Time to look at G4S. Security Company lied to state about Mateen's mental health [View all]

[cali]

I've been thinking a lot about this company so I did a little bit of research. They used to be known as Wackenhut which was around for a long time, before being taken over by G4S.


Nine years ago, the state of Florida received documentation from a security company vouching for the mental health of Omar Mateen, who launched a bloody attack this week on Orlando nightclub patrons.

But the psychologist whose name appears on the document in state records said on Friday that she never evaluated a man who now ranks as the worst mass killer in American history. In fact, she was not even living in Florida when the evaluation was supposedly completed.


The revelation on Friday became another source of scrutiny for the G4S security company, which was known as Wackenhut at the time. The psychological evaluation done for the company, which is required under state law, cleared Mateen to carry a firearm as a private security guard.

“What I do know is that in September 2007, I was not living or working in Florida, I was not performing any work for Wackenhut, and I did not administer any type of examination to Omar Mateen,” Dr Carol Nudelman, who now lives Colorado, said in a statement released through her attorneys to The Miami Herald and other papers who had published her name.

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http://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/1977077/security-firm-g4s-under-scrutiny-over-mistakes


Here's a bit from an AlterNet piece about G4S:

Before Orlando, Omar Mateen Worked for Human Rights Abusers

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More troubling still, Omar Mateen worked for a company that was perpetrating systemic violence against vulnerable people long before he took up arms against his LGBTQ neighbors. For nine years Mateen worked for G4S Security, a British-based corporation that contracts with the U.S. and Israeli governments for work that often violates human rights on a massive scale.

G4S, which brags about having 600 staffers on the southern border, has contracts with U.S. immigration authorities to detain and deport people back to Mexico, as well as to run private juvenile detention facilities. In Israel, meanwhile, G4S profits from providing equipment and services in Israeli prisons and interrogation centers where Palestinians are routinely tortured. It’s also involved in running Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Incidentally, G4S is the company that trained Mateen to work as an armed security guard, which licensed him to carry and use weapons. And although his coworkers told supervisors that Mateen “frequently made homophobic and racial comments,” the company did nothing. It kept him on board—and kept him armed.

Should this company continue to profit from multi-million-dollar contracts with the U.S. government?

Since 2012, there’s been a major campaign against G4S, resulting in decisions by major mainstream institutions—like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Methodist Church, numerous European universities, important charities in South Africa and the Netherlands, UN agencies in the Middle East, and more—to divest from G4S holdings, or to cancel or not renew service contracts. G4S is profiting from exactly the kind of anti-Arab and anti-Latino racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that are all on the rise in the U.S. right now.

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read:http://www.alternet.org/world/omar-mateen-worked-g4s-human-rights-abusers

Wiki link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G4S