Hey Thoughty2 here.
At some point in human history, we realized that if we left the cave door unlocked, someone
might come along and steal our collection of bear skins and our favourite rock.
So, what was the solution?
We couldn’t be everywhere at once so perhaps we needed a group of people to watch our cave,
prevent rock theft and make sure no one rode a mammoth too quickly through a pedestrian
zone.
Unfortunately, although rock theft declined, this new cave watching group became suspiciously
well dressed and were getting all the best bits of antelope at the nightly barbeque.
Police corruption has been an issue throughout the ages because as the Roman poet Juvenal
once wrote “who watches the watchmen?”
Good policing undoubtedly makes our lives better and easier but it’s a difficult balancing
act to get right.
So whether it’s making money on the side, avoiding blame for suspicious wrongdoings
or a belief that the end justifies the means, today we look at four massive police cover
ups from around the world.
Los Angeles has a lot of gangs and, if it wasn’t for all the drugs, violence and murder,
the amount of diversity on show would almost make you proud.
There’s the Bloods and the Crips, the Wah Ching and other triads, the unimaginatively
named White Power group; Nazi Lowriders, MS-13 and plenty of other Latino gangs.
There’s also the terrifying Los Angeles Wargamers who’s army of Dark Elves and endless
grain resource cards have terrorised the board game community for years; you can take their
lives, but no one will ever take their virginities.
To tackle this smorgasbord of criminal sub-groups, the LAPD assigned each division an anti-gang
team called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, which began in 1979.
When officer Kevin Gaines, of the Rampart division, was shot by an undercover officer
in 1997, the subsequent investigation revealed a police unit that didn’t just have one
or two bad apples, the whole barrel was rotten.
The Rampart scandal revealed that the Rampart CRASH team had planted false evidence, performed
unprovoked shootings and beatings, stolen and dealt narcotics, lied in court, committed
bank robbery and more.
In trying to give gang members a lengthy rap sheet, they had actually written their own.
A number of officers moonlighted as security for the hip-hop record label Death Row Records,
which had links to the Bloods gang.
It’s possible that some of these officers were even involved in the execution of Biggie
Smalls.
The LAPD had a real mess to clean up and eventually paid out $125 million in civil lawsuits, disciplined
around 25 officers and a handful went to jail, including Rafael Perez who snitched on all
the other officers in exchange for a reduced sentence.
On 15 April 1989, the worst disaster in British sporting history happened at Hillsborough
football stadium in Sheffield, when 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death during an FA cup
semi-final game.
Nowadays, every team in the top two leagues must have all-seater stadium, largely in reaction
to this tragedy.
On the day, two pens with Liverpool fans were already very full but there were still a lot
of fans outside the turnstiles when the game was close to kick-off.
These fans were all directed into the overcrowded pens and the ensuing jam of people crushed
everyone so tightly that many suffocated.
Initially the fans were blamed.
The Sun newspaper, owned by Australian media vampire Rupert Murdoch, printed a front page,
headlined “The Truth” that claimed Liverpool fans had pickpocketed the victims, urinated
on police and even prevented them from giving CPR to the injured.
All of these were proved to be completely false and The Sun newspaper is still boycotted
across the city of Liverpool to this day.
But it wasn’t just The Sun who were wrong, the police, led by David Duckenfield on the
day, spent decades pushing the blame onto drunken Liverpool fans and fans without tickets.
Duckenfield claimed that the fans forced their way in through a large exit gate, when in
fact he himself had ordered it to be opened to relieve the bottleneck that was building
up outside, ignoring the fatal crush happening inside the gate.
In 2012, an independent report was finally published, bringing the truth to light and
in August this year, an investigation began into Duckenfield, revealing the police force’s
utter disregard for people’s safety on that tragic day when 96 innocent spectators were
crushed to death, because of negligence.
There are even reports that the Freemasons had a hand in allowing the disaster to happen.
Now we head to the heart of the Caucasus, the beautiful country of Georgia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia was in a pretty bad state.
It may have had hundreds of stunning mountains, a rich history of wine making and a national
food called khachapuri (“Ka-cha-PUER-I”) that is a bread boat filled with cheese and
topped with a fried egg, but sadly, in this sick and twisted world, that is not enough.
Large gangs controlled much of the country but that all changed when Mikheil Saakashvili
(“Sar-cash-vee-li”) became president in January 2004, following the non-violent Revolution
of Roses in November 2003.
He promised to end police corruption and gang control.
And he did, by scrapping the entire police force and starting again.
A fellow revolutionary Batu Kuteli explained the reasons for this radical overhaul when
he compared tackling corruption to “building a ship in the middle of the sea while sailing,
while also learning how to sail, and while you have somebody attacking and trying to
sink your ship.”
Excellent point, you can see why they got the boat…
I mean vote.
The trouble was, his new force were a little too motivated and before too long corruption
was gone, because they basically locked everyone up, ending up with the highest per capita
prison population in Europe.
In March 2006, police claimed to have prevented a riot by the inmates in Tbilisi prison, organized
by gang leaders.
But they did it by preventing seven inmates from continuing to live, as well as injuring
17.
There was also mass surveillance, telephone tapping and torture.
There are a number of big British secrets, such as; why do we eat marmite and why do
we play all of America’s super heroes in films.
But the story of the Mau Mau was one of our closest guarded secrets, where the actions
of the colonial police and military in Kenya were mostly suppressed for over fifty years.
In the early 1950s, the native Kenyan population, particularly the Kikuyu people, thought that
the British might relax their occupation a little, especially after the Kenyans had fought
for them in WWII.
Obviously, they had never been overly delighted at being colonized, people are often not as
grateful as you’d think when you move into their house and eat all their food, even if
you do have an excellent collection of moustaches.
A rebel group called the Mau Mau appeared, killing around 200 Europeans and colonial
sympathizers.
The Brits used propaganda to paint the Mau Mau as evil boogey men, framing their activity
as part of a civil war among the Kikuyu.
In order to protect loyal Kikuyu and control the rebels, they moved over one million Kenyans
into village camps that were effectively giant gulags, with living conditions dependent on
how loyal they believed each person to be.
They use white settlers to control the camps and there was mass scale torture and execution.
It’s shocking enough on its own but the fact that it was less than a decade since
the horrors of Nazi Germany had come to light, the hypocrisy was probably the main reason
why the stories and documents were buried.
It’s thought that over 20,000 Kenyans died and some 5000 more tortured.
Barrack Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, had pins forced into his fingernails
and his testicles squeezed between rods, while two other men with him were castrated.
You see, the UK & US really do have a “special relationship”, we go way back.
It wasn’t until 2011 that a landmark court case, of Kenyan victims against the British
government, brought much of the evidence to light.
It turned out that many documents had been kept in a government building in Hanslope
Park, probably brought back by colonials who disagreed with what was happening and wanted
it on record that they had complained.
So, it just goes to show, you can’t always trust the men in blue, and remember, you always
have a voice, so if you’re being oppressed, speak up for yourself – unless the men in
blue are pointing guns at you, then you should probably shut the hell up.
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