Tag: Law and Disorder

You Can’t Commit Suicide If You’re in a Full Body Cast

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Cops are called to deal with an apparently suicidal person. When they arrive on the scene they decide to shoot or beat the shit out of the suicidal man:

Two police officers in Paterson, New Jersey, went to a local hospital March 5 on reports of a man who attempted suicide, video showed. But after the man threw an object into the hallway and insulted one of the cops, the officers grabbed the man’s wheelchair, punched him in the face and pushed him to the ground, according to a federal criminal complaint.

Another video (this one allegedly recorded by Officer Roger Then, 29, on his cellphone) caught the second stage of the assault, prosecutors said. At that point, the victim was in his hospital bed, video showed. Lying on his back, the suicidal man hurled an insult at an unidentified police officer. In response, that officer grabbed a pair of hospital gloves, put them on and “violently struck” the man two times, prosecutors said.

You can’t commit suicide if you’re in a full body cast!

While the story itself isn’t surprising, what is surprising is that Officer Then has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. I was expecting to read that the officer was enjoying a paid vacation since that is such a common outcome of stories like this. But apparently an officer recording himself beating a man lying in a hospital bed is stupid enough that federal law enforcers feel the need to actually do something.

Once again I’m left wondering exactly how many isolated incidents perpetrated by bad apples are needed to establish a trend.

The Ideal Officer

There is a slight amount of controversy in Minneapolis because a video was released showing a Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer napping in uniform in his patrol car:

The Minneapolis Police Department has launched an internal affairs investigation after video surfaced of a uniformed officer who appeared to be nodding off in a marked squad car.

A South Minneapolis resident, who recorded the act, said it was at 12:26 a.m. Saturday morning. A friend of the woman said she was driving home and noticed the police car, parked on Ogema Place, with an officer alone inside, and his head bobbing back and forth as if sleeping in the high-crime area.

I’ll be totally honest and say that I would far rather see this kind of behavior from MPD officers than the usual controversies involving unarmed individuals, sometimes in handcuffs, ending up summarily executed.

The officer in question really is the ideal officer in my book. Instead of creating a bunch of busywork or harassing innocent individuals, he decided to nod off. While it’s true that he was probably drawing a paycheck at the time, the fact that he wans’t hurting anybody automatically puts the money to better use than it would have been if he was harassing innocent individuals. Admittedly, that’s a very low bar to set for judging an officer’s actions but MPD has done a fantastic job of setting the bar low.

She Totally Had It Coming

Remember the officer who protected and served the shit out of a 20-year-old woman on Memorial Day? He claimed that the reason he took the woman to the ground and began pummeling her was because she spat on him and kicked him in the nuts. While such an excuse doesn’t justify such behavior, he did claim that his body camera footage would exonerate him. That footage was released but I’m having a tough time seeing when she spat on him or kicked him in the nuts:

What I see are a few officers harassing a girl and her getting agitated and walking away. Then I see one of the officers pursue her and eventually rush her. When that happens she puts up her hands defensively, probably instinctively, and is quickly taken to the ground and pummeled. It’s possible that she kicked the officer in the nuts when he rushed her but that would have been self-defense, not assault, as the officer had no grounds at that point for rushing her.

Instead of exonerating him, the body camera footage proves that the officer lied about the situation. Now the question is, will any meaningful punishment befall him for lying and assaulting a woman? I’m guessing there won’t be.

Once in a While the Nazgûl Toss Us a Bone

Once in a while the Nazgûl toss us a bone. This is probably because you have to allow the plebeians to win once in a while to maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Whatever their motivation, eight of the nine muumuu clad Supreme Court judges decided that police do need a warrant to search your property:

In an 8-to-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police in Virginia violated the Fourth Amendment by walking onto the driveway of home in order to peek under a tarp that was covering a stolen motorcycle, as the Justices decided the officer had run afoul of the Constitution by engaging in a warrantless search.

The court’s majority said “a parking patio or carport into which an officer can see from the street is no less entitled to protection from trespass and a warrantless search than a fully enclosed garage.

In any sane word this case wouldn’t have had to reach the Supreme Court. All of the lower courts would have agreed that Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches extend to the entirety of your property, not just the property behind a locked door. If that wasn’t the case, farmers would have little protection against warrantless searches since much of their property generally lies outside of buildings.

Protecting and Serving the Shit Out of You

Look at that? It’s a day ending in “y,” which means that there must be another isolated incident involving one of those rare bad apples:

The footage, posted on social media on Saturday, shows three officers from the Wildwood Police Department attempting to detain Emily Weinman, 20.

Ms Weinman was later charged with illegal possession of alcohol on the beach and for resisting arrest.

Two of the officers have been placed on administrative duty, officials said.

The incident, which occurred on a beach on Memorial Day weekend in the US, shows Ms Weinman being wrestled to the ground in a swimsuit and shorts.

With one officer on top of her, she kicks out at another, who then holds her legs down by gripping her ankles.

One officer is then seen punching her in the head with his fist before placing her in a headlock and pinning her to the ground.

My mistake, make that three bad apples. But I guess she should count herself lucky for not be summarily executed.

Remember that in the freest country on Earth there is no transgression so minor that a law enforcer won’t beat or execute you over it.

Land of the Free

My feelings for government agents are well known but even among such a rogues gallery Jeff Sessions stands out as particularly loathsome. I often compare him to a Saturday morning cartoon villain. He’s a two dimensional character who seem to be evil for the sole sake of being evil. In his latest disregard of common decency he has decided once again that the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four were the heroes and should be emulated:

Sessions, however, refuses to accept this reality. Instead, he has claimed that the agreement caused 236 murders. He points to a journal article written by Paul Cassell, a former federal judge, and Richard Fowles, that asserts the reductions in stop-and-frisk encounters from 40,000 a month to 10,000 a month caused the additional murders in 2016. While the report accurately states the reduced number of stop-and-frisk encounters and the spike in murders in 2016, it provides no causal link between the two events.

The authors essentially suggest that a huge number of random stops will reduce crime because no one will ever know when they might be stopped and, therefore, will not carry weapons. Apparently, they are fine with randomly stopping hundreds of thousands of people, a practice with a greater than 84 percent error rate.

Remember when films portrayed Nazis and Cold War Eastern European guards asking for papers as bad guys? Those were the days! Speaking of Nazi Germany and Cold War Eastern Europe, those governments taught us that even if you establish the most ruthless police state imaginable, crime will still be rampant. Random harassment teaches people to avoid law enforcers, nothing more. Needless to say, with such an education a policy of randomly stopping and frisking individuals can only manage to catch the dumbest criminals.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Government Claims

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has claimed that law enforcers are being thwarted by dastardly criminals 7,800 times because the contents of modern smartphones cannot be easily decrypted. It turns out that the FBI has significantly exaggerated the number of devices that it has been unable to unlock:

Last year FBI Director Christopher Wray said it had failed to access 7,800 mobile devices, but tonight a Washington Post report reveals that number is incorrect. According to the Post, the accurate number is between 1,000 and 2,000, with a recent internal estimate putting at about 1,200 devices, and in a statement, the FBI responded: “The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported.”

7,800 versus 1,200? That’s only an exaggeration of a factor of 6.5, no big deal.

Lying is nothing new for the FBI, which raises two interesting questions. Why does anybody take what the FBI says at face value and why aren’t members of the agency fired when they lie? Everything the agency says should be taken with a giant grain of salt. Moreover, when agents lie to the public (you know, the people they supposedly serve) and Congress, no punishment is ever issued, which encourages agents to tell more lies.

Speak English or Else

Be mindful of what language you speak in the land of the free:

(GREAT FALLS) Two U.S. citizens were stopped and questioned by a Border Patrol agent early Wednesday morning for speaking Spanish at a gas station in Havre.

Ana Suda – who was born in Texas and now lives in Havre – stopped with a friend at a Town Pump store to buy milk and eggs.

They were speaking Spanish when a Border Patrol agent asked them for their documents.

Speaking Spanish? Ihre Papiere, bitte!

In all fairness, I understand how this situation occurred. Put yourself in the agent’s shoes. You’re an American of moderate intelligence who hears two people speaking a language other than English. You can’t imagine that anybody would actively invest their time into learning another language so you’re fairly certain that those two people are from Mexico. You also know from your training that anybody from Mexico is probably here illegally. With this knowledge in hand you decided to do what you were hired to do, harass people.

The United States, like many superpowers before it, is decaying and the rulers are looking for somebody to blame (besides themselves, of course). As is tradition in decaying superpowers, the rulers of the United States has decided to place the blame firmly on the shoulders of barbarians outsiders. This has lead to the establishment of policies meant to seek out barbarian infiltrators and remove them and their immoral influence from this great nation. In other words, there’s a witch hunt on for outsiders and anything that isn’t considered expressly American is a sign of a witch.

Tracking Your Pieces of Flair

Some people mistakenly believe that if they don’t carry a cell phone, government agents can’t track them. While cell phones are convenient tracking devices, they aren’t the only tool in the State’s toolbox. Law enforcers have been using license plate scanners for years now. Such scanners can track the whereabouts of every vehicle in the department’s territory. And since license plate scanners are technological devices, they are improving in capabilities:

On Tuesday, one of the largest LPR manufacturers, ELSAG, announced a major upgrade to “allow investigators to search by color, seven body types, 34 makes, and nine visual descriptors in addition to the standard plate number, location, and time.”

Plus, the company says, the software is now able to visually identity things like a “roof rack, spare tire, bumper sticker, or a ride-sharing company decal.”

Even obscuring or changing your license plate won’t work if you have, like so many Americans, covered your car in unique pieces of flair.

I’m sure some people, thinking that they’re very clever, have already come up with the strategy of not driving their vehicle. After all, if you don’t have a cell phone or a personal vehicle, the government can’t track you, right? Wrong again.

Find a Career in Letting Children Get Gunned Down

Are you looking for a career that will allow you to live comfortably in your old age? Try a career in standing by while the children you’re tasked with protecting get gunned down:

Scott Peterson, the Broward County sheriff’s deputy who failed to engage the Parkland high school shooter, is eligible to receive an annual pension in excess of six figures.

The Sun Sentinel obtained records from the Florida Department of Management Services showing that Peterson, who retired in the weeks after the March shooting, is due to collect $8,700 per month. That works out to slightly more than $104,000 a year. Peterson, who is 55 years old, will be able to receive that pension for the rest of his life, and Broward County taxpayers will cover 50 percent of his health insurance premiums.

I guess the only solace here is that half of his health insurance premiums will quickly gobble up $104,000 per year at the rate it’s increasing.

My criticism here isn’t so much against Peterson (I’ve already criticized him) but against the department that employed him. Peterson failed to do his job and that failure likely lead to unnecessary deaths (shooters tend to off themselves upon meeting armed resistance so Peterson’s mere presence with a firearm would have stood a very high chance of immediately resolving the situation). He should have been terminated from the department for that. Instead the department let him retire and collect his absurd pension.