Cops out of control

When there's a large snowstorm pretty much anywhere people often tend to take to the streets and play -- which involves things like throwing snowballs.

In DC the requirement to show deference to police, even when you don't know they're police, takes precedence over any normal sense of human frivolity.

UPDATE:
The idiot law school teacher Althouse thinks the Reason description is inaccurate because they use the term "brandish" when he didn't actually point the gun directly at people.

She doesn't seem to understand that if they'd actually meant "point" then that's what they would have said. She's been teaching law for way too long, the law being a field where words have no actual meaning.

Cop forgets to turn on his camara

then he starts shooting.

In Austin a cop pulls up behind a car parked in an apartment complex with his gun pulled and ends up shooting (and killing) a sleeping passenger.

Taking a Urine Sample

This guy clearly did something to piss off the cop.

An Indiana man has filed a lawsuit claiming that police forcibly withdrew urine from his body during a drunken driving arrest.

According to the suit, police pulled over Jamie Lockard, 53, on suspicion of drunk driving in March. Police said he had driven through two stop signs.

A Breathalyzer test showed Lockard was under the legal limit, but Officer Brian Miller doubted the findings.

Lockard and his attorney claimed in the suit that police took him to Dearborn County Hospital and forced him to submit to a urine test.

Police said they obtained a warrant to obtain a blood and urine sample. They said Lockard refused to provide either voluntarily, saying he could not urinate and declining to drinks fluids to help him urinate.

Lockard's attorney said his client was shackled to a gurney and had a catheter inserted against his will.

What kind of judge signed that warrant?

Another example of too many cops

They have nothing to do but write tickets and shoot people.

Dumb, violent cops

Watch the video.

TOCCOA - Surveillance video shows 28-year-old Jonathan Ayers entering a convenience store just minutes before he would be shot. Joe Joseph, who owns the Shell station on Currahee Street, says everything seemed normal when Ayers walked in around 2:30 Tuesday afternoon.
During the short time that Ayers was in the convenience store, he came straight to an ATM and then he left.

Joe Joseph says within the next two minutes, something very unusual happened. He heard gun shots. "I've never seen anything like that before. You know, I watch movies but this was totally different."

As you can see in the video, a black Escalade truck pulls up next to a pump and before it completely stops, a man jumps out. "I think I heard 3 shots."

The men in the Escalade were undercover drug agents. Joseph says he saw them shooting as Ayers, the young pastor, tried to back up and get away. "He pulled off and they followed." A short time later, Ayers wrecked his car.

"At that time (of the shooting), I had a parking lot full of people. I mean they could have blown up one of my pumps and that would have been a total mess."

There were, of course, no drugs in the car and the young dead man was not a target of any police investigation.

This country just has too many police and too little accountability for their behavior.

Update: Some more information and observation.

The War Against Refreshing Citrus Drinks

From Channel 2, NYC

...To 10-year-old Clementine Lee, setting up a lemonade stand at Riverside Park on a hot Saturday afternoon seemed like a fun way to make money.

Instead, she and her dad got slapped with a $50 fine.
...

Don't go to West Palm Beach, Florida

. . . unless you just enjoy getting beat up.

...the officers concocted a story to explain the beating caught on dashcam video. The problem was that, when they huddled together to come up with a story, the discussion was also caught on tape.

Hotheads sitting around drinking beer

It's been my experience that having a couple of proven hotheads sitting around drinking beer does not tend to result in things calming down.

From the Daily News

"I am pleased that [Obama] is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment," the esteemed Harvard professor wrote on the Web site TheRoot.com late Friday.

"And if meeting Sgt. Crowley for a beer with the President will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige," he wrote.

Obama phoned both men on Friday to discuss the much debated events of July 16 and to invite them to the White House for a cold one. Crowley has not yet made a public RSVP, but is said to be on board.

Read more:

Texas cops on biker gang payroll

In small town West Texas, of all places,

Nearly 30 defendants, including two Texas sheriff's deputies, have been charged with operating a methamphetamine trafficking ring in Texas, Arizona and California, authorities announced Friday.

The 110-count indictment returned earlier this week in Lubbock charges members of the Aces and Eights Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, as well as two sheriff's deputies in Hockley County, Texas.

The indictment alleges motorcycle gang founder Bobby Duwayne Froman recruited fellow bikers to take cash to Modesto, Calif., where they bought large quantities of methamphetamine. The bikers then took the drug to Levelland, Texas, about 30 miles west of Lubbock. The group used Levelland as a base to distribute the drugs through West Texas and elsewhere.

The drug ring had been active since January 2003, officials said.

The deputies, Gordon Clark Bohannon and Jose Jesus Quintanilla, provided the gang members with information that hurt investigators efforts to shut down the ring, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.

Bohannon was arrested and will be arraigned July 20, according to court documents. His attorney declined to comment.

Quintanilla and Froman did not have attorneys listed in their online court records.

“It is particularly disappointing to all who conducted this investigation that two law enforcement officers were indicted by the grand jury and arrested on federal charges,” said Robert E. Casey Jr., the FBI special agent in charge. “The FBI's principal concern in this case is not only the safety and security of the law-abiding citizens of Hockley County, but that their trust and confidence in law enforcement is preserved.”

Twenty-eight defendants each face one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of methamphetamine. The indictment also charges some of the defendants with maintaining drug-involved premises, possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of methamphetamine, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, simple possession of methamphetamine, unlawful use of a communications facility and various firearms counts.

Another Texas cop fired.

This guy thought he was special

A veteran lieutenant with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office has been fired for leading a squad of deputies to investigate a $16 theft from his wife’s car at an Humble carwash last year, the department confirmed Wednesday.
...

Murray said Guthrie’s dismissal was the result of the department’s investigation of an incident in July when Guthrie and a number of deputies shut down a carwash after Guthrie’s wife complained that $16 was stolen from her vehicle.

The Detective

Great movie.

From 1951. With Kirk Douglas. It's like a long version of a dramatic episode of "Barney Miller". And it doesn't get better than that.

The movie was adapted from a Broadway play and is entirely set in the detective bullpen area of a Manhattan police precinct. (a couple of scenes are set in the Lieutenant's office, the rear of a paddy wagon, the roof of the precinct station, and on the sidewalk in front of the precinct station.)

Lynda watched it with me and she wondered whether a Manhattan police station would have had a black uniformed officer in 1951. I think it would have -- the white detectives would have needed a black officer to do the booking fingerprints of any blacks that might have been arrested. In 1951 white cops didn't like touching blacks -- that darkiness might have rubbed off on them.

Almost everything about the movie rang true to me.

Parking tickets

The parking ticket twits in Corpus Christi, TX drive around the downtown streets in unregistered electric golf carts.

If you lived in Corpus and tried to use one of those to save gas money on your grocery store trips you'd end up in jail eventually (after the 4th or 5th ticket).

But cops are special, laws don't apply to government agents raising revenue for the state.

My mother never told me

Some Oakland cops are trying to anew defense for their criminal behavior -- their training never included specific instruction that it's wrong to sign a false affidavit to present to a judge and that it's wrong to intentionally violate the 4th amendment.

Will better training really solve this problem?

The criminalization of life

Now it's official. It's a felony to be a 13 year old boy.

A student at a Florida school has been arrested after authorities say he was "passing gas"

Locking up Infants

Eight years old isn't an infant, but it's pretty close.

His father and a boarder/friend of his father were killed, shot with a 22. Police were called after the boy told a neighbor he though his daddy was dead. The boy denied any knowledge of what happened.

Police then interrogated him for a few hours, without allowing him to consult with any relatives or with a lawyer. He confessed and they charged him with premeditated murder.

more on the story.

When I was a kid I was locked up in a juvenile detention facility for a few days as a runaway. I know firsthand how cops interrogate children. Any confession that kid might have made is unreliable and it's just nonsense to base any kind of prosecution on it. It's really kind of amazing how much of our criminal justice system is based on nonsense.

If he was old enough to have a job he could use a cash advance to get the cash to hire a lawyer.


ht: Injustice Anywhere.

UPDATE: Simple Justice weighs in.

A Public Defender links to a video of the interregation.

I'm just amazed at how many people I run across that just assume the boy killed his father and father's friend based on the confession. The truth is that these Arizona cops screwed this up so badly that we'll probably never be able to know what actually happened. (Did y'all know that Miranda was an Arizona case?)

Florida Fashion Police

Do we have some empty prisons somewhere with a critical need to be filled?

Model of burglary patrol allocation

A long time ago, over 30 years ago, I was involved with a research project that taught me something about the typical mindset of police.

I was working at LSU and a friend of mine was a local cop. He had been a homicide detective but got involved in some union activity so was being punished for that by being re-assigned to the Research and Planning Department. He asked me for some help with a research project he was doing in support of a burglary task force. I got a couple of people from LSU to help. It resulted in a publication, Model of burglary patrol allocation, Journal of Police Science and Administration, 5(2) (June 1977). pp 179-184 by Phil Boudreauz, Gary Carson, John Pisa, and Chris Schroeder.

We did a spatial forecasting model, where we forecast the probability of a commercial burglary in the next week at a block-face level -- i.e, the odd street number side of the 700 block of XYZ Street.

The idea was to then rank locations by those probability estimates and conduct surveillance. It didn't really work out as planned. Not because the model didn't work well, it actually did. But because cops think surveillance is boring and they won't do it if they can figure out a way to get out of it.

We should have realized that after our first discussion with the sergeant who ran the task force. Pretty much all he wanted to talk about was the cool cars they got to drive as part of their undercover personas. This was way before forfeitures, which is the way cops get cool cars to drive today. Back then they went to car dealers and extorted loaners from them by implying that if they didn't donate a car they'd be left without police protection.

Then they'd drive around in the cool cars to impress potential informants. (and street hookers, etc, etc).

The reason for our research project was that the cool cars and informant approach wasn't working, they weren't making any burglary arrests. The second day that our forecasting model was in operation there was a burglary at the top ranked prediction location.

They didn't make an arrest then either because they weren't using the model to do surveillance. They just didn't want to do surveillance. It was boring.

When cops are the criminals

-The newsgroup rec.gambling.poker has a thread on those nut-case Phillie cops who pulled some guys out of a car and beat them up (and got filmed doing it).

One of the things I said in that thread is

Cops lie on a regular basis. It's institutionalized.

Do you know what an inventory search is? It's a pretense that allows the
search of a car without a warrent and without any particular reason. When
a cop claims he did an inventory search he's almost always lying. Ask a
cop, any cop, if he's actually ever written down an inventory as part of
an inventory search. They don't. Not ever. It's pretense. It's a lie.

Cops know it's a lie, prosecutors know, defense attorneys know, judges
know. But they all ignore it and accept the lie. It's built into the
system and has been approved by the Supreme Court. But it's a lie, it's
not the truth.

Our system of justice is built on that kind of nonsense. Cops lie. It's
what they do. It's part of their job. If any of them was ever truthful
about an inventory search he'd lose his job.

The Agitator gives us an example from Atlanta that results in a lot more than just somebody getting their car trashed -- cops lie and somebody dies as a result.

We don't seem to expect much from our cops. And, as a result we don't get much. It's really time to raise our expectations. It's time that we demand that our enforcers of the law actually follow the law. We're either a nation of laws are we aren't.

I wanted to be a police officer my whole life to help people

That's a quote from a Noble OK cop who was testifying on his own behalf at a hearing about his manslaughter charge after he and another cop shot at a snake last year and killed a 5 year old boy instead of the snake.

The snake was not poisonous and was contained in a bird house. More than one shot was fired, and police did not originally release the information about the snake being non-poisonous (actually that information eventually came from an animal control officer in another town).

When I lived in Cleveland, Texas, near a heavily wooded area in East Texas, a dry creek bed ran across the back side of my lot. Whenever it rained the creek bed would fill up snakes would find their way to high ground (my yard or my neighbor's yards). Rattlesnakes in the yard where not uncommon after a big rain.

There was no shortage of guns on that street. People who live in rural East Texas have guns. But the weapon of choice for killing rattlesnakes was a shovel. I kept a shovel in the yard and all my neighbors did (actually I had a big lot and kept two shovels, one next to the house and one next to a tree away from the house).

The two Oklahoma cops are pleading guilty in exchange of two years probation. And give up their police certifications.

THe guy quoted in the title is so full of shit. That's not why he became a cop. He was 34 years old when he became a cop. That makes it pretty clear that police work was not his first occupational choice. He was drawn to police work after trying other jobs. But policing offered a combination of good pay and a fun way to spend the day. Getting paid to wave a gun around and shoot at stuff is every little boys dream.

You can be sure that if some neighbor had shot at the snake and killed the boy that this cop would be standing in line to arrest the offender and would have a ready-made self-rightous explanation of why the bad person with a gun should go to prison.

Maybe one of these we'll actually start holding police to a higher standard. But it won't be anytime soon.

Inscriptions and your government

I didn't know what a Leatherman Micra was. I had to look it up.

But, the DEA knows what it is and they want to give them to agents. With an inscription to ensure they don't forget how important a focus on civil forfeiture is to the security of our country. Because if our government isn't seizing your property then the terroists will have won.