Via Jeremy at Social Memory Complex:

Adam Kokesh, “Duty to Resist“. 12 July 2008, Washington DC:

Text of the speech, from Adam Kokesh’s blog:

When I joined the Marines at a little strip mall in Santa Fe, and when I was in boot camp in San Diego, and when I was dodging mortars in Fallujah, I could not have imagined that I would one day share a stage with such renowned speakers. However, to march shoulder to shoulder, and to stand in solidarity with you, is a far greater honor.

It has been said that when in the course of human events, an oppression so revolts its subjects, it becomes necessary to alter or abolish the means of that tyranny. Is it that time when our Bill of Rights is defiled every day? When our adventures abroad threaten our security at home? When the Federal Reserve keeps our free nation enslaved by debt? When the people of the world tremble under the thumb of corporate imperialism? And now our nation is drifting dangerously from freedom to fascism. So I have to ask, is it time? The time is now, the threat is clear, the bands of tyranny are tightening around America, and it is our duty to resist!

As empowered patriots, let us take stock of our commitment to the ideals upon which this country is founded. America without her freedoms is like a body without a soul. The challenge before the Freedom Movement is no less, than to bring about a revolution of values, inspire a renaissance of American politics, and breathe new life into the tortured body of our nation. We will meet that challenge with courage and love, and as always, we the people, will prevail!

To rally the troops of the Revolutionary Army in the winter of 1776, Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, will in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”

As Iraq Veterans Against the War, we are resisting an occupation that we once risked our lives for. We swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, but we found out the hard way that the greatest enemies of the Constitution are not to be found in the sands of some far off land, but rather right here at home! We are your new winter soldiers and we are still defending America.

We bring the values, skills, and commitment that make us warriors to the fight before us today. We are working to end the war by strategically withdrawing our material support and inspiring others to do the same. By advocating for veterans, we honor those who served, and empower soldiers to become successful civilians. With Truth In Recruiting, we are inspiring a generation of young Americans to find a better way to serve this country than dying for empire. By supporting those who are actively resisting, we inspire further resistance, and ensure that soldiers still have the right, as is their duty, to disobey illegal orders.

During the siege of Fallujah, a young Lance Corporal was shot through the side of his flak jacket in a firefight to the west of the city. The bullet hit an artery near his spine. My team was called to help get him to the field hospital at Camp Taqadum. He was on a stretcher in the humvee in front of me, and I watched the Corpsman treating the external wound in a frightened, hurried panic, as the dust from the hot road swirled around us. When we got there, I carried him in as he moaned and writhed in pain, barely conscious. He flailed his arm off the stretcher, and as I put it back by his side I told him, “Don’t worry. You made it. You’re gonna be OK.” But he died only minutes later from the internal bleeding.

I have to live with that memory every day, but I have learned from it. I will not tell you that the band-aids applied by Republicans and Democrats will heal us. I will not pretend that everything is just going to be ok while we are bled dry by tyrants. And if it takes the last full measure of devotion, I will not allow the same fate to befall this country!

This young movement, is getting past the external wounds to the greater evils plaguing this nation. We know, that the greatest threat to American security is the current corruption of our government! No politician has ever ended a war. Civil rights were won in this country not by any legislator, but by a movement. I have great hope for America, but not because of an election. No, my hope comes from you!

Our tragic love affair with the state, has led us to put far too much trust in a government that we hoped could improve our lives, but has instead come to run our lives for us. We have become, as a people, like a frightened, battered, beat down victim of an abusive relationship. A servile, unquestioning, obedient people, will always produce tyrants. We must, as a nation, once again, embrace defiance, rebellion, and resistance!

Every day more and more Americans are avoiding unenforceable taxes, leaving government jobs out of disgust, and sending their kids to college instead of combat. But our efforts as a movement must become unified and deliberate to fully withdraw our compliance and support. Be it with your lives, labor, or tax dollars, stop investing in your own oppression! Guard your communities from the police state! Do not waste a single vote, or a single dollar, on the two-party system! Do not be content merely to grumble and to march while they are using fear, force, and violence as weapons of oppression. We must embrace the opportunity to resist civilly while we still can!

We are compelled to be here for many different reasons, and there is strength in our diversity. As within Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace, we do not need to be uniform to be unified. Take a look at the thoughtful, passionate people around you on this field, and throughout this country. Do not leave here without meeting a new brother or sister in the struggle. Take with you the inspiration to share your passion with someone who does not know they are yet part of our movement. Seek out where you can be most effective in the cause of liberty.

Challenge our force fed culture of unquestioning conformity and compliance. Embrace a world that is not defined by the politics of fear, our obedience producing schools, or the false prophets of the corporate media. As we have been awakened, we must stir the sleeping masses. As the forces of oppression are diligent, so must we toil. As they are committed, we must surpass them. As they step up their efforts, we must rise up to defeat them as a unified movement!

We have been labeled rebels, traitors, enemies of the state. All terms King George would have used to vilify our founders. I, for one, will always rebel against oppression, a traitor only to tyranny, and I would be remiss to not be the enemy of a state, that so blatantly tramples our freedoms.

American values have been nearly vanquished by consumerism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Yellow ribbons and lapel pins will not save this country. When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. The utmost manifestation of love and devotion to America, is today as it always has been, resistance of tyranny! Resist we must, and resist we will! We will not be silent! We will not obey! We will not let our government destroy our humanity! We will not wait another moment in fear to stand up for what we know to be right! It is time the government starts fearing the people again! It is time that we meet oppression with resistance!

They cannot stop us! Humanity marches on. You can fight it, or fight for it. When we say revolution, we say it with love. As we march onward from this place where we have pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, let us embrace the struggle, cherish the fight, and live in that love. The passion of our hearts will be raised with our fists!

It seems the prosecution brought a rather flimsy case. Whatever happened that night, there really wasn’t enough to link Bubaris to the killing. That’s what the defense argued, and that’s how the jury decided. Having read all the trial coverage, I would have voted to acquit as well.

George Bubaris

The Newsday piece repeats what made this look so damning:

The Westchester County Court jurors heard a fellow officer testify that Bubaris told him — on the night Perez died — that he’d gone out “hunting” or “looking” for the immigrant. And when word of the death spread, the officer testified, Bubaris told him, “You’re the only one that knows, bro.”

Still seems a rather odd thing to say if the man really had no part in the death, but we can’t know. Flawed though the state’s criminal justice system is, the rules against hearsay and circumstantial evidence are important protections.

It’s likely we’ll never know, now, what happened to Rene Perez that night after making the increasingly-fatal mistake of calling 911 when in need of help. If George Bubaris knows, he’s certainly not saying. And dead men tell no tales.

Related: Cops on the hunt: Do you know where your children are?

Prison?

Mall security?

Or nothing at all?

From WABC-TV, New York:

Mistaken identity police brutality?

[...]

Minter’s video captures police in plain clothes milling around and a helicopter above. They’d apparently been chasing a suspect who crashed his car into the front gate of the boatyard.

Lewis Tacktill, Minter’s boss, says he was across the boatyard and saw everything, including the fleeing suspect.

Sarah: “What was he wearing?”
Tacktill: “He was wearing a red shirt, and my friend was wearing a black shirt. It was kind of obvious. Red and black, two distinctive colors.”

Minter: “And I was wearing this black hoody, and they told me the guy they wanted was wearing a red shirt.”
Sarah: “And you’re saying your ID was in your pocket?”
Minter: “Yep. Right in my pocket. Just like it is now.”

Tacktill: “They said are you armed, he said no. He went down to his knees, and dropped down, and then they cuffed him and started hitting him.“

“So I said I’m not armed,” Minter said. “He cuffed me, and then the one on the right hit me with his pistol.”

“I saw them,” Tacktill said. “They hit him with a gun and then they pulled his hood over his head, and then a guy stomped his head like he was putting out a cigarette butt.”

“I was grinded on, my face hit with a gun, punched in my face and then my hoody pulled over my face,” Minter said.

Sarah: “And he wasn’t resisting?”
Tacktill: “No, he wasn’t resisting at all.”

Sarah: “You weren’t resisting?”
Minter: “Nope, I had no reason to. I was screaming for my boss, ‘Lou! Lou!’”

“I said, ‘That’s our guy that works here at the boatyard,’” Tacktill said. “And after that, they stopped.”

Minter, who says he has no criminal record and wasn’t charged with anything, claims he stood swollen and bloodied at the front of the yard for about half an hour before one of the officers took off the handcuffs.

“Then they just said, ‘Oh, we apologize,’” Tacktill said.

Sarah: “So they just came back and the officer said?”
Minter: “‘I’m sorry, we was looking for somebody that was really dangerous.’”

He says he walked across the street to Peninsula Hospital, where he told staff he’d been hit be a gun in the face and, while waiting to be treated, claims he was approached by one of the Garden City officers who tried to discourage him from filing a brutality complaint.

Minter: “They said if you got parking ticket or you got felonies or any kind of thing like that they could do for me, they would do for me.”
Sarah: “If you didn’t pursue this?”
Minter: “Yes.”

I would submit, though, that these thinkers celebrate too soon. The State’s ultimate penalty for real crime (initiations of force or fraud against people or their property) as well as all those non-crimes the State takes umbrage at is always death. This is the nature of the State; killing is the instrument by which it maintains itself.

To be sure, the State is mostly careful to not exercise the penalty too often. The system of compulsion and coercion, backed by the ultimate tool of death, is one which States have learned functions much better when the sword is cloaked in layers of misdirection and abstraction. The simple — and perhaps more honest — compulsion of the local tyrant demanding of his subjects, “Do it thus, or I shall kill you,” has been replaced with a long chain of escalation beginning with paper things like demands for compliance and citations, leading through more forceful papers such as summonses and warrants, but ultimately grounded upon the power of that barely-concealed blade.

If we accept the natural-rights view of self defense as given by libertarian theory, we can see that the penalty for every infraction is death.

Fail to pay your taxes? You will be killed.

Consume a proscribed substance? Death awaits you.

Neglect or ignore some trivial regulation? Murder is your fate.

“Oh come now,” they will cry, “the government doesn’t kill people for not paying their taxes!” In general this is true. In general people are compliant, whether out of worship or fear. But as situations escalate from non-compliance to the State’s demand for enforcement, be sure that the blade remains ready to plunge into the belly of the scofflaw.

I’m quite fond of hyperbolic examples. Let’s make one now.

Imagine that Bob is a fruit vendor. He sells apples, oranges and plums, and prices them by the piece. He advertises them at “12 for $3″ or “20 for $5″, or at whatever price he determines he can sell them profitably.

One day a policeman comes around to Bob’s stand and tells him about a new law. The State has adopted a new numbering system, duodecimal, which uses base-12 instead of base-10 decimal notation. The State has passed a law saying that all transactions, offers, sales, etc., must be denoted in duodecimal.

The policeman informs Bob that his signage is out of order. “12 for $3″ must be replaced by “10 for $3″, and “20 for $5″ must be replaced by “18 for $5″. Because Bob is in violation of the law, the policeman issues Bob a citation ordering him to comply and imposing a fine for breaking the law.

Bob naturally looks at this as ridiculous. Everyone he sells fruit to understands decimal notation, and to change it would only create confusion. Further, Bob knows that he’s committed no crime, no offense against the person or property of another. Bob refuses the citation and tells the policeman to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

A few days later, Bob receives a letter saying that the fine has been imposed on him by a judge, that he has 30 days to pay it, and that he must comply with the new duodecimal law. As before, Bob ignores this letter and this judge, harming and having harmed no person or thing.

Thirty days pass, sixty days, ninety. Bob keeps on selling his decimal-denominated fruit during the day and going home to enjoy time with his family in the evening. One day another letter arrives stating that the judge has issued an order which says that if Bob does not comply with the first letter within 5 days, he will be in criminal contempt of court and subject to arrest and a term of imprisonment. Bob is disturbed, of course, by this threat against his person, but ignores it as he might ignore the taunts of a bully on the street.

A week later, a group of armed men wearing clown suits appear at Bob’s door and say they are there to arrest Bob and take him before the judge. Bob tells them he won’t go, as he’s done nothing wrong, but the uniformed thugs are insistent. He closes the door in their faces. They break down the door and enter Bob’s home, guns drawn against Bob and his family.

Bob then, in fear of his life and the life of his family, perhaps draws a pistol and tells the clowns to go away. Perhaps he attempts to flee. The clowns shoot him dead.

In the aftermath, the killing is sanctified among the State’s organized criminals as justifiable, since Bob failed to comply with lawful demands, threatened police officers and resisted arrest. The State’s worshipers and pawns fall all over themselves to praise the brave uniformed thugs and denounce Bob as having “had it coming.”

The penalty is always death.

Innocent until proven guilty and all that…

From The Journal News:

Prosecutor: Bubaris spoke of ‘hunting’

A former Mount Kisco police officer accused of killing a homeless immigrant told a fellow officer that he had gone “hunting” for the vagrant and dropped him off on a remote road where he was later found dying, the prosecutor said yesterday during the opening of the homicide trial.

George Bubaris

Exactly how victim Rene Javier Perez sustained his fatal abdominal injury is at the center of the high-profile trial, which will continue Tuesday in Westchester County Court in White Plains.

The prosecution said it will present autopsy evidence that Perez died from blunt-force trauma and that the injury – including a torn mesentary – was so severe that he must have suffered the fatal blow shortly before he was left beside Byram Lake Road in Bedford on April 28, 2007.

The lawyer for 31-year-old defendant George Bubaris, however, said during his opening that Perez, who was drunk, more than likely died from “self-inflicted, accidental” injuries sustained from stumbling hours before Bubaris and two other officers responded to his 911 call from a Mount Kisco laundry.

[...]

Perrone said Bubaris essentially admitted to the crime when he told Officer Edward Dwyer later that night that “I went out hunting or looking for Rene Perez” and “I found him and I took him up or down to Byram Lake Road.”

The next day, back at the police station, as news circulated about the 42-year-old’s death and as the homicide investigation began, Bubaris told Dwyer, “You’re the only one who knows, bro,” Perrone said.

"You bet I'm goin' to be a soldier, too, like my Uncle David, when I grow up."

Chapter 1, THE EPISTLE TO THE PARANOIDS

–Lord Omar

1. Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear–and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!

2. Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting that ye’ve been left to fight alone.

3. All Chaos was once yer kingdom; verily, held ye dominion over the entire Pentaverse, but today ye was sore afraid in dark corners, nooks, and sink holes.

4. O how the darknesses do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

5. Verily, verily I say unto you, not all the Sinister Ministers of the Bavarian Illuminati, working together in multitudes, could so entwine the land with tribulation as have yer baseless warnings.

from Principia Discordia, Or, How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger

Related: Fuck the troops!

From The Mississippi Press:

Taser incident being probed

23 May 2008

Otis Ashford in his hospital bed

MOSS POINT — The Moss Point Police Department is investigating an incident in which a Moss Point police officer allegedly subdued Otis Ashford in the home of his sister last month with volts of electricity from a Taser gun, Interim Police Chief Frederick Gaston confirmed Thursday.

[...]

Ashford was arrested for interfering with police duties and resisting arrest on April 18. He said his court date has been set for June 10.

[...]

Curley Clark, president of the Jackson County chapter of the NAACP, said the organization is conducting its own investigation.

[...]

According to Ashford, he was watching television with his sister Dell Jones at her house on Westpine Street when they heard a disturbance in the front yard.

“We went out to see what was going on and this man started yelling to get back in the house,” Ashford explained. “At that point, I was just on the screened-in porch. So, we were really still in the house.”

Ashford said he and his sister were concerned their younger brother was being attacked and started calling his name.

“The man on top of the other man never said he was a police officer,” Jones said. “We didn’t know that until he picked the other guy up and took him away. When he stepped into the light, we could see he was an officer. He then started screaming he was coming back to get us.”

Ashford said as the officer disappeared into the night and they thought the incident was over.

“Then he came back, he busted through the screen door and just came at us,” Ashford said. “He was like a mad man. We never even left the porch. He kept saying he was getting me for interfering, but I never got off the porch. How could we interfere?”

Ashford said the officer, who he identified as Johnny Vaughn, pushed him against the wall and doused him and Jones with pepper spray.

“It was everywhere,” Jones said “All over us and all in the house. There was no sense in it.”

According to Ashford, another Moss Point officer arrived and Vaughn ordered him to use the Taser gun.

“He hit me with it probably eight times,” Ashford said as he raised his shirt and showed scars from the Taser’s barbs.

“And that right there,” Jones said as she pointed to a large white scar about the size of a half-dollar on her brother’s back, “that was where they held it on him.”

Ashford and Jones claimed the officer took a barb that wasn’t attached to Ashford and held it in one spot for several seconds, shocking him until he was unconscious.

“I don’t remember nothing after that,” Ashford said.

Jones said she called the police to come and direct the “out-of-control officers.”

“They were killing him,” Jones said, “and they would not stop.”

Their mother, Lillie Ashford, entered the house and watched her son being subdued by police and her daughter passing out.

Lillie Ashford said her son was dragged out of the house by the officers and thrown into a patrol car.

“There was an ambulance right there,” she said. “I begged them to take him to the hospital. I thought they had killed him.”

Lillie Ashford said the officers refused and took her son to jail.

Otis Ashford’s wife, Rosa, said it was at least three hours before her husband received medical treatment.

“When they finally let me see him, he was on a stretcher in the police station,” she said. “They said his heart rate was 179 and his pupils were dilated. They kept asking me what he was on and I told them he doesn’t do drugs.”

Otis Ashford said that when he awoke hospital technicians performed a drug screen test on him and it came back clean. He said he bonded out from the hospital after being kept for two days.

Otis Ashford said FBI Agent Robert Lambert told him the FBI has launched an investigation, but Gaston could not confirm his comments.

See also the SunHerald story.

Hat tip: The Spook at The Brown Watch

“Oppose the war; support the troops.”

The idea had a certain strategic logic to it. Our opinion was a minority one, and offending the millions with military members in their families or otherwise close to them didn’t seem like a terribly bright way of getting the peace message across. We also somewhat accepted the logic that the people in the military had signed up to defend America; that they were being sent to a criminal war for profit on the other side of the globe wasn’t really their fault, they’d been hoodwinked.

So, all of those well thought out banner ideas like “US Military: Millions of Murderers in Uniform” were left aside so that we might more effectively get the peace message across and avoid offending anyone’s precious sensibilities. We stuck instead to our peace signs and our rainbows and our doves and our “No blood for oil” lines. We endured the taunts from the counter-protests: “My country, right or wrong!” “America, love it or leave it!” “Traitors!” and so on. And we gingerly protested in our carefully cordoned-off free speech zones or under city permit permission, got ourselves in the papers and all cried together and lit candles as the radio reports started coming in of the missiles and bombs striking Baghdad. And, of course, none of it made a damned bit of difference.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

It always bothered me, though, this “support the troops” idea. Sure, it was a smart strategic play, but in stark conflict to the rest of what we thought we were doing. We were here to bring the truth to an ignorant, deluded or sleeping public, and the whole truth, nothing but. That truth must have necessarily included the realization that these amorphous “troops” we were enjoined to support were actually individual, thinking, morally responsible men and women. It must have included the knowledge that each and every “troop” currently engaged in mass murder in our names had volunteered. And we knew, as they should have, that the murderous, destructive, obscene organization they volunteered to serve, hadn’t conducted a legitimate “defense of America” since at least WWII, and maybe as far back as the War of 1812, depending on whose Pearl Harbor narrative you believe.

They weren’t conscripted, they weren’t shanghaied, they weren’t tricked into signing up and donning the uniform and picking up the gun. They sought out the role, they agreed to follow orders, they signed the papers, and nowhere along the way did they somehow become transformed from individual human beings, morally responsible for their individual acts of violence and destruction into those collectively romanticized “troops”. Some small number said, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and did the only moral thing possible, which was to desert. The rest marched freely onto the planes and ships and deployed, the willing agents of empire. Certainly in many, the thought was there afterward: “We didn’t sign up for that,” but still they went, perhaps finding their own moral cover in the notion they’d been tricked. Likely, most found no moral problem with going at all.

Even today, the “support the troops” mentality is embedded in the tactics and rhetoric of the organized anti-war movement, implicitly or explicitly. It’s considered bad form to condemn the American armed services en masse for their self-subjugation to the American empire’s war machine.

another victim of empire

Unlike Gulf War I, though, Gulf War II, freshly turned five years old, is an occupation. It is an obviously immoral war launched on the flimsiest of concocted excuses and conducted with the most sinister of aims. The history of Gulf War I, the suffering inflicted on Iraq by a decade of sanctions, the horror of depleted uranium weapons residues and unexploded landmines and other ordnance from the first attack should have made it obvious to anyone that a crime had been committed there. A massive, inexcusable, inhuman, monstrous, treasonous crime.

And yet, most of the military personnel that have served in the current conflict up to the present weren’t in the military for the first. They signed up, willingly. If they didn’t know the history of what the US military actually did for the prior fifty years, flag-waving nonsense and Cold War turned War on Terror hysteria aside, their foolishness should not excuse them. If they learned nothing from the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon or other places that the empire had been sticking its nose and its guns into, well, we should let neither ignorance nor willful blindness be an excuse. Unjust, illegal wars do not just happen by themselves. They are the sum total of millions of individual decisions by millions of individually responsible people to obey, topped by whatever dark cabal is giving the orders for the week.

Further, probably close to half or more of those still in Iraq today signed up after the war’s justifications had evaporated, after the stories of casual murder, collective punishment and institutionalized torture were already splashed on television screens and across newspaper headlines worldwide. They, especially, should have known better.

So, I will not support the troops. In fact, fuck the troops! Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders is, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

At the same time, fuck all those who support the troops! If history, recent or ancient, hasn’t been sufficient to educate you on the true nature of war and the true nature of the predatory, inhuman power you seem so eager to serve, then damn you for your stupidity, damn you for your ignorance, damn you for your blindness, damn you for your fallacious morality. And this goes not only for every family member or friend of someone serving in the US military today who is NOT insistently urging their child or husband or wife or friend to desert or disobey, it goes also for every federal employee and for every shareholder and employee from janitor to CEO of the military-industrial-terrorism complex and the companies that comprise it: Blackwater, Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Allied-Signal, Unisys, Westinghouse, DynCorp, Exxon, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, Hughes, KBR, Kearfott, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Shell, AT&T, Sikorsky, United Technologies and all the rest. There is blood on your hands, real human blood — lives taken, families shattered, homes destroyed, crops ruined, populations displaced, tortures committed, atrocities sanctioned, all facilitated by your unthinking, odious, ignorant, unconscionable support.

This essay is in part a response to the writings of Arthur Silber, in a piece entitled “The Honor of Being Human: Why Do You Support?“

credit: vredevanutrecht @ flickr

In concluding, he states:

The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, “Why do you obey?” but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, “No”? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

No, Arthur, I will not support.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Seattle to pay for unlawful arrest, excessive force

Stencil / Plantilla sobre asfixia policial by lademocracia.es @ flickr

In a stunning setback for the Seattle Police Department, a federal civil court jury on Monday found patrol officers made a false and unlawful arrest and used excessive force when they detained and then jailed a young Seattle man on charges of obstruction and resisting arrest.

The nine-member jury awarded Romelle Bradford $268,000 in damages. Though they rejected punitive damages, they also found the 2006 arrest was a federal civil rights violation, which means the city must pay Bradford’s attorneys fees, an amount not yet determined.

[...]

The arresting officer in the case, Jacob Briskey, said he was “disappointed” by the verdict but offered no other comment.

[...]

It was after a club dance Bradford was supervising in August 2006 that he and club volunteers summoned police because of a potentially unruly crowd outside the club. Briskey, 26, was then a rookie officer. He arrived as things were settling down, spotted Bradford jogging down the street and ordered him to stop. When Bradford didn’t halt immediately, Briskey rushed at him and slammed him to the ground.

Bradford said he didn’t think the officer was talking to him because he said he was wearing a red T-shirt clearly identifying him as a Boys & Girls Club member. He said he was holding up his club badge and showing the officer his T-shirt when he said the officer decked him with his forearm.

Using the F-word, the young officer threatened to break Bradford’s arm as he handcuffed him in front of several youngsters who were protesting that he was, indeed, a staff member trying to help.

After a police station interview in which Bradford insisted he was a staff member, police nevertheless booked and jailed him overnight. Briskey claimed Bradford’s failure to immediately stop justified the obstructing charge and that a hesitation to offer one arm during handcuffing — which Bradford doesn’t recall — justified the resisting charge.

Criminal defense attorneys refer to “obstructing a public officer” arrests by two other monikers: “Contempt of cop” and “the cover charge.” Several told the P-I those nicknames are applied because the charges are sometimes abused to punish people for their being “mouthy” or to cover up when police might have used wrongful force against an innocent person.

[...]

The jury didn’t rule entirely in Bradford’s favor. They found that Briskey had “reasonable suspicion to stop and temporarily detain” Bradford prior to arresting him. Thus they rejected an “illegal seizure” claim. They also found that Briskey didn’t act “with evil motive, actual malice, deliberate violence or oppression, with intent to injure, or in willful disregard” for Bradford’s rights. They also rejected other claims of “malicious prosecution,” “abuse of process” and “assault and battery,” denying an unspecified request for punitive damages.

But they did find that Briskey lacked “probable cause” to arrest Bradford, and that the arrest was unlawful. They said the force used was excessive under the federal civil rights law.