Tag: Law Enforcement Misconduct

And the Poland Shouts, “Leeroy Jenkins!”

I’ve made a lot of mention of the Ukraine’s Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and Neonazi predilections, on this blog, and while many former Eastern Bloc nations might respond with the equivalent of, “Hold my beer,” it appears that Poland and its judicial system has gone that extra contemptible mile, declaring historians to be criminals, and requiring a formal apology by them for pointing out the Nazi

On Tuesday, a Polish court found Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, two of the most renowned historians of the Holocaust in Poland, guilty of defamation and spreading “inaccurate information.” The two historians had been sued by the niece of Edward Malinowski, the mayor of a Polish town during World War II, for a passage that appears in their 1,700 page Night Without End about the genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. In the 2018 volume, testimonies are quoted which suggest that Malinowski was implicated in the local massacre of Jews by German soldiers. Engelking and Grabowski were ordered to write an apology to the niece for allegedly defaming her uncle and “providing inaccurate information.”

The trial represents a new milestone in the assaults on historical truth and democratic rights by the Polish state and the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). In addition to the trial against Engelking and Grabowski, a journalist, Katarzyna Markusz, is threatened with a three-year prison sentence for “defaming the Polish nation,” because of a passage she wrote on Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

These actions are part of a state-orchestrated campaign, aimed at promoting anti-Semitism and far-right forces. In 2018, the Polish government passed a law criminalizing any mention of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. Since then, historians have faced increasing pressure, including threats of lawsuits, along with hate mail and death threats from far-right forces which feel so emboldened that they often do not even hide their names anymore. While the lawsuit against Engelking and Grabowski was brought by Filomena Leszczyńska, it was heavily backed and driven by the Polish League against Defamation, a far-right outfit that is directly funded by the state. For many years, the League has been harassing Holocaust historians with threats of lawsuits.

………

The two-volume Night Without End (2018), which they edited together and which formed the basis of the trial, provides an extensive analysis of the life and fate of 140,000 Polish Jews in the countryside in the Nazi-occupied General Government of Poland. The work highlights, in particular, the role played by the Polish police (“Blue police”), a force that the Polish right has long sought to whitewash.

Poland has criminalized publishing the accounts of Holocaust survivors. 

The people of Poland, or the Ukraine, or Germany, or the Baltic States are not responsible for the horrible things that some of their ancestors when the enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “Final Solution.

However, they are responsible for promulgating lies and antisemitism, as well as aggressively condoning, to the point of erecting statues, of the worst of the collaborators criminals who did this.

What they are doing NOW is a stain on their national honor, and makes genocide more likely in the future.

If He Were Black, They Would Have Already Shot Him Multiple Times

Instead, it appears that, on the recommendation of an anonymous Kenosha police captain, teen murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and his legal team has been deliberately deceiving the court as to his whereabouts.

Obviously, this from my perspective as a non-lawyer, but this appears to be a BIG no-no for someone who is out on bail:

Prosecutors apparently couldn’t find admitted Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse, so now they are seeking a warrant for his arrest.

On Wednesday, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office said Rittenhouse had violated the conditions of his release. Prosecutors said they need a new arrest warrant specifically because Rittenhouse failed to inform the court after changing his address. The defense, however, responded by saying they intentionally concealed Rittenhouse’s true whereabouts because a local police captain instructed them to lie about where he was staying.

………

According to the conditions of his bond, Rittenhouse was supposed to relay such a change within 48 hours of moving. The motion asks Judge Bruce E. Schroeder to issue a new arrest warrant and increase Rittenhouse’s bail by $200,000.

………

The Illinois teenager was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted homicide, and two additional felonies over the admitted shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Rittenhouse also severely wounded Gaige Grosskreutz with a rifle carried across state lines. He further faces one misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the August shooting and is now 18.

………

In sum, the defense says it intentionally wrote the wrong address on the release papers after being advised to do so by local law enforcement. This, the defense claims, was to protect the location of a “safe house” for Rittenhouse.

The motion notes [emphasis in original]: “Pierce was directly informed by a high-ranking member of the Kenosha Police Department not to provide the address of the Rittenhouse Safe House because of the numerous threats made against Kyle and his family.”

………

“While I was completing this form, I was approached by a Kenosha Police Department Captain, who offered his assistance,” Pierce continued [emphasis in original]. “I asked the Kenosha Police Captain what address to put on the form. The Kenosha Police Captain told me that I ‘absolutely should not‘ provide the address of the physical location of the Rittenhouse Safe House on the form, but to instead provide his home address in Antioch, Illinois.”

There are a couple of points here:

  • What lawyer doesn’t pass this by the f%$#ing judge? (I’m already regretting ending my swearing for February)
  • What cop tells a defendant in a murder trial to lie to the court?

Well, I guess the answers to this question are pretty straightforward, and the expression, “Racist dirtbag,” figures prominently in both.

Rittenhouse needs to spend his pre-trial in jail, and his lawyer should be his cell-mate, at least until he gives up whatever police captain told him to lie to the court.

Fuck Me, I Agree With Pat Buchanan’s Rag

At the American Conservative, they write, “Don’t Let the Riots Legitimize Facial Recognition Tech,” and they are correct.

Law enforcement has an endless appetite for expansion of their powers, and will always do so.

Letting the Capitol insurrection to give additional powers to the US State Security Apparatus is a bad idea, particularly given the predilection of law enforcement to ignore right wing terrorists to go after left wing protesters.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

In response to the Supreme Court ruling Carpenter v. United States in 2018, whcih stated that law enforcement had to get a warrant to track people via their cell phones, elements of the US State Security Apparatus are purchasing exactly the same data from commercial suppliers without a warrant.

We need to make it illegal for US law enforcement to get private data from commercial suppliers that would otherwise require a warrant, if just because it would knock the pins out from underneath literal vampire* capitalist Peter Thiel’s business plan for Palantir.

Purchasing commercial information should not be allowed to be an excuse for using commercial vendor as a cut-out to the 4th amendment:

A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times.

Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

The disclosure sheds light on an emerging loophole in privacy law during the digital age: In a landmark 2018 ruling known as the Carpenter decision, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires the government to obtain a warrant to compel phone companies to turn over location data about their customers. But the government can instead buy similar data from a broker — and does not believe it needs a warrant to do so.

“D.I.A. does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially available data for intelligence purposes,” the agency memo said.

Mr. Wyden has made clear that he intends to propose legislation to add safeguards for Americans’ privacy in connection with commercially available location data. In a Senate speech this week, he denounced circumstances “in which the government, instead of getting an order, just goes out and purchases the private records of Americans from these sleazy and unregulated commercial data brokers who are simply above the law.”

………

It has been known that the government sometimes uses such data for law enforcement purposes on domestic soil.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year about law enforcement agencies using such data. In particular, it found, two agencies in the Department of Homeland Security — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection — have used the data in patrolling the border and investigating immigrants who were later arrested.

………

The military has also been known to sometimes use location data for intelligence purposes.

In November, Vice’s Motherboard tech blog reported that Muslim Pro, a Muslim prayer and Quran app, had sent its users’ location data to a broker called X-Mode that in turn sold it to defense contractors and the U.S. military. Muslim Pro then said it would stop sharing data with X-Mode, and Apple and Google said they would ban apps that use the company’s tracking software from phones running their mobile operating systems.

………

Mr. Wyden’s coming legislation on the topic appears likely to be swept into a larger surveillance debate that flared in Congress last year before it temporarily ran aground after erratic statements by President Donald J. Trump, as he stoked his grievances over the Russia investigation, threatening to veto the bill and not making clear what would satisfy him.

The the 4th amendment should never be for sale.

*I do mean this characterization of Thiel literally.  He is literally a vampire who wants to use the blood of the young to extend his lifespan.

Meanwhile, in DC

Republicans in Congress are using the right-wing insurrection on January 6 as an excuse for bills targeted primarily at peaceful protesters like Black Lives Matter.

Republicans never miss an opportunity to use a crisis to rat-fuck the country, do they?

In September, Florida governor and Trump ally Ron DeSantis proposed a bill dubbed the Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act to create new criminal penalties for offenses commonly committed during protests. He said it was needed to stop the “professional agitators bent on sowing disorder and causing mayhem in our cities” following months of largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

Hours after a far-right mob stormed the Capitol at the behest of the president, Florida Republicans introduced a version of the bill. That night, DeSantis said the violence in Washington shows that lawmakers “have no time to waste to uphold public safety” and must “swiftly pass this bill.”

DeSantis isn’t alone. Within the past year, lawmakers in 24 states have introduced at least 45 bills to create new penalties or increase criminal penalties for offenses related to protesting, discourage cuts to police funding, and provide protections to people who drive their cars into protesters or shoot protesters in an alleged act of self defense. Six of those bills—one in Utah, one in Mississippi, one in West Virginia, one in Tennessee and two in South Dakota—have been signed into law.

But the bills aren’t aimed at reining in the kind of violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, and federal prosecutors already have a litany of charges at their disposal to hold the perpetrators accountable. The bills seek to criminalize conduct typically associated with Black Lives Matter protests, like blocking streets or highways and camping out at state capitols. Provisions of DeSantis’s bill seek to discourage local governments from cutting police budgets, but what happened on Jan. 6 can’t be pinned on a lack of police funding or intelligence—the FBI knew extremists were planning to commit violence in Washington days before, and Capitol Police rejected offers for additional manpower from the National Guard. While some police officers were brutally attacked or took action to protect the lives of others, others shook hands with a member of the mob. One police officer even took a selfie with the insurrectionists.

This is why I oppose changes to the current laws in response to the January 6 insurrection.

The people who will be enforcing these laws, cops, prosecutors, etc.  are objectively pro-fascist and institutionally, if not necessarily personally, racist.

All that more laws get you is more opportunities for abuse.

Illinois Takes Steps to Fix Policing in the State

It’s not as extensive as it could be, there were some last minute bad cop favoring amendments, but the Illinois police reform bill has made it to the Governor’s desk, who has announced his support for the bill.

The way that we know that this is a good bill is that the police unions are completely losing their shit over this, as well they should.

The high points of the bill are:

  • Expanding a database of police misconduct and requiring that those records be kept.
  • The elimination of cash bail.
  • Reduces the scope unions to negotiate disciplinary and certification issues.
  • Resisting arrest citations must include the predicate charge for the original arrest.
  • Expanded reporting on killings and applications of force.
  • Whistleblower protections.
  • Bans the use of military equipment.
  • Requires that redistricting on the state level be based on permanent locations, and not where someone is incarcerated.
  • Applies tighter standards to the use of force.
  • Narrows the felony murder statute.
  • Expands the list of crimes that would result in an officer being decertified.
  • Adds a duty to intervene for officers who witness police misconduct.

Unfortunagely, two of the best portions got dropped at the last minute:

  • Eliminating qualified immunity for police officers, which means that bad cops with bad records (see the NYPD’s David “Bullethead” Grieco) are going to have to spend lots of money for liability insurance.
  • Completely eliminating the right to collective bargaining for the police on discipline matters. 

All in all, a very good bill, but I still want qualified immunity gone.

Yeah, Lihop*

So, now we know that there were specific rports from the FBI that right-wings intended to invade the Capitol on January 6.

Yet more evidence that the passivity of law enforcement in the face of a clear threat was more than just incompetence:

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s demonstrations in support of President Trump planned to do harm.

A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

………

Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free-speech rights.

We can’t do this to Wypipo.


The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence.

………

The head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Steven D’Antuono, told reporters on Friday that the agency did not have intelligence suggesting the pro-Trump rally would be anything more than a lawful demonstration. During a news conference Tuesday, held after The Post’s initial publication of this report, he said the alarming Jan. 5 intelligence document was shared “with all our law enforcement partners” through the joint terrorism task force, which includes the U.S. Capitol Police, the U.S. Park Police, D.C. police, and other federal and local agencies.

………

Steven Sund, who resigned as Capitol Police chief, said in an interview Tuesday that he never received nor was made aware of the FBI’s field bulletin, insisting he and others would have taken the warning seriously had it been shared.

“I did not have that information, nor was that information taken into consideration in our security planning,” Sund said.

………

The Jan. 5 FBI report notes that the information represents the view of the FBI’s Norfolk office, is not to be shared outside law enforcement circles, that it is not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies receiving it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”

Again.  “We can’t do this to Wypipo!”

………

The document notes that one online comment advised, “if Antifa or BLM get violent, leave them dead in the street,” while another said they need “people on standby to provide supplies, including water and medical, to the front lines. The individual also discussed the need to evacuate noncombatants and wounded to medical care.”

On Jan. 6, a large, angry crowd of people who had attended a rally nearby marched to the Capitol, smashing windows and breaking doors to get inside. One woman in the mob was shot and killed by Capitol Police; officials said three others in the crowd had medical emergencies and died. A Capitol Police officer died after suffering injuries.

………

For weeks leading up to the event, FBI officials discounted any suggestion that the activities of Trump supporters upset about the scheduled certification of Biden’s election win could be a security threat on a scale with the racial-justice demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.

………

Even so, there were warning signs, though none as stark as the one from the FBI’s Norfolk office.

FBI agents had in the weeks before the Trump rally visited suspected far-right extremists, hoping to glean whether they had violent intentions, said a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the law enforcement activity. It was not immediately clear who was visited or if the FBI was specifically tracking anyone who would later be charged criminally. These visits were first reported Sunday by NBC News.

In addition, in the days leading up to the demonstrations, some Capitol Hill staffers were told by supervisors to not come in to work that day, if possible, because it seemed the danger level would be higher than many previous protests, according to a person familiar with the warning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Capitol Police did not take the kind of extra precautions, such as frozen zones and hardened barriers, that are typically used for major events near the Capitol.

Again, this looks like deliberate malfeasance.

Law enforcement departed from standard protocols in order to empower the insurrectionists.

………

The FBI recently issued a different memo saying that “armed protests” were being planned “at all 50 state capitols” and in D.C. in the run-up to the inauguration, according to an official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter.

They knew that there was a risk of violence, and either because of interference from the Trump administration, or because senior elements of the US State Security Apparatus chose to be on the side of insurrection.

I’m more inclined to believe the latter case today than I was yesterday.

*Let It Happen On Purpose.

Yeah, LIHOP

As a bit of an FYI, there are two terms that frequently find their way into discussion, MIHOP (Make It Happen On Purpose), and LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose).

In the case of the recent riots and invasion of the US Capitol, at best the latter seems to be the case, particularly given the fact that there was a greater police presence at the March for Science headlining Bill Nye, The Science Guy. (Read the whole Twitter thread, it is chilling)

Now we have a report that  the FBI is investigating the possibility that there was inside support from law enforcement and the bureaucracy.

Well, duh:

The FBI has reasons to believe the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol not only premeditated the assault, but might have been aided by police and staffers in the building … TMZ has learned.

High ranking sources inside the Capitol Police Dept. tell TMZ the FBI is looking at several facts that stink of an inside job. For starters, the Bureau is puzzled by the ease with which the mob found its way to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s office.

It’s not off any main hallway or next to other Congressional offices … in fact, the path to get to the entrance is maze-like and not open to the public like other parts of the Capitol. The rioters who took it over — vandalizing it and stealing a laptop — got there within 10 minutes of entering the Capitol.

We’re told the FBI feels someone must have provided a roadmap for them to find it that quickly. Remember, the Capitol has been closed to the public since March due to the pandemic so it’s not like these guys could have been casing it to plot their path.

It is patently obvious that the law enforcement response by both by the Capitol Police and the DC Police was intentionally lackadaisical, and since neither of those organizations answer to the White House, this cannot be attributed to Trump administration rat-fuckery.

The lackadaisical response from the FBI and the National Guard, however, might very well have been told to stand down by Trump and his Evil Minions™.

It’s almost certain that a thorough investigation will see deliberate dereliction of duty, and I’d bet dollars to navy beans that that there were people inside of both the White House and the Congress who were actively aiding the rioters.

About Bloody Time

Following the insurrection at the Capitol, police departments across the country are finally looking into the unsavory extracurricular activities of some of their members

I’ve been saying for a long time that police are objectively racist and pro-fascist, maybe now some of the tens of thousands of police forces, and the civilians who nominally are in charge of these institutions, will actually start policing the police:

Police officers and at least one police chief from departments across the United States are facing termination, suspension or other discipline for their proximity to or alleged involvement in a chaotic gathering in Washington on Wednesday that ended in a riot at the U.S. Capitol and left five people dead.

Departments in California, Washington state, and Texas are among those that have announced investigations into their officers based on tips, social media posts and other evidence, though more officers could be identified as evidence emerges in the coming days.

The probes come after an especially fraught year for U.S. policing that saw massive civil rights protests against police violence. They are likely to raise questions about free speech, the expansion of surveillance and public trust in law enforcement, while legal experts warn the scrutiny could have unintended consequences.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Pigs Walk

The Kenosha County District Attorney has announced that no charges will be filed against the officers that shot Jacob Blake

The prosecutor is claiming that it will be too tough to convince a jury.

Another corrupt prosecutor covering up for the police:

The top prosecutor in Kenosha, Wis., declined to bring charges against the police officer who shot and gravely wounded Jacob Blake outside an apartment building in August, an episode that sparked protests and rioting and made the city an instant flash point in a summer of unrest that began with the killing of George Floyd.

The decision not to file charges against the officer, Rusten Sheskey, was announced on Tuesday afternoon by Michael Graveley, the Kenosha County district attorney. He said that investigators had reviewed 40 hours of video and hundreds of pages of police reports before making the decision.

The prosecutor said a case against the officer would have been very hard to prove, in part because it would be difficult to overcome an argument that the officer was protecting himself. He said Mr. Blake had admitted to holding a knife — even describing switching it from one hand to another as he moved to open a car door — and that statements from officers and other witnesses indicated that Mr. Blake had turned toward an officer with the knife immediately before he was shot.

………

“This decision does nothing but shore up that message that Black people are not safe in the United States of America in 2021,” Corey Prince, chair of the criminal justice committee of the N.A.A.C.P. in neighboring Racine, said Tuesday. “They continue to devalue Black lives, Black humanity, Black freedom, even when we’re with our kids.”

………

The case incited emotions in large part because of the gruesome scene captured by a cellphone video: A Black man being shot in the back multiple times as he moved away from the officer. Even those arguing that the officers acted appropriately conceded that law enforcement needed to figure out how to reach better outcomes in such situations.

They shot him in the back, but the prosecutor cannot be bothered to even try, because it’s just a Black man, and notwithstanding the protests, Black lives DON’T matter.

Why did This Take 9 Months

The Louisville Metro Police Department intend to fire two more police officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Gee, it only took 9 months.

We all know that without the protest, all three officers would still be on the force, and that there would be no criminal charges filed:

The Louisville police officer who fired the shot that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency room technician whose death set off a wave of protests on American streets, was told on Tuesday that the department was moving to oust him from the force, as was a second officer who obtained a judge’s approval for the poorly planned nighttime raid on her home.

“Second officer who obtained a judge’s approval,” is an awfully circuitous way of saying, “LIED TO A JUDGE.”

The move is the most significant acknowledgment by the department that its officers had committed serious violations when they burst through Ms. Taylor’s door late one night in March, encountered gunfire, and then fired a volley of shots at her and her boyfriend. The terminations mark an effort by the city’s interim police chief, Yvette Gentry, to achieve the reckoning she promised when she came out of retirement to lead the troubled department into the beginning of the new year.

Lawyers for Detective Myles Cosgrove, one of the officers who shot Ms. Taylor, and Detective Joshua Jaynes, who prepared the search warrant for the raid, said each had received notices of termination. Both have been on administrative reassignment as the investigations have been underway.

Until now, the only officer held accountable in the case had been Brett Hankison, a detective, who was fired in June for violating the department’s deadly force policy by shooting off 10 rounds from outside the apartment through two of Ms. Taylor’s windows. He was indicted by a grand jury in September on three counts of wanton endangerment because shots he fired entered a neighboring apartment.

This sort of sh%$ is not going to end until police start being held accountable for their actions.

Good Idea, but It Won’t Make It to the President’s Desk

The annual defense policy bill has language that requires federal agents, both law enforcement and military will be required to wear insignia and identify themselves when arresting people during civil disturbances.

I do not believe that this will make it out of Congress, but it should:

Congress is set to approve a defense policy bill that bars unidentified federal law enforcement officers from policing protests. The bill responds to a phenomenon that Mother Jones flagged in June: Unidentified federal law enforcement officers with no identifying insignia joined in the Trump administration’s coordinated crackdown on protests against police violence in several cities earlier this summer.

The 4,500-page annual defense policy bill that emerged from a House-Senate policy committee Thursday requires any armed forces personnel, including National Guard members, and federal law enforcement agents who respond to a “civil disturbance,” to display either their name or some other “individual identifier,” as well as the organization or branch of the Armed Forces for whom they work.

This provision is a direct response to the presence in multiple cities of unidentified federal officers last summer. I first reported on this issue on June 3 during a protest in Washington. Agents I approached would only say that they worked for the “Department of Justice” or the “federal government.” Other reporters elicited similar responses.

Basically, this means that they need to wear a badge identifying which agency that they work for, and a badge number so that they can be personally identified for complaints.

This is long overdue, and should be adopted at the state and local level too.

I Call This a Win-Win for Biden

Joe Biden has announced that he will be appointing Xavier Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services

I did not expect this, given Becerra’s support for Medicare for All, so it’s a win on a policy level. 

Additionally, it’s a win, because it means that Becerra will no longer be California Attorney General, where he has been a dedicated fluffer to bad cops and cop unions: (See also here, and here)

In his two years on the job, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has crafted an image as a progressive warrior, suing the Trump Administration dozens of times and delivering the Democrats’ Spanish-language rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union speech.

But there’s one major area where the Democrat isn’t allied with progressives: accountability for law enforcement. There, Becerra is at odds with the push by many in his own party to better police the police.

The attorney general is refusing to provide records on police misconduct that media outlets requested under a new law signed last year by Democratic former Gov. Jerry Brown. The legislator who wrote the law, also a Democrat, says the documents must be disclosed. But Becerra has sided with police who want the courts to weigh in before releasing records about officers who were involved in shootings, sexual assault or lying on the job.

………

Numerous police unions have filed lawsuits in recent weeks to try to block their departments from releasing misconduct records under the new law, Senate Bill 1421, which took effect on Jan. 1. The officers argue that the law only applies to records created on or after Jan. 1, while the legislator who wrote the law says it applies to any records in the police departments’ possession, including those from past years.

………

The records they released, all of abuses that were confirmed by internal investigations, showed one officer was fired after he offered to help a woman deal with drunk-driving charges if she had sex with him. In another case, an on-duty police officer had sex with a member of the public. Numerous other officers were dishonest or used force that resulted in severe injuries. It was the first time in many decades that such information has been made public in California, which has had one of the nation’s most restrictive police records laws.A broad coalition of media outlets have been requesting misconduct records from law enforcement agencies big and small since the new law took effect at the start of the year. Some agencies have complied—including police departments in Fairfield,Rio Vistaand Burlingame.

The records they released, all of abuses that were confirmed by internal investigations, showed one officer was fired after he offered to help a woman deal with drunk-driving charges if she had sex with him. In another case, an on-duty police officer had sex with a member of the public. Numerous other officers were dishonest or used force that resulted in severe injuries. It was the first time in many decades that such information has been made public in California, which has had one of the nation’s most restrictive police records laws.

Becerra refused to disclose any misconduct records regarding officers employed by the state Department of Justice. Then the free-speech nonprofit, the First Amendment Coalition, suedhim, arguing that his refusal has had a ripple effect, giving “a green light to other departments to disregard the new law.”

………

Becerra is not the first California Attorney General to side with police on accountability issues—or to take heat for it from the left. Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, for instance, refusedas attorney general to support statewide standards for police body cameras, endorsing instead the law enforcement argument that such rules should be determined at the local level, even if the result was a patchwork. She also opposed a bill to put the state Department of Justice in charge of investigating police shootings.

Becerra has held a similar position on more recent versions of the bill, marking another instance in which he sided with law enforcement against efforts toward greater transparency. Progressive advocates for criminal justice reform argue that the state Department of Justice could be more objective than local prosecutors in determining if shootings are justified, because local prosecutors work so closely with police. Even Becerra’s Republican opponent saidthe state should be in charge of investigating police shootings.

………

Becerra’s office agreed to review the Sacramento Police Department after officers killed an unarmed man in his grandmother’s backyard, but that was only because local officials requested it. And even though his review has made some strong recommendations—including that the Sacramento police should overhaul their use-of-force policies—Becerra stopped short of endorsing a tougher statewide standardto justify police shootings, something progressive Democrats are fighting forthis year.

Hopefully, the next California AG will not be so beholden to crooked cops.

Objectively Pro Nazi

Not the Republican Party this time, though they are to Nazis what hot fudge is to a sundae, but rather the overwhelming majority of the state security apparatus of the United States of America, at the federal, state, and local levels:

As protests over police brutality and racial justice broke out this summer, often resulting in harsh responses from law enforcement, police officers across the country have been accused of favoring a violent extremist group that took to the streets to oppose those demonstrators.

The latest example of a cozy relationship between law enforcement and the far-right Proud Boys happened in the nation’s capital last week when the Metropolitan Police responded to a stabbing involving members of the Proud Boys and an associate.

Provocateur Bevelyn Beatty and the chairman of the Proud Boys, who was with her, told police they were both stabbed by people associated with Black Lives Matter in a street fight early the morning after the presidential election. The Metropolitan Police Department repeated their claim to media outlets, leading to headlines around the country claiming Black Lives Matter had attacked the Proud Boys.

There’s no evidence Black Lives Matter had anything to do with the incident. Police officials have since walked back their initial statements, saying it’s unclear whether anyone involved was affiliated with political groups.

The department’s willingness to echo the accusations of the Proud Boys is another example of law enforcement’s deference to the group, said Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.

It’s been transparently clear for years that police support white supremacists, and white supremacist violence, while clamping down on left wing protests, particularly when law enforcement misconduct is at the root of those protests.

This must be destroyed root and branch.

About Bloody Time

The Philadelphia City Council has finally apologized for bombing its own citizens and allowing a city block to burn to the ground

It would have been nice if some of the people behind those decisions had actually faced consequences for their actions:

The Philadelphia City Council this week formally apologized for the decision in 1985 to drop an improvised bomb on a rowhouse occupied by the MOVE separatist group, a desperate action that resulted in a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed 61 homes.

The resolution, approved on Thursday, marked the first time that the city had formally apologized for the action. The measure, which also calls for an annual day of remembrance on May 13, the anniversary of the bombing, was sponsored by Jamie Gauthier, a city councilwoman who grew up near the West Philadelphia neighborhood where the bombing happened.

Ms. Gauthier recalled watching the aftermath of the bombing on television as a child, and said that the neighborhood was only now starting to fully recover from the devastation.

“There have been divisions in our city between police and community for decades, and I think if we had done the true work of acknowledging what happened with MOVE and with other acts of police violence, and we had really worked on not only the acknowledgment but building better relationships and working towards reconciliation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the place we are now,” she said in an interview on Friday.

“It was always striking to me that we did this, that our city did this and that no one ever was held accountable,” she added. “I thought that was unconscionable.”

People should have gone to jail and lost their jobs, but a 11 people, including children, were murdered, and a whole block was wiped out, and no one cared because they were black.

Support Your Local Police

Louisville, Kentucky Metro Police aggressively covered up allegations of child rape by two officers on the force.

When you talk about the “Thin Blue Line”, this is it, and if you support it you are supporting lawlessness by law enforcement:

Louisville Metro Police concealed at least 738,000 records documenting the sexual abuse of Explorer Scouts by two officers — then lied to keep the files from the public, records show.

The Courier Journal last year requested all records regarding sexual abuse of minors by two officers in the Explorer Scout program for youths interested in law enforcement careers.

Police officials and the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office said they couldn’t comply, insisting all the records had been turned over to the FBI for its investigation.

But that wasn’t true, according to records The Courier Journal recently obtained in the appeal of its open records case.

In fact, the department still had at least 738,000 records, which the city allowed to be deleted.

The records could shed light on when department and city officials first learned of allegations of sexual abuse of youths by officers in the program and what the officials did — or failed to do — about it.

“I have practiced open records law since the law was enacted 45 years ago, and I have never seen anything so brazen,” said Jon Fleischaker, an attorney for The Courier Journal. “I think it an outrage.”

………

In a tweet, Councilman Anthony Piagentini, R-19th, said: “There aren’t the appropriate words to describe how indefensible this is. The administration oversaw the sexual exploitation of minors and then deleted evidence.”

………

In May and July of 2019, Courier Journal reporter Matt Glowicki filed requests for LMPD’s investigative files on officers Brandon Wood and Kenneth Betts, who were accused of sexually abusing youths in the Explorer program.

LMPD records custodian Alicia Smiley responded that “any records … would previously have been turned over to the FBI,” which headed a joint task force that is still investigating the program.

When The Courier Journal appealed the denial of its request to the attorney general’s office, Assistant Jefferson County Attorney Annale Taylor told the attorney general’s office the same thing.

………

In fact, LMPD still had hundreds of thousands of records on the Explorer investigation in its possession — despite saying it didn’t.

………

Fifteen days after telling the attorney general’s office the department had no records, Taylor advised in a second letter dated Sept. 18, 2019, LMPD had found about“9,000 documents” on a “hidden folder.”

But instead of keeping them, in response to The Courier Journal’s appeal in the open records case, the city’s information technology team removed the records and gave them to the FBI.

It turned out far more documents — hundreds of thousands — were found and deleted.

………

The Explorer scandal began to unfold in October 2016, when the police department confirmed an officer was under investigation for his conduct in the program for young people considering careers in law enforcement.

It gets even sleazier, one of the officers involved in the scandal had early allegations of sex abuse but got into the force anyway:

The former head of the scandal-ridden Louisville Explorer program investigated allegations in 2002 that then-scout Kenneth Betts groped a girl but said he “forgot” about it when sex abuse claims arose against Betts 11 years later when he was an officer.

The now-retired official, Curtis Flaherty, also wrote a letter of recommendation for Betts roughly three years later when Betts applied to join the Louisville Metro Police Department as an officer.

………

The former head of the scandal-ridden Louisville Explorer program investigated allegations in 2002 that then-scout Kenneth Betts groped a girl but said he “forgot” about it when sex abuse claims arose against Betts 11 years later when he was an officer.

The now-retired official, Curtis Flaherty, also wrote a letter of recommendation for Betts roughly three years later when Betts applied to join the Louisville Metro Police Department as an officer.

An I the only one thinking that Breonna Taylor was not an anomaly?

Of Course He Did

In New York City, the commander of the police department’s Equal Employment Opportunity Division was just suspended for repeated unhinged racist rants on a law enforcement discussion board.

This is my shocked face:

For more than 20 years, an online chat board called the Rant has been the place where New York City police officers have gone in secret to complain about their jobs — not infrequently using blatantly racist and misogynistic language.

But even by the website’s vitriolic standards, scores of recent posts by a user who calls himself “Clouseau” have been especially disturbing.

Between the summer of 2019 and earlier this fall, “Clouseau” posted hundreds of messages on the Rant, many of which attacked Black people, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews and others with an unbridled sense of animus.

He referred to former President Barack Obama as a “Muslim savage” and called the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, who is Black, “a gap-toothed wildebeest.”

Now, city investigators say they have amassed evidence that “Clouseau” is a high-ranking police official. And not just any high-ranking official — the one assigned to an office responsible for combating workplace harassment in the Police Department.

………

The police official, Deputy Inspector James F. Kobel, adamantly denied that he had written the racist messages. The posts have been taken down since the Council began its inquiry, and the profile deleted.

………

Inspector Kobel denied the allegations to his superiors, a police official said. But on Thursday, he was relieved of his command of the Equal Employment Opportunity Division and placed on modified assignment pending completion of the department inquiry.

“That is a drastic step, but we thought it was the appropriate step due to the nature of his given assignment as well as the allegations and what we have learned thus far,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said. He added that the comments posted by “Clouseau” were “utterly disgusting.”

This guy is a deputy inspector.  They would not be going after him so aggressively unless they had him dead to rights on this.  (The cynic in me considers the possibility that he is being taken down to prevent evidence of law enforcement misconduct from becoming public).

BTW, there is no reason that the rant should not be routinely monitored by internal affairs and civil rights and EEOC staffers.

A racist garbage man can screw up your recyclables, but a racist cop can make you dead.

Why People Call for Abolishing ICE

One reason is because the organization has treated its detainees negligently, and when deaths and injuries result, they cover it up.

To quote P.C. Hodgell, “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”

Since January 2017, at least four dozen people have died while being held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Some were old, and some were young. Some had been in the US for years before being detained; others came here only recently, seeking refuge or better economic circumstances. Some were in terrible health upon arrival; others became ill while in custody.

………

In June 2019, BuzzFeed News filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the release of emails, investigative reports, medical records, and other documents related to 25 deaths in custody that ICE had publicly disclosed since President Donald Trump took office.

When the agency did not promptly provide records, BuzzFeed News filed a successful lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. To date, DHS has produced more than 5,000 pages of documents related to deaths in ICE custody. Collectively, they tell the story of how ICE has in some instances failed to provide adequate care to detainees, some of whom are locked up for months or years before their immigration cases are resolved.

………

ICE has publicly insisted that both the detention facilities it runs as well as those that are operated by private, for-profit corporations provide thorough and adequate medical care to all detainees. In response to a request for comment on this story, ICE said the agency takes the health and safety of detainees very seriously and while deaths are “unfortunate and always a cause for concern,” they are “exceedingly rare.”

But internal emails show that ICE’s own investigators raised serious concerns about the agency’s care of the people it detains, with one employee describing the treatment leading up to one death as “a bit scary.”

The documents show that:

  • In multiple instances, guards who were supposed to observe detainees placed in solitary confinement for extra monitoring falsified records to hide apparent dereliction of duty. In at least two cases — at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and Adelanto Detention Facility in California — people died while they were not being watched but should have been. “During the 51-minute period, the officer documented three welfare checks, none of which were supported by video surveillance,” one internal death review states. The guard resigned two days later, documents show.

    ………

  • Medical staff at some detention facilities — including a psychiatrist at Krome North Processing Center in Miami and nurses at Glades County Detention Center, also in Florida — at times did not use an interpreter when treating a detainee with limited English proficiency. The detainee was asked to sign documents related to his care in a language that he may not have understood. He later died while still in ICE custody.
  • Investigators found other failures that point to serious lack of care even if they did not lead directly to death. One man whom doctors noted had no lower teeth and was missing several upper teeth during a physical, for example, was not given a special diet to make sure his nutritional intake was adequate. In another instance, surveillance footage showed a detainee falling out of his wheelchair and struggling to move, but nurses told a guard who expressed concern that the detainee was faking or exaggerating his symptoms. Later that day, the detainee died.

………

Although ICE has maintained that it takes the well-being of its detainees seriously and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on their medical needs, immigrant advocates have repeatedly questioned the quality of care in ICE custody, concerns that grew this year as detainees began contracting COVID-19. Despite a dramatic dip in the detention population in recent months due to the pandemic, 21 immigrants died in ICE custody in the most recent fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the highest number of such deaths under the agency’s watch in 15 years. Several of those who died tested positive for the coronavirus.

ICE revels in cruelty and and abuse of immigrants.

I’m not sure how you fix this without firing them all and replacing every single officer.

And in the Continued War on Voting

In Minneapolis, a Trump official and the police union are trying to bring in retired officers to intimidate voters.

The fact that a Trump administration is trying to gin up a voter suppression effort is no surprise, but the involvement of the PBA, and it’s notoriously president belligerent Bob Kroll in actively recruiting thugs to suppress the vote is crossing the line from the thin blue line to active criminality:

The Minneapolis police union put out a call this week for retired officers to help serve as “eyes and ears” at polling sites in “problem” areas across the city on Election Day, at the request of an attorney for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

The request was made by William Willingham, whose e-mail signature identifies him as a senior legal adviser and director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign.

In an e-mail Wednesday morning to Minneapolis Police Federation President Lt. Bob Kroll, Willingham asked the union president about recruiting 20 to 30 former officers to serve as “poll challengers” to work either a four- or eight-hour shift in a “problem area.”

“Poll Challengers do not ‘stop’ people, per se, but act as our eyes and ears in the field and call our hotline to document fraud,” the e-mail read. “We don’t necessarily want our Poll Challengers to look intimidating, they cannot carry a weapon in the polls due to state law. … We just want people who won’t be afraid in rough neighborhoods or intimidating situations.”

Kroll then passed on the request to federation members, saying “Please share, and e-mail me if you are willing to assist,” according to a copy obtained by the Star Tribune.

Neither Willingham nor Kroll responded to requests for comment Wednesday.

Bob Kroll is a menace to the citizens of Minneapolis.