What about ‘Stand your ground’?

June 23, 2014June 22, 2014 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

KILLEEN, TX — A police officer suffered fatal injuries while performing a pre-dawn no-knock raid on a local residence to search for drugs. Several officers were shot by a resident as they tried to enter an apartment through a ground-level window under the cover of darkness.

Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie, an 18-year veteran of the department — died two days after being shot on Friday morning. Approximately 5:30 a.m. on May 9th, the Killeen Police Department sent its SWAT team to execute a surprise raid on a middle-aged couple because they allegedly possessed substances without government permission.

Dinwiddie and several other SWAT agents snuck up to a window and tried to breach it to gain entry. The commotion caused one of residents to fire on the unidentified intruders, and Dinwiddie was struck in the face. Three others were shot; 2 were shot in the armor and 1 was shot in the thigh.

Oh, and you guessed it: No drugs were found. But because this is Texas, and the guy who shot the cop is black (unlike this guy), I imagine prosecutors will tie themselves in knots to go after him.

To protect and serve

May 21, 2014May 22, 2014 ~ susie ~ 4 Comments

If you’re like me, you’re disgusted at how little is being done to stop police brutality. This story makes me sick:

The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange reports that Javier Payne suffered cuts to his face, his chest, and a punctured lung from being shoved into the window of the Hookah Shop. Paramedics had to hold Payne’s chest closed as he was rushed to the hospital — though they did not arrive on scene immediately because police called it in with a protocol used for drunks, not for a pediatric emergency.

Payne was arrested that night with another teenager on charges of resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, and assault. While it’s not clear what the circumstances surrounding the arrest were, police often use these kinds of charges to discredit or obscure accusations of brutality. The report filed by the officers made no mention of the window smashing.

After hours of surgery, Payne’s mother was allowed to see her son. “Mommy, Mommy,” he said. “The cop, he pushed my head through the window while I was handcuffed, Mommy, he pushed my head through the window.”

‘To protect and serve’

May 14, 2014May 13, 2014 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Cops choking and kicking 6th graders:

On Tuesday, the Boynton Beach, Fla. police department released two student-shot cell phone videos that show police officers detaining two sixth graders who’d reportedly just been removed from a school bus. In one video, an officer appears to put a student in a chokehold; in another, an officer kicks a student in the back of the leg, causing the student to fall.

Jurors tell judge: Don’t send Occupy activist to jail

May 9, 2014May 14, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This is one of the more uplifting things I’ve heard in a while. Will the judge listen? I seem to recall there’s a mandatory minimum on the charges:

A majority of the jurors who this week convicted an Occupy Wall Street activist of assaulting a New York police officer have asked the judge in her case to not send her to prison.

Cecily McMillan was on Monday found guilty of deliberately elbowing officer Grantley Bovell in the face, as he led her out of a protest in March 2012. She was convicted of second-degree assault, a felony, and faces up to seven years in prison. She was denied bail and is being detained at Riker’s Island jail.

However, nine of the 12 jurors who unanimously reached the verdict have since taken the unusual step of writing to Judge Ronald Zweibel to request that he not give her a prison sentence on 19 May.

“We the jury petition the court for leniency in the sentencing of Cecily McMillan,” they wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian. “We would ask the court to consider probation with community service.

Finally freed from a ban on researching the case, including potential punishments, some were shocked to learn that they had just consigned the 25-year-old to a sentence of up to seven years in prison, one told the Guardian. “They felt bad,” said the juror, who did not wish to be named. “Most just wanted her to do probation, maybe some community service. But now what I’m hearing is seven years in jail? That’s ludicrous. Even a year in jail is ridiculous.”

Though it came as a surprise to some of the eight women and four men who found her guilty of second-degree assault, McMillan said that the potential prison sentence had been on her mind for the two years since she was arrested for elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face at a demonstration in Zuccotti Park, where protesters had gathered to mark six months of the Occupy movement.

H/t Attorney Thomas Soldan.

U.N. human rights investigator accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing

May 5, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’m always so surprised when someone comes out and says it. Now wait for the character assassination any minute now:

(Reuters) – A U.N. human rights investigator accused Israel on Friday of “ethnic cleansing” in pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and cast doubt that the Israeli government could accept a Palestinian state in the current climate.

He spoke against a backdrop of deadlocked peace talks and accelerating Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem which Palestinians say is dimming their hope of establishing a viable state on contiguous territory.

Israel says Palestinian refusal to recognise it as a Jewish state is the main obstacle. U.S. President Barack Obama this week pressed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to help break the impasse, saying both sides must take political risks before the April 29 deadline for a framework deal.

Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told a news conference that Israeli policies bore “unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing”.

“Every increment of enlarging the settlements or every incident of house demolition is a way of worsening the situation confronting the Palestinian people and reducing what prospects they might have as the outcome of supposed peace negotiations.”

Asked about his accusation of ethnic cleansing, Falk said that more than 11,000 Palestinians had lost their right to live in Jerusalem since 1996 due to Israel imposing residency laws favouring Jews and revoking Palestinian residence permits.

“The 11,000 is just the tip of the iceberg because many more are faced with possible challenges to their residency rights.”

Cops can search your car for no good reason in PA

May 2, 2014May 14, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

And to be practical, they always could. We’re all grownups here, right? We all know that cops lie about probable cause to search, and now the famously corrupt PA State Supreme Court has given them its blessing. Seamus fucking McCaffery wrote the opinion? The judge whose lawyer wife was making big money referring clients to law firms? The same wife whose ticket he tried to fix?

Oh yeah, we have a great Supreme Court here:

As it turns out, until a few days ago, if you got pulled over in PA doin’ 55 in a 54 or what have you, you could have told a police officer who asked to search your car “Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk and the back, and I know my rights so you go’n need a warrant for that,” and you would have been correct. That is no longer the case. According to Lancaster Online, “Pennsylvania police officers no longer need a warrant to search a citizen’s vehicle, according to a recent state Supreme Court opinion.”

The way it used to work, with marijuana for an example, is that an officer who smelled weed could only search the car with the driver’s consent or if illegal substances were in plain view. For an additional search, a warrant was needed. But now, “it only takes reasonable probable cause for an officer to go ahead with a search without a warrant.” The opinion, authored by chief justice Seamus McCaffery, says that PA now adopts “the federal automobile exception… which allows police officers to search a motor vehicle when there is probable cause to do so.” And Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said the ruling puts PA in line with federal law and many other states. For what it’s worth, Jay-Z’s legal advice in “99 Problems” is no longer good advice in PA and even at the time of the song’s realase, was not good advice on a federal level. According to an actual law journal article on the matter:

If this Essay serves no other purpose, I hope it serves to debunk, for any readers who persist in believing it, the myth that locking your trunk will keep the cops from searching it. Based on the number of my students who arrived at law school believing that if you lock your trunk and glove compartment, the police will need a warrant to search them, I surmise that it’s even more widespread among the lay public. But it’s completely, 100% wrong. There is no warrant requirement for car searches. The Supreme Court has declared unequivocally that because cars are inherently mobile (and are pervasively regulated, and operated in public spaces), it is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment for the police to search the car—the whole car, and everything in the car, including containers—whenever they have probable cause to believe that the car contains evidence of crime. You don’t have to arrest the person, or impound the vehicle. You just need probable cause to believe that the car contains evidence of crime. So, in any vehicle stop, the officers may search the entire car, without consent, if they develop probable cause to believe that car contains, say, drugs.”

H/t Seth Okin.

Land of the free and home of the brave

April 24, 2014April 23, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Makes me proud to be an American!

In February 2012 Shinwari, who has lived in the US since he was 14, flew to Afghanistan to get married. He says that before he could get home to Omaha, Nebraska, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. A third FBI visit followed when he got home.

The following month, after Shinwari bought another plane ticket for a temporary job in Connecticut, he couldn’t get a boarding pass. Airport police told him he had been placed on the US no-fly list, although he had never in his life been accused of breaking any law. Another FBI visit soon followed, with agents wanting to know about the “local Omaha community, did I know anyone who’s a threat”, he says.

“I’m just very frustrated, what can I do to clear my name?” recalls Shinwari, 30. “And that’s where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don’t have a job; we’ll give you money.”

Shinwari is one of four American Muslims in a new lawsuit who accuse the FBI of placing them on the no-fly list, either to intimidate them into becoming informants or to retaliate against them for declining.

Bygones

April 23, 2014April 23, 2014 ~ susie

Just one of those crazy mixups that results in an innocent person getting shot by police!

With malice aforethought

April 10, 2014April 9, 2014 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Cops are just out of control. Just crazy:

Los Angeles police officers removed antennas from police cars in several predominantly Black neighborhoods to disable the recording equipment and avoid being monitored while on duty, according to an inspection by LAPD investigators.

The department review found about half of the 80 cars in the Southeast division—which includes Watts and the Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens housing projects—were missing the antennas that help capture what officers say in the field. The review discovered at least 10 more cars in nearby divisions also had antennas removed.

Members of the Police Commission, which oversees the department, said they were alarmed by both the actions of the officers and the failure of the department to reveal their actions when they were first detected.

“On an issue like this, we need to be brought in right away,” commission President Steve Soboroff told the Los Angeles Times. “This equipment is for the protection of the public and of the officers. To have people who don’t like the rules to take it upon themselves to do something like this is very troubling.”

But LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said the department did not purposely try to hide the matter from the commission and pointed out that he has always been a strong advocate of the recording devices. LAPD officials decided it would be futile to try to figure out which officers were responsible for removing the antennas, since so many of them use the cars during their shifts. Instead the department warned officers about removing the antennas and put checks in place to account for the equipment at the start and end of each patrol shift.

One of the main reasons a federal judge agreed to lift the Department of Justice’s oversight of the notoriously corrupt LAPD last year, after more than a decade, was because of safeguards such as the cameras.

Freedom!

April 2, 2014April 8, 2014 ~ susie ~ 6 Comments

I remember when people argued with me over this at the other place, insisting I was accusing the administration of doing illegal things when they weren’t. Some people are really fucking naive:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has conducted warrantless searches of Americans’ communications as part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations that target foreigners located outside of the U.S., the administration’s top intelligence official confirmed in a letter to Congress disclosed Tuesday.

These searches were authorized by a secret surveillance court in 2011, but it was unclear until Tuesday whether any such searches on Americans had been conducted.

The recent acknowledgement of warrantless searches on Americans offers more insight into U.S. government surveillance operations put in place after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The government has broadly interpreted these laws to allow for the collection of communications of innocent Americans, practices the Obama administration maintains are legal. But President Obama has promised to review some of these programs to determine whether the government should be conducting this type of surveillance at all.

“Senior officials have sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read Americans’ emails, monitor their online activity or listen to their phone calls without a warrant,” Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said in a joint statement. “However, the facts show that those suggestions were misleading, and that intelligence agencies have indeed conducted warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.”

H/t David Benowitz.