Two Minutes Hate

[lisarea]

We could prolly just have a puppycide thread, what with all the trigger happy piggos out there:

Woman allows police to search her house so long as they don't kill her dog -- Police proceed to kill her dog | Before It's News

[Crumb]

Shenandoah Superintendent Dick Profit

[Crumb]

Courthouse News Service

[livius drusus]

What. The. Fuck.

[Crumb]

Morons with tasers.

[Cliche Guevara]

Jesus! They're more than just morons, they're dangerous fucking psychopaths!

[erimir]

Why don't we just have a FUCK THA POLICE thread already?

[One for Sorrow]

Here's another one to raise your blood pressure a few points, this time with Canadian police, minus dead puppies.

[wei yau]

Not to diminish what happened to that couple, but that's about the most polite Two Minutes Hate/Fuck Tha Police story I ever read.

[Adam]

Inorite? Sadly, its a happy thing that the police came busting into an innocent family's house in the middle of the night and no one got shot or tasered or anything.

[One for Sorrow]

Originally Posted by wei yau

that's about the most polite Two Minutes Hate/Fuck Tha Police story I ever read.

Well, yeah. Like I said, Canadian.

[wei yau]

Originally Posted by One for Sorrow

Well, yeah. Like I said, Canadian.

It's so weird. The couple isn't even going to sue.

They're just going to write a sternly worded letter of complaint to the police.

[Ensign Steve]

[lisarea]

We were permanently banned from the Miami-Dade Metrorail for taking photos | Photography is Not a Crime

[Stormlight]

Passers-by laughed at dying man | Stuff.co.nz

Nice.

A young motorcyclist was heckled and jeered at as he lay dying beneath a van in Wellington, residents claim.

Shelley McManis, 19, said she was at her Russell Tce flat with her flatmate about 11pm on Saturday when she heard a collision between a motorcyclist and taxi outside the back entrance to Wakefield Hospital.

As he lay groaning in agony two men laughed at him and passing motorists jeered "oh shame mate, you crashed", Ms McManis said.

[Nullifidian]

Charming.

The ACLU is demanding a Louisiana jail end the mistreatment of suicidal prisoners, saying the prison has been caging them in tiny "squirrel cages" and treating them like animals.

The civil rights organization's Lousiana chapter issued a harshly worded open letter Thursday, condeming the St. Tammany Parish jail's practice of locking suicidal prisoners in cages too small for them to lie down in and forcing them to strip down.

According to the Louisana ACLU's website, guards at the prison also engage in sadistic behavior and "frequently ignore repeated requests to use the bathroom, forcing some desperate people to urinate in discarded containers."

The so-called "squirrel cages," which the ACLU says are smaller than the "minimum legal standards for dogs," are located in a central area of the prison, in full view of other prisoners. According to the ACLU, people have been imprisoned in the caged "for days, weeks, and months."

The prison's chief Sheriff, Jack Strain, has said in the past that prisoners "need to be caged like animals," says the ACLU's complaint.

Marjorie Esman, the Executive Director of the Louisiana ACLU, said "This is what can happen when you have law enforcement treating the mentally ill. If the Constitution's Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment means anything, it means that people shouldn't be treated like this. Jails across this country typically have housing for suicidal prisoners and don't resort to such barbarity. The squirrel cages belong in the history books."

The letter also cites multiple reports that suicidal prisoners have been forced to wear orange "Daisy Duke style" short shorts with the words "Hot Stuff" stamped on the rear.

"Prisoners report that they are hesitant to inform guards when they feel suicidal, out of fear that they will be placed in the cages," writes the ACLU. "This increases the likelihood that a prisoner will commit suicide, as happened last fall."

[The Man]

Since this has basically become the general police brutality thread I've got a number of cases that qualify.

Officer accused of tasing a ten-year-old child.

Officer throws eighty-year-old man to the ground and smacks him over the head with a baton after he already turned to walk away.

I'm having a difficult time summarising this one (warning: libertarians) in my own words so:

Earlier that day, Housley’s wife Leah had been taken to the hospital for a mental evaluation. When she left without being discharged, a nurse called the police and asked them to do a “safety check” — a request that is rapidly becoming a leading cause of preventable death.

Housley refused to let the police see his wife, and ordered them to leave. This should have ended the matter. It didn’t, of course.

Officer Doyle Holquist tried to “detain” Housley — that is, the uninvited armed stranger criminally assaulted the worried husband and attempted to kidnap him. Housley broke free and ran inside his house, locked the door behind him, and called 911 — perhaps in the desperate hope of casting out Beelzebub by Beelzebub’s power.

When Holquist and his comrades contacted their supervisors, they received conflicting instructions: One of their superiors advised them not to force their way into the home, the second told the officers that they could break down the door. Nobody gets extra credit for correctly guessing which of those instructions the officers chose to follow.

Once the police had demolished the door, Officer Holquist escalated the matter further, adding aggravated assault to criminal trespass by dousing Housley with pepper spray. One of Holquist’s homies, Cpl. Jeffrey Bauer, attempted to subdue Housley, who “bear-hugged” his assailant. Bauer’s response was assault with a deadly weapon, shooting the besieged man twice with his portable electro-shock torture device.

Confronted with three armed, violent intruders who had repeatedly assaulted him Holquist staged a desperate counter-attack by grabbing a wooden chair and swinging it at Bauer, who — recall — had just attacked him with a lethal weapon. Holquist drew his firearm and shot Housley in the neck.

For several days after the shooting, Housley was in critical condition. During that time, Leah Housley, the supposed beneficiary of police intervention, wasn’t permitted to see her husband, whom she correctly described as the “victim” of criminal violence.

On June 3, a jury acquitted Housley of two counts of second-degree “assault on a police officer,” one count of “resisting arrest,” and one count of reckless endangerment. He was found guilty on two counts of “obstructing a police officer” – the first presumably for absorbing Bauer’s Taser strikes, the second for allowing his neck to impede the path of Holquist’s bullet.

In what he probably thought was a gesture of quasi-divine clemency, Judge Philip T. Caroom fined Housley $500 and offered to expunge the guilty verdicts after a brief term of probation.

Police beating of pregnant woman who was trying to help neighbour leads to miscarriage.

[lisarea]

Utah agencies probe alleged illegal immigrant list - Yahoo! News

OH the fucking comments too. Why do I even read those things?

[LadyShea]

Yeah the comments are usually what get my blood pressure up even worser

[Watser?]

How is it that news sites everywhere all full of white males complaining about people taking their jerbs?

Do yer fucking jerbs then instead of poasting on news sites, you layabouts!

[Crumb]

[LadyShea]

I find this difficult to watch, and the taser cop seems like a sadist...and I kept expecting him to call her nigger, I could hear the contempt in his voice.

Woman calls cops to report prowler; gets tasered repeatedly on video

[Ari]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

I find this difficult to watch, and the taser cop seems like a sadist...

That goes quite well with the many "if you are doing nothing illegal than you have nothing to worry about" comments in the yahoo news article. Oscar Grant was also doing nothing illegal when one cop shouted racist things at him and another one shot him. Yep, nothing to worry about in either of these cases.

[Stormlight]

Poachers kill last female rhino in South African park for prized horn // Current

[BrotherMan]

For those of you who don't know Avatar: The Last Airbender was a pretty good show. (Even the bright savior lisapea herself, opensource zealot and hater of things big and small herself wouldn't dislike it too much.) There are a lot of reasons that made it the success it was. It was a little bit silly and a little bit serious and a lot of points in between. The target audience was children but it had great entertainment value for adults too. And not just dorky ones like me. Because I'm a man in a man's manly world of men oriented things I don't always pick up on gender equality things, but once it was pointed out to me I knew there was yet another dimension of the show that I enjoyed even without being consciously aware of it. Avatar: The Last Airbender did great justice to gender equality, at least most of the time.

That's why I was kind of excited to hear that the great folks who brought us Avatar: The Last Airbender are working on a new show set in that world called The Legend of Korra. See, Korra is the next iteration of the Avatar after the Last Aibender. And she's a girl. So I'm greedily clicking every link I can that purports to have information about the new show and I find this new one from the Wall Street Journal. (Technically it's a blog on the WSJ site, but WSJ is plastered everywhere on it.) And I'm p. excited and I get hit in the face with this moronic sexist question:

The new “Avatar” is a woman. What inspired you to change the sex of the protagonist of the series?

And before I read the answer my mind goes into some apoplectic fit. It's painfully obvious this moran hasn't seen any of the series or even understands what this fictional world is about (despite having described it in a previous paragraph). If he had asked the same question a different way, maybe I could have let it slide. (Why did you decide that this Avatar would be a woman? would have worked, for example.) But not only was this moron a moron, he is a sexist moron to boot. Bless their hearts, the creators rise above it and provide a very nice answer.

Michael DiMartino: It’s not so much about changing because we had Avatar Kyoshi before Aang. We’d established that the Avatar can be male or female and we just thought let’s explore one of those more in depth, because Kyoshi was a popular character with a lot of fans and it seemed like a great opportunity to not retread what we’d done with Aang, who was a great hero, we all loved him, but we really wanted to try something different. And we have so many great female fans out there, who really responded to Katara in the first series, we thought we have the fan base who are really going to enjoy seeing the Avatar be a female.

Konietzko: Mike and I, we love those characters too, and we’ve encountered countless fans who are male who really like those characters too. We just don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can’t have an action series led by a female character. It’s kinda nonsense to us.