Free press, free speech, free assembly are denied. Public access to court records is denied; public access to prisoners arrest and booking records is denied; banking regulators unlawfully shred their own records, the right to file petitions is denied, and here - public access is denied to public police records.
Why Is the Oakland Police Department Hiding the Truth About Its Violent Crackdown on the Occupy Protests?
Oakland police appear to have violated their own guidelines, and now they're refusing to release documents to civil rights attorneys as required by law.VIDEOS: [1] Rubber bullets used by police in Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
November 9, 2011
After three notably violent crackdowns on protesters in as many weeks, Oakland Police Department officials have refused a request by the ACLU of Northern California to release police reports documenting their use of force as required by law.
“We saw events that we found extremely troubling, and which violated provisions of Oakland's own crowd control policy,” Linda Lye, a staff attorney with ACLU of Northern California told AlterNet.
After recent police actions in Oakland gained national attention, “there was a lot of lip service paid to transparency and accountability and the public's interest in monitoring the situation,” she said. “But then OPD proceeded to say that it was invoking one of the statutory exceptions to the Public Records Act for the vast majority of our requests.”
READ MORE:http://www.alternet.org/story/
