Moderator: Dux
Two wrongs don't make a right.Stillwater wrote:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AFia3Uo0TQ[/youtube]
WildGorillaMan wrote:Enthusiasm combined with no skill whatsoever can sometimes carry the day.
Phaedrus wrote:If you don't look at the cops and do what they want, they won't shoot you.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery ... llenge-me/
johno wrote:The guy is not a clear writer. If when he says, "Don't challenge me," he means comply with my commands & don't step up into my space, I agree.
If he means if you tell my you pay my wages, I'll trump up some bullshit charge, then he should lose his badge. And get kicked in the balls.
We all know the lines. Don't lose your temper; be polite; listen; and when you refuse unreasonable requests, do it respectfully. I'm guessing most all of us deal with a couple problematic people in authority on a regular basis-- bad bosses, HR people, kids teachers, bureaucrats, etc... Dickheads are always memorable, and they infect in every field. The 'How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police' rules are universal.Blaidd Drwg wrote:johno wrote:The guy is not a clear writer. If when he says, "Don't challenge me," he means comply with my commands & don't step up into my space, I agree.
If he means if you tell my you pay my wages, I'll trump up some bullshit charge, then he should lose his badge. And get kicked in the balls.
It's not clear he draws a distinction in his head. The job is no doubt ugly and grey, clear lines are your best friend in the fog.
http://www.alternet.org/more-americans- ... 1#bookmarkYou might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S.—including violent crime—has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it, 1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.
So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?
Given the good news on crime, what are we to make of a report by the Justice Policy Institute, a not-for-profit justice reform group, showing that state and local spending on police has soared from $40 billion in 1982 to more than $100 billion in 2012. Adding in federal spending on law enforcement, including the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Agency and much of the Homeland Security Department budget, as well as federal grants to state and local law enforcement more than doubles that total. A lot of that money is simply pay and benefits. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the ranks of state and local law enforcement personnel alone swelled from 603,000 to 794,000 between 1992 and 2010. That’s about two-thirds as many men and women as the entire active-duty US military.
What these statistics make clear is that policing in America is ramping up even as the crime rate is falling.
Officer Weekley was blessed with a couple of mistrials via his "grandma made me do it defense", and quietly awaits his pension. Can't figure out if there ever was a civil penalty. Apparently the A&E channel has video tape of the raid that could provide key evidence that might help clear things up one way or another but they refuse to share it and no one is forcing them to.Herv100 wrote:DETROIT, MI — A Special Response Team shattered a family’s window in the middle of the night, hurled a flashbang onto a couch next to a sleeping girl, then charged in and shot her in the head. The hyper-aggressive tactics were made worse by the fact that police had taken it upon themselves to raid both sides of a duplex, when their suspect was only known to reside in one of them.
* * * * *
On the evening of May 16, 2010, the Detroit Police Department’s Special Response Team (SRT) prepared for a surprise raid to arrest a wanted man. A surveillance unit had been monitoring the duplex in which he lived throughout the day and a no-knock raid was scheduled for just after midnight.
Police staged a so-called “safety briefing” shortly before the raid; undoubtedly focusing on their own safety rather than the safety of unknown innocents behind the doors they were about to kick in. Officers were briefed that they’d be entering a “possible dope den,” in which the suspect “might be armed” and might even possess “dangerous dogs.”
Police neglected to account for — or flatly disregarded — the safety of any potential children that might be present. Besides the glaring presence of toys strewn about the lawn and front porch, it is unlikely that investigators could have missed the presence of four young children and multi-generational family in the opposite unit during their surveillance of the duplex.
The raid commenced at roughly 12:40 a.m. The Special Response Team arrived in its armored vehicle with a warrant to arrest Chauncey Owens, who was known to stay with his fiancée at 4056 Lillibridge Street.
Armed with MP5 submachine guns, adrenaline, and an unhealthy fear for officer safety, the raiders shuffled past the toys that littered the front yard and ignored the two distinct street address signs hanging on either side of the shared porch of the multi-unit building; 4056 was on the left, 4054 was on the right.
The exterior of 4054-4056 Lillibridge Street, where police killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones during a botched raid. Note the toys in the yard and the prominently-displayed address signs. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
A man named Mark Robinson was detained on the sidewalk while walking his dog, just before the raid. He repeatedly told officers, “There are children in the house,” yet his warnings went unheeded. He was pinned to the ground with officers’ boots on his neck and back, reported attorney Geoffrey Fieger.
The raid team was accompanied by an embedded cable TV crew, filming for A&E’s “The First 48.” With full bravado, the SRT put on a display of maximum force for the fans of police-state-adoring reality television.
Without warning, officers simultaneously attempted to breach entrances of two discrete living units of the duplex: the suspects’ location and the neighboring residence. What occurred at 4054 Lillibridge — where the suspect did NOT live — would be devastating.
In mere seconds, masked police officers stormed the porch and smashed the window of the neighbors’ downstairs apartment. They immediately tossed in a concussion grenade and kicked down the door. An officer discharged his rifle, and an innocent little girl named Aiyana Stanley-Jones was dead.
Amateur footage shot from the exterior of the building shows how quickly the raid unfolded:
From the footage above, the following timeline can be assessed:
0:24 — A dog detects the presence of police and begins to bark.
0:27 — Police being shouting indiscernibly.
0:28 — An officer uses a bludgeon to shatter the picture window of Aiyana’s residence. A flashbang grenade is thrown in immediately.
0:29 — The flashbang explodes inside Aiyana’s residence, lighting up the porch.
0:33 — A pop can be heard; presumably the fatal gunshot.
When the smoke cleared, 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was found on the couch, covered with blood, with a gunshot to the head. She had been sleeping on the couch next to her grandmother, Mertilla Jones. A mere 3 seconds passed from the time of the first shouts until officers entered the home. Aiyana was shot in six seconds.
The grenade had fallen directly onto the couch, where it scorched Aiyana’s “Hannah Montana” blanket, and caused Ms. Jones to dive for the floor.
The moment a flashbang grenade exploded inside Aiyana Stanley-Jones’ living room.
The trigger man was 37-year-old Officer Joseph Weekley, who both drove the armored personnel carrier and led the team through Jones’s door. Wielding a ballistic shield and an MP5, the 14-year DPD veteran claimed that he lost control of his weapon, but not for the reason one would expect. He blamed Aiyana’s grandma.
Officer Weekley’s novel defense was that Mertilla Jones rose up as he entered the apartment and “reached for his gun.” In his version of events, contact with grandmother caused him to pull the trigger of his submachine gun, subsequently striking the sleeping girl.
Mertilla Jones gave a very different account. She said that she had been dozing in and out of sleep on the couch when she was startled by the shattering of glass and the deafening incendiary device hurled through the window. Ms. Jones claims she reached to protect her granddaughter and made no contact with any officer, according to the Detroit Free Press.
“They blew my granddaughter’s brains out,” said Ms. Jones. “They killed her right before my eyes. I watched the light go out of her eyes.”
Officer Weekley was no stranger to controversy. Previously during his six years on the Special Response Team, he had been named among several officers in a federal lawsuit regarding no-knock raid in which officers aimed rifles at small children and shot two family pets in 2007
Mao wrote:Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party
He sounds like he's recovering from a serious stroke.Batboy2/75 wrote:Officer Friendly's Federal Buddies have decided to get in on the action. On a side note the reporters voice is grating.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -King.htmlThe graphic contents of an anonymous letter in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation called Martin Luther King a “filthy abnormal animal” have been made public for the first time.
Written in 1964 by a deputy of the feared FBI chief J Edgar Hoover posing as a disillusioned civil rights activist, the typewritten note appears to have been a heavy-handed attempt to blackmail King into taking his own life.
Already a notorious footnote in American history, the “suicide letter” was heavily censored when it was first published, with most of its more outrageous language remaining secret.
However, the full contents of the note have now been made public after a Beverly Gage, a historian from Yale University unearthed an unredacted copy in the National Archive while researching a book on Hoover.
It shows that in his attempt to goad King, William Sullivan, the agent identified as the author of the letter, stooped to the use of near-hysterical sexual slurs against the already-revered pastor, who would go on to be assassinated three years later.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-crim ... tml#page=1Once police had Nathan Hunter in handcuffs, they tended to his wife.
She was covered in blood. She told the officers Hunter flew into a rage that night in February 2013 because she hadn't bought him a Valentine's Day gift. He beat and choked her before stabbing her in the face with a screwdriver and throwing her down a flight of stairs at their apartment in South L.A., according to police and court records.
Hunter, 55, was convicted of felony spousal abuse and sentenced to six years in prison.
Under FBI rules followed by police departments across the country, the beating should have been counted as an aggravated assault because Hunter used a weapon and caused serious injuries.
That's not what happened. The Los Angeles Police Department classified it as a simple assault — a minor offense not included in the city's official tally of serious crimes.
It was no isolated case. The LAPD misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes during a one-year span ending in September 2013, including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies, a Times investigation found.
The incidents were recorded as minor offenses and as a result did not appear in the LAPD's published statistics on serious crime that officials and the public use to judge the department's performance.
Nearly all the misclassified crimes were actually aggravated assaults. If those incidents had been recorded correctly, the total aggravated assaults for the 12-month period would have been almost 14% higher than the official figure, The Times found.
The tally for violent crime overall would have been nearly 7% higher.
http://fox8.com/2014/10/09/controversia ... ew-driver/A Sandusky police officer placed on administrative leave following a controversial traffic stop seems to have known who he was pulling over last week, despite statements contradicting that.
Officer Christopher Denny radioed dispatchers to ask if there were warrants out for Andre Stockett 4 minutes before stopping the car Stockett was riding in on a traffic violation last week, according to Sandusky Police Chief John Orzech.
However, in video recordings of the stop, Denny is heard calling Stockett by another man’s name, telling Stockett he appears similar to a man wanted on a felony warrant.
Stockett, who says police have been harassing him, videotaped the stop. He and his girlfriend, who was driving the car, refused to get out of the vehicle, saying they did nothing wrong.
The officer can be heard asking Stockett to identify himself. Stockett refused.
“He knew who I was,” Stockett told Fox 8 Monday. “He talked to me moments before my girlfriend came to pick me up. I had my 2-week-old son in the back of the vehicle. I was doing nothing wrong.”
Sandusky Police Chief John Orzech said he discovered the discrepancies in Denny’s statements after beginning an internal review of the incident.
Wednesday, he placed Denny on paid administrative leave and called for an external investigation to be conducted by the Lucas County Sheriff’s Office.
In recordings of the stop, Denny cites numerous reasons for pulling the couple over, including the SUV’s headlights not being on at dusk, a K9 hitting on drugs in the car, and an expired driver’s license.
No drugs were found in the car, and the license was not expired. Instead, Stockett and his girlfriend were cited for obstructing officials business. They pleaded not guilty and will be in court next month.
The Lucas County Sheriff’s Office investigation is expected to take two to three weeks.
Police in Beloit are launching a new effort to reduce gun violence in which they're asking city residents to volunteer to have police search their homes for guns.
Police Chief Norm Jacobs said he doesn't expect the phone to be ringing off the hook with requests for police to search their homes. He nevertheless hopes the program will encourage people to think about gun violence as an infectious disease like Ebola, and a home inspection like a vaccine to help build up the city's immune system.
"Gun violence is as serious as the Ebola virus is being represented in the media, and we should fight it using the tools that we've learned from our health providers,” he said.
Jacobs said he hopes some searches will result in the discovery of guns they didn't know were in their own homes. He said that there’s also a chance they’ll find guns linked to crimes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/world ... .html?_r=0Now, they are among 43 students reported missing after deadly clashes with the police on Sept. 26, when at least six student protesters and bystanders were killed in the restive, rural state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in the country and long afflicted by political, social and criminal upheaval.
The state prosecutor investigating why the police opened fire on students from their vehicles has found mass graves in Iguala — the small industrial city where the confrontations occurred — containing 28 badly burned and dismembered bodies.
The prosecutors had already arrested 22 police officers after the clashes, saying the officers secretly worked for, or were members of, a local gang. Now they are investigating whether the police apprehended the students after the confrontation and deliberately turned them over to the local gang. Two witnesses in custody told prosecutors that the gang then killed the protesters on the orders of a leader known as El Chucky.
“I saw police trucks go up and down the hill to up there, where the bodies are found,” said one man in the neighborhood near the site who declined to give his name out of fear. “Then came the news they found the grave and it may be the students. But you would be a fool around here to accuse the police and expect to live.”
Even in a country accustomed to mass killings, the case has generated alarm, both for the possible involvement of the police and for the fact that the students were not known to have criminal ties. Miguel Martínez, a representative for the families, said students at the school had fought back against extortion attempts by gangs last year, but it was not clear if that could have made them a target now.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/n ... eto-1guala[Mexico's] president said 79 people had been arrested, including the mayor of Iguala, who allegedly ordered the attack on the students on 26 September and dozens of municipal police officers who allegedly handed the arrested students to a local criminal group called Guerreros Unidos.
Jesús Murillo, the attorney general, said members of the gang confessed to killing and then incinerating a large number of young people in a rubbish tip outside of neighbouring town of Cocula. The identity of the remains has yet to be established.
