As a matter of general principle...FUCK the American justice system.

[the_future_modernes]

Hello New Orleans! Your time in the sun: WARNING: POLICE BRUTALITY that escalates to MURDER MOST FOUL. No limits to the law in NoLa

Something terrible lies at the heart of New Orleans - a rampant, widespread and apparently uncontrollable brutality on the part of its police force and its prison service. The horrors of its criminal justice system from decades before Hurricane Katrina and up to now lie somewhere between, with little exaggeration, Candide and Stalin's Gulags.

Spit on the sidewalk here, and you may be arrested - New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate of any city in the United States - and if you're poor and black and can't pay bail, you will enter a place where any protection under the American constitution and the Bill of Rights is stripped away. You will wait weeks or months to be charged, whether innocent or not, and in the meantime you will be subjected to foul, overcrowded jail conditions, prisoner-to-prisoner violence and the brutality of the deputies who guard you. God help you if you have a medical condition, or a mental-health problem, or if you're pregnant (you may deliver in leg chains - it has happened). "A minor offence in New Orleans," one civil rights attorney told me, "can get you into a hellish place."

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

...

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using "unnecessary and unreasonable force"; that it is "largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers" and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. "NOPD's mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations," the report says, "was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects."

The department can't even handle its sniffer dogs: "We found that NOPD's canines were uncontrollable to the point where they repeatedly attacked their own handlers."


Absolutely SICKENING details at ontd_political

At this point, I'm going wholesale. Dismantle the entire system and replace with restorative justice techniques. Fuck "retributive justice" all to hell. I need an icon that says "OPEN YOUR GODDAMN EYES, JUSTICE!!! CAUSE YOUR SCALES ARE NOT FUCKING LEVEL!!!!"

Post on restorative justice techniques and iniatives coming up at some point during three weeks for dreamwidth. This is the fucking 21st century. We claim that we are civilized. PAST time that we act like it.