The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has an acute
public relations problem: Officers in its employ routinely
murder and mutilate innocent people. The established review
procedure for police killings is at least as predictable as a Zimbabwean presidential
election.
Former Nevada District Court Judge Don Chairez, has
described the Clark County Coroner’s inquest process as "a search for
justification of an officer's actions." Since the procedure was introduced
in 1969, hundreds of lethal force incidents have been reviewed by a seven-member
jury. Between 1976 and 2012, only one police shooting was ruled “negligent” –
and that decision was overturned on appeal.
This was the intended outcome of a process that was
collaborative, rather than adversarial: The District Attorney’s office
choreographs the questioning with the police department prior to the hearing,
and no direct cross-examination of police officers is permitted by attorneys
representing the victim.
“He
made me do my job”
Andre Laomarsino, who represented the family of 21-year-old
police murder victim Trevon Cole in a 2010 inquest, explained to me that “We
were allowed to submit written questions, one at a time, to the prosecutor.” He
wasn’t allowed to pose questions directly to Cole’s murderer, Officer Bryan
Yant (a
repeat offender), or even to ask follow-up questions.
Yant shot Cole in his apartment while his finance, Sequoia
Pearce, was kneeling on the floor with a gun to her head. The 21-year-old man
had been targeted by a narcotics enforcement team for a
series of “controlled buys” that were captured by a film crew from the
execrable police state propaganda program COPS.
Cole was suspected of selling 1.8 ounces of marijuana in one
of Metro’s staged drug buys – a quantity that probably wouldn’t have merited
even a misdemeanor prosecution. Although the undercover operatives diligently
tried to entice Cole into selling larger amounts, he adamantly refused to do
so.
Unable to connect Cole to a serious crime, Yant did what
police officers in such circumstances always do: he lied, deliberately
misidentifying Cole in a search warrant affidavit as another man with the same
name who had a different birthday and weighed about 100 pounds less than his
target, who was a former college football player. This permitted Yant to depict
Cole as a dangerous repeat offender, which led a judge to approve an armed,
night-time raid on Cole’s home.
The film crew wasn’t available on the night of the killing,
which meant the officers wouldn’t be able to preen for the cameras. This
probably left Yant – who had brought along his personal AR-15 – with a severe
case of blue balls. So as a consolation prize he kicked in the door to Cole’s
apartment, chased him into the bathroom, and killed him despite the fact that
the terrified young man had his hands raised over his head.
During his inquest, Yant followed the familiar script,
claiming that Cole – who was unarmed and outnumbered – “made an aggressive act
toward me,” which he insisted was “enough to make me fear for my life.”
According to Yant, Cole “made me do my job” – which was to
manipulate harmless people into committing prosecutable acts, perjure himself
to obtain judicial permission for a home invasion, and then kill an innocent
person without provocation or personal consequences.
The
Erik Scott Murder
A few weeks after Bryan Yant gunned down Trevon Cole, three
of his comrades – led by Officer William Mosher – “did their job” by murdering
38-year-old Erik Scott as he was leaving a Costco store.
Scott, an honorably discharged soldier and West Point
graduate, was legally carrying a concealed weapon during his July 10, 2010
visit to the store. A clerk noticed the gun and told Scott, incorrectly, that
the store had a policy forbidding guns on the premises. Another employee called
the police and reported that an armed, irrational man was terrorizing the
customers.
When the police arrived, patrons were told to leave because of an
emergency. Scott, who was with his girlfriend, was leaving the store when he
was confronted by Mosher.
No more than two seconds Mosher yelled, “Hands! Let me see
your hands!” the panicking officer fired two shots into Scott at point-blank
range. Without determining what had happened, Officer
Thomas Mendiola fired three shots at the victim. A third officer, Joshua
Stark, shot him twice.
The official account was that Scott had pulled his gun and
pointed it at Mosher. In fact, the object in Scott’s hand was a Blackberry. His
registered gun was still in its holster. When it became clear that Scott hadn’t
drawn his gun, the police narrative shifted (as has been documented
in detail by investigative writer Mike McDaniel). In support of that
revised version, investigators pretended that after Scott had been shot by Mosher, he attempted to reach a second
handgun – an unregistered Ruger -- that he supposedly carried in his right
front pocket.
That gun, which Scott had purchased as a gift for his
mother, was actually in his apartment at the time he was murdered. The Metro
Police acquired it in an
illegal search – better described as a “black-bag job” – and then subjected
it to a phony ballistics test intended to prove that it been damaged when
Mendiola shot Scott in the right leg. This was impossible, since the injuries
to Scott’s leg were several inches below his pocket.
None of this mattered in the official inquest – because
facts are inconsequential in that proceeding. All that counted was a police
officer’s subjective impression that his incomparably precious life – or that
of a fellow member of the sanctified brotherhood of official coercion -- faced
some unspecified threat.
“I felt that my fellow officer was in immediate and imminent
danger,” testified Mendiola, dutifully reciting from the police union’s
catechism of self-exculpation. “I just fired until I felt that the suspect
wasn’t a threat.”
When he was asked about the fact that Scott’s firearm never
left its holster, Mendiola replied with a verbal shrug.
“It was still a threat, whether it was holstered or not,” he
blithely stated. “I did what I had to do.”
On this construction, a police officer in Las Vegas would be
entitled to kill any Mundane who is carrying a holstered weapon. Every officer
who testified (that is, perjured) himself at the inquest emphasized the idea
that by carrying an unregistered Ruger, Scott had committed a felony – even
though there was no evidence that Scott had that weapon in his possession at
the time he was murdered.
Significantly, by the time the Erik Scott inquest occurred, Officer
Mendiola was under investigation for a firearms-related felony involving an
unregistered Ruger pistol. Just days after helping to murder Erik Scott because
his legally owned firearm was perceived as a “threat” to officer safety,
Mendiola gave a Ruger .22-caliber handgun to a convicted felon named Robert
Justice.
Originally charged with a felony, Mendiola was allowed to
plead guilty to a “gross misdemeanor” charge, fined $2,000, and allowed to
leave the Metro Police Force with his peace officer certification intact.
“Heroic
Deeds” of official murder
The coroner’s inquest “was the most amazing travesty of
justice,” Bill Scott, Erik’s father, told Pro Libertate. “It was entirely
devoid of due process.”
“The side representing the victim has no input at all,”
Scott continued. “It cannot question witnesses directly. Written questions are
handed to a bailiff, who submits them to the judge, who decides whether or not
they will be asked. We submitted 1200 questions over the course of a six-day
hearing, which was the longest in the history of the inquest. The judge
effectively disposed of all of them. In his final instructions to the jury, the
judge reduced the mater to one question: `Did the officers who fired believe
their lives were in danger?’”
Erik Scott's murderer, William Mosher. |
All three of the officers involved in the murder of Erik
Scott were exonerated by the inquest – and in what can only be construed as a
deliberate gesture of contempt toward the public, the Las
Vegas Police Protective Agency (PPA) nominated two of them, Mosher
and Stark, for consideration as “national officer of the year” in 2011. Mendiola’s
felony charge is the only reason he was snubbed for consideration.
PPA commissar Chris Collins referred to the
murder of Erik Scott as one of the “top two heroic events our officers
participated in” during 2010. He didn’t specify whether the other “heroic” act
was Brian Yant’s murder of Devon Cole.
“I don’t see it as a controversial shooting,” Collins smugly
told
the Review-Journal. “It was a heroic
deed and enough of a heroic deed for the judges [with the National Association
of Police Organizations awards] to give them an honorable mention.”
“That’s typical of Collins,” Scott observes. “He is a
monumentally arrogant individual, because his union runs the police force.
Collins and the PPA will justify any fatality, any use of force, any beating –
and [Sheriff Doug] Gillespie doesn’t have the guts to challenge them.”
Like Brian Yant, Bill Mosher –
who has the physiognomy, but not the talent, to find honest work as a Curly Howard impersonator
-- is a repeat offender who has learned that he can kill with impunity.
“Bill Mosher, the cop
who murdered Erik, is a former prison guard in Massachusetts who somehow wound
up as a casino guard in Las Vegas,” Bill Scott points out. “He got hired in the
mid-2000s at a time when Metro was hiring like crazy and were somewhat
indiscriminate. His training officer refused to graduate him, saying that he
was unsuitable to be a cop. Metro said, in effect, `We just need boots on the
streets.’ Within a year, Moser had shot and killed someone on the streets, and
four years later he shot Erik. So he had two fatal shootings in the first five
years as a cop.”
Sociopaths
in uniform
Yant and Mosher are entirely representative of the dominant
element within the Metro Police Force, according to Scott.
“Here’s the breakdown of the police composition, as
described to us by some good cops – most retired, some still active,” Scott
explains. “About twenty-five percent of Metro cops are what could be
characterized as rogue or bad cops. Another 25 percent are simply trying to
keep their jobs, their paychecks, and their pensions. Roughly half are
conscientious people who became police for the right reasons – but they are
frustrated by the system. As one of them told me, `It’s difficult to do the
right thing when you’re working for a vindictive tyrant.’ For this reason the
good cops don’t step up and confront the bad ones.”
If “good cops” are intimidated by fellow Metro officers, the
public has every right to be terrified of them. Public outrage over the Metro
PD’s reign of terror prompted the Las Vegas Review-Journal,
which otherwise faithfully carries out its duties as a local government-aligned
newspaper, to commit an act of journalism.
The paper ran a lengthy
series exposing the entrenched corruption of the coroner’s inquest process. This led to intervention by the US Justice
Department, which took official notice of the impunity enjoyed by the
department’s hired killers and urged a handful of trivial “reforms” upon the
Metro Police.
Last year, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie announced the
creation of an enhanced Force Review process in which shootings would be
examined by a panel composed of three officers and four Mundanes. Gillespie
promised that the panel would be representative of the “community,” that it
would have unfettered access to information, and that its deliberations would
be transparent. However, that body has no authority to fire or discipline
officers who engage in criminal violence against innocent people. Those
decisions would be made by Sheriff Gillespie – as dictated by the PPA.
In late July and early August, six members of the Use of
Force Board resigned in disgust after Gillespie
refused to fire Officer Jacquar Rostson, who shot
and seriously wounded an innocent man the previous November. In his
appearance before the Board last April, Roston displayed the contemptuous
arrogance one would expect from a member of the punitive caste, insisting that
his actions were entirely appropriate, and defiantly promising that he would
commit the same crime again under similar circumstances. The board unanimously
recommended that Roston be fired.
When Roston attended a pre-termination hearing a month
later, he made a ritualistic and patently insincere gesture of affected
contrition. In an act of cheap grace, Gillespie said that Roston had suffered
enough and imposed a week-long suspension.
This, in turn, led to the resignation of Board co-chairman Robert
Martinez and five other members of the panel, including Assistant
Sheriff Ted Moody.
“Why are we here?” asked former Board member Robert Le
Piere, a retired police officer from New Jersey, describing Gillespie’s act in
overturning their decision as “offensive.”
Running
up the false flag
The mass resignations from the Force Review Board presented
another potentially huge PR problem for the Metro Police. Fortunately, its federally
funded Counter-Terrorism
Center had put a contingency plan into action at the same time the Rotson
controversy began last April – a false-flag operation involving the Regime’s
preferred domestic enemy, the “Sovereign Citizens” movement.
For about a year, the Metro Police had been conducting
surveillance on an ex-convict from California named David Allen Brutsche, a
registered sex offender with six felonies on his record. In several traffic
stops, Brutsche expressed hostility toward the police in language influenced by
“Sovereign” ideology.
If there is a central casting agency for Homeland Security
Theater operations – and, for all I know, there is one – Brutsche is someone who
could have been built to its specifications. Last April, as the inquest into the
Roston shooting got underway, Metro officers arrested him while he was selling
water on the Strip. They then deposited him in a cell with a
disreputable-looking specimen who played on Brutsche’s animosity toward the
department.
Brutsche’s cellmate was Detective Scott R. Majewski, a
fellow who
is paid nearly $120,000 a year to keep political dissidents under
surveillance and orchestrate what he has brazenly described as “theater”
operations targeting them. Majewski’s LinkedIn profile boasts that he has “provided
training nationally” in such areas as “domestic terrorism” and the use of “Confidential
Informants.” It also prominently mentions his connections with the so-called
Southern Poverty Law Center, a quasi-private political police and propaganda
agency that indoctrinates law enforcement agencies about the supposed threat
posed by political non-conformists.
When Brutsche was released from jail, Majewski offered to
introduce him to others who shared “Sovereign” views – all of whom were police
operatives as well. At some point, the group was expanded to include a
67-year-old woman named Devon Campbell Newman, whose role in this affair was to
provide a “co-conspirator” who had no connection to the police force.
Over the next several months, Majewski and his comrades met
with Brutsche and Newman thirty times, inflaming Brutsche’s already passionate
resentment toward the Metro Police Force and manipulating him into
participating in a police-orchestrated “plot” to kidnap officers, put them on
trial, execute them, and dump their bodies in the desert.
This was a local adaptation of a familiar script used by the
FBI in Homeland Security Theater operations targeting Muslims. Every element of
the supposed plot to kidnap and murder police was devised by Majewski and his
cohorts. Brutsche was reportedly receptive to the plan devised by the
undercover operatives. Newman – an elderly lady who had never been in trouble
with the police – would later claim that she wanted to extricate herself, but
was afraid that either Brutsche or one of the others might kill her.
Shortly after the Roston inquest ended and the board
resignations began, Majewski and a still-unidentified undercover operative
decided to escalate the scripted “plot” to an operational phase.
On August 20, they summoned Brutsche and Newman to a meeting
in abandoned warehouse that had been rented by the department. In a performance
that merited Oscar consideration, the unnamed police operative denounced a
recent police shooting and claimed that the victim was a fellow Sovereign.
Playing a supporting role as a shill, Majewski insisted that there was no more
time to wait – the kidnap-and-murder plan had to be put into effect.
Brutsche, significantly, came down with a case of cold feet.
Newman, who was already terrified about her own welfare, was brow-beaten into
saying that she would participate. That was enough to overcome Brutsche’s
reluctance. As the two patsies left the warehouse, a SWAT team descended on
them. A few hours later their grim and sullen mugshots were ubiquitous in media
accounts describing how the Metro Police had infiltrated and disrupted a
devious plot by “anti-government extremists” to abduct and murder police.
A
typical news account drawing on Metro’s press releases following the arrest
claimed that “Undercover Metro officers infiltrated the group … [and learned]
of their detailed plans to `snatch and grab’ random police officers, try them
for treason in a `sovereign’ court and execute them….”
All of this is a lie, of course: There was no “group” before
Metro arrested Brutsche on a pretext and stuck him in a cell with Majewski, who
was also the one who created the “detailed plans” as part of the false-flag op.
But such details mattered as little in the Metro-orchestrated
homeland security theater production as they do in the department’s Potemkin police
shooting reviews. The objective was to trigger an avalanche of melodramatic
headlines – supplemented with appropriately alarming courtroom photos –
describing a deadly plot against the heroic Metro Police, and to associate criticism of the agency with
a convicted child molester.
It
won’t stay in Vegas
In every homeland security theater operation, the
initial headlines about the foiled “plot” are stentorian, and subsequent
corrections are issued sotto voce.
The purported Las Vegas police murder conspiracy follows the standard formula:
On September 25, the Clark County DA dropped all murder conspiracy charges
against Brutsche and Newman, who
now face a single count of conspiracy to commit kidnaping.
This is a prelude to a plea agreement that will probably
dispose of the case without the inconvenience of a trial that would expose the
methods used by Majewski and his local troupe of Homeland Security Theater
Players.
Here’s the murderous irony at the heart of this matter:
Las Vegas, like every other city, does face a lethal threat from people who consider themselves
emancipated from the law and entitled to kill without accountability. Like the
Sovereigns, those people speak in a specialized language that supposedly
legitimizes their lawlessness, and that makes no obvious sense to rational people
who don’t belong to their clique. The Las Vegas branch of this domestic
terrorist movement maintains a fraudulent “court” where criminal actions, up to
and including murder, are ratified. However, the crimes committed by that
state-sanctioned terrorist syndicate are neither hypothetical, nor uncommon.
Speaking with reporters from the Clark County Jail, Brutsche
observed,
correctly, that police in Las Vegas are “terrorizing” people and warned that “if
this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.” One objective of the Metro
Police Department’s Soviet-grade psy-op was to put those words in the mouth of
a convicted sex offender, in the expectation that people would revile the
messenger, rather than examining the message on its merits. As long as Vegas
residents are focusing on David Brutsche, they won’t remember the murderous
crimes committed by Brian Yant, Bill Mosher, or other Metro Cops.
This cynical Homeland Security Theater production has
played very well in Vegas, and there’s every reason to believe that the
people responsible for it will soon take it on the road.
A special appeal
I am immensely grateful for the generous help that so many of you have provided. If you can make a contribution to Pro Libertate, now would be a wonderful time to do so. In fact, we're -- once again -- in desperate straits.
October 3rd will be the seventh anniversary of the unexpected beginning of my career as a freelance writer. During that time I've occasionally found regular work for media outlets that expect full-time productivity for negligible pay. As I've explained before, I'm working constantly, but only being paid occasionally. Our situation is complicated by Korrin's persistent health problems, which require my attention and dictate that I carry out many, if not most, of the domestic tasks in our household. She is in the hospital once again, and I don't know when she will be coming home.
October 3rd will be the seventh anniversary of the unexpected beginning of my career as a freelance writer. During that time I've occasionally found regular work for media outlets that expect full-time productivity for negligible pay. As I've explained before, I'm working constantly, but only being paid occasionally. Our situation is complicated by Korrin's persistent health problems, which require my attention and dictate that I carry out many, if not most, of the domestic tasks in our household. She is in the hospital once again, and I don't know when she will be coming home.
As I point out below, my book Liberty in Eclipse is now available in audio format. I'm working on other products that -- hopefully -- will soon be available. I'm also diligently looking for full-time employment that actually pays something akin to a living wage. In the meantime, we're facing a catastrophic cash-flow situation. I'm not exaggerating in saying that I'm scrambling to pay next month's rent.
We will be deeply grateful for any help you can provide. Thank you very much.
If you can help, please do:
Dum spiro, pugno!
8 comments:
I'd be glad to buy your book, but I can't use an audio format since I'm deaf. Is it available in kindle or other downloadable form?
MamaLiberty, a Kindle edition of Liberty in Eclipse should be available fairly soon.
When I click on the audio link I get a message saying it is unavailable. Is it just my iPhone or something else?
Btw, great article as always. I would love to download podcasts of your radio show. Is that possible, or just listening live? I hate you are in financial shape you are in for speaking the truth, and hope you can get something soon. I donated what I can and hope others do the same.
http://mobile.audible.com/productNotFound.htm
This is what comes up when I click on the audio link. Is anyone else seeing this or just me?
As usual, great article! You have single handedly built up mountains of evidence of the police state.
I'm hardly inclined to think well of state agents, but while the man may have been manipulated, the fact remains that he was willing to continue meeting with people who he had every reason to believe were planning murder.
That's hardly the action of a responsible person.
Mr. Brutsche's background prior to his involvement with Metro's Homeland Security Theater troupe demonstrates that he's not a responsible person. That background is also why he was so valuable to them. People who stage theatrical exercises of the kind arranged by Majewski are very good at talent-scouting patsies.
There is no evidence that Brutsche contributed anything to this "plot" but his own credulousness. And it's worth underscoring the fact that Metro's false flag op, like those run by the FBI against Muslims, played on a sense of entirely defensible outrage over criminal behavior by state agents, rather than a desire for illicit personal enrichment or a private vendetta.
The people who orchestrate these operations know that the government employing them commits criminal violence against the innocent -- and that what they're doing is meant to manipulate, rather than protect, the public. This is why their criminal conduct is immeasurably worse than that of Brutsche or the other gullible people featured in Homeland Security Theater productions.
'... arrested for selling water on the Strip.' Imagine daring to sell water in 110 degree weather without the official city and county licenses! I'll bet he also neglected to collect the sales tax... horror of horrors.
Americans are now afraid of their own shadows.
'Hey, look - Muslim terrorists who want to kill you! And over there - look! Sovereign citizens who hate America! They too want to kill you!' And the boobs believe the propaganda.... meanwhile those who are actually committing acts of terror worldwide and others who kill folks on America's streets are repeatedly ignored.
___________
Will, would you care to include a mailing address below for those of us who'd like to send a check?
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