Society's ChildS


Megaphone

Man who rode in back of van with Freddie Gray says police are using him to "cover their ass"

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© MSNBC
New statements from the Baltimore man who was imprisoned with Freddie Gray in a police van on the night of Gray's death contradict authorities' account of the night in question, a local television reporter told MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Thursday.

"The key thing to take away is, he did not see Mr. Gray, he couldn't have seen Mr. Gray," WBAL-TV's Jayne Miller said of Donta Allen, who was listed as a source in a police document indicating that Gray purposefully injured himself on the night in question. "I asked him, 'Did you hear [Gray] say anything?' He didn't hear him say anything."

An affadavit for a search warrant stated that, according to Allen, Gray was "banging against the walls" of the van on April 12. Gray died a week after being taken into custody.

Hayes broadcast the entirety of Miller's interview with Allen, during which he denies giving police any information, and accused authorities of using him as a scapegoat for their failure to provide Gray with medical assistance.


Magnify

Baltimore police's history of "accidentally" killing its perps didn't start with Freddie Gray

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© Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty
A man accused of public urination rode in a similar police van, suffered a spinal injury, and died.

Freddie Gray gave a cry of pain as the arresting officers hoisted him to his feet. Something seemed wrong with his legs as he was dragged in handcuffs to a police van.

"Look at his leg!" a witness can be heard shouting on a cellphone video. "That leg look broke! His leg look broke! You all dragging him like that!"

But the 25-year-old's legs do not seem to have been the source of the pain that caused Gray to cry out again. His head was hanging down, and he may have already suffered a spinal injury such as could have been exacerbated by a failure to immobilize his head and neck before moving him.

More likely, he suffered the devastating and ultimately fatal spinal trauma after he was placed in the van.

"Something happened in that van," Michael Davey, lawyer for the Baltimore police union, said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Bell

Non-Muslims carried out more than 90% of all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil

An FBI report shows that only a small percentage of terrorist attacks carried out on U.S. soil between 1980 and 2005 were perpetrated by Muslims.

Princeton University's Loon Watch compiled the following chart from the FBI's data (as explained below, this chart is over-simplified ... and somewhat inaccurate):

terrorism pie chart
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database
According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs 6%). These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion. These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.
(The chart is misleading in several ways. For example, it labels "Extreme Left Wing Groups" and "Communists", but not "Extreme Right Wing Groups" or "Fascists". It should have either discarded all partisan labels, or included labels for both ends of the spectrum. In addition, "Latinos" is misleading, as Loonwatch is actually referring to Puerto Rican separatist groups, Cuban exile groups and the like. However, as shown below, many of the basic concepts are correct.)

Comment: These statistics show that you can take any group of people anywhere on the planet and repeat lies and propaganda about them over and over until their demonization takes root in the beliefs of the masses.


Handcuffs

Six Baltimore police officers face murder, other charges in Freddie Gray's death

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© Reuters/Adrees Latif
Six Baltimore police officers will face criminal charges, including second-degree murder and manslaughter, in the death of a black man who was arrested and suffered a fatal neck injury while riding in a moving police van, the city's chief prosecutor said on Friday.

Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby said Freddie Gray, who died a week after his April 12 arrest, was in handcuffs but otherwise was not restrained inside the van. The officers failed to provide medical attention to Gray even though he asked for help on at least two occasions.

Gray's death has become the latest flashpoint in a national outcry over the treatment of African-Americans and other minority groups by U.S. law enforcement.

Family

True cost of psychopathic austerity measures: More than 50,000 families shipped out of London boroughs in the past 3 years due to welfare cuts and soaring rents

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Councils are currently moving homeless mothers and children out of their boroughs at a rate of close to 500 families a week
More than 50,000 families have been silently shipped out of London boroughs in the past three years, an investigation by The Independent can reveal.

Leaked documents obtained by this newspaper expose the true scale of the "social cleansing" taking place across the capital as a result of welfare cuts and soaring rents. The figures show an unprecedented number of families who cannot afford to find homes in their local area being uprooted from their neighbourhoods and dumped further and further away from the capital, cut off from their relatives and support networks.

The spike coincides with the Coalition's introduction of the benefit cap and "bedroom tax", both of which have made it significantly harder for poor people to afford housing in London. In 2010, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, vowed that the controversial welfare reforms would not lead to "Kosovo-style social cleansing", pledging: "You are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living."

But official figures - which the authorities have previously refused to publish - show the problem is much worse than campaigners feared. They show that councils are currently moving homeless mothers and children out of their boroughs at a rate of close to 500 families a week, with numbers continuing to rise.

Handcuffs

Baltimore teen turns himself in after damaging a police car, faces $500k bail and life in prison...

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Allen Bullock, the 18-year-old seen in photos smashing in a police car with a traffic cone, turned himself in after being encouraged by his parents. But now he is being held on $500,000 bail, an amount his parents cannot afford, The Guardian reports.

Bullock faces charges of rioting and malicious destruction of property, among other criminal counts, after turning himself in at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center with his stepfather, Maurice Hawkins, at his side. According to Hawkins, who saw footage of his stepson on Saturday, the teen agreed to turn himself in after his stepfather told him that the police would "find him, knock down our door and beat him" if he didn't, The Guardian notes.

However, no good deed goes unpunished, and Hawkins now believes that they are making an example of the teen. "By turning himself in, he also let me know he was growing as a man and he recognized what he did was wrong," Hawkins told The Guardian on Wednesday. "But they are making an example of him, and it is not right."

"As parents, we wanted Allen to do the right thing," Bullock's mother, Bobbi Smallwood, said. "He was dead wrong, and he does need to be punished. But he wasn't leading this riot. He hasn't got that much power."

Hawkins noted that the proposed amount is higher than that placed on some accused murderers in the city. "Who could afford to pay that?" the stepfather asked.

Comment: If it was a drunk white kid in the suburbs the potential for jail time would be non-existent.


Sheriff

Mentally-ill man dies after Ohio deputy uses takedown hold in jail

David Dehmann

David Dehmann, 33, died last week at the Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. Dehmann, who suffers from several conditions (Asperger's Syndrome, Tourette's Syndrome and autism), was seriously injured by a deputy at the Knox County Jail in Mount Vernon, Ohio, on April 21.


Dehmann was taken into custody for alleged public intoxication, transported to a hospital, then released, but arrested a second time for alleged persistent disorderly conduct (video below).


The state's Bureau of Criminal Investigation's Special Investigation Unit is now investigating the incident, noted Mount Vernon News.

Comment: The excessive force used to subdue Dehmann is unconscionable. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon.


Stop

Convicted Utah pedophile steals school bus and uses it's list of names and addresses to try and kidnap children

Patrick James Fredrickson
© APConvicted child sex-offender, Patrick James Fredriksen
A known child sex offender has been arrested on suspicion of stealing a school bus and driving it around to pick up youngsters. Patrick James Fredricksen, 30 - who has previous convictions for unlawful sexual activity with a minor and impersonating a firefighter - was stopped on his way to one child's home in eastern Utah, police say. He had already used the bus's on-board list of children's names and addresses to try and abduct a young girl, they added.

Fredricksen has now been booked into Emery County Jail for investigation of theft of a vehicle and attempted child kidnapping. He is also expected to face a charge of damaging a prison after breaking a sprinkler pipe inside his cell and flooding the booking area, said sheriff spokeswoman Janalee Luke. Fredricksen's crime spree is alleged to have started while he was laying turf for a landscaping firm at a baseball complex in Huntington on Monday.

An employee at the site phoned the local sheriff's office to report a worker 'was acting strange' and had left on foot with a set of master keys to the complex. Shortly afterwards, a nearby funeral-parlor worker reported that his car had been stolen from the company car park. He told police he had noticed a 'suspicious' person around the building' but was talking to a bereaved family at the time so 'wasn't too concerned', according to the sheriff's office. They claim Fredricksen was the thief and that he drove the car to an empty school bus, which had its keys inside.

Comment: Studies have shown that these types of sexual predators cannot be rehabilitated.

For more information on how the minds of these individuals operate, check out Anna Salter's book, 'Predators, Pedophiles, Rapists, and other Sex Offenders' .

Also see:


Stormtrooper

Arrogant cop recklessly pursues fire chief to ticket him for responding to an actual emergency


Rincon Fire Chief Corey Rahn was on his way to an actual emergency on April 10 when he was aggressively pursued by police. Naturally, he believed they were en route to the same incident. A series of videos have been released documenting the absurd actions of the officer.

The chief was out running errands when he was alerted that a garbage truck had rear-ended a gas truck that was carrying 9,000 gallons of gas, 15 miles away from where he was. Understanding the severity of the situation, Rahn jumped in his personal vehicle and put a mini row of red emergency lights up so that he could rush to the scene and help.

As the fire chief was rushing to the scene, he became an unknowing suspect in a car chase. Despite his emergency lights, an officer began recklessly attempting to pull him over. However, as there was an extraordinarily dangerous situation, with a person trapped, Rahn assumed the officer was just on his way to the scene as well.

According to SavannahNow, the Central Dispatch was reportedly "too busy" to check if it was someone who was responding to an incident. So, the chase continued until eventually the officer used his PA system to demand that the fire chief stop. Rahn heroically ignored the orders and continued to where he was needed, only then learning that he was being chased.

Arrow Down

California's low-wage workers earned less in 2014 than 1979 in inflation-adjusted dollars

graph california low-wage workers
Over the past 35 years, California's high-wage workers have seen steady increases in their paychecks. But low-wage workers, 4.8 million strong and about one-third of the state's workforce, earned less in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2014 than they did in 1979, according to a new analysis from UC Berkeley.

Berkeley researchers analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data at the campus's Center for Labor Research and Education found that low-wage workers, defined as those earning hourly wages of $13.63 or less, have seen steady declines in their inflation-adjusted buying power. This low-wage workforce, nearly three-quarters nonwhite and concentrated in two industries -- retail trade, and restaurants and other food services -- has also become older and more highly educated.

Teens made up 5 percent of low-wage workers in 2014, down from 16 percent in 1979, and 48 percent of low-wage earners in 2014 had attended some college, compared to 39 percent in 1979. The analysis also showed that 40 percent of the state's low-wage workers in 2014 were foreign-born.

"We found that low-wage workers in California are older and more educated than they were 30 years ago, and yet they've seen stagnant and even declining wages," said Annette Bernhardt, a visiting UC Berkeley professor of sociology and a senior researcher at the center. "The story of growing inequality is not just about the top 1 percent, it is also about the millions of low-wage workers and their families who struggle with economic insecurity every day."

Comment: This helps to explain why nearly a quarter of California's 38 million residents (8.9 million) live in poverty. California continues to have - by far - the nation's highest level of poverty under an alternative method devised by the Census Bureau that takes into account both broader measures of income and the cost of living.