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Monday, January 20th, 2025

Beyond Excessive Force: How Police Abuse Women, the Poor, the Homeless

Author:     David Nakamura
Source:     rsn / The Washington Post
Publication Date:     29 December 24
 Link: Beyond Excessive Force: How Police Abuse Women, the Poor, the Homeless
Stephan:  

American politicians, and Americans themselves do not seem to be willing to tell the truth about what the country is really like.  Just as we lie about having the best healthcare, education, and democracy, so we endlessly lie about the police and sheriffs. In fact, we have the worse trained law enforcement amongst the developed democracies, just as we have the worst healthcare and public education systems. This article describes the truth about the real nature of law enforcement in the United States. We will not be able to fix any of this until we can tell ourselves the truth and demand that our politicians at every level make fostering wellbeing the first priority of any government policy.

Demonstrators gather during a protest in Federal Plaza on Jan. 30, 2023, in Chicago, in response to the death of Tyre Nichols, who died after being beaten by Memphis police during a traffic stop. Credit: Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

In Worcester, Massachusetts, police officers enforcing anti-prostitution ordinances coerced women to touch their genitals and perform sex acts.

In Phoenix, officers clearing homeless encampments illegally disposed of personal belongings of the people who lived there, including tents, sleeping bags, identification cards and medicine.

In Lexington, Mississippi, officers jailed those unable to pay fines for minor offenses and added more fees, a scheme one federal prosecutor likened to a “debtor’s prison that Charles Dickens wrote about.”

These abuses, and others like them, are documented in exhaustive Justice Department reports that followed sweeping police misconduct investigations in those three cities and five others — Minneapolis; Louisville; Memphis; Trenton, New Jersey; and Mount Vernon, New York.

The Biden administration launched the probes in the wake of the national outcry over the police killings in 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor […]

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2 Comments

  1. S B on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 at 1:29 pm

    Same thing happened in NY as in Phoenix. I saw it.

  2. S B on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 at 1:30 pm

    NY also