This cannot keep happening
A traffic stop in Virgina illustrates everything wrong with American policing.
A few years ago, I saw a photo on Reddit showing an African-American mother and child buying waiting at the “colored” window at an ice cream stand. The person who posted the video said that in addition to having to wait in a separate line, black customers also had to wait until all of the white customers had been served before they could buy their ice cream.
I had already heard the horror stories about lynchings and cross-burnings in the Jim Crow South, and knew about segregated accommodations and businesses (very much a thing here in Nova Scotia, too) but for some reason this is what really drove home just how humiliating and demeaning it was for African-Americans trying to navigate this bullshit every day.
I thought about that when I saw the video of Lt. Caron Nazario’s encounter with hopped-up police officers in Virgina. Nazario thankfully wasn’t killed or seriously injured, as we saw with George Floyd’s and other African-Americans’ encounters with police, but it is a sad reminder of what many people of color have to deal with on a daily basis.
Caron Nazario was driving his newly purchased Chevy Tahoe home when two police officers pulled him over in Windsor, Virginia, whipped out their guns, and started barking orders.
With their weapons raised, the officers demanded that Nazario, a Black and Latino man, get out of the SUV. Nazario looked in the mirror and saw he was being held at gunpoint, then placed his cellphone on his dashboard to film the December 5 encounter. He repeatedly asked to know what was going on. At one point, he even admitted to being afraid to leave the vehicle.
“Yeah, you should be,” one of the officers responded.
Nazario, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, was coming home from work and in full uniform at the time.
“I’m serving this country, and this is how I’m treated?” Nazario told the officers, according to his cellphone video.By the end of the incident, the cops would threaten Nazario, pepper-spray him in the face, and knee-strike him in the legs, according to body camera footage, Nazario’s cellphone video, and legal filings. Later, when Nazario was in tears and on the ground of a gas station parking lot as officers put him in handcuffs, he repeated, “This is fucked up, this is fucked up.”
The officers allegedly told Nazario if he were to complain, they’d charge him with crimes like obstruction, eluding, and assault on a law enforcement officer—potentially destroying his military career.
But now Nazario has a lawyer. And he sued the two Windsor police officers, Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker, on April 2, alleging violations of his constitutional rights under the Fourth and First Amendments.
Support our Troops, amirite?
Even as a criminal defence lawyer all too familiar with inexcusable and unprofessional behavior by police officers, disproportionately directed at minorities, I do not think of myself as anti-police in the slightest. I think abolishing the police is a utopian pipe dream, and “defunding” police is a mix of intriguing and poorly thought-out ideas. Police officers have a necessary role, but it’s an extremely dangerous and stressful job.
So, I don’t think police officers should be filmed whenever you see them detaining a suspect because I hate them. I think they should be filmed whenever possible to keep them honest.
As I write this, news about yet another police shooting of an allegedly unarmed black man has broken, in the very same city where George Floyd was killed. How many more times can this be allowed to happen?
Shot and chaser, Canadian edition:
Details here:
The organizers of one of the world’s most prestigious defense gatherings are in the midst of an uncomfortable international standoff between the Canadian government and China over a major award they had planned to give to the president of Taiwan.
The standstill, which is ongoing and has not been previously reported, has created tension between the Halifax International Security Forum and the Canadian government, which is a major sponsor of the forum.
Late last year, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter, the forum’s organizers decided to give its John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service to Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan. Cindy McCain, a member of the forum’s board of directors, greenlit the decision to honor Tsai with the prize named after her late husband.
It would have been the third time the HFX presented the McCain award. The first, in 2018, went to the people of Lesbos, Greece, for their efforts to save refugees; the second, in 2019, went to the citizen protesters in Hong Kong. HFX planned to give the third to Taiwan’s president for standing strong against China’s relentless pressure.
When Canadian officials learned of the forum’s plans, they made it clear that if organizers gave the honor to Tsai, the Canadian government would pull support — and funding — from HFX.
HFX hasn’t decided how to proceed. For now, the situation appears to be on ice.
The government of the People’s Republic of China, and its apologists, argue that Western-style democracy isn’t compatible with Chinese culture and values and that they cannot be expected to govern the way we do. Taiwan is a living refutation of that idea.
Speaking of the People’s Republic of China, they’re sheepishly admitting that their vaccines against COVID-19 might not, um work:
China’s top disease control official, in a rare acknowledgement, said current vaccines offer low protection against the coronavirus and mixing them is among strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness.
China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of domestically made vaccines abroad and is relying on them for its own mass immunization campaign.
But the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, said at a conference Saturday their efficacy rates needed improving.
“We will solve the issue that current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,” Gao said in a presentation on Chinese COVID-19 vaccines and immunization strategies at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu. “It’s now under consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process.”
He also praised the benefits of mRNA vaccines, the technology behind the two vaccines seen as the most effective, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, months after questioning whether the then-unproven method was safe.
[…]
Vaccines made by Sinovac, a private company, and Sinopharm, a state-owned firm, have made up the majority of Chinese vaccines distributed to several dozen countries including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, Brazil and Turkey.
However, the companies have not publicly published peer-reviewed data on the final stage clinical trial research and been criticized for a lack of transparency.
Sinovac’s vaccine, for example, raised concerns when it was found to have different efficacy rates from each of the trials it conducted in different countries, ranging from around 50% to over 83%.
At least when you order something from AliExpress or Wish.com and it doesn’t work, you’re only out a few bucks instead of being given a false sense of security about a deadly pandemic.
The ongoing acts of violence and discrimination for reasons of race, ethnicity, disability, gender etc. sometimes leave one feeling that there’s just no point.....it keeps repeating no matter what. But as discouraging and exhausting as it is, this must be fought.