Your Government Doesn’t Love You – Page 115

Thousands Stopped By Minneapolis Police Department with No Cause

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has quite a reputation. From its program of picking up people on the street and getting them high on illegal drugs to the corrupt Gang Strike Force there has been little good to say about the integrity of the agency. Now it appears that there is yet another scandal to add to the department’s pile. Thousands of people have been stopped by MPD officers for no reason whatsoever:

Minneapolis police officers rarely record details of their encounters with people they detain but ultimately don’t arrest.

That’s the key finding of a civilian review board draft report that examined 385 “suspicious person” stops conducted by officers in 2014. In nearly 70 percent of those stops, officers provided no documentation of the interaction, other than noting how the call was resolved.

The draft (.pdf) released this week by the Police Conduct Oversight Commission, a unit of the Minneapolis civil rights department, could lead to changes in how police document stops of suspicious people.

I say they were stopped for no reason whatsoever because if there was a reason you can rest assured the officer would have recorded it. Unfortunately this is looking like yet another case where the officers involved will go unpunished. The Police Conduct Oversight Commission is merely looking for changes to how police document stops, it’s not attempting to have the officers charged or even fired.

Since no documentation regarding most of these stops exists it’s hard to tell if MPD was targeting people of certain races. Perhaps MPD is learning form the mistakes of other agencies and simply not keeping detailed records that could be used to make a case of discrimination against the department.

Parking Illegally isn’t Illegal When You’re a Cop

If you park somewhere illegally you can get booted or towed. It sucks when it happens because you end up paying out a sizable chunk of change most of the time. Unless you’re a cop. When you have a shiny liability badge and you park illegal you can arrest the person who booted your undercover car:

The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, stems from a run-in that happened after the troopers, Sgt. Joseph Patout and Master Trooper Christopher Treadaway, parked a pickup with a Mississippi license plate in a lot across the street from Kyoto, a sushi bar on Prytania Street, and left it unattended for about 30 minutes.

The attendant, Brandon Hardeway, watched the troopers go into the Japanese restaurant, whose customers weren’t allowed to use the parking lot, and booted the pickup after allowing a grace period of several minutes, said Hardeway’s attorney, Isaac Soileau Jr.

“He felt pretty confident that he was doing the right thing when he booted it,” Soileau said of his client.

After leaving the restaurant, the troopers demanded that Hardeway remove the boot from their Dodge Ram pickup, saying they were undercover law enforcement officers, according to the lawsuit.

After checking with his employer, Premier Parking Enforcement, Hardeway told the troopers that the company “extended courtesy” to official vehicles used by New Orleans police as well as “other plainly marked emergency vehicles,” the lawsuit says. The company, also known as Boot Man Inc., did not make the same accommodation for unmarked State Police vehicles, “nor was it required to,” the lawsuit says.

After Hardeway told the troopers he wouldn’t remove the boot until they paid a $90 fee, the troopers told him he was “interfering with their official duties” and arrested him, the lawsuit says, handcuffing him and “forcing him into the back seat of a police vehicle.”

As they say, you can beat the charge but you can’t beat the ride. Even though state law doesn’t exempt undercover police cars from parking regulations the cops were able to kidnap the parking attendant, who was just doing his job I might add ironically, and are requiring him to suffer through the court system in order to get compensation.

Those shiny liability badges also ensure that the officers responsible for this mess will go unpunished. The lawsuit is against the Louisiana State Police, the two officers’ employer. Since the Louisiana State Patrol is tax payer funded the lawsuit, if successful, will do little more than return some of Premier Parking Enforcement’s stolen tax money. In all likelihood the two officers will go entirely unpunished. At most they may lose their jobs. But they certainly won’t be charged for unlawful kidnapping as they should be. Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse — unless you have a badge.

Touching Your Junk for Freedom

What’s to prevent sexual predators from getting a job with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) so they can feel up people? Not a damn thing as people flying through the Denver International Airport found out firsthand:

DENVER (CBS4) – A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.

It happened roughly a dozen times, according to information gathered by CBS4.

According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he “gropes” male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA.

“He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”

A major problem with a state is that it reserves for itself the right to violate anybody at any time. This is the nasty habit of attracting people who want to violate other human beings. Because of this you get enforcement agencies packed with people most would consider undesirable.

Compounding that problem is the problem of monopoly. When the state declares a monopoly on something and its power is used to violate people there are no alternatives. In the case of the TSA the only alternative to getting sexually assaulted by a TSA agent is not to fly since the state has granted itself a monopoly on airplane security.

Making matters even worse is that the state usually shields its agents from liability (which it can do because it has granted itself a monopoly on legal matters). Nobody was arrested or charged over this incident. Two TSA agents were fired and the Denver District Attorney’s Office decided not to file charges:

Earlier this month a prosecutor from the Denver District Attorney’s Office was asked to review the case but she declined to press charges because there was no reasonable likelihood of conviction and no victim had been identified.

I hope you continue to enjoy living in the freest goddamn country on Earth!

Crossing the Thin Blue Line

One of the difficulties in holding police accountable in this country is that when an officer is accused of doing something wrong he is investigated by his fellows and usually found innocent of any wrongdoing. This thin blue line of cops protecting other cops is a breeding ground for corruption. When an officer does cross the thin blue line the vengeance dished out by their fellow officers can be terrible. Just ask Frank Serpico. His fellow officers attempted to get him killed on a drug raid because he spoke out against corrupt officers.

Smart officers who want to blow the whistle on their corrupt fellows lawyer up first. Even then the level police officers will sink to in order to exact revenge is frightening. A Arkansas lawyer who is representing some good officers that came forth against corruption found out first hand how low departments still stoop:

An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials.

The hard drive was provided last year by the Fort Smith Police Department to North Little Rock attorney Matt Campbell in response to a discovery demand filed in the case. Campbell is representing three current or former police officers in a court action, which was filed under Arkansas’ Whistle-Blower Act. The lawsuit alleges former Fort Smith police officer Don Paul Bales and two other plaintiffs were illegally investigated after reporting wrongful termination and overtime pay practices in the department.

According to court documents filed last week in the case, Campbell provided police officials with an external hard drive for them to load with e-mail and other data responding to his discovery request. When he got it back, he found something he didn’t request. In a subfolder titled D:\Bales Court Order, a computer security consultant for Campbell allegedly found three well-known trojans, including:

Win32:Zbot-AVH[Trj], a password logger and backdoor

NSIS:Downloader-CC[Trj], a program that connects to attacker-controlled servers and downloads and installs additional programs, and

Two instances of Win32Cycbot-NF[Trj], a backdoor

All three trojans are usually easily detected by antivirus software. In an affidavit filed in the whistle-blower case, Campbell’s security consultant said it’s unlikely the files were copied to the hard drive by accident, given claims by Fort Smith police that department systems ran real-time AV protection.

It makes you wonder what the officers who installed the malware on the hard drives were thinking. Did they believe their programs would bypass the lawyer’s anti-malware? Were they hoping he didn’t keep backups of the information he had related to the case and that erasing them on the laptop would ensure they were gone forever? Or were they hoping to install illegal material, such as child pornography, on his laptop in order to frame him? Who know. But this shows just how far officers will go to lash out against those who cross the thin blue line. Going after whistle blower’s lawyers is probably seen as nothing more than collateral damage to them.

Children Are Property of the State

Many parents mistakenly believe that they are the legal guardians of their children. I say mistakenly because they are merely enjoying the temporary privilege of being the legal guardian of their children. That privilege, like all privileges, can be revoked at any moment by the state. One may wonder what would convince the state to revoke such a privilege. Most people would likely answer things such as letting a child starve or beating the child. Perhaps that was the case at some point in the past but more and more the state is revoke the permission of parents to be legal guardians of their children for asinine reasons. Now the state has gone so far as to rule that parents need not be at fault of anything to lose their guardian privileges:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – The state can remove an out-of-control child from the custody of a parent even if the mother or father is not to blame for the child’s behavior, a California appeals court said Thursday.

If children face substantial risk of harming themselves, it doesn’t matter whether the parent did anything intentional to put them in that position, the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled.

When you see the words “substantial risk of harming themselves” you may think about suicidal children and parents not properly securing things like knives, guns, or pills. That’s not the case here:

Thursday’s ruling came in the case of a Los Angeles County mother whose teen daughter repeatedly ran away from home and had a child at the age of 15. The appellate court said the girl remained incorrigible despite her mother’s best efforts, which included looking for her each time she left home, sending her to live with her grandparents and calling the police and Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services for help. The mother was identified in court documents only as “Lisa E.” and her daughter as “R.T.”

“(The) mother in this case was neither neglectful nor blameworthy in being unable to supervise or protect her daughter,” the court said.

Fortunately the state decided to swoop in, revoke the mother’s guardian privileges, and kidnap the child. In the end the state decided to grant guardianship privileges to the child’s grandparents but it could have just as easily decided to be less benevolent and placed the child in foster care or even prison (since the intention was to prevent the child from running away). This case just demonstrates what us anarchist already know; children are the property of the state.

I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Whatever the state controls can be arbitrarily changed at a moment’s notice with nothing more than a stroke of a pen and enough men in suits saying “Aye!” A counterargument to anarchism is that the state is necessary to help those in need. The argument is bullshit. Under a state assistance of those in need, as with everything else, is entirely controlled by the state. Over time this usually results in the state claiming a monopoly, or near monopoly, on providing welfare. At that point welfare becomes unpredictable because the rules can change at any moment. Missouri is experiencing one of these attempted arbitrary rule changes now as several politicians try to restrict what type of foodstuff food stamp recipients can buy:

That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items. Now, a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing for legislation that would stop people like Greenslate and severely limit what food stamp recipients can buy. The bill being proposed would ban the purchase with food stamps of “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.”

“The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to its original intent, which is nutrition assistance,” said Rick Brattin, the representative who is sponsoring the proposed legislation.

As the article points out the lawmakers may have a claim if they stopped at cookies, chips, energy drinks, and soft drinks. But seafood and steak are broad categories that encompass many nutritional foods. There are a lot of cheap seafood and steak options, especially when they’re on sale. Of course none of these politicians have an educational background in nutrition so whatever rules they make are, as always, arbitrary.

I know a lot of people are cheering this as a good idea. Most of those people would probably be happy if government food assistance only allowed enrollees to buy Soylent. They see people on government assistance as moochers who are stealing valuable tax dollars. It’s a misguided viewpoint. Their anger should be directed at the state as it is the entity that, through approximately a century of regulatory bullshit, transferred welfare from voluntary mutual aid groups to itself. Were welfare still in the hands of mutual aid groups those who didn’t want to participate wouldn’t have to and welfare would again be of a far higher quality.

In addition to that I also believe their anger is misguided because it assumes that those tax dollars would be put to better uses. Every dollar that gets put into welfare is a dollar that isn’t being put into buying more bombs, building better surveillance systems, or providing the police with even heavier armaments. As far as I’m concerned food assistance recipients should be allowed to buy caviar if they want it. Anything that pulls resources away from the state’s enforcement arms is good in my book.

Murdered Over a Broken Taillight

The murder of Walter Scott is receiving a lot of much needed media coverage. Thanks to the fact the murdered, Officer Michael Slager, was filmed this case didn’t get swept underneath the rug like so many others. It should serve as a reminder that people should always film any police encounter they’re involved in or are witnessing. But there’s one fact about this case that’s not receiving enough media attention, the event that lead to Scott’s murder:

The confrontation occurred around 9:30 a.m. ET on Saturday after Slager pulled over Scott’s car because of a broken taillight.

A man is dead because our rulers have deemed it acceptable to send armed thugs after people with broken equipment. Broken taillights are a simple matter to solve without pulling people over. Each vehicle has a unique license plate number that identifies it. If an officer sees a car with a broken taillight they could just look up who the vehicle is registered to, something they routinely do when they pull somebody over, and send them a letter informing them that their taillight is broken. Instead officers are allowed to turn on their loud sirens and flashy attention whore lights, force drivers to pull over to the side of the road, and waddle their heavily armed and often aggressive asses over to the driver to terrify them for a bit before issuing them a citation.

Walter Scott would almost certainly still be alive today if broken taillights weren’t grounds for officers to initiate force against motorists. In addition to being a remind of police brutality this story is also a reminder than any police encounter, regardless of how minor the offense that preceded the encounter was, can escalate to deadly force.

Customer Service with a Middle Finger

The worst part about monopolies is if you don’t like their service you have no alternatives. When it comes to monopolies the state is the biggest one of them all and it shows. For example, the state has declared a monopoly for itself in gang-style protection schemes. That is to say if you don’t want to be roughed up, kidnapped, or have your business stolen from you you only have one protection racket you can pay off, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Since the IRS has no competition it can demand you pay it off under the penalty of having armed thugs sent to kidnap you and still refuse to answer any of the questions you have about its overly complicated extortion structure:

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Tuesday that service at his agency has gotten so bad that they are ignoring more than 60 percent of taxpayers’ phone calls during this tax season.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Mr. Koskinen pleaded with more money, saying a budget boost would help them staff their overwhelmed customer service lines. He also said it would help reverse staffing cuts in their compliance division, where he said the government will lose $2 billion this year in money it would otherwise have been able to collect if it had better staffing.

Just because the IRS refuses to take your call doesn’t mean your exempted from or receive an automatic delay for paying your extortion bill. And since the IRS has no competition it has no motivation whatsoever to improve its service. After all, if you don’t pay you’re still going to rot in a cage and your assets will be stolen from you.

You Can’t Stop the Signal

Two days ago a giant bust of Edward Snowden was found perched atop the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park. The sculpture was of the best sort, illicit. It didn’t take long for the authorities to coverup and then remove Snowden from the park, which sent a more prominent message than anything else they could have done. But the signal can’t be stopped. Yesterday a different group of artists created a hologram of Snowden at the site of the previous sculpture:

NEW YORK — Hours after police removed an illicit bust of Edward Snowden from its perch in a Brooklyn park on Monday, artists replaced it with a hologram.

The group of artists — who collectively call themselves “The Illuminator” and are not related to the trio behind the original sculpture — used laptops and projection equipment to cast an image of Snowden in a haze of smoke at the spot where the sculpture once stood.

They say the action was a message of defiance aimed at the authorities who “censored” the piece, according to a tumblr post.

I believe if anybody is deserving of a monument it’s Snowden. He belongs to that rare breed of people willing to risk it all to bring our rulers’ dirty laundry to light. Someday I hope a monument of him and Chelsea Manning are erected in dedication to the idea that breaking the law is sometimes the most heroic thing one can do.

Feinstein Doesn’t Understand How the Internet Works

Dianne Feinstein has made herself famous amongst gun owners by spouting entirely false claims. But she’s not satisfied with simply being ignorant about firearms. She also wants to prove to the world that she’s ignorant about how the Internet works. Her latest crusade is to remove the Anarchist Cookbook from the Internet:

“The arrests of two women in New York accused of plotting to carry out bombings remind us that the threat of terrorism inside the United States endures. We must remain vigilant against these types of attacks and place a high priority on tracking and interdicting such plots.

“I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet.

How does she propose to do that? The Internet is a decentralized system where no single government’s rule dictates jack shit. Even if she could declare the Anarchist Cookbook illegal in the United States, which would carry some serious free speech ramifications, it wouldn’t prevent servers in other countries from hosting the book. There is literally no way for the book to be remove from the Internet. The fact that Feinstein doesn’t understand this should be more proof that she has no business writing or voting for any legislation affecting the Internet (just as she has no business writing or voting for legislation affecting firearms).

As an interesting side note the book, despite the title, has nothing to do with the philosophy of anarchism. It was written by William Powell as a response to the fact that the government was trying to send him off to fight a war without his consent (also known as a draft). The book wasn’t about anarchism but about retaliating against a government that would make him act against his will. Unfortunately the title selection has been used as evidence that us anarchists are a bunch of violent psychopaths since its publication.