North Dakota pipeline activists say arrested protesters were kept in dog kennels

[icymist]

Source: L.A. Times

After a night of chaotic clashes with police on the front lines in a months-long protest, Native American activists complained about the force wielded to drive protesters from the path of a pipeline they contend will desecrate tribal lands and put their lone source of drinking water at risk.

Protesters said that those arrested in the confrontation had numbers written on their arms and were housed in what appeared to be dog kennels, without bedding or furniture. Others said advancing officers sprayed mace and pelted them with rubber bullets.

“It goes back to concentration camp days,” said Mekasi Camp-Horinek, a protest coordinator who said authorities wrote a number on his arm when he was housed in one of the mesh enclosures with his mother, Casey.

At least 141 people were arrested Thursday after hundreds of police officers in riot gear, flanked by military vehicles releasing high-pitched “sound cannon” blasts, moved slowly forward, firing clouds of pepper spray at activists who refused to move.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-north-dakota-pipeline-20161028-story.html

[niyad]

1. and the bundy assholes were basically treated with kid gloves.

too bad that the buffalo did not run over a few of the swat assholes. but then, they probably would have been shot.

and let us not forget, nor allow anyone to forget, that drumpfy has a large financial interest in that energy company.

[cstanleytech]

6. No, the failure in the Bundy case was the jury.

For odd reason they thought it was ok for someone armed with weapons to take over property that they dont own.

[DK504]

2. The DOJ won't do damn thing right for theNative Americans...

And yet Comey and his incompetent DOJ hacks couldn't get slam dunk case prosecuted - why?

[Sand Rat Expat]

3. Comey isn't the head of the DoJ.

He's the FBI Director. The FBI gathers the evidence and hands it to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department prosecutes the case. Loretta Lynch is the Attorney General, the head of the DoJ, and she was appointed by Obama. Say what you like about Comey, but I don't think he had anything to do with the result of the Bundy trial.

[Igel]

4. Look at the decision and look at the law.

Or listen to commentary on the decision that prizes understanding over indignation.
Thos
In short: (1) Some sympathetic jurors; (2) conspiracy laws that require a lot of information in order to judge intent. Those two things aren't related: If you're in a group you tend to assume that fellow group members can somehow be justified or excused; you tend to believe them and assume their motives are decent. If you're in the same group and they're bad then you lose prestige and are humiliated or find some reason to excommunicate them from the group and rewrite history so they were never really members of your group. You see this on DU and routinely in juries. Group boundaries matter, and the more we have deep group boundaries embedded in society the worse the situation becomes. (Sadly, many people like deepening group boundaries because, well, identity. We despise it when those not in our group do this; we adore those who deepen boundaries to reinforce our group's boundaries. Chomsky always said asymmetries matter.)

"Intent" is a difficult thing to prove. It's the reason that SCOTUS shifted the burden of proof from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent" for a lot of civil rights cases. If you can show disparate impact, it's hard to show that it's not intentional but the result of a set of conditions that are important to uphold. "Accidental" is decreed to be intentional.

[Firestorm49]

5. Get The Bundys

So let me get this right. The armed takeover of a park in Oregon results in acquittal of armed insurgents, but unarmed pipeline protesters get hit with rubber bullets, water cannoned, and arrested. Maybe the solution would be to call in the armed morons - You know, the Archie Bunker militia.