Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

Seriously, Pocket Change and a Meaningless Probation?

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David Petraeus has pled guilty to to leaking top secret information, and his deal includes a two point “enhancement” for obstructing justice by lying to the FBI, and the DoJ is asking foir a $40,000.oo fine and 2 years probation:

………DOJ quietly announced it had reached a plea deal with former CIA Director David Petraeus for leaking Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information materials to his mistress, Paula Broadwell.
Among the materials in the eight “Black Books” Petraeus shared with Broadwell were:

…classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings, and defendant DAVID HOWELL PETRAEUS’s discussions with the President of the United States of America.

The Black Books contained national defense information, including Top Secret/SCI and code word information.

Petraeus kept those Black Books full of code word information including covert identities and conversations with the President “in a rucksack up there somewhere.”

Petreaus retained those Black Books after he signed his debriefing agreement upon leaving DOD, in which he attested “I give my assurance that there is no classified material in my possession, custody, or control at this time.” He kept those Black Books in an unlocked desk drawer.

For mishandling some of the most important secrets the nation has, Petraeus will plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Petraeus, now an employee of a top private equity firm, will be fined $40,000 and serve two years of probation.

He will not, however, be asked to plead guilty at all for lying to FBI investigators. In an interview on October 26, 2012, he told the FBI,

(a) he had never provided any classified information to his biographer, and (b) he had never facilitated the provision of classified information to his biographer.

This is a guy whose record seems to be more of an exercise in self-promotion than anything else, and it’s pretty clear that he deliberately mishandled classified information because he wanted to help his girl friend, and it also clear that he lied to the FBI with the specific intent of obstructing an investigation, and the Department of Justice doesn’t want any jail time.

I hope that the judge goes a bit further than the Department of Justice.

Headline of the Day

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DEA Warns of Stoned Rabbits if Utah Passes Medical Marijuana.

The dead enders in the drug prohibition industry have become increasingly shrill as the rest of the population realizes that prison works to fight drug use like gasoline puts out fires.

The story gets even weirder:

Utah is considering a bill that would allow patients with certain debilitating conditions to be treated with edible forms of marijuana. If the bill passes, the state’s wildlife may “cultivate a taste” for the plant, lose their fear of humans, and basically be high all the time. That’s according to testimony presented to a Utah Senate panel (time stamp 58:00) last week by an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“I deal in facts. I deal in science,” said special agent Matt Fairbanks, who’s been working in the state for a decade. He is member of the “marijuana eradication” team in Utah. Some of his colleagues in Georgia recently achieved notoriety by raiding a retiree’s garden and seizing a number of okra plants

.(emphasis original)

Illegal pot growing does constitute an environmental issue, frequently the farms contribute to erosion, and apply various agricultural chemicals to excess, but stoned bunny rabbits?

Seriously?

I think that this “Reefer Madness” bullsh%$ needs to be called out.

I will note that the Utah senate panel went with sanity, as opposed to the, “Think of the poor bunnies,” claptrap, and passed the bill along to the state senate.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen, Eh?

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Up in the Great White North, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has determined anti-fossile fuel activists are a terrorism threats:

The RCMP has labelled the “anti-petroleum” movement as a growing and violent threat to Canada’s security, raising fears among environmentalists that they face increased surveillance, and possibly worse, under the Harper government’s new terrorism legislation.

In highly charged language that reflects the government’s hostility toward environmental activists, an RCMP intelligence assessment warns that foreign-funded groups are bent on blocking oil sands expansion and pipeline construction, and that the extremists in the movement are willing to resort to violence.

“There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,” concludes the report which is stamped “protected/Canadian eyes only” and is dated Jan. 24, 2014. The report was obtained by Greenpeace.

“If violent environmental extremists engage in unlawful activity, it jeopardizes the health and safety of its participants, the general public and the natural environment.”

The government has tabled Bill C-51, which provides greater power to the security agencies to collect information on and disrupt the activities of suspected terrorist groups. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has identified the threat as violent extremists motivated by radical Islamic views, the legislation would also expand the ability of government agencies to infiltrate environmental groups on the suspicion that they are promoting civil disobedience or other criminal acts to oppose resource projects.

It’s pretty clear that the RCMP report was done at the instigation of the government, not the other way around.

It’s also pretty clear that Harper is a nasty piece of work, at least by Canadian standards.

Rachel Maddow is Wrong, and the Senate Republicans are Right

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She ascribes the delays in her nomination purely to animus on the part of Republicans.

While I agree that the bulk of the opposition is driven by hatred and political expedience, but we also need to look at what the Republicans are actually saying, and the history of the Obama administration’s approach to corruption in the finance industry.

The stated reason given by Republicans to oppose Lynch is her role in what is clearly a laughable settlement with HSBC over money laundering and tax evasion, and I would argue that Obama’s selection of Ms. Lynch is likely to have been driven (at least in part) by her cozy relationship with the Banksters.

It is clear that Barack Obama is determined not to have a meaningful accounting of Wall Street criminality:

Senate Republicans are seizing on the global tax scandal engulfing HSBC to delay the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general, the Guardian can reveal.

The Republican chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Chuck Grassley, was on Friday preparing a fresh tranche of questions for Lynch about the huge cache of leaked data showing how HSBC’s subsidiary helped conceal billions of dollars from domestic tax authorities.

Grassley and another Republican senator are planning to investigate whether Lynch could have done more to stand up to the world’s second largest bank.

Lynch negotiated a controversial settlement with HSBC in 2012, after the bank admitted to facilitating money-laundering by Mexican drug cartels and helping clients evade US sanctions.

Now there are questions over why she did not also pursue HSBC over evidence that its Swiss arm helped US taxpayers hide their assets.

The secret bank files – obtained and examined in detail this week in a series of reports by the Guardian, CBS 60 Minutes and other media outlets – reveal that HSBC’s Swiss arm colluded with some high net-worth individuals to hide their assets from tax authorities across the world.

The new data, leaked by a whistleblower, was obtained by French tax authorities and shared with the US government in 2010, raising questions over why the Department of Justice has yet to take action against HSBC in the US.

It’s a legitimate question, particularly since HSBC’s acts have been egregious enough to lead Swiss law enforcement to raid HSBC.

Considering the degree to which secrecy, and tax evasion, have been central to the business of Swiss banking, the fact that they have initiated a criminal investigation, and that the US Department of Justice has not, is telling.

It should be noted that Lynch claimed that she did not have sufficient evidence for criminal prosecutions, but as Empty Wheel notes, “Sure, she and her prosecutors were unable to find the evidence in Carl Levin’s gift-wrapped case. But trust her, she seems to be saying, she might one day see fit to charge some warm bodies with fraud if she’s confirmed.”

Note that there are now allegations that HSBC gave material support to terrorists.

Hello? It’s Time for the FBI to Visit and Start Breaking Heads!

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Last week, I noted that the County DA had charged police with murder for shooting a homeless man.

Well, now the City Attorney and the Police are conspiring to exclude prosecutors from police involved shootings:

This week, Bernalillo County (N.M.) District Attorney Kari Brandenburg charged two Albuquerque police officers with murder in the killing of homeless man James Boyd. The shooting was captured on video and widely covered in the national media. Brandenburg’s decision comes on the heels of the controversial non-indictments in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which sparked protests around the country. It didn’t take long for Albuquerque police and their supporters to react.

 A top prosecutor for District Attorney Kari Brandenburg’s office was shut out of a briefing after a fatal police shooting near San Mateo and Constitution NE on Tuesday evening, Brandenburg told KRQE News 13.

Police officials and others were gathering to discuss the most recent developments in the investigation a few hours after the shooting, Brandenburg said. Chief Deputy DA Sylvia Martinez attempted to join the briefing, but Deputy City Attorney Kathryn Levy would not let Martinez attend.

What Brandenburg said happened Tuesday evening would be an unprecedented move by city of Albuquerque officials, and it comes a day after Brandenburg charged two APD officers with murder in the March shooting death of homeless camper James Boyd.

Levy invoked the charges in barring Martinez from the briefing, according to Brandenburg.

“Sylvia was told that our office has a conflict of interest because we charged the officers,” she said.

Reached by telephone for comment Tuesday evening, Levy, who has for years worked as APD’s attorney, refused to answer questions . . .

………

Prosecutors’ presence at the scenes of police shootings and inside the investigatory briefings has been ubiquitous for decades here. In fact, the DA’s participation in the investigations is memorialized in a written agreement with APD and other agencies signed in 2004.If true, this is really reprehensible behavior and an abdication of office on the part of both police and the deputy city attorney. It’s also just the latest example of law enforcement officers and their supporters demonstrating incredible petulance in retaliation for public scrutiny or the rare attempt to hold rogue cops accountable for their actions.

(Emphasis mine)

This is deeply corrupt.

What’s more it’s deeply evil.

It is an attempt to create an absolute impunity for bad cops.

The Feds need to be involved, and they need to kick some major league ass.

Finally, Eric Holder Does Something Meaningful About Law Enforcement Overreach

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Eric Holder has massively curtailed the asset forfeiture program:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.

The program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. It allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.

“With this new policy, effective immediately, the Justice Department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons,” Holder said in a statement.

Any actions to curtail a procedure that can only be described as enforcement under the color of law is a good thing.

It it both corrupt and corrupting.

So I Guess, Occassionally, You Actually Get Charged for Committing Murder on Camera

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The Albuquerque DA has has charged two police officers with murder in the shooting of a homeless man:

Declaring that “I have a job to do and I’m doing it,” District Attorney Kari Brandenburg said her office was filing murder charges against two Albuquerque police officers in the shooting of a mentally ill homeless camper in the Sandia foothills last spring in a case captured on a police video that shocked the nation.

The charges filed Monday against officer Dominique Perez and recently retired Detective Keith Sandy appear to be the first against an APD officer for an on-duty fatal shooting in at least 50 years. Both men are charged with an open count of murder for the March 2014 shooting death of James Boyd following a four-hour standoff.

Brandenburg said Perez and Sandy would not be booked into jail until after a preliminary hearing is held to determine if there is enough evidence for either of them to stand trial on any of three charges – first-degree murder, second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter.

………

Boyd, 36, had been camping in a restricted area of open space in Albuquerque’s foothills when he was told to leave by Open Space officers. Boyd, who had a history of mental illness and run-ins with police, refused and brandished at least one of the two small knives he carried during the standoff with police.

More officers were called to the scene, with more than 20 present at one point.

Officer Perez’s helmet-mounted camera captured the final moments of the standoff, when Boyd appeared to be complying with commands to leave. As he bent down to gather his belongings, an officer throws a flash-bang grenade at his feet. Another officer sends a police dog at Boyd, who pulls the knives out of his pockets again.

As he appears to turn away from the officers, Sandy and Perez fire three rounds apiece from assault-style rifles, striking Boyd in the back. Officers continue to yell at him to drop the knives.

“Please don’t hurt me anymore. I can’t move,” Boyd says as he lies on the ground.

Officers fire bean-bag rounds at him as he’s on the ground, then let loose a police dog, which grabs his leg and shakes it. He doesn’t move. Officers then approach and cuff him.

Boyd, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, died the next day at the hospital.

All caught on tape.

And it only took 10 months.

I am still dubious that this will result in anything resembling a vigorous prosecution, because rather unsurprisingly, she appears to do this under duress, as her earlier actions indicate:

In spring 2012, Brandenburg and District Court judges agreed that she would temporarily stop using the “investigative grand juries” after Journal stories made the inner workings of those proceedings public.

In January 2013, Brandenburg announced her intention to resume using the special grand juries to review police shootings, but state District Court judges put a halt to that.

Attorneys for victims’ families have called the investigative grand jury process a “sham” in court filings.

In halting the “investigative grand juries,” the judges told Brandenburg “that the appearance of a lack of impartiality is impossible to avoid, especially given that the procedure is used only for police officers and specifically limited to officer-involved shootings.”

Journal stories about the internal workings of the grand juries showed that grand jurors were provided instructions on different versions of justified shootings, but no criminal statutes; prosecutors met with officers to review testimony; and prosecutors asked officers leading questions.

And she wanted to reinstate that system.

So, I do not expect a conviction, or a meaningful plea deal.

Yeah, Nothing Suspicious Here

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A grand juror for the Michael Brown shooting investigation is suing St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch so that he can talk about the grand jury proceedings.

The juror claims the the prosecutor lied about what happened in the grand jury, and wants to be allowed to refute his statements:

A grand juror is suing St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in an effort to speak out on what happened in the Darren Wilson case. Under typical circumstances, grand jurors are prohibited by law from discussing cases they were involved in.

 The grand juror, referred to only as “Grand Juror Doe” in the lawsuit, takes issue with how McCulloch characterized the case. McCulloch released evidence presented to the grand jury and publicly discussed the case after the grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, then a Ferguson police officer, in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American.

 “In [the grand juror]’s view, the current information available about the grand jurors’ views is not entirely accurate — especially the implication that all grand jurors believed that there was no support for any charges,” the lawsuit says. (A grand jury’s decision does not have to be unanimous.)

 “Moreover, the public characterization of the grand jurors’ view of witnesses and evidence does not accord with [Doe]’s own,” the lawsuit continued. “From [the grand juror]’s perspective, the investigation of Wilson had a stronger focus on the victim than in other cases presented to the grand jury.” Doe also believes the legal standards were conveyed in a “muddled” and “untimely” manner to the grand jury.

 In the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri argues that this case is unique and that the usual reasons for requiring the jurors to maintain secrecy should not apply.

This is a special case.

The juror is arguing  that there was deliberate prosecutorial misconduct, and that they should be allowed to publicly air these concerns.

I agree.

It is clear that McCulloch deliberately threw the case, and if this evidence is becomes, perhaps it might lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor, or the DoJ looking at the shenanigans at the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office.

Naaah ……… I’m just kidding.

Silly rabbit, black lives do not matter.

Black Cops Fear the Cops Too………

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You would think that if there was a group of minorities who would know how to behave toward the police, it would be black cops, but they fear encountering the police as well:

From the dingy donut shops of Manhattan to the cloistered police watering holes in Brooklyn, a number of black NYPD officers say they have experienced the same racial profiling that cost Eric Garner his life.

………

“It makes good headlines to say this is occurring, but I don’t think you can validate it until you look into the circumstances they were stopped in,” said Bernard Parks, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is African American.

“Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with.”

Blacks made up 73 percent of the shooting perpetrators in New York in 2011 and were 23 percent of the population.

A number of academics believe those statistics are potentially skewed because police over-focus on black communities, while ignoring crime in other areas. They also note that being stopped as a suspect does not automatically equate to criminality. Nearly 90 percent of blacks stopped by the NYPD, for example, are found not to be engaged in any crime.

The black officers interviewed said they had been racially profiled by white officers exclusively, and about one third said they made some form of complaint to a supervisor.

All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions. The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained from doing so either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system.

In declining to comment to Reuters, the NYPD did not respond to a specific request for data showing the racial breakdown of officers who made complaints and how such cases were handled.

………

“There’s no real outlet to report the abuse,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain who said he was stigmatized and retaliated against throughout his 22-year career for speaking out against racial profiling and police brutality.

Officers make complaints to the NYPD’s investigative arm, the Internal Affairs Bureau, only to later have their identities leaked, said Adams.

One of the better-known cases of alleged racial profiling of a black policeman concerns Harold Thomas, a decorated detective who retired this year after 30 years of service, including in New York’s elite Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Shortly before 1 a.m. one night in August 2012, Thomas was leaving a birthday party at a trendy New York nightclub.

Wearing flashy jewelry, green sweatpants and a white t-shirt, Thomas walked toward his brand-new white Escalade when two white police officers approached him. What happened next is in dispute, but an altercation ensued, culminating in Thomas getting his head smashed against the hood of his car and then spun to the ground and put in handcuffs.

“If I was white, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Thomas, who has filed a lawsuit against the city over the incident. The New York City Corporation Counsel said it could not comment on pending litigation.

At an ale house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last week, a group of black police officers from across the city gathered for the beer and chicken wing special. They discussed how the officers involved in the Garner incident could have tried harder to talk down an upset Garner, or sprayed mace in his face, or forced him to the ground without using a chokehold. They all agreed his death was avoidable.

Said one officer from the 106th Precinct in Queens, “That could have been any one of us.”

This is arguably a more damning indictment of the inherent racism of the police as an institution than Michael Brown, or Eric Garner, or Amadou Diallo, or any one of hundreds of other black (and brown) men.

I would argue that the picture is even bigger than that.  I would argue that this is actually something that we as a society demand.

The police are not a source of this sickness in this society, they are a product of this sickness in our society.

Quote of the Day

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If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

—Charlie Pierce

He is taking about how our torturers and our police demand to operate with impunity.

Another Statement of Obama’s that is “Inoperative”*

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Cliff Stone, who worked with the State Department finding places to send innocent Guantánamo detainees once they were cleared for released, has resigned in the slow pace of releases:

The State Department envoy who negotiates detainee transfers from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is resigning, dealing another blow to President Obama’s efforts to close a facility that top administration officials say is a blight on the country’s international standing.

The resignation of Cliff Sloan, a close confidant of Secretary of State John Kerry, comes as officials at the State Department and the White House have increasingly expressed frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Sloan denied that he was leaving because he was frustrated by foot-dragging at the Pentagon. He said he had always intended to stay a maximum of 18 months, noting that he was right on schedule.

“Frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners,” my ass.

The military is not a democracy. Barack Obama is commander-in-chief.

If someone is dragging their feet, Obama can fire them.

What’s more, I would argue that he has a moral obligation to fire them.

Guantánamo is more than a moral cancer on America. It is a source of outrage in the Arab world, and is one of the most power recruiting tools that Jihadis have.

*Yes, I am invoking the memory of former Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.

I Finally Have Some Meaningful Thoughts About the Police Shootings in New York this Saturday

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My first thought is that the NRA is a much bigger threat to the safety of police officers than peaceful protesters, civilian review boards, or criticism:

The last year when Ismaaiyl Brinsley—the man who killed two New York City cops on Saturday—should have been able to buy or carry a gun was 2008, when he was convicted of felony shoplifting, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to more felonies after he shot a woman’s car with a stolen handgun. Over his life, he had 19 arrests in Ohio and Georgia.

As a felon, Brinsley was barred under federal law from buying a gun. Had he undergone a background check, he would have failed it and authorities could be notified. Yet the National Rifle Association argues that bad guys will get their hands on guns regardless of the law. The lobby points to violence in states with strong gun laws as evidence of gun control’s ineffectiveness.

In fact, it’s weak gun laws that enable felons, domestic abusers, and the mentally ill to arm themselves. Whereas licensed gun sellers must conduct background checks, unlicensed secondary market sellers face no such requirement in more laissez-faire states.

This is a direct result of the gun show loopholes and other similar exceptions foisted upon us by the ammosexual lobby.

The second thought is that the advocates for police in general, and the PBA in New York City in particular, are demanding that criticism and accountability for the police be non-existent:

I covered New York politics for 15 years, and I saw some awfully tense moments between the police and Democratic politicians. But there has never been anything remotely like the war the cops are waging right now against Mayor Bill de Blasio for the thought crime of saying something that was completely unremarkable and so obviously true that in other contexts we don’t even bat an eye when someone says it. And for that, the mayor has blood on his hands, as Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Pat Lynch said Saturday evening after the hideous assassinations of two NYPD officers?

Let’s rewind the tape here. On Dec. 3, in the wake of the Staten Island grand jury’s refusal to indict in the case of the police homicide of Eric Garner, de Blasio gave a press conference at a Staten Island church. He spoke of the need to heal and so on, the usual politician’s rhetoric, and then he uttered these words:

This is profoundly personal for me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. I said to him I did. Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

Dante de Blasio, as you surely know, is a mixed-race young man of 16 who looks black and sports a large, ’70s-style afro. Does anyone seriously think that his father should not have told him what he did? Come on. We all know the odds (actually, we don’t, more on which later). We hear every prominent black man in America who has a son and who decides to talk about this publicly—football players and actors and others—say exactly the same thing. We’ve heard it hundreds of times. Are these men lying? Are they paranoid weirdos? Of course they aren’t. They are fathers, describing to the rest of us what I thought was a widely acknowledged reality.

I understand that any management-labor dialogue is necessarily fraught, but this is literally a prescription for a police state, and Pat Lynch should be condemned.

What’s more, this attitude is likely to make police officers less safe.

Barack Obama is Never Going to Say What Hilary Just Said

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Hillary spoke the three words that Barack Obama never will, “Black lives matter.”

Obama’s entire professional life has been about avoiding anything that would make him to appear to be an “angry black man”, so we won’t here this from him:

Clinton also addressed the recent protests that have erupted across the US and drew links between violence at home and abroad.

She declared: “Yes, black lives matter,” a mantra of demonstrators around the country who have been protesting about grand jury decisions not to indict white police officers involved in the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York.

She wondered what Kennedy would say about “the thousands of Americans marching in our streets demanding justice for all” and “the mothers who’ve lost their sons”.

“What would he say to all those who have lost trust in our government and our other intuitions, who shudder at images of excessive force, who read reports about torture done in the name of our country, who see too many representatives in Washington quick to protect a big bank from regulation but slow to take action to help working families facing ever greater pressure?” Clinton said.

Props to Hillary for saying those three words, and shame on Obama for not saying those three words.

What the Rude one Said

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Note to Cops: If You’re Gonna Be So Thin-Skinned, You Should Stop Killing People:

That’s Andrew Hawkins, a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns. He wore that shirt while warming up for his team’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunay. As you can read, it calls for justice in the deaths of Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old who was shot to death by a Cleveland cop for holding a toy gun, and John Crawford, who was shot to death by a cop outside Dayton, Ohio, for the crime of holding a BB gun he had picked up while shopping in a Walmart. Both were killed within seconds of the arrival of the police, with no attempt to ascertain what was occurring. They are both awful situations that call for serious soul-searching by the police in Ohio, to hold the officers accountable in some way, to improve training so that such tragedies don’t happen again, to perhaps confront the racism that seems to heighten the violence in these situations. That would all be meaningful and sensitive.

But it’s so much easier to go batsh%$ and attack Hawkins.

Yeah, like teenaged girls who just saw that bitch Tanya wearing that purple dress on Instagram when she knew perfectly well that Alicia was gonna wear the same one to the dance (god, Tanya, you don’t even look good in purple), the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association stomped its feet and demanded an apology: “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.” You gotta love the implied threat there: “Mighty nice stadium you have here. Be a shame if we let your animal fans run wild.”

Read the rest of the Rude Pundit’s essay.

One Thing Worse than Being a Whiny Bitch is Being a Whiny Bitch with Permission to Shoot People

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The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, on Friday called on cops to keep Mayor Bill de Blasio away from police officers’ funerals.

The union published a notice on its website urging officers to keep de Blasio or City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito away, the New York Daily News reported on Friday.

“DON’T LET THEM INSULT YOUR SACRIFICE!” the notice reads.

Officers can download a form to request that de Blasio and Mark-Viverito not attend their funerals “in the event that you are killed in the line of duty.”

“Due to Mayor de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice,” the form reads.

and

A Cleveland police union has demanded that the Cleveland Browns football team apologize for a player who wore a T-shirt before Sunday’s game protesting the police shootings of two black people.

Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins wore a shirt reading “Justice for Tamir Rice And John Crawford III” during pre-game warmups. Rice, who was just 12 years old, died last month after a Cleveland police officer shot him when he mistook the boy’s toy gun for a real weapon. Crawford, 22, was shot dead by police in August at an area Wal-Mart while he was holding an air rifle.

Cleveland Police Patrolman Union President Jeff Follmer sent local TV station WEWS a statement after Sunday’s game that called for an apology from the NFL team. “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law,” the statement read, as quoted by WEWS. “They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.

Seriously.  If a member of the police force cannot deal with the rather anodyne statements about controversial use of force by the department, they need to find another line of work.

I would suggest that they apply to be professional  Klein Bottles, because with their heads so far up their asses, there would be very little adjustment.

Welcome to Our Police State

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And now the cops are sending SWAT teams to check on the license of hair stylists:

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued a ruling on the sort of issue you’d hope a federal appeals court would never need to rule on — whether the government should be allowed to use SWAT-style tactics to perform regulatory inspections.

At issue were a series of police raids on barbershops around the city of Orlando. The raids were basically fishing operations for drug crimes and to recruit confidential informants. All of the raided shops were black- or Hispanic-owned. The problem is that, because they were fishing expeditions, the police didn’t have enough evidence to obtain a warrant. Instead, the police asked an occupational license office to send along an inspector. Voila! These were no longer drug raids. For the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, they were now officially licensure inspections that just happened to include armored cops storming the businesses as if they were harboring an ISIS sleeper cell.

………

I’ve since posted about incidents in which SWAT teams were sent to raid someone suspected of credit card fraud and a woman involved in an ongoing zoning dispute with the local government. Of course, we’ve also seen hundreds of SWAT-style raids on people in the medical marijuana business, even though they pose little threat to police or the public. There have also been SWAT raids on doctors and patients suspected of crimes involving prescription painkillers, even though, again, there’s little reason to think these suspects are dangerous. Last year, a spokesperson for the St. Louis County, Mo., police department told a local TV station that all felony warrants there are now served with SWAT teams, regardless of the crime.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is completely nuts?

Stay Classy, My Friends

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A bar in Missouri (or is that Misery?) was found to offer a “Michael Brown Special”, 6 shots of Jose Cinge for $10:

A “Michael Brown Special” is now being offered at Mug Shots, a Missouri bar. The six shots of Jose Cinge for $10 drink has sparked quite a controversy both in the town of St. Joseph and around the country.

Mug Shots bar is reportedly known for its “sarcasm is always free” mantra. One of the co-owners of the Missouri bar now regrets his most recent attempt at sarcasm and the creation of the Michael Brown Special drink.

During an interview with WDAF-TV local news, the co-owner who asked not to be identified, said, “[The Michael Brown Special drink] was not meant to cause any harm. I should have thought a little bit more about it before I made it a shot special.”

Gee, you think?

It’s on a par with the Trayvon Martin pistol targets.

Get back under your rock and stay there, you contemptible ratf%$#.

Your Daily Update on Police Impunity

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Even Jon Stewart cannot handle this. No joke here.

The New York Daily News, a paper not generally considered a friend of the minority community, nor an adversary of the police department, is livid over the refusal of a Staten Island grand jury to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for the killing of Eric Garner:

The grand jury’s vote to exonerate the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner on Staten Island has glaring earmarks of a gross miscarriage of justice.

 The ruling is painfully far harder to understand than the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

 To a large degree, the evidence against Officer Daniel Pantaleo was widely scrutinized by the public in the form of a on-scene video posted to the Internet by the Daily News. The image of Pantaleo wrestling Garner to the ground with his arm around Garner’s neck was horrifying.

 Even granting that a cop has wide latitude in using force to make an arrest, Pantaleo’s sudden aggressiveness was unnecessary. The fact that it entailed a chokehold only reinforced the excessive quality of his actions.

 After the medical examiner found that a chokehold and chest compression led to Garner’s death, the connection between cause and effect seemed enough to many people not only to indict but to convict Pantaleo.

 Deep, intense skepticism about the grand jury’s ruling is fully warranted — while recognizing that no one other than the panel and Staten Island prosecutors have reviewed all the evidence and matched the facts against the law.

And then we have news on the shooting of 12-year old Tamir Rice.

It appears that, before he was hired as an officer by the Cleveland PD, Tim Loehmann was fired by the Independence, Ohio police department because he was mentally unfit:

Tim Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death last month, resigned from a smaller Ohio police force in 2012 after being found unfit for duty. Among other obviously disqualifying behavior, Loehmann was “distracted” and “weepy” during his firearm qualification session, according to just-released records from his brief tenure with the Independence police department.

“He could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” Independence Deputy Chief Jim Polak wrote in a letter on November 29, 2012, according to records obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group. “For these reasons, I am recommending he be released from the employment of the city of Independence. I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies.”

Polak also wrote that he believed there would certain situations during which Loehmann would “not react in the way instructed.”

………

The problems at Independence erupted on Nov. 28, 2012, the records say. Loehmann showed up “sleepy and upset” for a 6 a.m. state gun qualification session.

Tinnierello wrote that Loehmann “was distracted and was not following simple instructions” at the shooting range.

At one point, he went to the back of the range to reload his magazine and could not return to the line where he was supposed to shoot from, Tinnierello wrote. Loehmann appeared to be crying and was emotionally upset so Tinnierello said they would stop the exercise for the day.

Seriously?

This guy got hired by the Cleveland PD?

I would not hire him as a pastry chef!

Repeat after me:  Police cannot police themselves.

Allowing them to do so is an invitation to corruption and incompetence.

Only Took 3½ F%$#ing Years………

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In South Carolina, a former police chief was indicted on murder charges.

The alleged crime took place in 2011:

A white former police chief here was indicted on murder charges in the 2011 shooting death of an unarmed black man after an argument, a case that instantly drew comparisons to the Ferguson shooting and the chokehold death in New York.

 The indictment of Richard Combs, the former chief and sole officer in the small town of Eutawville (YOO’-tah-vihl), was released Thursday. He faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted in the death of Bernard Bailey.

 Combs’ lawyer accused prosecutors of taking advantage of national outrage toward police and the justice system to get the indictment.

 “He’s trying to make it racial because his timing is perfect,” attorney John O’Leary said. “He’s got all the national issues going on, so they want to drag him in and say, look what a great community we are here, because we’re going to put a police officer who was doing his job in jail for 30 years. That’s wrong. That’s completely wrong.”

 Prosecutor David Pascoe said he had always planned to seek a murder charge if a judge threw out the former chief’s “stand your ground” self-defense claim, which happened last month.

 Combs, 38, had previously been charged with misconduct in office for the shooting. He had faced up to 10 years in prison.

 The indictment is one of three this year for white officers in the shootings of unarmed black men in South Carolina, which has a dark and painful past of civil rights violence.

 The shooting happened in May 2011. Bailey’s daughter received a traffic ticket from the chief for a broken taillight and called her father to the scene. Bailey and Combs argued, but eventually went their separate ways. The police chief got an arrest warrant for Bailey for obstruction. A few days later, Bailey went to Town Hall to argue about his daughter’s ticket. When he showed up, the chief tried to arrest Bailey, a 6-foot-6 former prison guard.

 Prosecutors said Bailey marched back to his truck, and Combs tried to get inside to turn off the ignition. The two briefly fought, and Combs shot Bailey, 54, twice in the chest.

 Combs said he was tangled in Bailey’s steering wheel and feared for his life if Bailey drove away. Last month, a judge threw out his self-defense claim and ruled Combs should have let Bailey leave.

Seriously? 3½ years to indict this guy?

Still, this prosecutor did his job, as opposed to the St. Louis and Staten Island prosecutors, and in South Carolina of all places.

But it should not take 3½ years.