Men wearing street clothes identifying themselves as “the police” whisked away an international graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts after she co-authored an op-ed critical of Israel.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the U.S. on a student visa, was detained on Tuesday in Somerville by two men wearing street clothes and masks. In a video posted on social media by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ozturk is seen walking down a sidewalk when she is stopped by a man wearing a hat and hoodie. After saying, “Hi, ma’am,” the man – who did not appear to flash a badge of any kind – seizes her phone as a second man approaches. Those two men eventually handcuff her as others, wearing masks, stand guard.
At one point, one of the men can be heard saying, “We’re the police,” but he did not identify an agency or department.
“You don’t look like it,” a bystander can be heard saying. “Why are you hiding your faces? Why are you hiding your faces?”
One bystander told The Boston Globe that Ozturk informed the men, “I’m a student.” The paper said the bystander spoke on condition of anonymity “for fear of retaliation from the government.”
“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” Ozturk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai told The New York Times. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”
OK, I’m done, I cried at this one. She’s literally yelling out, grabbed off the street, and everyone is going about their lives. We have to do something.
Yea I couldn’t believe how no one even batted an eye. WTF is wrong with us?
How long before these tactics are employed against citizens and permanent residents? How long before “pro-Palestinian” becomes “to the left of Chuck Schumer”?
It’s like when fed were jumping out of vans and kidnapping protestors during 2020.
At least they were marked cops. This is secret police. The descent continues
They weren’t marked cops. They were driving up in family style minivans. Not sure if there’s still video around of it. I believe the ones I saw happened in Portland or Seattle.
Cops should always, always, always be able to identify themselves. Can anyone tell me if it still qualifies as resisting arrest or refusing a lawful order if the officers directly refuse to identify themselves?
So it looks like she would have been within her rights to resist. And, tbh, I wish she had. I was minding some kids recently in a public location and tried to form a plan of what to do if plainclothes ICE officers tried to roll up on us. The plan effectively amounted to mighty morph into a seagull; yell about how they’re trying to kidnap these kids, they’re pretending to be cops and refusing to identify because they’re not cops, point out specific people and demand that they help me protect these kids from the kidnappers, get staff or security involved, be as difficult as possible, and basically make such a clusterfuck about it that these mfs decide to go work for Starbucks instead.
That’s specific to Massachusetts police. If these were federal, they wouldn’t be beholden to that statute, as it only applies to the commonwealth filing charges of resisting arrest. There is no federal law or statute requiring they identify themselves or agency. That being said, a lawyer likely could prove to a jury an individual was acting reasonably given the information available to them by resisting. That hangs on the hope that you survive the encounter and make it to a court. This is really a rock and a hard place scenario, particularly given the number of masked officers present. Everyone will have to make the call that they can live with or die by in the moment.
And so I just started blasting….
Arm yourselves if possible.
It really is coming to that
My god man it’s already fucking there. Don’t get caught with your pants down.
The good ol’ Gestapo.
But there’s also a chance there’s civilian Nazis going around abducting people as well.
Comments on the twitter video are all zionazi trolls. On brand.
