intelligence and his natural impatience for obvious evasion. He also displayed a more mature understanding of ethics than his grandmother.

According to Pelosi’s account of the conversation, the child asked her if she favored war in Syria. Seeking refuge in circumlocution, Pelosi tried to brush off the question by replying, “We’re not talking about war; we’re talking about action.” The child, who apparently knew that the “action” being discussed would entail killing people, persisted through Pelosi’s persiflage: Did she support war with Syria? Pelosi again tried to deflect the question, this time by turning it back on the child by asking what he would do.

“I think no war,” was his reported reply. 

In desperation, Pelosi unleashed the most potent weapon in her rhetorical arsenal – the “Bomb-the-children-to-save-the children” argument.

“I said, `Well, I generally agree with that, but you know, they’ve killed hundreds of children there,’” Pelosi recalled in a brief statement to reporters on the White House lawn. “And he said, `Were these children in the United States?’ And I said, `No, but they’re children wherever they are.’”

America’s political class is thickly populated with thinly educated people, and in that dismal company Nancy Pelosi has always distinguished herself through her sheer stupidity. She is so incurably dense that she shared this story in the belief that it offered a compelling display of wisdom – rather than the pitiable spectacle of a policymaker losing a debate over geopolitics to her five-year-old grandson. 

That child, unlike his famous grandmother, instinctively drilled down to a question she and her comrades cannot answer: Quo warranto? By what supposed authority would the US government make war on Syria to deal with atrocities committed against children living in that country? 

Pelosi is famously disdainful of the idea that the U.S. Constitution imposes limits of any kind on federal action. Her platitudinous response to her grandson’s insightful and incisive question seems to assume that the US government has universal jurisdiction over mistreatment of children everywhere. One unspoken corollary is that the same government has unqualified authority to abuse and slaughter children in order to achieve its objectives.

At least for now, Syria seems to be the geographic limit of Pelosi’s exquisite sensitivity regarding the suffering of children overseas.  Her concern crested just to the west of Iraq, where more than a million children have died from violence inflicted by the government that has employed Pelosi since 1987.

No recorded examples exist of Pelosi expressing anguish over the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who perished in anguish from starvation and disease as a result of the US-inflicted embargo that lasted from 1991 to 2003. Pelosi’s silence about that atrocity tacitly ratifies the assessment of her fellow humanitarian warmonger, Madeleine Albright, who blithely told 60 Minutes that the extermination of a half-million or more Iraqi children was a suitable price to pay in order to “punish” Saddam Hussein.

 

Pelosi has likewise been silent about the ongoing horrors experienced by the children of Fallujah, an Iraqi city that was pulverized by the US military in 2004 as retaliation for the killing of a handful of Blackwater mercenaries.  That onslaught included widespread use of chemical munitions in the form of white phosphorous rounds and ammunition made with depleted uranium. Those, too, are chemical weapons, unless the relevant sections of the periodic table have been revised to suit the interests of the Exceptional Nation. 

The collective punishment of Fallujah for defying the illegal occupation of Iraq was an atrocity of Stalinist magnitude, and that punishment continues today as the city witnesses an unprecedented increase in the rate of pediatric cancer and birth defects, such as spina bifida, heart problems, and inexplicable deformities. Medical researchers believe that this is a result of persistent elevated levels of lead, mercury, and uranium from the onslaught. 

A scene from "liberated" Fallujah.

It appears that Fallujah’s victims constitute another exception to Pelosi’s axiom that
“children are children wherever they are.” The same is true of Pakistani, Yemeni, and Afghan children who have been annihilated through US drone strikes. For Pelosi they are small lives, of little consequence.

Not a syllable of condemnation has escaped Pelosi’s lips regarding her president’s murder of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was obliterated by a drone-fired missile just weeks after Mr. Obama murdered his father, Anwar al-Awlaki. 

If Abdul al-Awlaki had been a Syrian teenager killed by the government of Bashar al-Assad, Pelosi might have taken notice of the crime. When committed by her Dear Leader, however, such extra-judicial killings are considered commendable by Pelosi, who doesn’t think that the Regime needs even to acknowledge killing U.S. citizens.

“People just want to be protected,” warbled Pelosi when asked about summary execution of US citizens by drone strikes. “And I saw that when we were fighting them on surveillance, the domestic surveillance. People just want to be protected. [They’ll say] `You go out there and do it. I’ll criticize you, but I want to be protected.’”

Pelosi’s logic – if that word can be tortured into applying here – dictates that it is sometimes necessary to "fight" Americans to "protect" them -- even if it means "protecting" them to death. That’s a serviceable summation of her position regarding Syria: She’s willing to bomb Syrian children in order to protect them, too. Although Pelosi’s views won’t withstand the scrutiny of her five-year-old grandson, they do display a certain deranged consistency. 

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