Los Angeles police riot
leads to arrests, injuries

By Jack Hood

The police riot began as a protest involving members of the Occupy LA movement. Members of the group had organized to come down to the regularly scheduled ArtWalk event in Downtown L.A. to hand out chalk as a show of support for 11 people who had been arrested over the previous month for writing on the sidewalk.

PREFACE

Many people ask, What has happened to the "OCCUPY MOVEMENT?" The answer is that it has been crushed through the use of BRUTAL police tactics never before seen in the country. There can no longer be any question that the elites are maneuvering for the implementation of a "POLICE-STATE" – AND IT CAN BE IMPOSED ALMOST ANY TIME NOW. Writer / poet Anis Shivani writes:

"The most sweeping set of changes in American history has occurred; all our cherished freedoms annihilated beyond recognition ... SOME TIME AGO, STREET REVOLUTION MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE STOPPED THE PROCESS UNDERWAY AT HEADLONG SPEED. BUT NOW IT'S TOO LATE EVEN FOR THAT." [Please see our article, "Nasty as They Want to Be."]

-- Antipas

____________________________________

A force of 150 Los Angeles Police Department officers broke-up a small demonstration of Occupy Los Angeles protesters Thursday night, using rubber bullets and batons to disperse the estimated crowd of 200. Several demonstrators and bystanders were wounded in the confrontation, which the Los Angeles Times termed a "melee" ...

Wound inflicted by a rubber bullet during the chalkwalk demonstration.
The demonstration was called by Occupy Los Angeles in response to recent arrests of protesters for the "crime" of writing on sidewalks and walls in chalk. A Facebook page sponsored by the organizers of the event read:

"11 people have been arrested in the last month for writing with chalk on a sidewalk, this is not a crime. This is harassment and an attempt to stifle dissent. We will chalk it out all over ArtWalk letting people know about the dangers of chalking."

Several attendees of ArtWalk, a public gathering of street artists and vendors in Downtown Los Angeles, expressed their anger with the police response: "I was just here for ArtWalk, I didn't think anything was going to happen, and as I walked towards a group of people, I saw the line of police. So, I turned around and that's when they [the LAPD] shot me. I wasn't even doing anything wrong. I was just walking down the street. I did nothing wrong," explained Charlie Shepherd to NBC Los Angeles reporters as he revealed his rubber bullet wound to the camera.

In an absurd show of force, LAPD called a citywide tactical alert—a tactic reserved only for major emergencies and situations where public safety is generally at risk.

LOS ANGELES -- The number of suspects killed by police in Los Angeles County has risen nearly 70 percent in 2011 over the previous year. The increase in police killings come at a time when murder rates have fallen to historic lows - 612 homicides were recorded countywide last year.
The brutal reaction of the LAPD to a small demonstration of "chalkers" at a public art fair highlights the increasing militarization of the police force in the face of unprecedented levels of rising social inequality. Furthermore, such an obvious abrogation of the democratic right to free speech is no accidental occurrence. It underscores the preparations being made by the elites for an expansion of the struggle against austerity and budget cuts among average Americans.

In fact, the growing reliance of the police force on violence to control the population is not limited to the Occupy movement. In 2011, LAPD shootings increased by 50 percent compared with 2010, and this despite a drop in the city's crime rate for the ninth consecutive year. "We're safer than at any time since 1952," quipped Democratic mayor and former union bureaucrat Antonio Villaraigosa in January. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck even boasted: "These are the three best years of crime in the modern history of Los Angeles."

 The LA Times recently noted that there were only two areas where major crimes increased in 2011. One of the two areas two areas to increase was shootings by police. The LAPD has responded to criticism by proclaiming that this 50 percent increase in shootings was in response to a 22 percent increase in assaults against police officers. Police Chief Beck explained, "Officer involved shootings are also up—largely in response to these kind of attacks."

But this amounts to nothing more than a blatant lie, according to a report by Los Angeles Police Commission Inspector General Alex Bustamante released this month. Police officials systematically covered up the fact that the number of assaults on police officers remained unchanged between 2010 and 2011. Bustamante's report estimates that the police exaggerated the number of assaults against officers by 45 percent.

This was accomplished through a process in which LAPD officials counted attacks on officers based on the number of officers involved, while counting shootings by police as a single event, regardless of the number of victims involved. In an article earlier this month, the LA Times explained how this was carried out:

"In an incident in April 2011, for example, in which a suspect shot at police from inside a house, the LAPD counted 16 assaults on officers and one officer-involved shooting, despite the fact that 15 officers fired their weapons."

Bustamante's report concluded that "as such, there does not appear to be a clear correlation" between police shootings and assaults against police ...

The militarization of police and the routine dismissal of democratic rights come as the elites prepare themselves for a greater conflict with average Americans ...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently bragged that New York City has the "7th largest army in the world." Aaron Akins writes, "... I have a feeling that seeing their local constables in riot gear like we've seen at Occupy Oakland and Occupy Wall Street would have given the Founding Fathers great pause. The right to keep and bear arms doesn't look like much of a deterrent to tyranny when the police are driving tanks and using sonic weapons."

Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman describe one example of what's happening:

"At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's Department's Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year old son, and left the bedroom to investigate.

"Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot--or even switching his rifle off of 'safety'--he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena's. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

"Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a prolif-eration in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it be-come routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work?"

________________________________________

God bless you all!

S.R. Shearer
Antipas Ministries

***

IN ADDITION, WE URGE YOU TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW ANTIPAS PAPERS, PRINT THEM OUT YOURSELF, AND STUDY THEM CAREFULLY; SHARE THEM WITH YOUR FRIENDS.

YOU MAY DOWNLOAD THEM FREE!

***

FINALLY, WE URGE YOU TO DOWNLOAD AND PRINT OUT THE FLYER WE SENT TO YOU RECENTLY.

YOU MAY DOWNLOAD THE FLYER HERE

Then make copies and take these copies out to the campuses where you live; pass them out; OR if that seems too "daring" for you right now, post them on telephone poles, the sides of buildings, on campus bulletin boards; post them in union halls, in the neighborhoods of the poor and downtrodden, near employment offices, wherever you can.

Once again, we URGE you to read (or re-read):