The brutal police pepper-spraying of nonviolent students at UC Davis on Friday shocked then nation, but Salon civil liberties watchdog Glenn Greenwald says American police have been brutally repressive for years now. "Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time." The worst part is, Americans don't even realize how much their rights are officially meaningless. "If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist."
Read it at Salon
