Poor Stallman

[1/2] https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Austin,_Texas_voted_to_cut_the_thug_department's_budget) -- Austin, Texas, voted to cut the thug department's budget. Texas Governor Abbott threatens to cut Austin's taxes as a punishment for this, and put the city's thug department under the control of the lawless and cruel state thug department. The article starts by describing how the state thugs attacked Lauren Mestas. Her car had slogans such as FUCK THESE RACIST POLICE, and "all cops are bastards." A thug was so offended by this that he believed he was entitled to bring many thugs to point guns at her, then force her out of the car, which they ruined ‐ demonstrating that at least Texas state cops are bastards. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/texas-austin-police-militarization-budget/ -- Texas Deployed SWAT, Bomb Robot, Small Army of Cops to Arrest a Woman and Her Dog -- September 22 2020 -- She had done nothing wrong. State troopers started following her because of “anti-law enforcement rhetoric” on her car windows.

Twenty-four-year-old Lauren Mestas was already having a bad day when she noticed a cop car tailing her northbound on Interstate 35, headed into downtown Austin. She wasn’t overly concerned at first, as she wasn’t breaking any laws, but the patrol vehicle remained on her tail as she exited onto Riverside Drive, headed west. She started to suspect that it might have something to do with the slogans soaped all over the windows of her 2001 Toyota 4Runner. In addition to “BROWN PRIDE” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” written across the rear window were the words “FUCK THESE RACIST POLICE.” Two days earlier and not even a mile away, a few blocks south of the Texas Capitol in the center of Austin, Mestas had witnessed an off-duty Army sergeant named Daniel Perry shoot and kill an Air Force veteran named Garrett Foster, who had been at a BLM protest with an AK-47 slung across his chest, pushing his quadruple-amputee fiancée in a wheelchair. At the sound of gunfire, Mestas and two other young women had fled across Congress Avenue, the main downtown boulevard, and hidden behind a column of the Frost Bank Tower. In the process, she had accidentally lost her cell phone, as well as the remote control to open the gates of her apartment complex. That night, on arriving home, she’d parked in an ungated portion of the sprawling, 42-building apartment complex, located in far South Austin. Badly shaken by the shooting, she must have confused the spot, because when she went out the next morning, a Sunday, she couldn’t seem to find the 4Runner anywhere. “I was not in a good headspace,” she told me. “I thought somebody had stolen my car.”

She called the city’s non-emergency line to report the suspected theft. Eight hours later, she stumbled across the 4Runner while walking her dog, a chihuahua named Optimus Prime, and redialed 311 to retract the stolen vehicle report. The operator, Mestas told me, assured her that the 4Runner’s vehicle identification number and license plate number would be removed from the police department’s stolen vehicle list, and gave her a confirmation number for verification, should she happen to get pulled over. Monday morning, she went to her job at Planet K, the longtime Austin smoke shop where she was employed as a shift lead. She had yet to recover, emotionally, from witnessing Foster’s murder. “I spent two hours on my shift sobbing,” she told me. “I had just seen somebody get shot and killed. I was pretty much catatonic.” A little after 10 a.m., her manager sent her to the bank to break $200 into small bills and coins. She took Optimus Prime with her for company. It was on the way to the bank that the cop car picked up her tail. The officer, a state trooper from the Texas Department of Public Safety, or DPS, later filed an incident report which made clear that his reason for running a license plate check was that, in his words, “the vehicle had anti law enforcement rhetoric scribble [sic] all over the outside.” He followed her for a mile on Riverside Drive along the south shore of Ladybird Lake, and waited a full five minutes to hit the siren and lights.

“Oh my God,” Mestas thought, surmising what must have happened. “They think I stole my car.” She panicked, and instead of pulling over, she came to a dead stop in the middle of the First Street Bridge, blocking the inside lane. The spot where she braked to a halt might well have been the precise geographic center of Austin, with Ladybird Lake flowing beneath her toward Longhorn Dam, Auditorium Shores and all of South Austin to her rear, and City Hall directly in front of her. It was 10:40 on a weekday morning, and normally the bridge would have been packed with traffic, but four months into the pandemic, there were hardly any other cars. The state trooper, Garrett Ray, was joined by a second DPS officer, Jason Melson. Instead of approaching the 4Runner, they drew their service weapons and took cover behind the open doors of their patrol vehicles. According to Ray’s incident report, it was an “HRS,” or high-risk stop, also known as a felony stop: a procedure employed when an officer believes that someone in the car has committed a serious crime and could be dangerous.

The tactical terminology is worth noting because earlier that very same morning, the Austin Police Department had released damning dashcam footage of officers shooting and killing an unarmed man named Michael Ramos in a high-risk or felony stop that, like this one, had been based on faulty dispatch information. A 911 caller reported that Ramos and a woman had been using drugs in a parked car, and that he was holding a gun. Ramos had been spooked by the sight of eight armed officers pointing weapons and screaming at him to get his hands up. When he tried to flee, one of the officers opened fire with an assault rifle. APD later confirmed there was no gun in Ramos’s possession. One hour after Mestas was pulled over, at 11:40 a.m., I happened to come across the scene by accident. I was riding my bike around Ladybird Lake, and I counted at least 40 DPS vehicles blocking the south end of the First Street Bridge. There had to be 80 cops on scene by that time, if not 100. The emergency vehicles included a fire truck, an ambulance, and two BearCat armored personnel carriers. Every minute or so, a mechanical RoboCop-like voice repeated, “Driver, exit the vehicle with your hands up.” The dystopian intonation sounded over Auditorium Shores, where a crowd of people who had been exercising or playing with their dogs had gathered on the sidewalk to watch the spectacle unfold.

Like other bystanders, I initially assumed that it was a hostage situation, bomb threat, or active shooter. The first clue that it might be something more farcical or absurd were the slogans soaped on the windows of the weather-beaten old 4Runner, which the police had so thoroughly surrounded. From 100 yards away, in the blinding sunshine, I couldn’t quite read them, but on one rear window I distinctly made out the acronym ACAB, which stands for “all cops are bastards.” Ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota on May 25, cities across the United States had been convulsed by protests against police brutality, and Austin was no exception. Like virtually every other big city in America, the lion’s share of our municipal budget goes to an increasingly militarized department of police, and all through June and July, there had been rising calls for APD to be defunded, and for the chief to resign. In response to indications that Austin’s relatively liberal city administration would give in to protester demands, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, had deployed thousands of DPS troopers to Austin, as well as to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, to combat “violent extremists, anarchists, and antifa,” as DPS Director Steven McCraw put it in a June 2 press conference. “They just can’t help themselves,” McCraw said of the out-of-town antifa operatives believed to be besetting the city. I had seen the newly arrived formations of state troopers standing guard around the Capitol but never out in force like this. The officer who appeared to be the incident commander was a relatively young man with black hair, shiny black cowboy boots, and a black tie under his flak vest, which identified him as a DPS special agent.

Other agencies were present as well. A U.S. Marshal in boots and jeans suited up in a bulletproof vest alongside his Ford F-150 4×4. Texas Army National Guardsmen patrolled the side of the bridge, lest an amphibious threat come from the paddleboarders on Ladybird Lake. City bike cops in blue polo shirts held the outer perimeter. Overhead, a police helicopter circled. Technicians in T-shirts and camo pants were unpacking a drone the size of a coffee table on the pavement. A smaller police drone, consumer-grade, already hovered above the beleaguered 4Runner. I had only been there a few moments when an APD SWAT team arrived. They pulled up in eight blacked-out Chevrolet Tahoes with all the insignia removed, and commenced to unload an arsenal of military weapons and body armor from big drawers that pulled out of the beds. The sound of multiple firearms being locked and loaded echoed from the face of the apartment building across the street. One SWAT officer with tribal tattoos had his shirt off as he changed uniforms. A SWAT sniper with a heavy backpack went trotting off in the direction of Aussie’s, the sand volleyball bar, presumably to find a shooter’s nest in the urban terrain.

A vehicle like a refrigerated truck pulled up, and police technicians placed an antenna on the roof and busied themselves assembling some kind of machine in the cargo area. The surface of Mars would have seemed a more suitable place for the thing that they eventually rolled out than the First Street Bridge. It was a bomb robot on a platform of tracked wheels the size of an ATV, bright silver in color. It must have made some kind of ultrasonic noise when they booted it up, because it set a dog walker’s clutch of terriers barking. Half an hour passed, and nothing seemed to happen. Under the glare of the midsummer sun, it was impossible to see inside the motionless 4Runner at a 100 yards’ distance. Some bystanders got bored and drifted away or sought shelter in the shade. A potbellied DPS officer in a felt cowboy hat walked up to those who remained and began to take photos of us with a digital camera. It was an unexpected thing to do to unoffending pedestrians, and chilling the way he went about it, coldly making eye contact with each person in turn. But then, it’s not for their friendliness that Texas state troopers are so famous. Anyway, we were all wearing face masks, as was he, on account of the coronavirus pandemic.