GreekReport – More than half of all police officers in Greece voted for pro-Nazi party Golden Dawn in the elections of May 6. This is the disconcerting result of an analysis carried out by authoritative newspaper To Vima in several constituencies in Athens, where 5,000 police officers in service in the Greek capital also cast their ballot. At some polling stations, Golden Dawn obtained 19 to 24% of votes. Read article
Guardian – Russian riot police have broken up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a sit-in for a week and detaining at least 15. The dispersal of the makeshift encampment is the latest step in a government crackdown on protests over Putin’s return to the presidency on 7 May for a six-year term following four years as prime minister. Read Article
Reuters – Occupy protesters demonstrate outside St. Paul’s Cathedral and scuffle with police in the City of London. Read article
NY Times – Police officers stopped people on New York City’s streets more than 200,000 times during the first three months of 2012, putting the Bloomberg administration on course to shatter a record set last year for the highest annual tally of street stops. Data on the 203,500 street stops from January through March — up from 183,326 during the same quarter a year earlier — was sent to the City Council from 1 Police Plaza late on Friday under a legal requirement spawned by public outrage over the 1999 fatal police shooting in the Bronx of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler. Read Article
BBC – Police intervened following a clash between protesters, local media say. Police dispersed a similar protest on Sunday. It was part of a weekend in which tens of thousands protested. The square is a focal point for the movement of “indignants”, which erupted in response to economic crisis and austerity policies exactly a year ago. Read article
PressTV – UK police mistreatment of people held in their custody has come under spotlight as a new incident captured on CCTV emerges of County Durham police “torture” assault. Two British police staff who twisted and grabbed the arms of a man in order to make him answer their questions after his arrest at Peterlee Police Station in March 2011, have been ordered to pay him £50 each in compensation, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) condemning the violent act as “a form of torture”. Read Article
Reuters – Scuffles break out between protesters and police outside a tax office in Naples as public anger grows against tax authorities Read article
Daily Mail – A Georgia policeman has come under fire for kicking a pregnant woman so hard she was forced to have an emergency C-section. Raven Dozier said that when officer Jerad Wheeler came to her house to quell her brother’s dispute with her mother, Wheeler used a Taser on him. She cried out and Wheeler pounced, kicking the nine-month pregnant woman in the stomach and charging her with obstruction. Read Article
Daily Mail – Police fired Tasers at a terrified Alzheimer’s sufferer in a troubling incident that reopens the debate on the controversial weapon. Six officers were called to take the unarmed 58-year-old man to hospital but he had no idea what was going on and lashed out at them. What happened next left his wife ‘heartbroken’ and his neighbours in tears. Read Article
Guardian – Police in New York City disproportionately stop black and Latino people even in low-crime areas, leading to a “two-tiered” policing system that divides along racial lines, according to civil rights campaigners. A new analysis of NYPD figures by the New York Civil Liberties Union challenges the police’s assertion racial disparities in stop-and-frisks reflect the geography of New York’s high-crime areas. Read Article
New Scientist – Being hit with a Taser stun gun in the chest can lead to cardiac arrest and death, according to a new study. The research by Douglas Zipes, a heart specialist at the Krannert Institute of Cardiology in Indianapolis, Indiana, was based on records he acquired as a plaintiff’s expert witness in a number of lawsuits involving US police use of the controversial stun gun. Read Article
RT – Ten months after Fullerton, California police officers beat a 37-year-old homeless man to death, video footage of Kelly Thomas’ last few minutes of consciousness were showed in a Santa Ana, CA courtroom on Monday. Monday marked the first day of a preliminary hearing that will go on to determine if there is enough evidence for two Fullerton cops — Officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli — to be ordered to stand trial for the May 5, 2011 beating of Thomas. Read Article
At least six people were taken to hospital, and around 15 riot police injured, while many opposition leaders were among nearly 600 people to be detained. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Moscow police had acted “softly” and should have been even more forceful. Read article
Huffington Post – A Seattle-based immigrant advocacy nonprofit filed a formal civil rights complaint against the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, challenging the practice of local police departments calling in border patrol agents to act as interpreters in routine matters. As part of the complaint, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) also released a damning video which they claim was recorded last February. It allegedly depicts border patrol agents calling undocumented immigrants “all wet,” (at the 2:25 mark in the below video) a derogatory term used to describe those who have crossed the border illegally, according to NWIRP. A Washington State Patrol officer brought the border patrol agents captured in the video to the scene for “interpretation assistance,” according to the complaint. Read article
Reuters – Demonstrators are back on the streets of Aleppo as amateur video appears to show tear gas dispersing crowds. Read article
BBC – The unknown attackers used rocks, clubs, firebombs and shotguns. The protesters retaliated, beating some assailants. Soldiers and police have now intervened to stop the clashes, but as long as six hours after the violence started. Two leading presidential candidates have suspended campaigning in protest at the way authorities handled it. Read article
New Scientist – Two research papers published this week throw further light on the health risks of the Taser stun gun. This striking image [see article] shows the central issue examined in one of the papers: what happens when one of the two barbed darts fired by a police Taser struck a 27-year-old man on the side of the head. Although Isabel Le Blanc-Louvry and colleagues at the department of forensic medicine at Rouen University Hospital in France do not reveal when or where this occured, they say the victim had been drunk and resisted police requests for his ID. The police fired the pneumatically powered Taser to incapacitate and subdue him – but somehow nobody noticed a dart remained stuck in his head, until he later went to hospital complaining of a persistent headache. Read article
Herald Sun – The ABC reports officers have been using software it licensed from UK company Micro Focus to access their COPS database. The database – described as the “nervous system” of NSW Police – contains highly confidential details of almost every person in the state with a criminal history. Micro Focus claims NSW Police bought 6500 licences off them for COPS access software known as ViewNow. Read Article
Daily Mail – Bristling with guns, his face masked, a police officer moves in on a suspected suicide bomber.
Just 91 days away from the start of the Olympics, the dramatic scene gave a foretaste of what can be expected this summer after a man threatened to blow himself up in a busy office block. Thousands were evacuated, Tube stations were closed and streets locked down over a wide area of London’s West End.
Snipers, bomb disposal squads, nuclear biological and chemical warfare specialists and dozens of armed police were scrambled to the building on Tottenham scrambled to an office block on Tottenham Court Road, one of the city’s busiest shopping streets. Read Article
Press TV – Saudi-backed forces in Bahrain have attacked mourners holding a funeral for a protester killed by regime forces. Activists said on Monday that the police quickly attacked the mourners after they started calling for the downfall of the regime. Thousands of Bahrainis took to the streets in the Manama suburb of Bilad al-Qadim for the funeral procession for 36-year-old Salah Abbas Habib, who was found dead on a rooftop in the village of Shakhoura, southwest of Manama, on Saturday shortly after regime forces attacked an anti-government demonstration in the area the day before the Formula One Grand Prix. Read Article
BBC – They say 120,000 people packed the capital Prague, protesting against austerity measures and corruption. Police put the numbers at 90,000. Echoing 1989, people jangled their keys – a signal to the centre-right coalition cabinet to lock up and leave. Read article
Wall Street Journal – With little public attention, dozens of universities and law-enforcement agencies have been given approval by federal aviation regulators to use unmanned aircraft known as drones, according to documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by an advocacy group. The more than 50 institutions that received approvals to operate remotely piloted aircraft are more varied than many outsiders and privacy experts previously knew. They include not only agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security but also smaller ones such as the police departments in North Little Rock, Ark., and Ogden, Utah, as well the University of North Dakota and Nicholls State University in Louisiana. Read Article
Independent – A man has stripped naked at a US airport as a protest against airport security screeners, police said. The incident at Portland International Airport in Oregon caused some passengers to cover their eyes and their children’s eyes while others looked, laughed and took photos, a police report said. Port of Portland police said 49-year-old John E Brennan was arrested for investigation of indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. Read Article
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