[Peace-discuss] [sf-core] Tragedy of US police training by Israeli companies

[C. G. Estabrook]

The desperate defenders of Israel - and those of the police - are grasping at straws. 

What would we say of violent policing in the US in the 1930s, were it revealed that US police were being trained by the Gestapo?

Cf. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/michael-brelo-cleveland-police-officer-acquitted-of-manslaughter-in-2012-deaths.html>.

"From from any dispassionate and rational vantage, this verdict appears to be insane, except that this kind of insanity is so pervasive now in America, that one has to at least give serious consideration to the proposition that our entire culture is in a well-advanced state of pathological breakdown.” —Jeffrey St Clair


> On May 23, 2015, at 2:13 PM, 'Fields, A Belden' a-fields at illinois.edu [sf-core] <sf-core-noreply at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> "The facts are that U.S law enforcement has been receiving training from the Israeli’s for years now and the recent exponential increase in police murders of unarmed civilians, mostly African Americans is a direct result."
> 
> David,  
> 
> I have no doubt that Israelis are offering police training, especially anti-terrorist training, to US police forces.  That's not surprising.  But there are two problems with your above assertion.
> 
> First, we don't know that that there has been "an exponential increase in police murders of unarmed civilians, mostly African Americans."  What we do know is that such killings are now coming to light in ways they have not before because of modern technology available to citizens, first and foremost cell and smart phones.  
> 
> Second, having been born before Israel existed and grown up in Chicago I can assure you that 
> the police in that city were not shy about firing on African Americans.  And Lt. Burge did not need Israelis to teach him how to torture African American men into false confessions.  His own experience in torturing suspected Viet Cong while in the US Army did him quite well for that function.
> 
> I have researched police behavior for well over two decades while working on my book on human rights.  There is lots of very good and well-researched material on policing and minorities in the US and abroad, some of it written by scholars at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, and some of it written by others.   In fact, you might look at the book of our comrade Jim Barrett to see historically how ethnic tensions manifested themselves in violent policing going far back in the histories of immigration in both Chicago and New York.  I think that that would be a better way of  working that just grabbing off the web whatever makes the case you want to make.
> 
> I hope this is useful.
> 
> Belden
> 
> 
> On 5/22/2015 3:51 PM, David Johnson wrote:

>> […]
>> 
>>  
>> The facts are that U.S law enforcement has been receiving training from the Israelis for years now and the recent exponential increase in police murders of unarmed civilians, mostly African Americans is a direct result.
>> 
>>  
>> I have plenty of other sources that confirm this.
>> 
>>  
>> David Johnson
>> 
>>