Sauce for the gander.

C’mon, Omar. There’s a bit of a difference between a skinny neck beard libertarian with no special powers and a fully armed cop backed up by near immunity and the wealth of the most powerful nation in history willing to snap the neck of anything that suits it’s fancy.

I’ll take the libertarian who will debate me on Locke or maybe Hume over the steroid-fueled rage machine cop who’s the equivalent of “Hulk Smash!”

Remember, FUCK YOU if you talk loud on a phone. That gets a punch in the face.

Nice to see people are starting to realize this is the present and the future only gets worse.

Using FOIA, and a lot of research through old police files, it would be insightful to document the Use of Force reports filed by Sgt. Clifton, as well as the Citizen Complaints filed against Sgt. Clifton.

And, also EVERY police report that Sgt. Clifton ever filed.

As well as the legal record of public filings concerning the conduct of Sgt. Clifton.

Clifton showed a sadistic stream a yard wide for at least the past 18 years.

And, no one on the Minneapolis PD ever noticed?

It appears that he was a menace to the community all the way back to 1995, and his very early years on the Minneapolis police force.

Just think through the incident documented in the court appeal back in 1995:

Provoking an incident at 4:00 a.m. with a hospital janitor named Harry Lazover, who had followed the same work routine for the past seven years: Leave his apartment at 4:00 a.m.; walk to the bus stop; catch the 4:45 a.m. bus to his job at the local hospital.

Until he met Officer Clifton. Clifton rolled up on, stopped, questioned, harassed, detained, attacked, and clubbed in the head to unconsciousness with a police flashlight a mildly learning disabled man.

A man who had a perfectly good explanation (as if he even needed one) of what he was doing on the Minneapolis sidewalk outside his home at 4:00 a.m.

On where he was going: To the Bus stop to go to work at the Hennepin County Medical Center.

When I.D. was demanded by Clifton he also showed Officer Clifton both his hospital I.D., as well as his state issued I.D. Not good enough.

On how he was going to get there: Walk.

On what he was going to do at the bus stop: Wait for the 4:45 a.m. bus.

Sgt. Clifton is one sorry piece of police excrement, and has been for over career with MPD……

George Bush MURDERED more than 6,000 of our servicepeople.

Obama, on the other hand, KILLED only TWO people (one was killed by a drone).

So, who is REALLY the murderer-in-chief?

Police residency requirements only make things worse by artificially limiting the pool of applicants to training academies.

Actually, such rules have an especially terrible effect on minority recruiting. Think about it. A middle class black kid whose family moved up out of Hawthorne to escape the public schools might join the MSP police force, but not if it means moving back to the city’s decrepit core.

While you’re out there doing them bizarre non-sequiturs for the crowd’s enjoyment, kindly try and put at least *some* of the blame on Michelle Bachman. Or Jesse Ventura. Or maybe the Republican Governor of nearby Wisconsin.

1) How do you know?

2) So the Anoka School system is responsible for the Minneapolis SWAT officer’s assault?

Do you have any more non-sequiturs for us?

@#16 – Along with all the usual reasons Radley commonly mentions, I think the elimination of the city residency requirement for police officers has also had a negative effect in Minneapolis. They don’t live here anymore, this is only their workplace(battleground).

2) The perpetrator of this barbarity is from *Minneapolis* SWAT, not Anoka.”

If the assault had taken place in Minneapolis, instead of Anoka, we would not have been hearing about it.

Of course don’t forget that lovely Anoka has a school policy that has the effect of preventing teachers from protecting kids from anti-gay bullying, with the predictable result of 9 teen suicides in the last year.

I don’t know why he lost the first jury trial. The unpublished decision faults the trial judge to some extent (which is why there was an opportunity given for a retrial, and why he got $55K instead of zero), but there must have been other stuff going on. Slow and learning disabled people can make sympathetic plaintiffs, at least potentially. Especially ones holding down paying jobs and supporting themselves.

what was his race?

did he have a decent lawyer?

did he just draw a bad jury?

I’m going to take you at face value, and pretend for a moment you’re not just blowing off steam to make yourself feel better.

Here’s are the implications of your comment:

1) You have no objection to a prison system based on sadistic and arbitrary retribution, where some rape, some get raped, and all human rights are forfeit once a person has been found guilty. Nice.

2) You’re in favor of extraordinary rendition to developing world shit holes, to be used whenever YOU decide that even our repulsively violent prison system isn’t brutish enough to do the job. Okay.

3) You want Clifford’s punishment to be based, not on the particular crime he committed, but one the general grounds that he is a SWAT thug. Because hey, what could possibly go wrong with putting people on trial for WHO they are, instead of WHAT they’ve provably done?

4) You want his entire family to be punished for something he did. Specifically, you want them stripped of citizenship and turned into international refugees.

Now, remind me please: exactly what values and beliefs do you claim to share with the author of this blog and the people who read it?

Allow me to restate a previous comment: Clifford should be farmed out to a Turkish Prison and left to rot there. Stripping him and his family of US citizenship would also be a good thing.