Tag: United Police States of America

Prosecutors are Scum

If one mindlessly accepts the bullshit fed to them by public schools and other government propaganda departments, they believe that governments exist to protect the people by ensuring justice is served. After even a minor amount of analysis though one is left realizing that the purpose of government is to rob wealth from the masses. A good example of this is how government approaches justice.

For justice to be served there must first be a crime. A crime necessarily involves a victim. The government gets around this by espousing a nonsense belief that society, a concept that exists solely in our imaginations, can be a victim. It uses this belief to charge people with victimless crimes such as being in possession of a plant or firearm that has been arbitrarily declared verboten. Another factor that must exist for justice to be served is that only a person guilty of a crime is punished for it. Prosectors, however, are primarily concerned with conviction rates, not justice:

Prosecutors are supposed to disclose any information they uncover that might help the defense. But enforcing that obligation — and punishing those who ignore it — has been no easy task. After Mr. Thompson was freed, he won a $14 million judgment, only to have the Supreme Court reverse the award in 2011, ruling that prosecutors can be held financially liable only if they are shown to have a pattern of unethical behavior. He received nothing.

[…]

This time, lawyers for Mr. Jones and experts at the Innocence Project have pored over court records to compile evidence of a pattern.

“This was a galling disregard for the constitutional rights of defendants,” said Michael L. Banks, a lawyer with the Philadelphia firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. “From the top of this office, there was a culture of winning. And winning meant getting convictions. And that’s why there’s such a striking pattern of wrongful convictions.”

Once again we see the redundancies built into the government to protect its power. Withholding evidence from the defense is supposed to be a crime itself but the Supreme Court ruled that it’s only a crime if there is a pattern of such behavior. What constitutes a pattern? Who knows. But it ensures that yet another barrier exists between corrupt prosecutors (a redundant term) and their victims so business can continue as usual. And that’s the way government works.

Just Another Day Ending in “Y”

It’s another day ending in “y,” which can only mean that another dog has been executed by a law enforcer. But this incident contains an added bonus. Not only was a dog injured but so was a 9-year-old kid who was in the room:

On the evening of Dec. 30, Danielle Maples was making nail polishes with her children. The atmosphere in her home changed when her husband threatened to hurt himself. Maples called 911 to get help.

Then after police arrived – as she and her husband stood outside their home unarmed – she heard two gunshots from inside.

A Wichita police officer fired at her dog – in a small living room occupied by her four children, ages 6 to 10.

Suddenly, the already stressful evening turned into a nightmare.

When the officer shot at the family dog in the same room where her four children were gathered, a bullet fragmented and ricocheted off the concrete floor beneath the carpet where her 9-year-old daughter sat. The girl suffered wounds above her eye. At the hospital, Maples saw a bag with three fragments taken from her daughter’s forehead.

Bullet ballistics are the closest thing to magic that this universe offers. It’s hard to predict all of the ways that discharging a bullet in an uncontrolled environment can go wrong. In this case an officer was trying to perform a routine dog execution that resulted in a child being hit. And what response did the family receive?

An officer later told the family that “it could have been worse,” she said.

I’m not sure if that was meant to be a thinly veiled threat or just the typical hand waving towards violence individuals detached from anything most would recognize as a conscience exhibit. Either way, this story isn’t an isolated incident. Officers perform executions on dogs so frequently that there is now a database of collected reports.

What compounds this incident is that the officer wasn’t even responding to a violent situation. A family member was suffering from a mental crisis. There is no reason that the officer should have been so tooled up. But this incident does serve to illustrate an important lesson. Never call 911 if somebody is suffering a mental crisis. If you do, law enforcers will likely be dispatched and when they show up they may decide to “help” by shooting somebody (maybe even the person suffering the mental crisis).

Formalizing a Tradition

For too long the specter of responsibility has hung over the heads of our brave boys in blue. Although the tradition is not to hold law enforcers responsible for their actions, it’s still just a tradition. But the governor of New Mexico wants to formalize that tradition:

Updated | The Republican Governor of New Mexico could soon propose legislation that would protect police officers from lawsuits—essentially granting them immunity from cases of excessive force.

Governor Susana Martinez’s bill would shield officers who fail to comply with police orders but would not protect officers who do not obey orders or break from training, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

This is the kind of strong backing of the thin blue line that this country needs. For too long just following orders or training has been an informal get out of jail free card. Now it can be a formal one, which means all of that pesky showmanship to make it appear as though rouge officers are held accountable can be discarded. This should save taxpayers some money since internal investigations, prosecutors, and other people involved in the showmanship don’t have to waste their time with it.

Rules of Evidence Don’t Apply

The legal system of the United States has a concept of admissible and inadmissible evidence. If, for example, a prosecutor uses evidence that was acquired illegally, it is supposed to be thrown out. However, this concept like most concepts developed to protect defendants is little more than a fairytale told by politicians, judges, and law enforcers to create the illusion of legitimacy in the minds’ of the masses. In reality there are a lot of options for those who wish to submit “inadmissible” evidence. Parallel construction is one such option:

The Special Operations Division receives raw intelligence from the NSA’s surveillance programs, including from the mass surveillance programs revealed in documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. DEA agents in this unit then analyze the surveillance data and disseminate leads to federal and local police nationwide. But the information comes with a catch. Law enforcement can’t use it to secure search warrants or in any way reveal the intelligence community as the source of their leads. Instead, they must find another way to justify their searches and broader investigations.

[…]

The convoluted and secretive process of building a case to obscure the use of underlying intelligence, known as “parallel construction,” is meant to protect the intelligence community’s sources and methods, according to internal DEA documents. It also often deprives the accused of a fair shot at defending themselves in court because some of the evidence against them is not made public.

If a domestic law enforcement agency is given evidence by the National Security Agency (NSA), it’s not supposed to be able to use it because the NSA is supposed to be prohibited from spying on American citizens. So when the NSA finds evidence that is of interest to a domestic agency, it gives the agency the evidence and orders them to make up a story about how it was uncovered by the agency’s personnel. The agency then works in reverse. It creates a story about how it discovered the evidence. After charges have been filed the defendant has no knowledge of the NSA’s involvement and therefore can put up a meaningful defense.

You may get your day in court but does it really matter when the court is rigged to favor the prosecution?

As She Should

The mother of the victim of the recent swatting incident is calling for the officer who killed her son to be brought up on charges:

An attorney representing Lisa Finch, the mother of a man who was killed by Wichita police last week after a “swatting” prank call, is calling for criminal charges to be filed against the officer who fired the fatal shot.

“Justice for the Finch family constitutes criminal charges against the shooting officer,” attorney Andrew Stroth told the Associated Press in a phone interview.

As she bloody well should.

As I said in my original post, swatting is a byproduct of trigger happy law enforcers avoiding consequences for their actions. If law enforcers were held responsible for their actions, it would likely instill a sense of responsibility into law enforcers. If law enforcers had a sense of responsibility, swatting wouldn’t be a thing because few departments would respond to an anonymous tip by deploying a SWAT team to a provided address to perform a little shock and awe. Instead they would investigate the matter to determine if the reported incident is even legitimate and then act accordingly.

I really hope that the officer who shot Andrew Finch ends up facing criminal charges. Storming a home and gunning down an unarmed man in response to an anonymous call is criminal.

I’m Altering the Deal

Jeff Sessions who, even for a government goon, is a particularly loathsome piece of shit announced that the federal government will again pursue states that have legalized cannabis:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday rescinded a trio of memos from the Obama administration that had adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws.

The move essentially shifts federal policy from the hands-off approach adopted under the previous administration to unleashing federal prosecutors across the country to decide individually how to prioritize resources to crack down on pot possession, distribution and cultivation of the drug in states where it is legal.

“We have to stop people from smoking the jazz cabbage less they begin listening to the music of the negro!” –Jeff Sessions (Probably)

At least I assume that’s Session’s motivation for this announcement because the drug can’t be too dangerous since the states that have legalized it haven’t gone up in flames. But I guess the federal government feels the need to fulfill its prophesy that cannabis kills by siccing its murderous thugs on cannabis users.

If You’re Afraid of Risk, Don’t Take the Job of Absorbing Risk

If you ask the average America what the job of a police officer is, you will likely receive some variation of, “To protect and serve the public.” This shouldn’t surprise anybody. We’re told from a young age that police officers are heroes who protect us and that we pay taxes so police officers can protect us from nefarious individuals.

So, at least ideally, the purpose of a police officer, like that of a firefighter or a private security guard, is to absorb risk. When your job is to absorb risk, the job you take is necessarily risky, which is why many individuals, including myself, are puzzled by officers’ obsession with going home safe at night:

If my concern was “you going home safe,” then I’d just fucking hunker down and die. Because I wouldn’t want that poor responder to endanger himself.

Except…that’s what I pay taxes for, and that’s what you signed up for. Just like I signed up to walk into a potential nuke war in Germany and hold off the Soviets, and did walk into the Middle East and prepare to take fire while keeping expensive equipment functioning so our shooters could keep shooting.

There’s not a single set of orders I got that said my primary job was to “Come home safe.” They said it was to “support the mission” or “complete the objective.” Coming home safe was the ideal outcome, but entirely secondary to “supporting” or “completing.” Nor, once that started, did I get a choice to quit. Once in, all in.

When that 80 year old lady smells smoke or hears a noise outside her first floor bedroom in the ghetto, she doesn’t care if you go home safe, either. She’s afraid she or the kids next door won’t wake up in the morning.

People have varying degrees of risk tolerance. The more risk tolerant a person is, the less they’re concerned about mitigating risks. An investor who is highly risk tolerant is more willing to invest in an unknown startup than an investor who isn’t very risk tolerant. An individual who is motivated to save lives and is highly risk tolerant is more willing to take on the job of fighting fires than an individual who may have the same motivations but isn’t risk tolerant (they might instead opt to become a doctor).

The problem with the “I want to go home safe at night,” mentality that many officers cite whenever they put bullets into somebody is that going home safe at night isn’t part of their job description. Their job description is to absorb risk, which means possibly not going home at night.

If you’re not willing to be shot at, signing up for the military isn’t for you. If you’re not willing to run into a blazing building, being a firefighter isn’t for you. If you’re not willing to put yourself in a situation where you have to let another person initiate violence before you can respond in kind, being a police officer isn’t for you.

Extending Professional Courtesy into Next Year

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman promised to announce whether Office Noor, the Minneapolis law enforcer who murdered Justined Ruszczyk, would be charged. Today Freeman made an announcement but it wasn’t the announcement he promised:

A decision on whether Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor should be charged in the shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond will be made sometime in 2018, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Thursday.

His professional courtesy will be extending into next year, which makes sense. The 2018 Super Bowl is being hosted in Minneapolis. Based on what the public has learned so far it appears that Noor isn’t going to be charged. When that’s announced it will likely cause some civil unrest. Seeing how far the city and country have already gone to appease their National Football League (NFL) masters I’m not surprised that this announcement is being pushed back into 2018, likely sometime after February 4th.

This must is clear, justice, or even the illusion of justice, isn’t as important as the annual handegg championship game.

Can You Steal from a Thief

An Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) office was arrested because he is suspected of stealing weapons from the department:

An Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper was arrested Thursday night on suspicion of theft and weapons violations after officials say he kept eight flashbang grenades from a 2011 training session instead of turning them over to the department, according to court records.

But the question remains, can you steal from a thief? The department’s weapons are paid for with tax dollars and civil forfeiture funding. In other words the department’s weapons are paid for with stolen wealth. Assuming John Petculescu, the man who is charged with stealing the weaponry, is a tax payer, which is a pretty good assumption since he was a DPS employee, he has just as much of a right to those weapons as any other tax payer or victim of civil forfeiture. Unfortunately, the government has claimed a monopoly on theft for itself, which gives it the option to severely punish anybody who challenges its monopoly.

Like You and Me, Only Better

If you’re being attacked and you managed to call 911, a law enforcer will probably show up in time to draw chalk around your body and take some pictures of your corpse. Now when a law enforcer is attacked the whole goddamned world will be alerted so that other law enforcers can drop everything they’re doing, such as responding to your attack, so they can help one of their fellows:

Last week, while many of us were caught up by the internet getting ripped apart by the seams, FCC chairman Ajit Pai also announced a new national system of wireless emergency Blue Alerts, which will notify the public if police officers are threatened, “missing, seriously injured, or killed.”

However, there won’t be such a system to alert everybody in the area when we’re being attacked. I guess we’re just not important enough. Perhaps if we spent more of our time steal wealth from each other to give to the State, we would get our own national alert system.

Isn’t it strange how everybody in this country is supposedly equal under the law but the law continues to establish an environment where favored individuals, such as government employees, enjoy privileges that others do not.