Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

Brownshirt Much?

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Ernst Röhm Jim Pasco, executive director of the of the PBA, the Police Union has taken to physically threatening director Quentin Tarantino over his statements regarding the police:

On Wednesday, the Free Thought Project reported on the remarkably brave stance Academy Award-winning film director Quentin Tarantino, has made in owning his comments condemning police brutality.

After police across the country had announced their plans to boycott his films, Tarantino refused to be bullied and remained steadfast in his decision to call the police who murdered people “murderers. ”

Tarantino was not calling all cops murderers, nor was he purporting that he “hates cops.” However, these facts are not important to those throwing bricks from the other side of the blue wall.

In fact, during a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Tarantino responded, “All cops are not murderers. I never said that. I never even implied that.”

 And what is the response of the PBA?

In a veiled threat, the largest police union in the country says it has a “surprise” in store for Quentin Tarantino.

 Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, would not go into any detail about what is being cooked up for the Hollywood director, but he did tell THR: “We’ll be opportunistic.”

 “Tarantino has made a good living out of violence and surprise,” says Pasco. “Our officers make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question.”

The FOP, based in Washington, D.C., consists of more than 330,000 full-time, sworn officers. According to Pasco, the surprise in question is already “in the works,” and will be in addition to the standing boycott of Tarantino’s films, including his upcoming movie The Hateful Eight.

“Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element,” says Pasco. “Something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere]. And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable.

“The right time and place will come up and we’ll try to hurt him in the only way that seems to matter to him, and that’s economically,” says Pasco.

When asked if this was a threat, Pasco said no, at least not a physical threat. “Police officers protect people,” he says. “They don’t go out to hurt people.”

Yes, that disavowal of violence is so convincing.

What a story for the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

My guess is that we are going to see law enforcement shutdowns of showings of The Hateful Eight using flimsy “public safety” pretenses all around the country.

Not a Surprise………

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It turns out that when correcting for poverty, crime rate, and the like, the only thing that determines the level of law enforcement personnel at a school is solely determined by the percentage of black students:

With the viral video of a police officer violently arresting a black female student at high school in South Carolina reinvigorating the debate over school resource officers, new research bolsters critics’ claims that school security can have a negative effect on students, particularly African Americans.

The new study by two academics in New York showed that the mere presence of African American students at a school makes it more likely the school will take on security measures, even when controlling for neighborhood crime and school misconduct.

The study also found, among other things, greater racial disparities in student suspensions and arrests in schools where there are cops present or other security measures are taken. Those arrest and suspensions are believed to contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”

This is not a surprise.

It has been “Zero Tolerance”, and “Getting Tough On insertnounhere”, etc. have almost always been primarily an a ploy to excuse racism.

Are You F%$#ing Kidding?

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Fox Lake Police Lieutenant Charles Joseph Gliniewicz stole thousands of dollars from a youth fund, and when investigators started getting close, he faked his own death staged his suicide to make it look like it was a cop killed in the line of duty.

Following a manhunt, they found his body After finding the body, a manhunt insued, and immediately people blamed Black Lives Matter.

As my son is wont to say, what the f%$#ing f%$#?

There aren’t many stories that articulate how absurd and ridiculous America’s relationship with race is better than this one. It is layers on layers on layers on layers on layers of ridiculous, dry rubbed with “What the f%$#?” marinated in “This is some bullsh%$” and served with a generous helping of “You need more people” on a lightly toasted “No, seriously. Get the f%$# outta here” kaiser roll.

Fox Lake Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was a crooked cop who staged his own death in September. And he wasn’t just run-of-the-mill crooked. He stole tens of thousands of dollars from a youth fund; using the cash on vacations, gym memberships, and porn. (Which, admittedly, aren’t the worst things in the world to use your embezzled cash on. You can say many things about Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, but at least he wasn’t boring.)

Sadly, this — an officer committing suicide — is not terribly uncommon or particularly newsworthy. As Shaun King pointed out earlier today, “cops are more likely to commit suicide than they are to die in an inner-city gun battle, by a targeted assassination or by a car crash from a high speed chase.” But this isn’t about Gliniewicz, who apparently was battling some serious demons. It’s about the reflexive need to blame his death — back when it was still thought to be a homicide — on BlackLivesMatter. Which is what many people did. And, this wasn’t just the usual pajama-clad neckbeards on Twitter and Fox News making this claim either. Ron Hosko, current president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and a former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division (yes, that FBI), wrote a piece in USA Today effectively blaming #BLM for creating the climate that led to Gliniewicz’s murder. Which, again, wasn’t a murder.

(%$# mine)

Oh, you poor delicate flowers.

It’s almost enough to have me juxtapose a porcine metaphor with law enforcement personnel.

I’m Really Enjoying Trevor Noah on The Daily Show

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Case in point, his latest skewering of police whingeing about the fact that they might be recorded when the break the law and violate the constitution:

The police are just trying to make a basic point: People are treating them unfairly just because of who they are and how they look. People keep following them around with cameras, watching everything they do, suspicious that they’re always about to break the law, leaving police afraid to even get out of their cars for fear that someone might whip out a phone and brutally film them. Who can imagine how that must feel? And if you listen carefully, all the police are saying is “phones down, don’t shoot.”

It is a brutal take-down of police complaints about the fact that law enforcement agents might now be held accountable for breaking the law.

What people like New York Police Union president Patrick Lynch and FBI director James Comey are suggesting is that we must structure our society so that police are able to operate with impunity, and without accountability, all while operating in secrecy.

This is quite literally the definition of a police state.

Why Videotaping Cops Needs to Be Universal

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Roid Rage

Does anyone out there think that Richland County Senior Deputy Ben Fields would have been fired if his assault hadn’t been caught on video tape?

The South Carolina Sheriff’s deputy captured on video forcefully removing a student from class has been fired, the local sheriff said Wednesday, less than a week after the incident at Spring Valley High School first came to the public’s attention.

 Richland County Senior Deputy Ben Fields was already suspended after videos of him flipping and tossing a black female student across a classroom went viral online.

 Fields was told of his firing late Wednesday morning

 “What he should not have done is throw the student,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said. “Police officers make mistakes too. They’re human and they need to be held accountable, and that’s what we’ve done with Deputy Ben Fields.”

 Lott said he wouldn’t describe Fields as remorseful, but rather sorry it all happened.

Of course he is sorry that it all happened.

He’s lost his job.

BTW, in addition to being a school resource officer he was a football and strength training coach:

………

 Fields said in during his deposition for a federal lawsuit filed against him that he is a competitive power lifter, saying it is a “sport,” where you “try to lift as much as you can at one time.”

 In his deposition, Fields says he does not take steroids, but has not been tested for steroids in the past. He said he has taken supplements, including Creatin, to help build muscles.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah. We believe him when he says that he’s not juicing. (not)

If his behavior had not been caught on video, this steroid addled loon would still be abusing school children.

For all of the wanktastic tirades against police accountability by the FBI director, the problem is not cameras, it’s bad cops and a culture that coddles and protects them.

FBI Director Blames Public Accountability for Murder Spike

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James Comey is arguing that because everyone has a camera on their cell phone now, police are unwilling or unable to do their jobs:

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.

With his remarks, Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison.

………

Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion.

………

After civil rights leaders and the Justice Department accused the Seattle Police Department of discriminatory policing and excessive force, the number of officer-instigated stops declined and crime ticked upward, said Kathleen O’Toole, the police chief.

Chief O’Toole said it was up to police leaders to insist on reversing that trend. The critiques made the department better, she said. Crime is down this year, and her city has hosted police officials from places such as Baltimore wanting to understand why.

“There’s never been as much scrutiny on police officers as there is now,” Chief O’Toole said. “We should embrace it.”

Yes, we should embrace greater police accountability.

Being a cop may be a tough job, but it is also one which pays relatively well, and when juxtaposed with its good job security, it means that you can generally find people willing to do the work.

This means that to the the degree that bad cops are flushed out of the system, they will be replaced by good cops.

Then you have to flush the bad attitudes and practices out of the system.

Also, as I have noted before, I think that a significant portion of the police force is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a counselor friend of mine believes that it is nearly universal after about 5 years, and mentally ill cops are not going to be good cops.

In terms of addressing PTSD, I would start with the following:

  • Eliminate routine overtime in police departments.
  • Forbid moonlighting by cops in security positions.
  • Make vacation longer, at least 6 weeks a year, and mandatory.
    • Also, again, no moonlighting on vacation.
  • Mandatory counseling for all police officers on at least a monthly basis, because if all cops have to talk to a counselor, there is no stigma.
  • Stop having cops act as revenue agents through ticketing and the like.  Everyone has a God given right to hate the taxman, and being widely loathed is not conducive to mental health.

Understand that these changes would require a significant increase in base pay, probably by at least 20%, but we are living the alternative, and it ain’t pretty.

I’D Say, “Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen,” but There Is No Such Thing as a British Citizen

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Technically, they are all British subjects of the crown, not citizens, and now it looks like the Tories will be seizing the children of parents with unacceptable thoughts:

If there are two edicts I try to follow whenever I’m writing, they are, first, write what is true and, second, avoid cliche at all costs. I bring that up only as a preface before saying the following: the UK is walking down an Orwellian path. It’s nearly the cliche of cliches to say something like this, and yet it happens that the cliche is true. While there is most certainly a real thing known as a threat from Islamic terrorism, there is also such a thing as overreaction. What started as the British government’s attempt to ban extremist thought from social media and television (under the notion that some thoughts are too dangerous to enjoy the freedom that other thoughts deserve) then devolved into the conscripting of teachers that were to be on the lookout for children that might become radicalized. To assist them with this, the government helpfully provided spy-software to use against students. Spy-software which itself was found to be exploitable in the most laughably easy of ways. This employed two of the most horrifying aspects of Orwell’s Oceania: the concept of thought-crime and the employ of citizens to fearfully surveil one another.

And now it seems the UK is going even further, adopting Oceania’s reputation for the swallowing up of citizens should they be found suspect of thought-crime by those watchful citizens. Specifically, the Family Division of the Judiciary has put out a memo declaring exactly how it will remove children from the homes of anyone it suspects might radicalize those children. Here’s a snippet.
Recent months have seen increasing numbers of children cases coming before the Family Division and the Family Court where there are allegations or suspicions: that children, with their parents or on their own, are planning or attempting or being groomed with a view to travel to parts of Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State; that children have been or are at risk of being radicalised; or that children have been or at are at risk of being involved in terrorist activities either in this country or abroad.

Only a local authority can start care proceedings (see section 31(1) of the Children Act 1989 – the police powers are set out in section 46). However, any person with a proper interest in the welfare of a child can start proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or apply to make a child a ward of court.2 Usually, in cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above, it will be the local authority which starts proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or applies to make a child a ward of court, and the court would not expect the police (who have other priorities and responsibilities) to do so. There is, however, no reason why in a case where it seems to the police to be necessary to do so, the police should not start such proceedings for the purposes, for example, of making a child a ward of court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the child travelling abroad, obtaining a passport order, or obtaining a Tipstaff location or collection order. Given the complexities of these cases, I have decided that, for the time being at least, all cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above are to be heard by High Court Judges of the Family Division.

In other words, the High Court Judges within the Family Division are now tasked with determining whether children will be made wards of the state based solely on suspicions of possible radicalization. Children torn from mothers and fathers in Muslim homes will be subject to the whims and inherently flawed watch of the larger citizenry. A citizenry, mind you, that has had its vigilance unduly ramped up by the government’s past actions and requests. It’s hard to imagine a better recipe for the unfair targeting of Muslim families than this. Unfortunately for all concerned, this same memo imagined just such a recipe, making things even worse.

The UK is beginning to resemble the movie “V”, and a that the local media seems transfixed and appalled by the fact Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t hate poor people for being poor.

There are worse things than having Donald Trump leading the polls, and David Cameron and his evil minions™ is one of them.

Hired Guns Arrive at Predetermined Conclusion

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The prosecutors in Cayuga County hired a couple of “experts” to review the Tamir Rice shooting and they determined that Cleveland Police did the right thing when they shot a 12 year old to death.

This is hired gun expert witness bullsh%$ at its worst:

Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.

 Those opinions, reached separately by a Colorado prosecutor and a former F.B.I. supervisory special agent, were released Saturday night by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, whose office will ultimately present evidence in the case to a grand jury to decide on possible criminal charges.

 “The question is not whether every officer would have reacted the same way,” Kimberly A. Crawford, the retired F.B.I. agent, wrote in her report, which noted that Officer Loehmann had no way of knowing Tamir’s gun was fake. “Rather, the relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer, confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary.”

 The reports, which were commissioned by the prosecutor’s office, come almost 11 months after the shooting outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014. Footage of the shooting was captured on a surveillance camera, and Tamir’s name quickly became among the most prominent in a series of black men and boys whose deaths at the hands of the police were memorialized in Twitter hashtags and protest chants.

 Both Ms. Crawford and S. Lamar Sims, the prosecutor from Colorado, said in their reports that they were evaluating Officer Loehmann’s actions under the United States Constitution, not Ohio state law.

 “There can be no doubt that Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking,” Mr. Sims wrote. But he added that “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.”

These so-called experts were hired by the prosecutor because they knew that they would say before they ever signed a contract:

A YouTube video of a prosecution expert who has sided with Cleveland police in the shooting death of Tamir Rice has emerged. The video shows him making pro-police comments about the case months ago.

Further, a second expert hired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty to review the Rice shooting was once admonished by the U.S. Department of Justice for being “unfaithful” to the law in an effort to exonerate police in their use of deadly force.

The videotaped comments by S. Lamar Sims, a senior chief deputy district attorney in Denver, and the pro-police stance by expert Kimberly Crawford are raising questions of McGinty’s motive in retaining their reports of the 12-year-old boy’s shooting death last year.

McGinty released their respective reports late Saturday. Both experts hired by McGinty found the officer’s shooting of Tamir, who was armed only with a pellet gun, to be justified.

………

In the YouTube video posted on May 8, Sims does not mention Tamir Rice by name. However, it is clear that he is speaking about the boy’s shooting last year outside of the Cudell Recreation Center on Cleveland’s west side.

………

Subodh Chandra, the Cleveland attorney representing the Rice family, said Sims’ comments appear to favor police. Chandra said the comments make it appear that Sims was selected by McGinty for his pro-police stance.

“It’s clear from the video that this so-called expert engaged by the prosecutor’s office had already prejudged this matter long before he was engaged by the prosecutor,” said Chandra. “It also raises questions in the Rice family’s minds about whether that was precisely why that so-called expert was engaged.”

Chandra said Crawford’s past support of police also raises questions about her biases and whether those past opinions are the reason McGinty asked that she review the evidence connected to Tamir’s shooting death.

In a past case of police use of deadly force, Crawford’s opinion was rejected by the Department of Justice for being outside the law, “overly protective of law enforcement” and going “too far to exonerate the use of force.”

What we have here is yet Another prosecutor who is trying to lose a case against a rogue cop who murdered a black kid.

Here’s a Thought: Just Don’t Break the Law

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It appears that the movers and shakers in law enforcement are feeling bad because officers misdeeds can end up being saved for posterity.

Here is a thought. How about just not being bullies and thugs, you whiny bitches:

Chiefs of some of the nation’s biggest police departments say officers in American cities have pulled back and have stopped policing as aggressively as they used to, fearing that they could be the next person in a uniform featured on a career-ending viral video.

 That was the unifying — and controversial — theory reached Wednesday at a private meeting of more than 100 of the nation’s top law enforcement officers and politicians.

 ………

 With homicide rates soaring inexplicably this year in dozens of U.S. cities, the group convened by new U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch concluded with a brief news conference promising a robust response to the reversal of decades of falling violent crime rates.

But for hours preceding that, mayors, police chiefs, U.S. attorneys and even FBI Director James Comey privately vented in a Washington ballroom that they don’t really understand the alarming spike in murders and applause filled the room when mayors said police officers’ sinking morale could be a factor.
………

 Could the root cause be drugs? Guns? Gangs? Perhaps a little of each, said Chuck Wexler, a former top officer in Boston and head of the Police Executive Research Forum.

 Wexler tried to sum up the day-long discussion for Lynch, who arrived near the end. But there was another problem, he told her, one that hits closer to home for the nation’s top cop.

 “Perhaps the most difficult to calibrate, but the most significant,” he said, “is this notion of a reduction in proactive policing.”

 Police chiefs and elected leaders from Baltimore, Chicago, New York and St. Louis were more blunt:

 “We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Lynch. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”

 There is no evidence of a broad retraction of police engagement with the public in major cities, and no participant in Wednesday’s summit presented a single example of lackluster policing that somehow contributed to a violent crime.

Our police forces have increasingly come to resemble an occupying military, and the training has inculcated police in a culture of impunity.

Anything that reverses these trends is a good things, whether it is YouTube or politicians who are willing to stand up to the police unions, I’ll take what I can get.

The Good Guy’s Win

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A few days ago, I noted how law enforcement came down on a New Hampshire library for operating a TOR node.

Today, we earn that the West Lebanon library told the US state security apparatus to go pound sand:

The Kilton Public Library in West Lebanon will reactivate its piece of the anonymous internet browsing network Tor, despite law enforcement’s concerns that the network might be used for criminal activities.

The Lebanon Library Board of Trustees let stand its unanimous June decision to devote some of the library’s excess bandwidth to a node, or “relay,” for Tor, after a full room of about 50 residents and other interested members of the public expressed their support for Lebanon’s participation in the system at a meeting Tuesday night.

“With any freedom there is risk,” library board Chairman Francis Oscadal said. “It came to me that I could vote in favor of the good . . . or I could vote against the bad.

“I’d rather vote for the good because there is value to this.”

I haz a happy.

And yet Another Element of the US State Security Apparatus Goes Rogue

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It appears that the DEA specifically targeted the Evo Morales government in Bolivia in what appears to be something very close to an attempted coup:

The United States has secretly indicted top officials connected to the government of Bolivian President Evo Morales for their alleged involvement in a cocaine trafficking scheme. The indictments, secured in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting called “Operation Naked King,” have not been previously reported.

Morales, a former leader of Bolivia’s coca growers union, has long been at loggerheads with the DEA. In 2008, Morales expelled the agency from the country and embarked on his own strategy of combatting drug trafficking, acknowledging the traditional uses of coca in Bolivian culture and working cooperatively with coca growers to regulate some legal activity and to promote alternative development elsewhere. Morales’ plan has been effective at reducing cultivation, according to the United Nations.

But that doesn’t mean the DEA accepted its eviction quietly. In fact, the agency went after members of Morales’ administration in an apparent effort to undermine his leadership.

The sealed indictments, revealed last week in a lawsuit filed by long-time DEA informant Carlos Toro, target Walter Álvarez, a top Bolivian air force official; the late Raul García, father of Vice President Álvaro García Linera; Faustino Giménez, an Argentine citizen and Bolivian resident who is said to be close to the vice president; and Katy Alcoreza, described as an intelligence agent for Morales. Toro said in the court document that he played an integral role in securing the indictments as part of the DEA’s undercover investigation into the alleged Bolivian cocaine trafficking ring, which the agency ran out of its office in Asuncion, Paraguay.

………

The U.S. government and the DEA made no secret of their displeasure when their longtime nemesis, Morales, was elected. “If radicals continue to hijack the indigenous movement, we could find ourselves faced with a narcostate that supports the uncontrolled cultivation of coca,” General James T. Hill, a U.S. army commander with the Southern Command, told the House Armed Services Committee in March 2004, referring to Morales’ movement.

“I don’t think there’s an attractive or viable future by becoming a narcostate,” John Walters, then the Bush administration’s drug czar, told The New York Times the next year, when it appeared Morales was on his way to victory.

Morales used the accusations to his political benefit. “They accuse me of everything,” Morales said at a campaign rally, according to the same Times article. “They say Evo is a drug trafficker, that Evo is a narcoterrorist. They don’t know how to defend their position, so they attack us.”

………

By 2014, the Times was writing about Bolivia’s renaissance:

Tucked away in the shadow of its more populous and more prosperous neighbors, tiny, impoverished Bolivia, once a perennial economic basket case, has suddenly become a different kind of exception — this time in a good way.

Its economy grew an estimated 6.5 percent last year, among the strongest rates in the region. Inflation has been kept in check. The budget is balanced, and once-crippling government debt has been slashed. And the country has a rainy-day fund of foreign reserves so large for its relatively small economy that it could be the envy of nearly every other country in the world. The Times article notes that extreme poverty under Morales has plummeted, despite — or, more likely, because of — his refusal to follow the path the U.S. has urged.

………

In the face of U.S. denunciations that Bolivia would become a narcostate under Morales, the country has instead managed to reduce coca leaf cultivation, especially over the past five years. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, total production of dried coca leaf fell 11 percent from 2013 to 2014, and has fallen by an average of nearly 10 percent each year since 2011. Interdiction efforts targeting coca cultivation have also dropped precipitously since the DEA’s dismissal in 2008, though confiscations of cocaine continued to rise until 2013, when they dropped off significantly. In 2014, confiscations of processed cocaine hydrochloride returned to previous levels, though interdiction of coca leaves and cocaine base remained low.

“[Drug trafficking] must be fought — we are convinced of that — and we are doing so more effectively and more wisely,” Morales told Al Jazeera in a 2014 interview. “When the United States was in control of counternarcotics, the US governments used drug trafficking for purely geopolitical purposes …. The US uses drug trafficking and terrorism for political control …. We have nationalised the fight against drug trafficking.”

In 2009, Hillary Clinton warned of Morales and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s “fear mongering” in written testimony during her secretary of state confirmation hearings. Yet Morales’ fears, it turns out, weren’t rooted in mere paranoia. The DEA was, in fact, out to get him.

The revelation of Operation Naked King goes to show that Bolivian leaders’ paranoia was well justified, said Kathryn Ledebur, who runs the Andean Information Network based in Bolivia. “US authorities frequently dismiss Bolivian government denunciations about the DEA and US intervention as absurd speculation, but these revelations show what is common knowledge on the ground — there has long been an alarming lack of oversight of DEA operations in Latin America, including recurring mission creep and a violation of agreements with host countries,” she wrote in an email.

What is going on here is very simple: A coup attempt by the DEA, and they are trying to take this government down not because their policies are a failure, but because their policies are a success.

If other governments follow their example, bad things will happen:   the DEA will face a situation where their most important path to career advancement an visibility, f%$#ing around with other sovereign nations, will be curtailed.

At some point, lead to reductions in budget and manpower at the agency, so clearly Evo Morales must be overthrown, because, to quote Mel Brooks, “Holy underwear! Sheriff murdered! Innocent women and children blown to bits! We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen! We must do something about this immediately! Immediately! Immediately! Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!”

This is not surprising.  After all, one of the first major foreign initiatives of the Obama administration was to tacitly support a coup against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras.

Haven’t we f%$#ed up Latin America enough since 1823?

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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A small library in Lebanon, New Hampshire decided set up TOR on its network.

This was just shut down as a result of threats from the Department of Homeland Security:

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”

………

After Macrina conducted a privacy training session at the Kilton library in May, she talked to the librarian about also setting up a Tor relay, the mechanism by which users across the Internet can hide their identity.

The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina’s plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.

A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.

DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”

When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”

For those who don’t speak the language of law enforcement threats, “Needed to make the city aware of it,” means, “Threatening to link public officials to child porn.”

The action taken by the library is legal, and is very much in the tradition of libraries promoting the free exchange of information, but the US state security apparatus cannot tolerate this, even though the US government is the largest single funder of this network.

And in the News of the Self-Evident

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The Justice Department has determined that police tactics worsened unrest and violence during the Ferguson protests:

Tactics used by police during the days of sometimes-violent street protest last year in Ferguson, Missouri, increased tensions between law enforcement and protesters, according to a report Thursday by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Service, known as COPS.

The report said the use of dogs, snipers and tactical vehicles designed for the military “inflamed tensions and created fear among demonstrators.”

The COPS office reviewed how police responded in the 17 days after the fatal police shooting Aug. 9, 2014, of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown.

Although it focused on the conduct of four agencies — St. Louis County police, St. Louis Metropolitan police, the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Ferguson Police Department — it said more than 50 law enforcement agencies were eventually involved. Their participation suffered from “inconsistency in direction” and a lack of effective communication.

The report said using dog teams for controlling crowds of protesters “invokes powerful emotions in many observing citizens and protesters, particularly where racial tensions exist.” Tear gas was used inappropriately, it says, without considering how protesters could safely move away.

I am a bit more skeptical of what was going on.

I think that the actions of law enforcement in and around Ferguson were calculated to stoke unrest, because they wanted a pretext to respond with violence in order to assert their authority.

Law enforcement wanted to create a violent situation in order to justify their use of violence, and they hoped for, and largely got, a complacent media to buy into their narrative in order to discredit the protesters narrative.

That Sheriff and DA Who Blamed Black Lives Matter for the Shooting of a Deputy? Turns out That They Were Lying through Their Asses Off

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Will Bunch adds his own perspective on this based on his own experience jumping to conclusions, though I think that he is being to kind.

Bunch jumped to conclusions, but these guys clearly seized an opportunity to push a political agenda:

One of the easiest things in this world is to leap to a conclusion — especially when there’s some circumstantial evidence that fits what you’re looking for. It’s also a very bad thing to do. I know because I’ve done it myself — and I regret it to this day. Six years ago, a part-time census worker in rural Appalachia was found strung from a tree with the word “Fed” scrawled on his body. Although I was careful to note that the case was still under investigation, I wrote about the man’s death in the context of right-wing anti-government chatter during the first year of the Obama administration. I was writing a book about the Tea Party at the time and had just gotten back from a gun rally in Kentucky (true story). Anyway, it turned out the man had staged his suicide so his beneficiary could collect the insurance. I’d made a mistake…and also learned a lesson.

You’d think if anyone would know better than a lowly journalist/blogger not to leap to conclusions — especially on little or no evidence — it would be high-ranking law enforcement officials in a major American city.

………

Those are the facts of a sad and infuriating story. But top officials in Harris County — including the sheriff and the district attorney — went well beyond the facts of the case. Deputy Goforth had barely been transported to the morgue when these law-enforcement officials held a nationally televised news conference to blame the murder on the #BlackLivesMatter movement that’s been confronting America’s uniquely high rate of police-involving killings. They did so even as they also acknowledged they had absolutely no information — none, nada — about what the killer’s actual motive was

………

If Anderson or Hickman had uttered such baseless accusations in court, their words would have been tossed out by the judge and perhaps the basis for misconduct charges. Instead, the invented allegation was barely questioned by a feckless mainstream news media, then amplified by the right-wing echo chamber of faux news and political opportunists who seized on a chance to squelch a growing movement for social justice by linking it to a high-profile murder. It’s fair to note that officials in Harris County were emotional about the murder of a colleague — but where was the professionalism to know not to toss a match onto a political bonfire, with such rank speculation?

This behavior is contemptible, but it is also not unexpected, though it was egregious enough that the Houston Chronicle, a paper that could never be mistaken for the liberal media, also excoriated this behavior, particularly on the part of the Sheriff (paid subscription required, but you can also find it in the Google cache) noting that, “Linking a non-violent group with a cold-blooded murder, without proof, isn’t leadership.”

In the meantime, Fox News is gleefully using this as an excuse to use euphemisms for  n****r, which I’m sure amuses their audience no end.

What Ta-Nehisi Coates Said

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He notes that there is no Ferguson effect, and that this is a matter of fact, not of opinion:

The Times has a story today on the rise in homicide in some American cities. It’s an important story—one which is hurt by the utterly baseless suggestion that those who protested against Ferguson may well have blood on their hands:

The New York Times quoted two academics, one of whom suggested that police are too concerned to act with impunity, and the other who notes that the rise in murder rates in the St. Louis area predated the shooting of Michael Brown.

For police to be in fear of prosecutions of their misconduct* to be driving an increase in crime, it would have to occur after the trigger.

As my colleague Brentin Mock points out, to observe that homicides began increasing in St. Louis before the protests is not to make a subjective interpretation, but to offer a knowable and verifiable fact. If the “Ferguson Effect” is real, how can it be that it started before the Ferguson protests?

Neglecting this question is neither dispassionate nor high-minded. It is the sort of insidious “false equivalence” that so rightly irks my colleague James Fallows.  “False equivalence” runs contrary to the mission to journalism—it obscures where journalists are charged with clarifying. A reasonable person could read the Times’ story and conclude that there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it. That is the path away from journalism and toward noncommittal stenography: Some people think climate change is real, some do not. Some people believe in UFOs, others doubt their existence. Some think brain cancer can be cured with roots and berries, but others say proof has yet to emerge.

I’m sick of this, “Opinions on the shape of the world differ” crap.

*Or maybe it isn’t fear. Maybe it’s a bunch of cops throwing a tantrum. Certainly, it appears that some of their behavior, particularly with regard to the NYPD and Mayor De Blasio to be the acts of a petulant child.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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So, the cops raid the house looking for a felon who is already in custody, and hold the naked mom and her kids at gunpoint as a result.

Anyone wanna guess if anyone involved in this fiasco is going to suffer any consequences but this family?

Silly rabbit, accountability is for civilians:

Police terrorized a naked woman and her children at gunpoint last week during a no-knock raid on the wrong apartment.

Marianne Diaz said she was awakened about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday by SWAT officers knocking down the door to her Worcester, Massachusetts, apartment as officers wearing helmets and shields burst inside and pointed “big guns” at her head, reported the Telegram & Gazette.

“Stop f*cking crying and take care of your f*cking kids,” one officer commanded, Diaz said.

Diaz said her 7-year-old daughter was shaking in terror as she held her 18-month-old daughter in her lap, and she said officers would not allow her to cover up for about 10 minutes — after a woman officer frisked her nude body.

………

Prosecutors said Friday that police acted on the “best information” they had before obtaining a search warrant from a Central District Court judge, but court documents show the man police were looking for had been arrested nearly two weeks earlier and listed another address as his home.

………

Diaz has asked the city and police department to investigate why the raid was permitted in the first place, but prosecutors have already said it “was executed in the manner it was for the safety of all involved.”

The young mother said she still couldn’t believe what had happened.

“Before they left, one (officer) said, ‘We treated you with respect,’” Diaz said. “They didn’t even apologize.”

There will be on consequences.

There are never any consequences, which is why we have police acting like an occupying force.

District Attorneys in California Have One Fewer Way to Let Killer Cops Walk

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California has just passed a law that forbids the use of secret grand juries to investigate police involved shootings:

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday making California the first state in the nation to ban the use of grand juries to decide whether police officers should face criminal charges when they kill people in the line of duty.

The ban, which will go into effect next year, comes after grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, made controversial decisions in secret hearings last year not to bring charges against officers who killed unarmed black men, sparking protests across the country. Calls for transparency also have come amid national concerns about disparate treatment of blacks and other racial minorities when encounters with cops turned deadly in Baltimore, Cincinnati and South Carolina.

“What the governor’s decision says is, he gets it — the people don’t want secrecy when it comes to officer-involved shootings,” said retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor LaDoris Cordell, the first African-American appointed as a judge in Northern California and a key supporter of the bill. “We’re not trying to get more officers indicted. We’re saying, ‘Whatever you decide, do it in the open.'”

What we have seen recently is that there are a lot of DA’s out there who use grand juries to justify not pursuing bad cops.

Now those DA’s will no longer have plausible deniability.

Now it will go to a preliminary hearing, with a judge, and where defense counsel can contest the facts and the law, in public.

It’s not creating a state level prosecutor who’s only job is investigating and prosecuting police shootings, but it’s better than the status quo.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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It turns out that the DHS no fly list is basically based on hunches with a pseudo-scientific gloss:

The Obama administration’s no-fly lists and broader watchlisting system is based on predicting crimes rather than relying on records of demonstrated offenses, the government has been forced to admit in court.

In a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping US and other citizens from travelling on airplanes is a matter of “predictive assessments about potential threats”, the government asserted in May.

“By its very nature, identifying individuals who ‘may be a threat to civil aviation or national security’ is a predictive judgment intended to prevent future acts of terrorism in an uncertain context,” Justice Department officials Benjamin C Mizer and Anthony J Coppolino told the court on 28 May.

“Judgments concerning such potential threats to aviation and national security call upon the unique prerogatives of the Executive in assessing such threats.”

It is believed to be the government’s most direct acknowledgement to date that people are not allowed to fly because of what the government believes they might do and not what they have already done.

………

On Friday, the ACLU asked Judge Anna Brown to conduct her own review of the error rate in the government’s predictions modeling – a process the ACLU likens to the “pre-crime” of Philip K Dick’s science fiction.

“I believe this is the first case in which a court is being asked to review the basis for the government’s predictive model for blacklisting people who have never even been charged, let alone convicted, of a violent crime,” said ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi.

In March, as a result of the lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security began informing people of their inclusion on a flight blacklist and permitting them to file a “redress inquiry”. The resulting non-adversarial process has the government perform “careful consideration” of its reasons for blacklisting, with the Transportation Security Agency director as final arbiter. The ACLU considers the new process insufficient.

But the Obama administration is seeking to block the release of further information about how the predictions are made, for the same reason it opposes providing greater information for challenging watchlist inclusion: damage to national security.

………

In April 2014, five people, all of whom are Muslim, claimed that they were suddenly forbidden from flying after declining FBI pressure to become informants or in order to place pressure upon them to do so. Informants, along with social media postings, have become a driving factor in the FBI’s uptick in arrests of people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

In July 2014, the Intercept published an internal watchlisting guidance indicating that nominations to government watchlists were growing, with few rejections. Social media posts were among acceptable criteria, and acquittals in court did not necessarily lead to removals from the list, the Intercept’s document showed.

We are living in an era where the state security apparatus, and the executive that is supposed to ensure that they work in accordance with our interests and our values are thoroughly corrupted by power and fear.

Obama’s message is to tell us not to worry, because he is a good and trustworthy man.

The whole point of our system, with its separation of powers, is that we are not supposed to rely on the the good nature of our leaders.

Obama has taken the worst excesses of the Bush administration, and normalized them.

This will Obama’s most important legacy, and it is not a positive one.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever!™

So Not Surprised………

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It turns out that drug sniffing dogs are little better than a coin flip, so they are yet another way that law enforcement manufactures probable cause for a search:

Police are now speaking out about a decision from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that drug dogs signal for drugs nearly every time they are sent to sniff a vehicle or home. This decision shows that police dog searches are not legitimate and that they are just used as a pretense for officers to violate the rights of innocent people.

The case stemmed from a 2010 traffic stop in which 20 kilograms of cocaine were found in a vehicle after a search from a police dog named “Lex.”

The suspect ended up taking the case to court, and while his sentence was upheld, some very interesting points were uncovered during the investigation.

It was revealed that Lex, the drug dog in question, signaled for drugs 93% of the time, even when there were no drugs present. These findings show that dog sniffs are not accurate and are simply used as a tool to justify a full police search. The findings also indicated that Lex was incorrect roughly 40% of the time.

“Lex’s overall accuracy rate … is not much better than a coin flip,” the ruling stated.

………

Last year, we reported on the high-profile case of Timothy Young. Young was pulled over for failure to use his turn signal when a police K-9 was said to have alerted to his vehicle. After police found no evidence of drugs in his car or on his person, he was then handcuffed and driven to a hospital an hour away. During this forced visit to the hospital, Young was x-rayed and sodomized in search of non-existent substances.

Still think if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear? Ask Mr. Young that question…..

Live in obedient fear, citizen.