Why did the police stay idle during the Charlotteville mayhem?

There are common police methods to deal with such situations and have been for decades.  That they were not used suggests instructions from on high, most likely from Democrat governor McAuliffe. Did McAuliffe WANT mayhem so he could puff up himself by condemning it?

There’s the role police are supposed to play in upholding the law and preventing violence.

It’s a thankless job most of the time, and police must walk a fine line between respecting peaceful First Amendment activity and maintaining the peace, while not overstepping the limits of the Fourth Amendment.

For whatever reason—which only the police and government officials are privy to—the police failed to do their job at the Charlottesville demonstration, a charge levied by both the Alt Right and the counterdemonstrators.

The same police who in the past have responded to any acts of disorder or disobedience with the full power of their uniform and weapons were curiously lax in the face of outright violence.

As a Rolling Stone reporter recounted, "Unlike other events I’ve covered where anti-fascist protesters face off with white supremacists, the police make no effort to cordon the two groups off from each other to prevent violent clashes before they happen."

Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard)—many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months—had been called on to work the event, despite the fact that police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, and despite the fact that Charlottesville had had what reporter David Graham referred to as "a dress rehearsal of sorts" a month earlier when 30 members of the Ku Klux Klan were confronted by 1000 counterprotesters, police failed to do their jobs.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police "seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured."

"Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville," reported ProPublica.

"Could Police Have Prevented Bloodshed in Charlottesville?" asked The Atlantic.

"Police Response Inadequate at Charlottesville Rally," concluded U.S. News.

"There was no police presence," a peaceful activist explained. "We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other."

Cornel West echoed this sentiment. "The police didn’t do anything in terms of protecting the people of the community, the clergy," he told The Washington Post.

So what should the police have done differently?

For starters, the police should have established clear boundaries—buffer zones—between the warring groups of protesters and safeguarded the permit zones.

Instead, as eyewitness accounts indicate, police established two entrances into the permit areas of the park and created barriers "guiding rallygoers single-file into the park" past lines of white nationalists and antifa counterprotesters.

This is where the worst of the violence between protesters took place.

By 8:40 am protesters had already started gathering in the downtown area. Police failed to separate them.

By 10 am, a "mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters." Police looked on and did nothing.

By 11 am, the general unrest had dissolved into all-out disorder. Police did not step in.

All the while protesters were throwing urine-filled water bottles, pepper spray and smoke bombs, and clobbering one another with flag poles and shields, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, watchedfrom a command post overlooking the downtown area and did nothing.

Moran watched while fights broke out and police stood by and failed to intervene.

Only at 11:22 am, after hours of brawling and confrontations between the protesters, did Moran take action by calling on Governor Terry McAuliffe to declare a state of emergency. Only then did police mobilize to declare the gathering an unlawful assembly, "cutting off the rally before it officially began," and begin clearing demonstrators out of the park.

There were other models that could have been followed.

As investigative reporter Sarah Posner notes, "At a neo-Nazi rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, just days before the November election, police employed this tactic with success – while the rally attendees and anti-fascist protesters taunted each other over a barrier of police, they were blocked from coming into physical contact. But in Charlottesville, the police inaction creates a sense of pandemonium."

A good strategy, advises former federal prosecutor Miriam Krinsky, is to make clashes less likely by separating the two sides physically, with officers forming a barrier between them. "Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible," she said.

In Cleveland, the site of the GOP presidential convention, "Trump diehards, Revolutionary Communists, Wobblies, and Alex Jones disciples" faced off in a downtown plaza. Yet as The Atlantic reports, "Just as confrontations between the groups seemed near to getting out of hand, police swooped into the square in huge numbers, using bicycles to create cordons between rival factions. The threat of violence soon passed, and no pepper spray or tear gas was needed."

For that matter, consider that Charlottesville police established clear boundaries just a month earlier in which they maintained clear lines of demarcation at all times between KKK protesters and counterprotesters. Indeed, the primary violence at the July 8 Klan rally came when police used tear gas and pepper spray to force protesters to disperse.

SOURCE

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ACLU Blames Cops for Charlottesville Violence

Ronald Bailey

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA:  Those fights erupted despite the fact that state, city, and police officials mobilized 1,000 first responders, including 300 state police and National Guard members, to control the protests. Many of the cops wore riot gear, carried shields, and were backed by armored vehicles.

Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, has said the plan was to keep the two sides separated. "There were physical barriers to separate those opposing sides and law enforcement as well, however individuals chose to assemble on the streets," she told The Wall Street Journal. "We are not in a position to tell people where to assemble."

So what happened?

"It is the responsibility of law enforcement to ensure safety of both protesters and counter-protesters. The policing on Saturday was not effective in preventing violence," said Virginia ACLU chief Claire G. Gastanaga in a statement. "I was there and brought concerns directly to the secretary of public safety and the head of the Virginia State Police about the way that the barricades in the park limiting access by the arriving demonstrators and the lack of any physical separation of the protesters and counter-protesters on the street were contributing to the potential of violence.

They did not respond. In fact, law enforcement was standing passively by, seeming to be waiting for violence to take place, so that they would have grounds to declare an emergency, declare an 'unlawful assembly' and clear the area."

Here's what I saw as a reporter. First, a disclaimer: I am not a policeman, a lawyer, or a frequent participant in public protests. Second, nobody is ever justified in punching people for their political beliefs, no matter how much I detest their views.

That being said, I noticed a great difference in how the cops and barricades were deployed when a month earlier I covered a KKK rally at Charlottesville's Stonewall Jackson statue. At that rally, double-fenced metal barricades separated the Klansmen from the counterprotesters. This created a no-man's-land where a line of police stood, keeping each side from coming into physical contact with each other. Police evidently had no problem telling the Kluxers where to assemble. I stood within 20 feet of the KKK during their whole demonstration, and a not single rock, bottle, or any other missiles were thrown by either them or the hundreds of counterprotesters. And no one got punched or bashed with clubs either.

This past weekend, by contrast, police deployed a single line of metal barricades which could easily be reached across. They placed no police between the racists and the counterprotesters. When I got to the park, the police and National Guard all appeared to be standing on the sides and behind—not in-between, as they did at the KKK rally.

The state of emergency had apparently been called just as I approached the park, and riot police were marching in to clear out the area. A line of police behind shields basically pressed the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates down Market Street between crowds of counterprotesters who had lined the street. Despite the dangerous decision to remove them by that route, I am happy to report that I saw only a few scuffles break out between the racists and the counterprotesters.

It is hard to believe that the police were less prepared at this event than at the Stonewall Jackson rally. Sadly, Gastanaga's assertions ring true.

SOURCE

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Ted Cruz "owns" the NYT

After Cuban-American U.S. Senators Cruz and Marco Rubio forcefully denounced white nationalists and called for a full Federal investigation into Saturday’s fatal attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, a New York Times reporter made the mistake of trying to pick a Twitter fight with Cruz.

“Sorry to be cynical, but most of all Rubio and Ted Cruz to me seem mostly to be doing a tremendous job of posturing for 2020,” tweeted reporter Eric Lipton Sunday.

Big mistake:  “Gosh, you’re right,” Cruz shot back. “Because Nazis & the Klan have such love for Cuban-Americans. If only we worked for a paper that shilled for Stalin….”

Cruz continued, “I know it’s hard to understand. Too many schools don’t teach NYT’s shameful history covering up Soviet atrocities.”

Cruz “attached a link to the Wikipedia article on Walter Duranty, a New York Times journalist who ignored the famine suffered under Josef Stalin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting from the USSR,” The Washington Examiner reports.

Lipton did not respond to his pants-down whipping from Cruz.

SOURCE

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TRUMP APPROVAL GOES UP AND PEOPLE AGREE WITH HIM ON CHARLOTTESVILLE

Well ain’t this a bitch for the left wing media and riot instigators? Since Charlottesville, the media has been in total meltdown mode blaming Trump for the violence over the past weekend

But in a repeat of myriad Trump campaign controversies, voters didn’t share the same level of outrage as the elites. The latest wave of polling shows that the president’s overall job-approval rating has inched upwards since the controversy, that a sizable majority of Americans support maintaining Confederate memorials instead of tearing them down, and that a notable minority agree with the president’s use of “both sides” language during Tuesday’s press conference.

More HERE

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Please boycott and do NOT use $1 and $20 bills depicting slave owners on them. Send to me. I will dispose of them properly. Thank you.



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