St. Louis County officer suspended over video, Glendale officer suspended for Facebook post
August 23, 2014 10:00 am • FROM STAFF REPORTS607

Dan Page, a St. Louis County police officer who identifies himself as a former Green Beret in a video from 2012, is shown in a screengrab from the video.

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Two St. Louis-area police officers have been suspended by their departments, as the unrest in Ferguson keeps intense scrutiny on the personal conduct of law enforcement officials.

A St. Louis County officer who had been assigned to the streets of Ferguson has been suspended after a Youtube video of him making incendiary comments surfaced.

A Glendale officer was also suspended Friday after comments he posted to Facebook.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said officer Dan Page, a 35-year veteran of the department, has been suspended pending a review by the internal affairs unit. The video was brought to Belmar’s attention by CNN reporter Don Lemon, who had previously brought Page to the department’s attention after complaining Page shoved him.

The video of Page was apparently made in 2012 before a group called the Oath Keepers of St. Louis and St. Charles. It is unclear where it was shot. Glendale officer Matthew Pappert was also suspended after posting on social media that he thought the Ferguson protesters should be "put down like rabid dogs."

In the wake of the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer and weeks of ensuing protests, the two incidents illustrate the glare that the international news story has cast on local police. While he would have reacted to the video the same way absent the Ferguson protests, even Belmar admitted that he wouldn't have faced the same pressure to maintain the county police force's image.

Belmar told the Post-Dispatch that Page's comments defaming President Barack Obama, the U.S. Supreme Court, Muslims and various sexual orientations would likely have triggered disciplinary review for being “beyond the scope of acceptable police conduct.”

But it was Page’s comments in the video describing himself, in Belmar's words, as "an indiscriminate killer, that it didn’t matter what your race or background was” that most concerned the police chief.

“With the comments on killing, that was obviously something that deeply disturbed me immediately,” Belmar said.

An internal review will start Monday, and Page will not be doing any police work until internal affairs makes an official decision on whether the officer should be suspended, Belmar said.

“Had he been a probationary officer doing the same thing, I would have fired him two hours ago,” Belmar said.

Among Page's rambling comments in the hour-long video:

• "Muslims are passive until they gain parity with you or they exceed you in numbers and they will kill you."

• "Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill won't even talk to me. They say 'You're an extremist.' I say amen. OK. And I'm real good with a rifle. My best shot is at 1,875 meters. I got me a gold star on that one. That's a fact. You run from me you will die tired. I'm dead serious, folks."

• "I personally believe in Jesus Christ as my lord savior, but I'm also a killer. I’ve killed a lot. And if I need to, I'll kill a whole bunch more. If you don't want to get killed, don't show up in front of me, it's that simple. I have no problem with it. God did not raise me to be a coward," he said before warning the audience that he believes the government will put kids in indoctrination camps.

• "I'm into diversity. I kill everybody, I don't care."

Page says on the video that he is a former Green Beret who did nine combat tours and took early retirement from the military because he refuses to take orders from "an undocumented president."

“It’s very concerning to the NAACP that an officer like that is on the ground. And who knows what he’s already done on the ground already?” John Gaskin, a St. Louis County and national NAACP board member, told CNN Friday afternoon.

Belmar confirmed that Page had been assigned to day patrols in Ferguson during the unrest over the last two weeks. Belmar said Lemon, the CNN anchor who first reported on the Page video, complained days ago that the officer had pushed him while he was reporting in Ferguson. Other than that, “we’ve not gotten any complaints,” Belmar said.

The chief said that he reviewed footage of Page in the incident Lemon complained about. “I didn’t think it amounted to any sort of assault,” Belmar said.

The chief is not aware of any other blemishes on Page’s record, but he said he has not had an opportunity to review Page's file.

“That was kind of the only time his name has been recognized up here,” he said of the Lemon incident. “But again, this video is disturbing.”

Belmar added: “No one believes he was ever involved in a shooting or a fatal shooting.”

Page has been deployed with the U.S. Army several times during his police career, according to Belmar. He was most recently deployed from 2008 to 2011, and again in the early 2000s. It wasn’t immediately clear where Page had been deployed.

Pappert was suspended after posting on Facebook that the Ferguson protesters were "a burden on society and a blight on the community," according to posts preserved by news and opinion website "The Daily Caller." Another post that appears to come from Pappert says the "protestors should have been put down like rabid dogs the first night."

Jeffrey Beaton, chief of police in the small St. Louis County suburb of roughly 6,000 people, said the comments of Pappert were brought to his attention at roughly 10:40 a.m. Friday morning and "an internal investigation was immediately initiated." Pappert was immediately suspended until the investigation is complete, Beaton said, which shouldn't take longer than "a couple weeks."

The investigation will look for any other conduct "that's relevant or similar," Beaton said.

"These type of allegations could result in disciplinary action up to and including termination,” he said.

Glendale canceled a local ice cream social and Arbor Day celebration scheduled for Friday evening on North Sappington Road after the Facebook comments came to light.

On Wednesday, a St. Ann police lieutenant was suspended after pointing a semi-automatic assault rifle at a protester in Ferguson the night before, police said. Lt. Ray Albers pointed the gun at a peaceful protester after a "verbal exchange." A county sergeant witnessed the incident, forced the officer to lower his gun and escorted him away.

And your solution is ? police deal with the lowest form of vermin that you or I could not believe. They do the best that they can. Many do it because they want to contribute and protect the community where they serve. I would not want their job for any amount of money would you?

TB, this person likely was seriously damaged emotionally in the military and needs help, imho

but what is troubling, is that it seems someone else in that 'oath keepers' meeting would have said something, but obviously there is no complaint against him and no one spoke up until now

and what is also troubling is that the Ferguson department is so welcoming of people who have such troubling mentality and backgrounds,,,,,,,,


I believe most officers are there to protect, but it is seeming like the Ferguson department may be recruiting that lowest common denominator that people are raised to believe police PROTECT us from


seems they need to revise some of their recruiting and background processes,,,,,

Seems police have poor relations in the black high crime ares, which a lot of times are similar to war zones. Never hear of poor police relations in other ethnic area of the US. I would imagine that it is hard to find recruits that would be willing to put their live in jeopardy. I would not have the job, but, some need to provide for their families like the rest of us.

true.,,, you 'never hear of',, in main stream media

not sure of why that is because I have certainly 'heard of ' it in real life,,,,

although I certainly could believe there is less of a prevalence because of how we in this country are conditioned to think of black people,,,,, real talk

I am doubtful of that part of the story, due to the following:
1. 35 years veteran of the St Louis County police department- so at one job for 35 years
2. Retired from Marines when Obama (undocumented president) was elected? Which would be 2008 or 5-6 years ago. At best that would the National Guard not the Marines.
3. Seems to be a nut job at a nutjob OathKeepers organization

Im curious what that group is about too,, TB

and why he remained a part of it

I remember a certain Shirley Sherrod being forced into resignation because she gave an account of something in her past and how she had not been proud of it and learned and grew from it instead,,


,,sigh,, oh well...

actually they spoke out against the Police,and the Deployment of the National Guard in Ferguson!

http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/25/oath-keepers-ferguson

The Oath Keepers are a collection of current and former military, police, and public safety officials who have pledged not to obey unconstitutional orders. Institutionally, the group has been harshly critical of the cops' behavior in Ferguson. Last week it released a communiqué that begins like this:

The events in Ferguson have shown us daily that the looting and violence by a few is not being stopped, while the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition government for redress of grievances is not being respected. The current riot control tactics of the local police, rooted in outmoded techniques developed in the 1950's—and only made worse by the ongoing militarization of our police—are failing the people of Ferguson, giving them a false choice between rampant looting on the one hand, and hyper-militarized police and curfews on the other (which also fail to stop the looting, leaving the mistaken impression among many of the American people that even more militarization and curtailment of free speech and assembly is needed).

Some earlier comments from the Oath Keepers hit a similar note, declaring: "The police should not be militarized in logistics or in attitudes. The people are not an 'enemy.' Police should not make war on the people." The St. Louis chapter's president, Duane Weed, has a Facebook feed filled with critiques of police behavior in Ferguson, along with conspiracy theories blaming violence among the protesters on agents provocateurs. The photo above shows Weed at a Ferguson protest—he's the one on the right. The woman with him is wearing a T-shirt that says "National Cannabis Coalition."

Meanwhile: Last Friday, the St. Louis County Police Department suspended Dan Page, an officer who achieved some infamy during the protests by pushing protesters and a reporter live on CNN. That isn't what got him relieved of duty. He was relieved of duty because someone dug up a video of him giving a talk to Weed's chapter of the Oath Keepers. In his lecture, Page warned that Washington was plotting to impose a dictatorship, offering a conspiracy story of a sort that Oath Keepers often embrace. But he didn't stop there, or even start there: He also declared that the Constitution is a Christian document, fretted that the military was filled with "sodomites and females," and went off on a variety of other bizarre and sometimes offensive tangents. There's plenty in there to embarrass the St. Louis Oath Keepers, but the most embarrassing thing for them should be the sight of Page participating in the very activity their group just denounced. ("We need officers focused on looters, not on bullying the media and protesters," their communiqué declares.)

Weed has told CNN that Page was merely a guest speaker, not a member of the group. And indeed, Page says in his talk that he didn't realize he was going to be speaking to the Oath Keepers ("I thought that this was just a church meeting"), and he always refers to the organization in the second person. He does accept an Oath Keepers pin patch at the end of the video, but he looks a little uncomfortable as he takes it; I doubt he ever wore it. But Page's presence at the meeting—and the friendly reaction he got from at least some of the audience—show how entangled those two threads can be.

Exceerpt from Mother Jones:

Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason
Glenn Beck loves them. Tea Partiers court them. Congressmen listen to them. Meet the fast-growing "patriot" group that's recruiting soldiers to resist the Obama administration.
—By Justine Sharrock | March/April 2010 Issue

Email
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Photos by Lucian Read.
THE .50 CALIBER Bushmaster bolt action rifle is a serious weapon. The model that Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray is saving up for has a 2,500-yard range and comes with a Mark IV scope and an easy-load magazine. When the 25-year-old drove me to a mall in Watertown, New York, near the Fort Drum Army base, he brought me to see it in its glass case—he visits it periodically, like a kid coveting something at the toy store. It'll take plenty of military paychecks to cover the $5,600 price tag, but he considers the Bushmaster essential in his preparations to take on the US government when it declares martial law.

His belief that that day is imminent has led Pray to a group called Oath Keepers, one of the fastest-growing "patriot" organizations on the right. Founded last April by Yale-educated lawyer and ex-Ron Paul aide Stewart Rhodes, the group has established itself as a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan have all sung its praises, and in December, a grassroots summit it helped organize drew such prominent guests as representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, both Georgia Republicans.

There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.


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Pray (who asked me to use his middle name rather than his first) and five fellow soldiers based at Fort Drum take this directive very seriously. In the belief that the government is already turning on its citizens, they are recruiting military buddies, stashing weapons, running drills, and outlining a plan of action. For years, they say, police and military have trained side by side in local anti-terrorism exercises around the nation. In September 2008, the Army began training the 3rd Infantry's 1st Brigade Combat Team to provide humanitarian aid following a domestic disaster or terror attack—and to help with crowd control and civil unrest if need be. (The ACLU has expressed concern about this deployment.) And some of Pray's comrades were guinea pigs for military-grade sonic weapons, only to see them used by Pittsburgh police against protesters last fall.

Most of the men's gripes revolve around policies that began under President Bush but didn't scare them so much at the time. "Too many conservatives relied on Bush's character and didn't pay attention," founder Rhodes told me. "Only now, with Obama, do they worry and see what has been done. Maybe you said, I trusted Bush to only go after the terrorists.* But what do you think can happen down the road when they say, 'I think you are a threat to the nation?'"

In Pray's estimate, it might not be long (months, perhaps a year) before President Obama finds some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse. One of his fellow Oath Keepers, a former infantryman, advised me to prepare a "bug out" bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammo, and water purification tablets, so that I'd be ready to go "when the **** hits the fan."

When it does, Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL and make their way to their "fortified bunker"—the home of one comrade's parents in rural Idaho—where they've stocked survival gear, generators, food, and weapons. If it becomes necessary, they say, they will turn those guns against their fellow soldiers.



PRAY AND I DRIVE through a bleak landscape of fallow winter fields and strip malls in his blue Dodge Stratus as Drowning Pool's "Bodies"—a heavy metal song once used to torment Abu Ghraib detainees—plays on the stereo. Clad in an oversize black hoodie that hides his military physique, Pray sports an Army-issue buzz cut and is seriously inked (skulls, smoke, an eagle). His father kicked him out of the house at age 14. Two years later, after working jobs from construction to plumbing—"If it's blue collar, I've done it"—he tried to enlist. It wasn't long after 9/11, and he was hell-bent on revenge. The Army turned him down. Blaming the "THOR" tattooed across his fist, Pray tried to burn it off. On September 11, 2006, he approached the Army again and was accepted.

Now Pray is both a Birther and a Truther. He believes he is following an illegitimate, foreign-born president in a war on terror launched by a government plot—9/11. He admires soldiers like Army reservist Major Stefan Frederick Cook, who volunteered for a deployment last May and then sued to avoid it—claiming that Obama is not a natural-born citizen and is thus unfit for command. Pray himself had been eager to go to Iraq when his own unit deployed last June, but he smashed both knees falling from a crane rig and the injuries kept him stateside. In September, he was demoted from specialist to private first class—he'd been written up for ******** infractions, he claims, after seeking help for a drinking problem. His job on base involves operating and maintaining heavy machinery; the day before we met, he and his fellow "undeployables" had attached a snowplow to a Humvee, their biggest assignment in a while. He spends idle hours at the now-quiet base researching the New World Order and conspiracies about swine flu quarantine camps—and doing his best to "wake up" other soldiers.

Pray isn't sure how to do this and still cover his ***. He talks to me on the record and agrees to be photographed, even as he hints that the CIA may be listening in on his phone. Although I met him through contacts from the group's Facebook page, Pray, fearing retribution, keeps his Oath Keepers ties unofficial. (Rhodes encourages active-duty soldiers to remain anonymous, noting that a group with large numbers of anonymous members can instill in its adversaries the fear of the unknown—a "great force multiplier.") For a time, Pray insisted we communicate via Facebook (safer than regular email, he claims). Driving me from the mall back to my motel, he takes a new route. He says unmarked black cars sometimes trail him. It sounds paranoid. Then again, when you're an active-duty soldier contemplating treason, some level of paranoia is probably sensible.

The next afternoon we join Brandon, one of Pray's Army buddies, for steaks. Sitting in a pleather booth at Texas Roadhouse, the young men talk boastfully about their military capabilities and weapons caches. Role-playing the enemy in military exercises, Brandon says, has prepared him to evade and fight back against US troops. "I know their tactics," brags Pray. "I know how they do room sweeps, work their convoys—if we attack this vehicle, what the others will do."

A strapping Idahoan, Brandon (who doesn't want his full name used) enlisted as a teenager when he got his girlfriend pregnant and needed a stable job, stat. (She lost the baby and they split, but he's still glad he signed up.) Unlike his friend, he doesn't think the United Nations must be dismantled, although he does agree that it represents the New World Order, and he suspects that concentration camps are being readied in the off-limits section of Fort Drum. He sends 500 rounds of ammunition home to Idaho each month.




Pfc. Lee Pray vows he'll fight to the death if a rogue US government "forces us to engage."
EVERY YEAR ON April 19, history buffs gather on the village green in Lexington, Massachusetts, to reenact the first battle of the Revolutionary War. For Stewart Rhodes, it was the ideal setting to unveil the organization his followers consider the embodiment of a second American Revolution.

Rhodes, 44, is a constitutional lawyer—his 2004 Yale Law School paper, "Solving the Puzzle of Enemy Combatant Status," won the school's award for best paper on the Bill of Rights. He's now working on a book tentatively titled We the Enemy: How Applying the Laws of War to the American People in the War on Terror Threatens to Destroy Our Constitutional Republic. Raised in the Southwest, Rhodes enlisted in the Army after high school, receiving an honorable discharge after he injured his spine during a night parachute jump. He enrolled at the University of Nevada and in 1998, after graduating, landed a job supervising interns for Congressman Ron Paul. Rhodes has also worked as a firearms instructor and a sculptor—for Vegas' MGM Grand hotel, he produced a fiberglass Minuteman statue—and has practiced law in small-town Montana ("Ivy League quality without Ivy League expense"). He writes a gun-rights column for SWAT magazine. He's a libertarian, staunch constitutionalist, and devout Christian.

It was while volunteering for Ron Paul's doomed presidential bid that Rhodes decided to abandon electoral politics in favor of grassroots organizing. As an undergrad, he had been fascinated by the notion that if German soldiers and police had refused to follow orders, Hitler could have been stopped. Then, in early 2008, SWAT received a letter from a retired colonel declaring that "the Constitution and our Bill of Rights are gravely endangered" and that service members, veterans, and police "is where they will be saved, if they are to be saved at all!"

Rhodes responded with a breathless column starring a despotic president, "Hitlery" Clinton, in her "Chairman Mao signature pantsuit." Would readers, he asked, obey orders from this "dominatrix-in-chief" to hold militia members as enemy combatants, disarm citizens, and shoot all resisters? If "a police state comes to America, it will ultimately be by your hands," he warned. You had better "resolve to not let it happen on your watch." He set up an Oath Keepers blog, asking soldiers and veterans to post testimonials. Word spread. Military officers offered assistance. A Marine Corps veteran invited Rhodes to speak at a local Tea Party event. Paul campaigners provided strategic advice. And by the time Rhodes arrived in Lexington to speak at a rally staged by a pro-militia group, a movement was afoot.