From [HERE] An activist group is again accusing the Des Moines Police Department of abuse and discrimination with their release of video of the arrest of a Black man last fall. 

The videos in question show the arrest of Lentern Woods on September 23rd, 2021. In the videos, officer Joshua Buttons approached Woods – who Button knew had a history of mental illness – on a Des Moines street. As Buttons tries to talk to Woods, Woods ignores the officer and walks away. Button is seen following Woods to the end of the block, then tackling him to the ground before he crosses the street. Woods then hits Button and the officer responds with punches, knees and a taser. Woods is eventually taken into custody and charged with assault on Button.

In a discussion with a supervisor after the arrest that was recorded on a body camera, Button says he was trying to keep Woods out of traffic and says he used his taser because Woods was grabbing at his belt on which his gun was harnessed.

The group calls the incident another example of a police department that is operating without proper oversight from Des Moines’ elected leaders. “We have a city of leaders that refuse to do anything,” said Sharon Zanders-Ackiss with Iowa CCI, “We keep giving you evidence that it’s happening over and over and over. Yet you try to minimize the risk of our reality. This is what our community is dealing with. And until we get some leadership in there that can clean house and do the job they need to do. This will continue because right now there’s no accountability and you can’t keep squashing it and thinking it’s gonna go away because we’re not going away.”

The group is once again calling for Chief Dana Wingert to be fired from the Des Moines Police Department. They are also asking for the creation of a community review board to oversee the police department.

The Des Moines Police Department responded to the accusations with forceful denials on Thursday. According to the department, Woods was seen violently swinging his fists as passersby and walking into traffic before Button approached him. They claim stills from Button’s body camera video clearly show that Woods has his hands on the officer’s taser (which would be a no no in the Free Range because citizens have no right to defend themselves from unlawful assaults from cops, even where they have a reasonable belief that cops are trying to kill them, discussed below).

However, the bodycam video does not show that Woods had been doing anything other than walking down the street. In fact, there are no other pedestrians present in the body cam video- thus Woods could not have committed the crime of threats to do bodily harm, which is a misdemeanor or felony depending on the words uttered to someone; watch the video for yourself. As such, the white cop lied about what occurred and violated Woods’ so-called 4th Amendment rights to be free from unlawful seizures. That is, at the time of the stop Woods had not committed any crime and there was no legal basis for the stop. Or so goes the legal truth of the 4th Amendment. The Supreme Court has explained that in order for the police to stop you the police must have reasonable articulable suspicion that there is criminal activity afoot and that you are involved in the activity. Police may not act on on the basis of an inchoate or unclear and unparticularized suspicion or a hunch - there must be some specific articulable facts along with reasonable inferences from those facts to justify the intrusion.

But legal truths in books and courtrooms must give way to reality on the street. Race Soldiers so frequently abuse their power that no one can make a compelling argument that constitutional rights afford Black people any protection from cops on the street. Black & Latino men face an omnipresent threat of being stopped, seized and searched by cops without legal cause anytime, anyplace. The only thing upholding the 4th Amendment is your belief in it. It is an illusion, a strategy and nothing more. In reality, Constitutional rights are myths, non-existent in a system of free range slavery. Observe also that the cops claim that after the cop tackled Woods to the ground that Woods threw a punch at him. In other words, the Black man attempted to defend himself from an unlawful arrest. Such action has been made unlawful in most states. Citizen-subjects must always obey authority; obey authority or be placed in greater confinement. In a system of physical coercion (law over humanity) only another, higher authority, such as a judge, can declare an arrest lawful. Similarly, you only have rights if an authority agrees that you do; you may believe you have rights but only authorities decide whether you do or don’t. Pursuant to Iowa Code 804.12:

A person is not authorized to use force to resist an arrest, either of the person’s self, or another which the person knows is being made either by a peace officer or by a private person summoned and directed by a peace officer to make the arrest, even if the person believes that the arrest is unlawful or the arrest is in fact unlawful.

Pursuant to FUNKTIONARY:

disobedience – thinking for oneself—deciding for oneself what to do and not to do. 2) the refusal of services of those in power—to deny their alleged authority over you. The Beast allows you to be disobedient or ignorant but not both. Disobedience is the only crime—all others are offshoots. (See: Prometheus, Rights, Thinking, Thought & Rebel)

disobedient – master over one’s thoughts and acting on same relative to the dominating recidivism of authoritarian culture

rights – fantasmatic or fictitious objects having no reality in actuality by those imagining as an identity being in possession of them. Rights are cultural gratuities perceived through various fantasy frames, recognized, and sometimes even created, by man’s system of law to provide a modicum or pretense of civility under a system whereby their very undermining and violation is vouchsafed. Rights are merely rites unless you know how to assert and defend them in order to enjoy them. 2) things people are free to do whether they are able to or not. 3) conditions of existence required by hue-man’s nature for their potential survival (primarily against the cartoon that kills, i.e., the wholly unconscionable entity called the “State”). It is a mistaken notion that rights are enjoyed by one at the expense of the many—that is the realm of privilege. Enjoyment of rights in a neo-imperialistic world controlled by Yurugu through the Greater System (Symbolic Order), paradoxically, entails not only a recognition of their inevitability but, equally, their impossibility. How can we be endowed with rights, or even know what rights are when they are based on binary considerations? Rights, as ontological ephemera, cannot be universally observed, recognized, realized or enforced—and paradoxically, act also as its own eternal source for its assertion and vessel for its fulfillment in our imaginary enjoyment of them. While the law reads rights referentially, what is universally needed in the praxis of rights discourse today is a particular re-inscription, demystification or reontologising of rights (revivified and convivial) by the pan-gendered subject-citizendecoder— taken symptomatically rather than seriously. Most people rarely experience the cognizance of being property of corporate fictions because as long as you don’t violate the rules of society your real status as feudal-property-slave is not involved or revealed. If there is no ‘I,’ to what and to whom do rights as objects accrue? Those who are confused by suffering (and the subject of same) require a re-onotoligisation of rights through the trajectory of meaning independent of their existence. Rights and even ‘lefts’ (i.e., what remains after all of our imaginary rights are traced to their inception as figment) for that matter, like good and evil, are human inventions which humans treat as non-human realities. While fantasy frames invent rights, romanticism reinvents them. Enjoy your symptoms and play with your syndrome—the symptom is the solution. Read carefully the holding in the supreme Court case of U.S. v. Babcock. Rights are myths—obedience to servitude or jail is the reality. Always remember: “The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.” ~William Safire. (See: Abilities, Bill of Rights, Monoright, Servitude, Fantasy, Jurisdiction, Human Resources, Citizenship, Frankenstein, Autonomy, Rule of Law, Surrogate Power, Indigenous Power, Yurugu, Jouissance, Privilege, Disobedience, Duty & Willpower)