LAPD Trained in Israeli Tactics Attack Immigrant's March

Yesterday here in LA, as in MANY cities across the US, there was a large immigration march. Having seen the reports from other marches across the nation and watching the news last night, LA's march was set apart from the others due to the BRUTAL police reaction. You can link to get all of the LA Indymedia reports, and below is posted one of the articles.

I received the following by email last evening:

May Day LA Demonstrations: Breaking News

Here’s the latest news into the LA-IMC newsroom as of 12:00 AM:

High school walkouts have been reported throughout the city at well over 50 different schools. Many other schools have been placed on lockdown.

The massive downtown march as started. Now estimated at 50,000+ and growing. Smaller feeder marches are steaming in from all directions into the downtown area.

Port workers are holding a rally in Banning Park near the harbor after forcing the Port authority to declare May Day a holiday thus closing the harbor.

Unconfirmed reports of a few arrests in the downtown area. Some students have been detained and returned to campuses. All events seem to be peaceful at this time. No reports of police violence.

5:20 PM: The Police is trying to break up the march at 6th street and Park View. The people refuse to leave, each side standing face to face. The Lawyer's Guild of LA is negociating with the police for a compromise. There are still about 50,000 people at McArthur Park.

Update: 6:20 PM, The police has sent tear gas into the crowd at Alvarado and 6th street. Thousands of people are panicking and running away. The police is also firing rubber bullets into the crowd. They have declared unlawful assembly to a mostly family crowd, in McArthur Park.

Police have encircled McArthur Park asking people to leave, but ironically they are not allowing anyone to leave if they want. There are reports of fires and LAPD beating. The mainstream media is out for lunch as none are there.

Please see the newswire for more details.

One thing that the public needs to know about the LAPD and Chief Bratton. Chief Bratton has strong Israeli ties through his Jewish attorney wife and his own trips to Israel as well as sending members of the LAPD to receive training by the Israeli police and come back having learned those tactics.

"Los Angeles, Alta California - December 9, 2002 - (ACN) Just 45 days into his term as the new Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Bill Bratton is already in Israel for 6 days of training and meetings with top Israeli "security and anti-terrorism experts." Bratton is married to prominent Jewish attorney and co-anchor of Court TV Rikki Klieman. Chief Bratton also has very strong social and political connections to Michael Bloomberg, the new Jewish Mayor of New York City. Chief Bratton departed to Tel-Aviv on Saturday and will not be back to attend to his duties at Parker Center until Monday December 16."

Ironically the last sentence of this article reads:

" Because of the brutal Jewish occupation of Palestine and the Los Angeles Jewish community's support of Zionist Israel, the large Mexican-American population in Los Angeles might end up being the indirect victims of a massive biological and/or nuclear attack upon the city. God help us all!"

Well, the "large Mexican-American population in Los Angeles" were the victims of an attack all right, by the LAPD which is TRAINED in Israeli tactics and were used on MOSTLY Mexican-American immigrants marching in a PEACEFUL demonstration. IRONIC!!!

SOURCE of the article just quoted from.

In addition.......

JINSA Hosts LAPD Terror Bombing Expert

Expert Briefs JINSA Leaders, Government Officials on Homicide Bomber Threat

SOURCE

On the evening of January 16, 2003, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) hosted Ralph Morten, Detective Supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department's explosives unit, or "bomb squad." Detective Morten, who has been an officer for 28 years and is a 10-year veteran of the bomb squad, briefed JINSA leadership, representatives from the Department of Defense and a delegation from the Transportation Security Administration on the domestic threat posed by homicide (suicide) bombers and lessons learned firsthand from the experience of the Israeli National Police Force.

Detective Morten first visited Israel in April 2002 as part of a delegation that included two officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's office. The officers were briefed by high-ranking officers of the Israeli National Police Force on homicide bombers, their tactics and techniques for carrying out attacks on civilians, and the procedures used by police and security forces to prevent and respond to these attacks. He returned to Israel later in 2002 for additional meetings and to observe the methods used by the Israeli police to train their forces to deal with these increasingly frequent attacks.

Since his return to the United States, Detective Morten has conducted more than 65 training sessions for over 4,500 police, fire and military personnel based on the information shared with him by Israeli security forces.

These tactics are the ones used in the OCCUPATION. Rubber bullets, tear gas, batons. How do you use these tactics on a "homicide bomber" AFTER THE FACT!!!!! This is FASCISM and NOTHING ELSE!!!!


The following is an account with pictures added of just what happened in LA yesterday:

Police Terror in the Park
by Leslie Radford Wednesday, May. 02, 2007 at 12:55 AM

The police shoot and tear gas families celebrating immigrants and May Day

2007-05-01_police_invasion6.jpg, image/jpeg, 448x336

Reporter: "What's the police's excuse going to be?"
Witness: "Besides racism?"

MACARTHUR PARK, May Day 2007--Police stormed a workers' and immigrants' rally at 5:30 p.m. this afternoon in MacArthur Park, sending thousands of families running in terror as they cleared MIWON Immigrant rally and festival with foam and beanbag bullets, batons, and tear gas. The cops marched through the park in riot gear, indiscriminately clubbing down people in their wake. Young people formed the front line against the onslaught, running in retreat for a few yards at each thud-like explosion of a teargas canister and then turning back to the cops, while older and younger people ran through the single open exit in fear that it, too, would be barricaded.

A few moments before, children had been playing on the hillside and dancing with puppet dragons. A drum circle was beating out a rhythm, hot dog and shaved ice vendors strolled through the crowd, and speakers at the north end stage called out for solidarity among immigrant and and non-immigrant workers.

According to a witness, the melee began when someone in a crowd gathered on Alvarado Street between 7th and 8th Streets hurled something toward the police, as the Aztec danzantes performed for a group gathered on Alvarado. The witness reported that the motorcycle cops nudged the audience, then cops on foot split the crowd in the street and stormed them.

A National Lawyers' Guild observer, Sanjukta Paul, was beaten repeatedly, including a blow to the kidneys, as she attempted to separate the police from the crowd. She had demanded that she had the right to be there as she tried to move people off the street, but a cop replied, "No, you don't," then clubbed her with his baton.

From inside the park, the first warning was a single thud. Then a line of squad cars, sirens wailing, raced down 6th Street and turned onto S. Park View to 7th Street. Crowds from the street began pouring into the south end of the park, as parents scooped up children from impromptu wrestling matches and pulled them out of trees where they had climbed. Finally a helicopter overheard blared out the dispersal order, telling the crowd to leave the park and return to their cars. Another round of cop cars tore down the crowded street.

"I've been in protests in the '50s, the '60s, '70's. I've never seen anything like this," an elderly woman reported. She had been on Alvarado when the cops had charged. The people had lifted the woman over a fence onto private property, where the owner offered her sanctuary. Her daughter, frantically seeking her child as she retreated, was batoned in the stomach three times by a pig who said she wasn't moving back "fast enough."

As the police entered the park, vendors at the entrance frantically tried to escape with their carts. Organization members desperately tried to clear tables and literature in the path of the incursion. Roughly eighty pigs formed a diagonal line and marched across the park, sweeping everybody into a shrinking semicircle.

The police used foam and bean bag bullets against the people in the park. At least one guy left with blood soaking through his white T-shirt and a massive bruise already forming. Foam bullets carry the impact of a 95 m.p.h. fastball or a baseball bat. Last month, David K. Maxson from McHenry County, Illinois died in a "justified" police shooting with a beanbag gun.

A slight breeze wafted much of the teargas away, but those in the park felt welling eyes and difficulty breathing. One woman complained that the fracas had triggered an asthma attack.

The police arbitrarily fired on and beat those within range. Several reporters were beaten, and at least one was taken in away in an ambulance for a wound to his leg. One white-haired guy reported that his wife had been shot in the chest.

A few stray rocks from the park did little to slow the advance of the armed and firing pigs. Someone in the retreating crowd smashed a brick on the sidewalk so that others in front of him could hurl the shards at the police, but no one did picked them up. For a few moments some of the ralliers reorganized in a march on 6th Street and stopped traffic, but the cops ordered that they leave the area. The marchers threw the rocks in their hands on the street in frustration as they left. A number of people circled around the clock and came back down to the park on 6th Street, but the cops kept them at a distance, and a legal observer convinced them to leave the area.

By 8:00 p.m. the park was clear, but the Pico Union district was filled with people in the streets, sitting on stoops, and hanging out on street corners. Last year's May Day march also ended with police violence in Alvarado Street. The district was a hot spot during the 1992 Rebellion, and Pico Union is the home of the infamous Rampart Police CRASH unit, which cost the city millions of dollars for lawsuits involving drug dealing, perjured testimony, and framing innocent people. A federal investigation of CRASH was suspended when it was revealed that the FBI was likely complicit in the unit's abuses of immigrants.

Source

Cops Terrorize May Day Protestors
by We're all immigrants Tuesday, May. 01, 2007 at 11:44 PM

[ Screen capture from T52 Telemundo broadcast, showing LAPD Riot cops pointing shotguns at protestors during May Day protest ]

mayday_la.jpg, image/jpeg, 504x368

I was watching T52 Telemundo, one of the Spanish language stations for Los Angeles, and saw this unbelievable footage of the LAPD Riot Squad forcefully driving thousands of people out of MacArthur Park during the May Day march. Telemundo ran footage of their news crew being swept out of the park along with everyone else - driven out by lines of riot police with batons at the ready and toting 12 gauge shotguns as well as tear gas launchers. The shotguns supposedly fire “non-lethal” rubber bullets and bean-bag loads, munitions that were used against the crowd at close range. Telemundo footage showed one shirtless male protestor with a huge bloody welt/abrasion on his mid-section, being led away by comrades after cops shot him with such “non-lethal” munitions. Telemundo footage also showed tear gas canisters being fired at the fleeing crowds.

Telemundo’s footage showed a peaceful crowd being terrorized and threatened by the police. I don’t have the technology to make a video, or even to make a proper screen capture - so I used a hand held digital camera to shoot a screen capture of my TV screen as I played a video tape of the news.

The resulting picture shows one of the peaceful protestors in the park, holding an American flag mounted on a pole and being driven backwards by a line of cops. On the left you can see one of those cops pointing a shotgun directly in the man’s face. It’s a stunning image - a riot cop shoving a loaded shotgun in the face of a peaceful protestor holding an American flag.

Source

UPDATE

FROM A.N.S.W.E.R Los Angeles:

Take action today

Write an e-mail or contact Mayor Villaraigosa to express your outrage at the attack on immigrant rights marchers and community members.

ANSWER has set up an easy-to-use mechanism to fax or write a letter to the Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa demanding that Bratton be fired immediately and that his application for reappointment be denied. Click this link to send your letter by fax or email.

Link HERE to watch the video of Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine singing in McArthur park just a half hour before the police came in force shooting rubber bullets, tear gas and swinging batons. IRONICALLY the song is a union song which sings about the establishment shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at union members marching for their rights!! Note that EVERYTHING was peaceful in the park prior to the police arriving. I have been waiting all day to see if a you tube came up showing the police violence that erupted but so far the only one up is the one below taken by local Channel 11 Fox News. The woman in the beginning says that some protestors had provoked the police but that was well before the march was to end up at McArthur Park and then the police marched forward. Please note how the police treat the journalists in this video: Listening to the news today on KPFK many eyewitnesses called in to report HORRIFIC beatings of protestors with batons who were doing nothing but trying to get out of the way of the police.