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Disturbing news from Occupy circles about NYPD practices these days - I mean, in addition to all those other NYPD practices we were already disturbed about.
David Graeber, a prominent anarchist involved with Occupy since its beginning, recounts seeing a woman friend in New York a few weeks ago, her hand in a cast. A cop had grabbed her breast, she said.
When she raised a fuss and screamed about the groping, the cops dragged her out of sight and started working her over. "Stop resisting!" they continued to shout, as they repeatedly slammed her body into the concrete. At some point she told them she was reaching over to get her glasses, which had come off in the scuffle. In the reptilian police mind, this justified pinning her hands behind her back and bending one wrist until it snapped.
Those familiar with police riots versus anti-globalization demonstrations and the more recent Occupy demonstrations, or who follows Radley Balko and CopBlock, is aware that sexual assault's the only thing unusual about this case. As Graeber says, "arbitrary violence is nothing new. The apparently systematic use of sexual assault against women protestors is new."
Of course sexual assault itself is hardly new as a weapon of social control, in historical terms. It appears in the arsenals of most authoritarian regimes - large-scale, premeditated use of rape for ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces in Bosnia, Egyptian troops using "virginity inspections" to humiliate female demonstrators taken into custody, and so on.
Comment: What are they going to do, hand over the underwear?
No evidence has yet been 'handed over' because there is no evidence to hand over.
The Underwear Bomber - Crushing Freedom With Phony Arab Terrorism