To Protect & Shove? Watch Big, Tough Cop Push 86 Year-Old Woman To Ground At Trump Protest

A police officer in Tucson, Arizona, shoved an 86-year-old woman onto the pavement during a tense confrontation with demonstrators opposed to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, video footage shows.

The Tucson Police Department said that it is investigating the incident from earlier this month that also left a retired school teacher with a face full of pepper spray as she tried to help the elderly woman, who is reportedly 4-foot-5 and weighs less than 100 pounds, up off the ground. “I saw the police being way more aggressive than I’ve ever seen them be,” Rolande Baker, the 65-year-old former educator told the Washington Post, adding that the pepper spray attack had left her temporarily blind.

Authorities released body cam footage of the protest on Friday following a Freedom of Information Act request by Tucson News Now, a local television station, and amid mounting accusations among local immigration advocates that police had used excessive force against protesters. Tucson police chief Chris Magnus has said that officers handled the crowd appropriately. You can watch the entire body cam footage here.

Link to Story and 1-Minute Video

 

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The Wonderful American World of Informers and Agents Provocateurs

By Todd Gitlin
The Nation (6/27/13)

Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.

Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time—look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t. What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on this sort of spying on Americans.)

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.

Two Stories From Occupy Wall Street

The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation. …

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  • VIDEO Of Police Agents Provocatuers In Action: Here are clips of police agents provocateurs in action in various peaceful demonstrations. Note the sound does cut out for a minute or so at one point. Link to 10-Minute Video