On Wednesday afternoon, 12:20pm, October 18th, 2017, a San Francisco police officer on bicycle patrol was hit by a suspect driving a stolen vehicle. I believe the assailant was under investigation for illegal firearms possession. (No private guns allowed in SF after the Milk/Moscone hoax) He was later apprehended at 3:30pm (of course).
Facebook and Twitter spread the word as this happened and a friend of mine found herself and her entire neighborhood under a “shelter in place” order from the SFPD. To my knowledge, this is the first time that order has been issued in Frisco. That got my antennae up.
A few years ago, Ab Irato over at Fakeologist asked an interesting question: Does a hoax seem more convincing if one is in close approximation to said hoax? Well, after years of high-grade skepticism regarding all things media, I can conclude that this one was very transparent even as it happened in my own backyard.
The officer’s name is given as Elia Lewin-Tankel. He is still in Zuckerberg (!) General Hospital, under tight security. Though I don’t claim to be an expert at searching for names, his does not come up on the sites I’ve looked at, including Intelius. The photos of him and his (GF?) wife have the air of two attractive actors posing for social media filling. He very much has the mien of a performer. She smiles the smile of a professional who has worked on her “look”. The main photo being used in the media is a ridiculous paste-up of him and his prop bulldog.
(Looks like the dog is sunning itself in GG Park while the CGI mush of the officer fades into gooey pixels.)
Just this morning (Friday) I was watching the local Fox affiliate, KTVU*, and their morning news program. Against all California legal statutes, a KTVU reporter was granted an interview with the suspect in his prison orange onesy. The suspect is said to be homeless and he claims he’s suffering PTSD from a previous police beating. He looked lucid, well fed, fashionably scruffy in the urban hipster manner. In fact I would describe him as a younger Morgan Freeman-ish type. His eye work while being interviewed was one of an actor pacing himself while recalling his bullet points.
My best guess is this was a drill. (A colleague drove right past a swarm of police cruisers and later motorcycles, so this was a happening thing) But, the shelter in place part would be the key to the drill. People in one of the storied parts of Frisco, ground zero Manson country in the upper Haight** to be exact, obeyed. The fact that the media reported it as a real thing was to get an accurate reading of the public response. If they had announced there would be a drill, the results would have been tainted.
It’s no more real when it happens at home, but it is a lot more annoying and unnerving when its in your face.
*KTVU was the station that reported the names of the Korean airliner flight crew that supposedly crash landed a plane at SFO back in 2013 as: Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow.
**This is the hood where Abigail Folger and her mother founded the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in 1967, which was probably used as an intel clearinghouse behind its façade as a quick fix for the clap and bad trip rest area. Manson lived a block down, across the street from the Straight Theater that Folger put money into to host Dead-ins and the like. The hood has been largely gentrified and the few homeless strays would have been in GG Park a few blocks west while this all went down.
Piece of Mindful 
It is annoying as shit when it happens where you live. Imagine my frustration in June or July 2015 when 9 black church goers were “gunned down” by a “white supremacist” in Charleston. Found myself biting my tongue A LOT over the next few months. That wasn’t an argument I was prepared for. “but i knew so-and-so the preacher”…oh, that guy who’s prolly sitting on a beach in fucking Tahiti or some shit now?
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Nobody but newbies call San Francisco “Frisco”. It is the “City by the Bay”. Chill.
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Nobody gives a shit what “locals” call that shithole. Chill.
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Remember that kerfuffle at SFSU last year with the black woman accosting a white dude with dreads due to his ‘cultural appropriation’? That shit was so fake. Their acting was so unbelievably bad. He was wooden and having trouble with his lines. She was laughing and smiling through most of it, like when actors get the giggles on a particularly absurd SNL sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwSFv8e8K4
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My cousin in Milwaukee put up on FB police reports of a runaway criminal in a certain car that alert citizens needed to be aware of – report to authorities if you see this vehicle! Amazingly, the article they cited referenced two police report numbers, each ending in 33. When I said don’t worry, it’s fake, it fell on deaf ears, of course.
The strategy of tension works all the way down into every city … constant reinforcing of the need to be afraid.
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May I suggest a more specific motive behind this drill-turned-hoax?
I found this comment in the online article of the San Francisco Examiner; Jon Jones quotes the article and then opines:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/officer-critical-condition-crash-idd-four-year-sfpd-veteran/
“Johnson appears to have been on probation when he was booked into jail.”
This is a California specialty.
In these kinds of hoaxes, I always look to see where the early commenters (=insider operatives) are nudging the discussion. Could this psyop be an action on the part of the police state to end the early probation trend in CA? And for the plutocrats, a push to keep the prisons full and profitable, to build more and bigger penitentaries?
A Google search for more on this fallen officer yielded an interesting early result from the archives of the POA Journal, the “Official Publication of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.”
Click to access POAJournal_March2017.pdf
Let me save you a click: the headline of SFPOA’s President Martin Halloran reads, “The Social Experiment Surrounding Prisoner Early Release And Decriminalization is a Failure.” The subtitle is “Why Californians are the ‘Mice Caught in the Maze’.”
The country with the highest incarceration rate in the world is perhaps going to have that rate go even higher. Thanks, Frisco ….
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This recalls to mind a question I had a few weeks back reading while POM. What if the US prison stats are a hoax? Assuming the owners are paid by the head, why wouldn’t they inflate the numbers? Why would they care if criminals are loose in various ghettoes? Maybe a side reason for all these local hoaxes?
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Maarten- I think you are spot on. If anyone recalls the Polly Klass case out here many moons ago, that hoax ushered in the Three Strikes Law whereby felons with three convictions got, I believe, a life sentence, no questions asked. The fallout, likely by design, turned many prisoners into informants to change that lifer status. It also was said to have overcrowded the prisons, which may connect to the early release program now under fire. BUT… what if the prison populations are manipulated in this way? Sometimes the population has to be culled and early release is engineered through hoaxes to placate the public. Then, as things adjust for new conditions, the population needs to be increased. More hoaxing required. Early release is tossed and the prison slave labor force increases to meet these current needs. Just spec, but internally logical.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Polly_Klaas
“He then kidnapped the scared Klaas.”
Note the word scared which gives this the ring of fiction.
Also, Nirvana – a psy op band – had a song called “Polly” on their breakthrough album “Nevermind”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_(Nirvana_song)
“Inspiration
In the VH1 Classic Albums documentary about Nevermind, bass player Krist Novoselic remembers Cobain writing “Polly” after reading a newspaper article about the abduction, torture and rape in August 1987 of a 14-year-old girl by Gerald Arthur Friend; Friend had picked her up near the Tacoma Dome in his car after she had attended a rock concert. She managed to escape when he stopped for gas; she got out of the vehicle and made a scene, attracting attention from surrounding people.”
Also it is reported that Polly Klaas met her grim fate on the 1st October, 1993.
The 1st October was also the date for the Las Vegas 2017 shooting psy op.
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http://pollyklaas.org/about/pollys-story.html
“The intruder then took a sobbing Polly off into the night.”
On the Wikipedia page it was
“He then kidnapped the scared Klaas.”
“sobbing Polly”
“scared Klaas”
Trying to engage our emotions for the victim.
That’s nearly enough in itself for me to know this was a psy op.
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English is not my native language, so I let every one else here speculate what the pun “Polly Hannah => pollyanna” in this context means …
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Good spot. I knew that her full sounded phonetically funny but didn’t think of “Pollyanna”.
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Stepping back a bit from the San Francisco focus, there seems to be a direct link between new “immigration policy” and incarceration rates for undocumented persons already inside U.S. borders. Private prisons are again looking like a good investment. Slow-walking deportation creates longer detainments and higher occupancy rates. Dept. of Homeland Security is orchestrating the flow of new inmates and profits toward GEO and other “pay-to-play” private prison companies that ponied-up early and often to the Trump campaign. Now comes the payoff. http://www.businessinsider.com/geo-group-corecivic-private-prisons-trump-immigration-crackdown-good-business-news-2017-8
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeEpwl-vfCmWZC4ptDyO9qw/videos
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It may be time to take a closer look at S.F. Mayor Ed Lee who has just died. From Wikipedia: Lee died of cardiac arrest at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital on December 12, 2017, at age 65 at 1:11 a.m. Aces and Eights and 33…very spooky.
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