WARNING! Police "voice stress tests" [regional social justice/civil liberties report]

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

WARNING! Police "voice stress tests" [regional social justice/civil
liberties report]

Note by Hunterbear:

Any social justice grassroots organizing -- getting and keeping people
together for action -- also deals with plenty of individual and family
advocacy cases.  And often some of this -- organizing and advocacy --
contains dimensions well worth sending to the Four Directions.

It's been interesting here in Eastern Idaho as always -- in a mercurial
setting where only a few days ago my gloved fingers were freezing during my
early morning daily pre-dawn trek  high up and far away in the rugged stuff
and now the rapidly warming weather has jumped, but only momentarily, to
close to 100 degrees [above.] I now have to keep an open eye -- I see well
in the dark -- for rattlesnake buddies cooling themselves in the  early
morn.

More than those quite natural and reasonable challenges, however, we've had
our hands full for several days with some tangled regional justice
situations. Around here, as elsewhere, some of those can be mighty dramatic
and deadly -- e.g., a young unarmed Indian killed by police a few months
ago -- and some can be very quietly so.

[BTW, I've never been bitten by a rattler, decades ago stopped shooting
them, and more recently consider them good friends. Still, one has to keep
an open eye  since global tensions, even in this "perfection of
primitiveness" can be high.]

One of these  individual advocacy justice cases, a complex Native matter,
has involved efforts by Anglo police to maneuver the person involved into
the "cop shop" for "voice stress tests." The Native person is innocent  --
not a prerequisite for getting my help -- in a situation where larceny from
some direction certainly occurred.  The effort to draw the Native  into a
projected hour-long voice stress test [and why so long?] was put
reassuringly [without any mention of the right to have an attorney present]
on the basis of "eliminating you as a suspect."  Problem is, voice stress
testing -- a badly flawed approach -- can frequently find anyone "guilty"
faster than a local White jury in an Old Mississippi civil rights
demonstration case.

I blocked that, pronto.  The person didn't take the "test" -- and continued
to successfully resist. The whole matter is now fading.

Like many of us, I've always known that polygraph [lie detector] testing is
not dependable.  I was savvy [and intuitive] enough to know immediately that
any voice stress test should be avoided -- and can certainly be very
problematically inaccurate [who isn't badly stressed under those
conditions?] -- but even I, keeping up reasonably well in the lands of
Criminal Justice [which I've taught and fought] and even more in the Civil
Liberties world, didn't know just how dangerously messed-up is this
increasingly and widely used substitute for careful  law enforcement
investigation.

And more and more local and state police agencies are now using these
poisonous devices -- all over the Land.

I did some digging -- and came up with some solid info.  This piece, which I
mentioned some days ago in a very brief posts on a few lists, is well worth
reading.

http://www.newhouse.com/archive/story1a110501.html

Sure, rattlesnakes can be skittery. But they don't court trouble -- and
almost always sound their unique and unmistakable warning -- like bouncing,
whirring mini-rocks in a big, thin dry gourd rattle.

And most people do recover fast from rattler venom.

Voice stress tests -- human witch-craft creations wearing superficial
"scientific" garb -- can be downright deadly:  deadly to people, deadly to
justice.

Fraternally / In Solidarity

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear]  Micmac / St Francis Abenaki / St Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunterbear]