Quote from: SpikeAnd if you think being tear gassed is a sign of police brutality... or even just incompetence...

No, I don't.  I am remarkably pro-police as a general rule.

However, the police fucked up royally at the WTO protests.  They did, that's just a fact.

A regular customer of the store where I worked at the time was a parking lot attendant at a major parking garage near Westlake, a major shopping cneter that was open for shopping at the time.  He had a tear gas cannister fired into his booth.  Another customer was stepping out of Nordstroms with hands full of shopping bags.  She had two cannisters fired directly at her.

That is incompetence.

In attempting to control the protesters, the police ended up driving them up and away from the designated protest area, and into a residential area notable for its many retirement communities.  That is to say: senior citizen housing.  They flooded the street with tear gas, a significant health risk for those senior citizens.

That is incompetence.

The chief of police, Norm Stamper, at the time acknowledges that the deputies brought in for the protests were undertrained and ill-prepared for the duty.  The police claimed that they didn't know the Black Bloc was coming, DESPITE it being the cover story on the local alternative paper The Stranger the week before -- and they'd been reporting on John Zerzan's plans for at least two months before the protests!

I am not saying that using tear gas is brutality or a sign of incompetence.  I am only saying that the undertrained sheriff's deputies brought in from rural districts were ill-prepared to deal with the event, and they went a bit overboard with their use of tear-gas, to the point where they created as many problems as they solved.

The real blame lays on the head of Norm Stamper, then-mayor Paul Schell, and Governor Gary Locke, who were caught totally off-guard by the activities of the black bloc, and naively thought the peaceful protesters would be able to "police their own."  This was an idiotic decision that lead to disaster, and there's a good reason none of those men are still in office.

Sounds like what happened in Ontario a few years ago, when they went nuts on a group of peacefully protesting students with pepper spray.

Quote from: HackmastergeneralI felt it much funnier.    I'm laughing right now.

And so am I. XD

I was kind of annoyed when they closed it right after I had read every single post and made a listing for them. I mostly posted my creepy gamers at the end of the newer thread.