THERE IS NOTHING POLITICALLY CORRECT IN A GUNFIGHT

Polk County, Florida Sheriff Grady Judd says that if you point a gun at us, we are going to shoot you

Last January, Polk County Florida deputies engaged four armed robbers in a gunfight. The foursome had held up a pawn shop and viciously killed a mother and her daughter. Unfortunately, the robbers were taken alive. Afterwards, Sheriff Grady Judd made a remark that his officers were prepared for a gunfight with the murderous robbers. The Sheriff’s remarks apparently set off some alarm bells in the liberal mindset of a reporter.

Here, during a press conference, is the exchange between Sheriff Judd and that reporter:

REPORTER: “I think everybody understands the gravity of what happened and the urgency and the response that you took. Some of the comments you made last night about shooting the suspects, possibly, and the comments today about ‘ready for a gunfight’ — was that in the heat of the moment? Do you have any regret about that?”

SHERIFF JUDD: “I not only have no regret, I’m pretty excited about telling you that — that’s exactly what would’ve happened. Make no mistake about it, there’s nothing about politically correct in a gunfight. There’s nothing about politically correct when you are keeping people alive and well and safe. And the people of this community and these law enforcement officers come first.”

“I meant every word of it then, and I mean every word of it now. If you surrender peacefully, that’s the way we prefer it. You start pointing guns at us, you can not only plan on, but you can guarantee that we are going to shoot you.”

BRIAN WILLIANS AT THE FRONT LINES

The anchor of NBC Nightly News for 10 years has been dumped into MSNBC after telling a bunch of whoppers about himself while broadcasting the news

By Pamela Putz

The Unconventional Gazette
June 19, 2015

Brian Williams was the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 10 years until he got caught lying about being in a helicopter over Iran which nearly got shot down. He was suspended for six month and has been dumped into the uber left-wing MSNBC where he will join such luminaries as ultra-leftie Rachel Maddow and fellow phony Al Sharpton.

Here are some of the whoppers Williams told on the NBC Nightly News:

I witnessed the resurrection of Jesus.

I was no more than 10 feet from Julius caesar as the Roman senators stabbed him to death.

I accompanied Columbus on his voyage to the new world.

I was shot at during the Battle of Waterloo.

I accompanied Pickett during his charge at Gettysburg.

I helped write Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

I accompanied Gen. Robert E. Lee to Appomattox for the surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

I nearly got shot when I accompanied Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

I was in the trenches with the French during the Battle of Verdun.

I helped deliver the Dionne Quintuplets.

I landed at Omaha Brach with the 1st Infantry Division.

I was standing next to Joe Rosenthal when he took his famous picture of the flag raising on top of Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi.

I was on the Enola Gay when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

I was on the U.S.S. Missouri when the Japanese surrendered to MacArthur.

I accompanied the US Eighth Army during its long retreat from the Yahoo River.

I was with the U.S. Marines during the Battle of Huế.

I got hit by a brick during the Rodney King riot.

I rode with the Hells Angels.

I escorted Monica Lewinsky to and from the White House so she could service President Clinton in the Oval Office.

I was with SEAL Team 6 when it got Osama bin Laden.

Etc., etc., etc.

Please feel free to add any other whoppers you heard Williams tell.

WANT A PEN PAL?

Jennifer Hyatte, #394869, is a lonely and bored woman doing life in the Tennessee Prison For Women

By Bob Walsh

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 17, 2015

Jennifer Hyatte wants a pen pal to help her pass the hours-days-years.

She had been a nurse in the prison system in Tennessee when she became involved with and eventually married her husband-prisoner in 2005.

She murdered Officer Wayne Morgan in August 2005 while he and another correctional officer were transporting her inmate-husband George Hyatte from a court date where he had just pleaded guilty to robbery. They managed to evade capture for one day.

She is now divorced and lonely.

Any bites?

CAN’T KEEP THIS TRUE HORSE LOVER FROM HORSING AROUND

Cirilo Castillo Jr. is arraigned yet again for having sex with a horse, or rather for attempting to, because when the mare said no, she meant no!

Back in January 2012, I posted “A True Horse Lover,” a story about Cirilo Castillo Jr. having been arrested for having sex with a horse. At the time it was reported that Cirilo of Alamo, Texas had sex with a number of horses on previous occasions. Well, apparently they can’t keep a true horse lover from horsing around.

Cirilo, 45, was at it again. He was busted for yet another horsing around incident which occurred February 17 when he was found injured in an Edinburg rancher’s barn. Evidently when a mare says no, she means no! The horse Cirilo chose to have sex with was not in the mood. She kicked the supreme shit out of our horse lover, breaking poor ole Cirilo’s leg.

Castillo was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail. He was arraigned June 3 before Hidalgo County Justice of the Peace Charlie Espinoza, who set his bond at $1,000.

I wonder which mares Cirilo favored - white, black or brown?

It’s a mystery to me how a man would want to have sex with a horse. Sheep yes, horses no. Pigs yes, horses no. Eureka, I’ve solved it. Cirilo Castillo Jr. and Bruce Jenner are much alike. Jenner thinks he’s a woman and Cirilo thinks he’s a horse. Both need to undergo some serious head shrinking.

TWIN PEAKS MASS ARRESTS LEAD TO LAWSUITS

The cops in Waco busted 177 bikers after a deadly brawl and each was held on $1 million bond

Unless you live under a rock, you know that on May 17 there was a deadly brawl between biker gangs at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas during which nine bikers were killed by gunfire or stabbings and 18 injured. The cops rounded up everyone at Twin peaks, arresting 177 suspects who were charged with engaging in organized crime with bond set at $1 million each.

In order to bail out, each defendant would have to come up with $100,000. Only 34 suspects were able to bail out by June 4, leaving 143 roosting in the McLennan County pokey. Judge Ralph Strother said they would have to wait until next month for a bond-reduction hearing.

The lawsuits have started. Matthew Clendennen, 30, a Baylor University graduate and the owner of a landscaping business, managed to come up with $100,000 and bailed out of jail June 2. He insists he did nothing criminally wrong, claiming he was just sitting with some friends on the Twin Peaks patio. The only thing he did was to duck for cover into the inside of the restaurant when gunfire erupted in the parking lot. When the cops came they put flex-handcuffs on him. Later he was placed on a bus with other bikers and transported to the Waco convention center for processing. Clendennen thought he was being detained as a witness. Instead he ended up in jail with that $1 million bond.

Clendennen is suing city of Waco, McLennan County, Waco Police Officer Manuel Chavez and other officers involved and District Attorney Abelino Reyna. The lawsuit accuses Chavez “of signing a ‘fill in the name’ warrant he knew lacked individual probable cause and deceiving the Justice of the Peace who signed the criminal complaint.” The City of Waco and McLennan county are accused of "caus[ing] the arrest and detention of numerous individuals...regardless of whether or not there was individualized probable cause to arrest and detain a particular individual." Reyna is accused of creating the ‘fill in the name’ warrants and of violating Clendennen’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

The lawsuit also claims the two-week confinement caused Clendennen the loss of business and that because of his arrest, his ex-wife has filed suit to deprive him of joint custody of their two children.

The brawl at Twin Peaks was between the Bandidos and the Cossacks. Clendennen is a member of the Scimitar Motorcycle Club which has had some association with the Cossacks. However, the Scimitars are not on the Justice Department’s watch list for outlaw biker gangs.

Two other bikers are also preparing lawsuits. And you can bet they will be followed by a slew of suits before this is all over.

I could see the lawsuits coming. Anytime cops resort to making mass arrests they are likely to sweep up some innocent persons in the process. The police cannot arrest people just for belonging to biker clubs, and that includes the outlaw bikers. If they could, all the Hells Angels, Bandidos and other outlaw bikers would have already been locked up.

On this occasion, Twin Peaks had foolishly invited bikers for a social get-together. There was a large police presence at the establishment in anticipation of possible trouble. The cops should have arrested only the bikers they observed fighting or who were pointed out by witnesses, any of those present who were in possession of prohibited weapons, and anyone with an outstanding warrant. They should have released the others after obtaining their names, addresses and other identifiers.

When this is finally all over, the city of Waco and McLennan County will be many millions of dollars poorer.

HEADS KEEP ROLLING IN SAUDIA ARABIA

Two beheadings on Monday bring the total executions by the Saudis so far this year to 100

According to the Saudi Press Agency, Ismael al-Tawm, a Syrian, was beheaded Monday in the northern region of Jawf for smuggling "a large amount of banned amphetamine pills into the kingdom."

Also on Monday, Rami al-Khaldi, a Saudi national, was beheaded in the western province of Taef for stabbing another Saudi to death.

The two beheadings bring the total Saudi executions so far this year to 100. According to AFP, in all of last year there were ‘only’ 87 beheadings in Saudi Arabia.

According to Amnesty International, the record year for executions in the Saudi kingdom was 1995 when a total of 192 heads were sent rolling.

It was just last month that Saudi Arabia advertised for eight new executioners to carry out public beheadings. Since no experience was required, I suspect all of those positions have been filled by now.

100 heads rolled so far this year? Texas, eat your heart out!

And California? With 750 condemned inmates roosting endlessly on its death row, California voters who favor the death penalty should elect King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud as their next governor.

YOU’VE GOT TO CUT OUT UNMARRIED SEX IF YOU WANT TO GO TO HEAVEN

The Unconventional Gazette
June 16, 2015

God visited a woman and told her she must give up smoking, drinking and unmarried sex if she wants to get into heaven.

The woman said she would try her best.

God visited the woman a week later to see how she was getting on.

“Not bad,” said the woman, "I've given up smoking and drinking, but when I bent over to look in the freezer, my boyfriend caught sight of my long slender legs, pushed up my skirt, pulled my panties down to my knees and had sex with me right then and there."

"They don't like that in heaven," said God.

The woman replied: "They're not too happy about it in Costco either!"

WE NEED TO DO A BETTER JOB OF INFORMING THE PUBLIC ABOUT WHAT THOSE ‘INNOCENT’ DEATH ROW DENIZENS ACTUALLY DID

None of those on California’s death row whose appeals have been exhausted have claimed to be innocent

By a San Francisco police captain

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 15, 2015

Responding to the fact that California death penalty abolitionists Gov. Jerry Brown and Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris have been dragging their heels in applying the death penalty to those whose appeals have been exhausted, a San Francisco police captain wrote:

When stories like the Anthony Graves case in Texas come out, it causes people to re-think their support for the death penalty, and not take issue with the machinations of Jerry and Kamala. After seeing those rare cases where innocent people like Graves spent years on death row, it should not come as a complete surprise that the majority of Californians do not share our outrage at the delay in executions.

The anti-death penalty media makes sure that stories like the Graves case make front page news. However, it is nearly impossible to find out the horrifying details of what the likes of Michael Morales, the Killer of Terry Winchell, actually did to get on death row. When the media does mention the details of these murderous bastards, we hear things like Tookie Williams writing children’s books, or how Jaturun Siripongs, since arriving on death row, has become a Buddhist monk, and is respectful to the employees at San Quentin. We don’t hear anything about his un-monkly behavior in slaying a few folks in a robbery.

The public needs to realize that of all of those on death row that are cleared for execution (Their appeals are exhausted), not a single one makes a claim of innocence. Some claim that the Jury should have been told they had a tough or less than idyllic childhood, but the information wasn’t conveyed. Some claim that if they would have had a really good lawyer, they would have gotten a life without parole sentence. Others claim the prosecution used their preemptory challenges to exclude Hispanics [and blacks] from the jury etc etc.

Those of us in the know need to do a better job of conveying these facts so we can inform the public about what’s really going on, and force Jerry and Kamala to carry out their constitutionally mandated duties.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m glad the San Francisco police captain brought up the Graves case. There is a false public perception that needs to be corrected. It seems as though the cops get blamed for wrongful convictions when in fact overzealous prosecutors hungry to have a sterling conviction record are really to blame in most instances.

Anthony Graves spent 18 years in prison with 12 years on death row for killing six people, a crime he did not commit, because prosecutor Charles Sebesta withheld evidence and falsified testimony to obtain a capital conviction. Graves was released from prison in 2010, but it took the Texas bar association until this month to disbar Sebesta. That bastard should have been disbarred nine years ago when the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a retrial for Graves because of what this sorry-ass excuse for a prosecutor did.

In this case, us Texans cannot be proud, we should be ashamed!

SMALL BUT SIGNIFICANT VICTORY FOR POT PROHIBITIONISTS

Colorado Supreme Court rules unanimously that businesses can fire workers for off-the-job marijuana use

In 2010, Brandon Coats, a registered Colorado medical marijuana user, was fired by Dish Network when he tested positive for using pot. Coats, a customer service worker, sued Dish Network with his lawyers arguing a Colorado law prohibiting employees from being fired for “any lawful activity” outside the workplace applied to their client’s use of medical marijuana.

Today, in a unanimous decision, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld two lower court decisions that had ruled against Coats. Here is what Justice Allison H. Eid wrote in the court’s 6-to-0 decision:

“Employees who engage in an activity such as medical marijuana use that is permitted by state law but unlawful under federal law are not protected by the statute.”

The ruling is a small but significant victory for us pot prohibitionists. The court seems to be saying that federal law, which prohibits the manufacture, distribution, sale and possession of marijuana, supersedes state law.

Now if the feds would only enforce the law, but fat chance that this will occur under any Democratic administration. Nevertheless, the decision has left the pro pot crowd pissing and moaning.

Meanwhile all is not gold that glitters. Dozens of cities in Colorado and Washington State have banned marijuana dispensaries from within their city limits.

WILL SEASONS CHANGE? I’M WAITING

The madness surrounding murder and the death penalty in California

By Richard Krupp, PhD

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 11, 2015

An Orange County man who freely admitted murdering eight people is still awaiting sentencing about four years after his killing spree. Even if/when he is sentenced to death, the execution may take years or may not even happen at all due to a laborious legal system, special interest groups, and political obstructionists.

Is there an end to the madness in sight?

Over the years California has had a changing relationship with the death penalty. The fluctuations have occurred primarily in the judicial system; sometimes embracing, while other times rejecting, death sentences for murderers.

Are the seasons changing?

The Sacramento Bee had an interesting story about this subject recently:

Is capital punishment dead in California?

Clarence Ray Allen was the 13th man to die in San Quentin’s death chamber since California resumed executing inmates in 1992.

His Jan. 17, 2006, execution was also the last one conducted in this state. Since then, 52 other death row residents have died of old age, suicide or natural causes, but not one has made the short walk from the pre-execution holding cell to the $835,000 lethal injection chamber that was completed in 2010 but never used.

And it’s uncertain if they ever will, despite the state’s announcement last week that it will develop a new drug formula for putting people to death. Today, California has 750 condemned prisoners – up from 646 after Allen, 76, was killed.

Legal challenges and a shortage of the three drugs used in the state’s current execution formula have kept anyone from being executed since Allen. But death penalty advocates who sued in Sacramento Superior Court in 2014 won a critical settlement last week when the state agreed to develop a new method for lethal injection executions that would use just one drug.

The state said it would develop the one-drug policy this year, leading death penalty advocates to predict the executions eventually will resume. Currently, 17 inmates on death row are believed to have exhausted all appeals and be eligible for execution. But the state lacks a court-approved way to kill them.

In December 2006, after a federal judge ruled that the state’s three-drug execution protocol risked causing pain to an inmate that would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” the state began preparing changes to make its injection procedures meet judicial approval. (for full story read http://tinyurl.com/nbrcx7e.)

I’m not sure what kind of thought process is involved in showing such concern for the comfort of the soon to be deceased murderer. How would someone even know how it feels to be executed by lethal injection?

Have any executed inmates returned from the dead to speak about the pain they suffered? Why does anyone even care? Opponents keep trying to have the death penalty eliminated by the California voters without success. Will the will of the people change like the seasons?

Of course murderer-supporters have had more luck with sympathetic judges. How long will this present obstacle block executions?

I haven’t heard the anti-death penalty advocates address the families of the victims.

Why are they more interested in the criminals than the victims? This is something I will never comprehend.

What would a “court-approved way to kill” require? Does execution have to be comfortable? Pleasant? By that court-approved standard, perhaps the condemned need not be aware they had drifted into the afterlife.

I’m sure some court somewhere can come up with something. I’ve been waiting for the season to change. The season for death penalty delays and obstacles needs to end.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here it is June of 2015 and the State of California has yet to resolve the absurd ruling in December 2006 of a federal judge that the state’s three-drug execution protocol risked causing pain to an inmate that would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment. Nearly 10 years ago the state began preparing to present an execution process that would be acceptable to the courts.

Nearly 10 years? Even though a majority of Californians support capital punishment, it is obvious that the state has no appetite to execute anyone. From the June 5 Sacramento Bee:

But death penalty advocates who sued in Sacramento Superior Court in 2014 won a critical settlement last week when the state agreed to develop a new method for lethal injection executions that would use just one drug.

The state said it would develop the one-drug policy this year, leading death penalty advocates to predict the executions eventually will resume.

Texas has been merrily topping the condemned with a single injection dose of pentobarbital. Shortly after the injection, the condemned snort a few times before falling asleep like a baby. So it shouldn’t take California more than 10 minutes to come up with a single execution drug protocol. But with all the legal challenges yet to come, the death penalty is all but dead in California.

BARE TITTIES AND DICKS BLAMED FOR DEADLY MALAYSIAN EARTHQUAKE

An earthquake on Borneo island that killed 18 people is blamed on ten Western tourists for stripping naked on top of sacred Mount Kinabalu

Mount Kinabalu is a 13,435-foot high peak on the Malaysian part of Borneo island. The mountain is located in the state of Sabah and is considered sacred by the locals. It is also a popular tourist mountain climbing attraction.

On May 30, ten Western tourists stripped naked on the mountain’s summit and took pictures of each other, some of which popped up all over the internet. Four of the tourists, Eleanor Hawkins of Britain, 24, Dutchman Dylan Snel, 23, and Canadian brother and sister Lindsey, 23, and Danielle Petersen, 22, were busted by Malaysian authorities on obscenity charges. The two women had bared their breasts, but the men got completely naked. The cops are seeking the other six miscreants, but they are believed to have left the island.

On June 5, there was a 6.0-magnitude earthquake around the mountain. The quake killed 18 people, including seven schoolchildren from Singapore, along with two of their teachers and another adult who were on a field trip to the mountain.

Earthquakes are rare in that area of Borneo island. The locals blame the earthquake on the ten tourists for defiling the sacred mountain by stripping naked on its summit. They believe the nudity angered tribal spirits believed to dwell on the mountain. Even some government officials agree with the local tribes.

According to AFP:

Last Saturday, Sabah's deputy chief minister Joseph Pairin Kitingan and other officials also suggested a link to the quake.

"This is very offensive behaviour and showed disrespect to the sacred mountain... This will certainly bring misfortune," he had told reporters.

On Friday, the four appeared in a court and pled guilty. They were each sentenced to three days in jail, fined the Malaysian equivalent of $1,332, given credit for time already served, and ordered deported.

I don’t know whether it was the sight of the titties or the dicks which so angered the tribal spirit dwellers on Mount Kinabalu that they made the earth quake, but in either case they must have been some whoppers.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS FOR REAL

Life on earth is doomed despite what Rush Limbaugh says about global warming

There have been a lot of arguments about climate change and global warming. Scientists generally agree that we are experiencing a period of global warming which will melt the earth's ice caps. That will raise the sea levels and submerge coast lines worldwide. The left-wing blames it all on man-made emissions. The right-wing claims global warming is one gigantic left-wing hoax. Hardly a week goes by without Rush Limbaugh informing his ditto heads that there is absolutely no truth to global warming.

Here is the real truth as I see it. We are undergoing climate change, like it or not. Dr. Richard Krupp, a former California correctional administrator, points out that “The climate has been changing since before there were people to keep track of it.”

Climate change is cyclical. I do believe that to some extent man-made carbon emissions are contributing to the cycle we are now experiencing, but no amount of government mandated emission controls are going to stop the current period of global warming.

If you don’t believe that global warming is for real, I suggest you look at the before-and-current satellite photos of the Arctic ice shelf. It is disappearing right before our eyes.

Unfortunately the global warming issue has become a political football. In his State of the Union address to Congress, President Obama said, “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security.” Say what? Never mind ISIS, Russia and China because, according to Obama and the Pentagon, right now it’s global warming that poses the most serious threat to our national security.

The Pentagon Is going to have to find a way to fire a nuclear missile at the sun and hope that will reverse global warning. But then again that might bring about the Ice Age. Either way, life on earth is doomed.

Bob Walsh says, “I am unwilling to impoverish our country and destroy our lifestyle to appease some radical leftist asshole who wants me to feel guilty about having a decent car and air conditioning.”

I too am unwilling to impoverish our country and destroy our lifestyle, but not for the reason Bob gives. I’m unwilling to do so because man-made emissions only play a small part in the global warming cycle and all the emission controls we can come up with are not going to reverse global warming - they will only delay the inevitable disappearance of life on earth.

WHO BESIDES JOYCE MITCHELL HELPED THE CLINTON PRISON ESCAPEES?

Recently I wrote, “It kind of looks like they [Richard Matt and David Sweat] had the help of one or more correctional officers. So far none of the correctional officers at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York have been implicated in the escape. Instead, Joyce Mitchell, a civilian employee appears to be the main suspect. She was arrested today and charged with promoting prison contraband in the first degree, a felony, and criminal facilitation in the fourth degree, a misdemeanor.

Mitchell is reported to have admitted to New York State Police investigators that she slipped Matt and Sweat hacksaw blades, drill bits and lighted eyeglasses. She also agreed to pick the two convicted murderers up at the manhole from which they emerged, but at the last minute she chickened out and checked herself into a hospital with a panic attack.

According to the authorities, Mitchell did not furnish any power tools to the escapees. Since all of the prison’s power tools were accounted for, it is believed that Matt and Sweat were able to swipe them from contractors working at the prison.

Now picture this. Matt and Sweat occupied different cells. Each separately cut through cell walls that included a steel plate. After they got through the wall, they twice severed a 24-inch steam pipe, once to get in and once more to get out. All of that work took hours and, even if muffled with a blanket, had to make a tremendous amount of noise. And no correctional officers heard it?

Now I will say that instead of only one correctional officer, Matt and Sweat had the help of several officers in addition to the help they received from Mitchell. That help was either deliberate or came about through the gross negligence of the officers on duty.

RUTH BADER GINSBURG, STEPHEN BREYER AND ELENA KAGAN ARE ENEMIES OF ISRAEL (UPDATE)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s three Jewish justices voted not to allow American citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on their passports

Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, in which the court’s three Jewish justices - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan – voted with the majority to deny American citizens born in Jerusalem the right to list Israel as their birthplace on their passports, infuriated the Israelis and overjoyed the Palestinians.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat declared that “just as Washington is the capital of the U.S., London is the capital of England, and Paris is the capital of France, Jerusalem was and will always be the capital of Israel – but more than that, it’s the heart and soul of the Jewish nation.”

Israeli attorney Nitzana Darshan-Leitner told Arutz Sheva radio that the ruling was “a real kick in the face of every Israeli citizen, that such a great friend of Israel’s does not recognize its rights.”

The Israelis see the Supreme Court ruling as a victory for the U.S. State Department which has always been less friendly toward Israel than Congress, and much more so under the Obama administration. The ruling also gives President Obama the power and authority to make decisions regarding Israel without allowing for checks and balances by Congress. That does not bode well for Israel considering the hostile relationship between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

While the Israelis fumed over the Supreme Court ruling, the Palestinians were overjoyed by it.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said “The decision sends a clear message that Israel is an occupying power in East al-Quds (eastern Jerusalem), the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

CHEAP, SYNTHETIC ‘FLAKKA’ DETHRONING COCAINE ON FLORIDA DRUG SCENE

By David Adams and Zachary Fagenson

Reuters
June 10, 2015

MIAMI -- For decades, South Florida has battled drug traffickers who ship boatloads of cocaine from South America. Now the region is dealing with a new epidemic - cheap, synthetic drugs that arrive from China through the mail.

As authorities in the Sunshine State battle with the surge of Alpha-PVP, better known as "flakka" or "gravel," police departments have begun equipping officers with field detection kits, employing sniffer dogs at mail facilities and training patrol units to look for signs of delirium.

The drug's popularity, however, is only growing. In 2014, the first year it appeared in the state, authorities in Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, recorded 190 incidents involving flakka. By early May of this year, the number of incidents involving the drug had already raced past 275.

"Cocaine was king, until this year," said Detective William Schwartz, a veteran narcotics officer with the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

Unlike cocaine, flakka, is both cheap and accessible. The drug is widely advertised for sale online by Chinese companies and can be shipped in large quantities to U.S. addresses by established global delivery companies. Once it hits the streets, a single dose can sell for as little as $5.

Flakka, which was placed on the U.S. list of illegal controlled substances in 2014, is chemically designed to mimic cathinone, a natural stimulant found in the leaves of the khat plant, chewed traditionally in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

It gets its nickname from the Spanish slang for a slender and attractive woman, and is similar to ecstasy or MDMA, and so-called "Molly." It is sold as small clear crystals that can be popped in the mouth or smoked.

Users are said to feel a sense of super human strength and delirium.

While flakka has also shown up in parts of Ohio, Houston and Chicago, it has made the most substantial U.S. inroads in South Florida, which historically has had one of the country's highest rates of drug use.

Florida's long, contiguous coastline and numerous airports have made the state a leading U.S. entry point for cocaine, heroin and marijuana, mostly funneled from South America through the Caribbean.

"We are ground central," said Robert C. Hutchinson, deputy special agent for Homeland Security Investigations in Miami. "We want to nip it in the bud before it gets out of control."

New World

Synthetic drug seizures - almost all of which is flakka - accounted for 34 percent of Broward's crime lab reports in the first three months of 2015, overtaking cocaine which dropped to 30 percent, Schwartz said.

"That's the first time in my memory that a drug has ever surpassed cocaine," he added. "We are crossing the threshold into a new world."

One kilo, worth $50,000 on the street, can be bought from online companies in China for as little as $1,500, drug experts say.

Law enforcement agencies face big obstacles because flakka is not illegal in China. Manufacturers there typically classify the drug as a legitimate "research chemical," and offer discreet delivery by mail.

Gil Kerlikowske, the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection said China had dramatically increased its criminal investigations into synthetic drugs but its huge ports and vast territory made it harder to tackle.

The Obama administration has raised the issue of flakka in talks with China, according to the U.S. State Department.

What has law enforcement and drug treatment professionals most concerned are flakka's long-term effects. First-time users can take three to four days to return to a normal state of mind, while for repeat users, it could be 14 to 16 days, according to drug treatment professionals.

Dr. Peter Ventre, a psychiatrist at Fort Lauderdale Hospital, said a girl in her early 20s recently suffered symptoms similar to a stroke or brain bleeding after using flakka.

"Now she can't talk, can't recognize anybody and can't walk on her own," he said.

Last month, police in Melbourne, southeast of Orlando, arrested a 17-year-old girl after finding her running down a street naked, covered in blood and screaming "I am god! I am Satan!," according to the police report.

"They're convinced they're being chased by wild animals or people who are trying to kill them," said James Hall, an epidemiologist at Nova Southeastern University.

He said some 27 people have died from flakka-related overdoses in the last eight months in Broward County alone.

"It's the most intense, rapidly emerging drug problem since the 1980s with the emergence of crack cocaine," Hall added.

WHAT MINORITY COMMUNITIES REALLY WANT FROM THE NYP

A majority of poor blacks want a return to NYPD’s ‘broken windows’ arrests for quality-of-life offenses

By Heather Mac Donald

New York Post
June 9, 2015

“How you view ‘broken windows’ policing,” Charles Blow pronounces in The New York Times, “completely depends on your vantage point, which is heavily influenced by racial realities and socio-economics. For poor black people, it means that they have to be afraid of the cops as well as the criminals.”

To test Blow’s assertion, I attended a police community council meeting in the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct last week.

The “fear” Blow attributes to “poor black people” was nowhere in evidence. Instead, I heard what I always hear from law-abiding residents of “poor black” neighborhoods: an urgent desire for more policing, and above all, for the enforcement of public-order laws in the face of an ongoing breakdown of informal social controls.

“Oh, how lovely when we see [the police]!” an elderly woman from Hunts Point exclaimed during the meeting. “They are my friends.” Retired transit worker Earl Cleveland told me: “Where I live, the police are very courteous; I’ve never had a problem with them. They do their best.” During the public Q&A with the precinct’s commander, residents complained repeatedly about large groups of youths hanging out on corners. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.”

Another man asked: “Why are they hanging out in crowds on the corners? No one does anything about it. Can’t you arrest them for loitering? They’re perched there like birds.” A middle-aged man wondered: “Do truant officers exist anymore?”

The president of a local mentoring program, Israel Rodriguez, begged for a police watchtower in his neighborhood, a plea he has been making for 10 years, he said. Whenever he hears gunfire, as he had over the previous month, he goes running toward the shooting, terrified that one of his three children was struck.

Shootings are up 167 percent in the 41st Precinct through May 24 of this year — and the precinct is not even considered one of the high-priority areas that are so worrying NYPD top brass as summer approaches.

Before the meeting, the superintendent and two residents of a subsidized senior housing building discussed a fellow tenant who was allowing teens to use his apartment for drug dealing. Their hypothesis: The elderly man was a “homo,” trading access for sexual favors. “For this to be happening, it frightens me very much,” one of the tenants said. “Drugs are very dangerous. The police should arrest those kids.”

As for pedestrian stops, a middle-aged man told me: “I think they should put [stop-and-frisk] back. It was higher two years ago before the mayor took office. The criminals feel more comfortable now; it’s easier to get their hands on a gun.”

All of these wished-for and promised enforcement actions are precisely the type of policing that Blow and other activists relentlessly blast as oppressive and racist.

And if the officers of the 41st Precinct respond to these heartfelt requests for enforcement, they will generate precisely the racially skewed statistics that the New York Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times will use against the NYPD, since such demands for public order come disproportionately from minority communities, where parental controls have broken down.

Blow’s claim that one’s view of Broken Windows policing depends on one’s “vantage point, which is heavily influenced by racial realities and socio-economics,” is true, but not as he intends it.

In New York City, the only group of voters in a recent Quinnipiac poll who don’t support Broken Windows policing is the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Many young people have no experience of New York’s bad old days and are ignorant about what it takes to maintain the public safety that they assume is their birthright.

The closer one is to crime and disorder, the greater one’s support for proactive enforcement.

Slightly more black than white voters said they want the police to “actively issue summonses or make arrests” in their neighborhood for quality-of-life offenses: 61 percent of black voters wanted such summons and arrests, with 33 percent opposed, versus 59 percent of white voters in support, with 37 percent opposed.

But thanks to the attacks on Broken Windows policing and proactive stops, officers are reverting to the purely reactive policing of the pre-1990s era.

Criminal summonses in New York, which are made up overwhelmingly of the dread Broken Windows enforcement, were down 26 percent by the end of May, compared to the same period last year. Arrests were down 17.4 percent. Pedestrian stops have dropped 95 percent since their 2011 high, and are on track to go down another 42 percent this year.

Meanwhile, homicide is up 18 percent this year from 2014, and shootings are up roughly 20 percent from two years ago. In Baltimore, arrests were down 56 percent in May, while the month was by some measures the most deadly period in the city’s recorded history.

The puzzle for the police is what critics like Blow want them to do — proactively police and be accused of racism, or back off and wait for people to get shot and be accused of a dereliction of duty.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “Are Cops Racist?”

NOW ONLY TWO DRUG CARTELS LEFT IN MEXICO

The head of criminal investigations for Mexico’s Attorney General says that of all the drug cartels, only the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) remain

Tomás Zerón, head of criminal investigations for Mexico’s Attorney General, told the meeting of the 32nd International Conference for the Control of Drugs in Cartagena, Colombia Tuesday that of all the Mexican drug cartels only the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) remain.

Zerón said that with the capture or killings of the top leaders of the Gulf, Juarez, Tijuana, Los Caballeros Templarios and Los Beltran Leyva cartels, those groups have become fractured with the different factions fighting each other. He also believes the Los Zetzas “are on the point of disintegration.”

According to Zerón, right now there remain three big Capos of drug trafficking in Mexico: Ismael Zambada "El Mayo"; Fausto Isidro Meza Flores "El Chapo Isidro" and Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes "El Mencho". The first two are the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel and "El Mencho" is head of CJNG.

The Sinaloa Caetel is mostly into the trafficking of cocaine while the CJNG is mostly into trafficking methamphetamines. Both are also trafficking marijuana and heroin. Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG are both very strong and have taken over the territories formerly controlled by the disintegrated cartels.

BALTIMORE COPS FOLLOWED THE REQUEST OF THE PROSECUTOR WHO IS NOW PROSECUTING THEM

State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby wanted drug activities stopped at the intersection where Freddie Gray was arrested

By Bob Walsh

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 9, 2015

Another interesting fact has surfaced today in the now-notorious Freddy Gray case. It seems that the police presence at the specific intersection where Freddy Gray was arrested by the Baltimore P D was at the direct request of the State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby who brought the charges against the officers.

Three days before the arrest, Mosby contacted the police brass with the assertion that the locals were complaining of increased drug activity at that intersection and the request that the cops increase their presence there. Her husband is also the City Councilman who represents that area of the city.

Fortunately the notification to the cops went out via email and many of the cops, including the senior officer charged in the case, were on the email distribution list.

So it seems that those mean, evil cops who arrested Freddie Gray were there making drug busts at the request of the prosecutor who is now persecuting them.

It seems that maybe this case is coming apart even faster than some people predicted. I wonder if Ms. Mosby will now be disqualified from trying the case. Not only is there the claim of prejudicial conduct it now seems that she might very well be called as a witness in the case.

Curiouser and curiouser.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sorry Bob, but celebrations about Marilyn Mosby’s missteps are all for naught. Nothing alters the facts that the arrest was questionable to begin with and that the arresting cops ignored several requests by Freddie Gray for medical aid.

While the bicycle cops may have been there to stop drug activities, no reports have come forth that before the chase began which led to his arrest, Gray was observed selling or buying drugs, or that the cops found any drugs on him when they caught him..

As for the murder charge against the driver of the paddy wagon, that is a real stretch. Unless you get an all-black prejudiced jury, I do not see how that charge can stand up.

HORSE DUNG MAY REVERSE SOME NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Herr Professor Hans Fleischer, Dean of Neurological Studies at Albert Ludwigs University, has discovered an amazing breakthrough in neurological disorders

By Adolf der Schweinehund

The Unconventional Gazette
June 8, 2015

Krün, Germany – German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while hosting the G7 meeting at the Schloss Elmau hotel in Krün, announced Monday that a team led by Herr Professor Hans Fleischer at Albert Ludwigs University had made an amazing discovery that appears to reverse some neurological disorders.

According to Merkel, the discovery started quite by accident when an Alzheimer’s patient was on an outing from a nursing home two years ago.. The patient found a dried pile of horse dung and thinking it was tobacco, took it back to the nursing home. He obtained some cigarette paper and rolled up a dozen or so horse dung cigarettes. The nursing home workers thought it was funny and did not try to stop him from smoking the horse dung. A few days later they were amazed when his short-term memory appeared to return. Upon seeing that they contacted Professor Fleischer.

Professor Fleischer and his team of neurological scientists immediately ran a battery of tests on the Alzheimer’s patient. They decided to go to some horse pastures in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, where the university is located, to gather up all the dried horse dung they could find. The dung was rolled up into cigarettes. Permission was granted by the families of 20 Alzheimer’s patients and 10 epilepsy patients to begin a two-year study with their loved ones smoking horse dung.

Half the Alzheimer’s patients and half the epilepsy patients were given regular tobacco cigarettes to smoke. Each patient was given three cigarettes to smoke each day for approximately two years. The patients smoking regular cigarettes were observed getting worse, but those smoking horse dung showed marked improvement. The epilepsy patients had fewer seizures and the Alzheimer’s patients reverted to near-normalcy. Except for occasional bouts of diarrhea, those smoking horse dung showed no side effects.

Professor Fleischer believes fecalnabinol, the active ingredient in horse dung, is responsible for the neurological changes. He said his team of researchers will have to conduct further studies. Professor Fleischer also believes that fecalnabinol may very well reverse additional neurological disorders. His team is trying to find a way to extract the fecalnabinol from the dung so that it can be injected into patients or taken orally by tablet or capsule.

You could see that Chancellor Merkel was very proud in announcing Germany’s latest scientific discovery. She was congratulated by all the G7 participants, including President Obama.

The American president then praised Germany for its scientific and technological achievements and announced that he will order the Centers for Disease Control to gather up a ton of dried horse dung in order to carry on and further develop Herr Professor Fleischer’s work.

Vladimir Putin, who was kicked out of the G8 - hence the G7 - because of Russia’s military incursions into the Ukraine, was asked in Moscow what he thought of Merkel’s announcement. Putin replied, “Sounds like a bunch of horseshit to me.” When asked what he thought of Obama’s announcement, Putin said “More horseshit!"

RUTH BADER GINSBURG, STEPHEN BREYER AND ELENA KAGAN ARE ENEMIES OF ISRAEL

The U.S. Supreme Court’s three Jewish justices voted not to allow American citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on their passports

On Monday the U.S. Supreme court ruled 6-3 that American citizens born in Jerusalem could not list Israel as their birthplace. The ruling finally ends a lawsuit filed 12 years ago against the U.S. State Department by three American citizens, Menachem Zivotofsky and his parents.

The State Department has adamantly joined with European and other nations in refusing to recognize the sovereignty over Jerusalem by any nation. Israel has declared that all of Jerusalem is its capital. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

In 1995 Congress passed legislation calling for the U.S. to recognize a united Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The State Department under every administration since then has refused abide by that legislation. In 2002, Congress passed legislation calling on the president to have the U.S. embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to allow American citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace. As the Zivotofsky lawsuit shows, the State Department again refused to comply with that legislation.

All the opposition to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital started with the appeasement of the Arabs who threatened to cut off the West’s oil supply. Now the opposition is a bid to appease the Palestinians in their demand for a state of their own with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Justice Anthony Kennedy speaking for the majority said that the president has the exclusive power to recognize foreign nations, and that the power to determine what a passport says is part of this power.

Chief Justice John Roberts said in dissent that “The court takes the perilous step — for the first time in our history — of allowing the president to defy an act of Congress in the field of foreign affairs.”

I have long maintained that America’s liberal Jews were no friends of Israel. While they say that they support Israel, their support is tepid and they blame Israel for causing today’s increase in anti-Semitism.

By their ruling in the Zivotofsky case, the court’s three Jewish justices – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan – have demonstrated that they are enemies of Israel! If the three Jewish justices were to have had dual citizenships, they would have been considered traitors by the Israelis.

CLASSY COUPLE

Instead of taking a private jet or flying first class, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt piled themselves and their six children into the coach section of a commercial flight to Paris

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt can easily pay for a private jet to take them wherever they choose to go. Or they can easily afford to fly first class. But on Saturday Angelina and Brad piled themselves and their six children into the coach section of an Air France plane on a flight from Los Angeles to Paris.

By choosing the economy section, I think Angelina and Brad were trying to show that they do not consider themselves better than ordinary people. Now that’s one classy couple!

CHRIS CHRISTIE WOULD GET MY VOTE

Says he will crack down and not permit legalized marijuana if elected president

When asked on the Hugh Hewitt shoe last April if he were the president would he enforce the federal drug laws against marijuana in Colorado and Washington, he replied “Absolutely. I will crack down and not permit it.”

Christie went on to say:

“Marijuana is a gateway drug. We have an enormous addiction problem in this country. And we need to send very clear leadership from the White House on down through the federal law enforcement. Marijuana is an illegal drug under federal law. And the states should not be permitted to sell it and profit from it.”

On today’s CBS Face the Nation, Christie repeated his pledge that if elected president he will crack down on the states that have legalized marijuana in violation of federal laws.

Christie has also debunked medical marijuana on his radio show, saying "This program [New Jersey’s medical put program] and all these other [state] programs, in my mind, are a front for legalization [of marijuana].” He pointed out that – unlike California and some other states – New Jersey’s program is strictly a medical one with the result that there is little demand for medical pot in his state.

Good for Chris! On that stance alone he would get my vote.

There is just one problem. Christie will not get the Republican nomination. Bedrock Republicans have never forgiven the New Jersey governor for embracing President Obama when the president came to his state to view the damage left by Hurricane Sandy.

Republicans Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Rand Paul have pledged not to interfere in those states that have legalized pot for medical or recreational purposes. Furthermore, in a recent Pew Research Center poll, 54 percent of those who identified themselves as Republicans said the federal government should not interfere with states that have legalized marijuana -- Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska.

Again, good for Chris! Shame, shame on those Republicans like Cruz, Bush, Paul and the ones in the Pew poll who oppose enforcement of the federal laws against marijuana in those states that have legalized it.

CASANOVA A CHILD MOLESTER

If you think I’ve been studying history and dug up a little known fact about Giacomo Casanova, the 18th Century famous Italian lover, you are wrong. I am referring to Salvador Casanova, 50, of Houston.

Salvador is known to his neighbors as ‘Candyman’ because he sold candy from his apartment. But that’s not the only thing he was doing there.

On Tuesday, a seven-year-old girl went to Casanova’s apartment to purchase some candy. Police say that instead of selling her candy, Salvador sexually assaulted the little girl.

Afterwards, the child ran home and told her mother what happened. Mom called the cops.

When the cops arrived, Casanova was no longer at his apartment. However, the police found him hiding behind a commercial trash dumpster at the apartment complex.

Salvador is roosting in the Harris County jail, charged wit aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14. Bond is set at $30,000.

Now his neighbors worry that Casanova may have molested other children.

As for the famous Giacomo Casanova, for all we know, he might have been a child molester too.

FORMER MARINE WHO ALSO WORKED FOR THE FBI TURNED MUSLIM EXTREMIST WHO WORKED FOR WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBER RADICALIZING DOZENS OF FELLOW PRISONERS BEHIND BARS

Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah was arrested in 2011 on weapons charges and successfully radicalized 36 prisoners in just his first year behind bars

By Chris Spargo

Mail Online
June 5, 2015

A former US Marine who went on to work undercover for the FBI in Egypt before becoming a Muslim extremist has been radicalizing dozens of his fellow prisoners behind bars.

Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah, is serving time at John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Seminole County, Florida on a weapons conviction, with a tax fraud sentencing expected in the near future.

According to prison authorities, the man spends most of his time at the mosque, but the rest of his time seems to be focused on discussing his faith with other inmates.

Those talks seem to work too, as in 2011, Robertson successfully radicalized 36 men, leading to the decision that he be kept in solitary confinement.

Federal authorities are now working to make that confinement more permanent for the man as a result of the horrific harm his religious principals are teaching other inmates.

'The United States believes that the defendant is still an extremist, just as he was in the early 1990s,' prosecutors say in one filing obtained by Fox News.

This in reference to the fact that he worked as a bodyguard for the sheikh responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

It is not his possible knowledge of bombs and weaponry that seems to have authorities the most concerned, but rather his remarkably powerful gift of persuasion.

'The only differences are that the defendant is now focused on training others to commit violent acts as opposed to committing them himself, and the violent acts are to occur overseas instead of inside the United States,' said prosecutors.

Robertson's lawyers on the other hand feel that he should be released from prison with time served.

'Marcus Robertson has never tried to radicalize anyone,” said Robertson’s attorney Daniel Brodersen.

'He’s tried to practice his religion in prison to the best of his ability.'

As for how he feels about solitary, a police spokesperson said at this point it is the prisoner's preference to be alone in his windowless room where he is shackled to the floor and has a guard watching him at all times.

Robertson served in the marines for six years, and also during this time became a member of Forty Thieves, a robbery gang he was the head of that was comprised of Muslim security guards.

He was arrested in 1991, and as part of his deal with prosecutors served just four years in prison and agreed to go undercover for the FBI.

Around the same time he also worked as the bodyguard for Omar Abdel Rahman, the man whose group is widely believed to have been behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Robinson would later donate $300,000 in stolen funds he received to various mosques he attended.

He worked for the FBI until 2007, but was thrown out in February 2007 according to someone who claims he attacked his CIA handler.

He then began travelling the world teaching and promoting the most extreme version of Islam, also finding time to legally marry two women and father 15 children in total, from both his legal spouses and other women.

He was living in Orlando when he was arrested on weapons charges in 2011, and soon after the tax fraud conviction when a wiretap revealed that he had instructed a student to file a false return so he could save money to travel overseas for violent terrorist training.

He will be sentenced for that charge by the end of the year.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A marine for six years? No thank you for your sevice!

JERK LAW CLERK NOW UNEMPLOYED

Middlesex County Superior Court law clerk, Leslie Anderson mourned the death of a deer while belittling the death of New Jersey state trooper Anthony Raspa

By Bob Walsh

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 5, 2015

New Jersey State Trooper Anthony Raspa died on the job on May 30, killed after his patrol vehicle hit a deer and then veered into a tree.

A Middlesex County Superior Court law clerk, Leslie Anderson, posted the following on face book about the incident:

“…that it is sad and heart wrenching for the family members left to suffer the consequences of the Trooper’s recklessness–especially for the deer family who lost a mommy or daddy or baby deer.” She further said that the trooper’s death was “…not that sad and certainly not tragic..” and “…there are people in this country and around the world dying for much less. There is nothing tragic about this. Get over yourself and your sense of entitlement, people.”

Ms. Anderson was suspended for two weeks with pay. She then resigned.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Leslie Anderson got her warped sense of mourning well before she entered law school. Anderson is one of many undergraduate students who have been unduly influenced by the Marxist and other far-left professors that have infested our colleges and universities.

Anderson’s two-week suspension with pay was no punishment. It was more like a two-week paid vacation.

RESTORING DECORUM TO GRADUATION CEREMONIES CALLED RACIST

Senatobia, Mississippi school superintendent Jay Foster is called a racist for having black family members arrested who disregarded the request to hold any applause until the end of a high school graduation ceremony

Jay Foster, superintendent of schools in Senatobia, Mississippi, is determined to have order at graduation ceremonies. At the beginning of the recent Senatobia High School graduation ceremony, he asked the audience not to scream and to hold their applause until the end, or face ejection.

Several black families disregarded Foster’s request and were ejected from the building. Furthermore, two weeks later, arrest warrants for disturbing the peace were issued for four of the blacks. Now Foster is being accused of racism.

Shaun King of the Daily Kos says:

“At a time where the nation is talking about problems in the United States with mass incarceration and the over-criminalization of society, rarely has such a clear example of African Americans being overcharged for everyday behaviors as this.”

Yelling and screaming like a bunch of fools is everyday behavior? Not where I come from.

When I graduated from high school in 1943, the graduation ceremony was a solemn and respectful one with no applause from the audience until it was over. The same when I got my college degrees in 1952 and 1954.

All that has changed and now graduation ceremonies are becoming a farce. There was so much yelling during the high school graduation ceremonies for my two granddaughters that you could not hear the names being called off for many of the graduates. The same was true during the ceremony when one of my granddaughters graduated from Sam Houston State University a couple of weeks ago.

It's sad for me to say this, but at all the above ceremonies, African-Americans appeared to be doing most of and the loudest yelling, but there were plenty of whites yelling too. At the Sam Houston ceremony there was a black man directly behind me who even started yelling at the top of his voice before the ceremony started. I am estimating that during the ceremony, the names of half the graduates could not be heard because of all the yelling.

Black parents, families and friends, perhaps more so than whites, have every reason to be very proud that their loved one has graduated, whether from high school or college. But that doesn't give them the right to be disruptive at what should be a solemn ceremony. And the same holds true for white families.

I hope Superintendent Foster sticks to his guns. The accusations that Foster is a racist for bringing charges against some of the disrupting noisemakers is pure hogwash! He was merely trying to restore some much needed decorum to graduation ceremonies, and that's not being racist.

Instead of being condemned, Superintendent Foster should be commended!

BIG, REALLY REALLY BIG C0CAINE BUST

A multi-agency task force’s seizure of 306 kilos of cocaine began with a traffic stop in the San Bernardino County desert town of Victorville and ended at a house in the Los Angeles County city of Santa Fe Springs

Officers from the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task (LA IMPACT) Force, a multi-agency group, seized 306 kilos (674.6 pounds) of cocaine that is believed to have been supplied by Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa drug cartel.

The first bust Tuesday evening resulted from a month-long investigation by L.A. IMPACT and began when officers from the task force observed a drug exchange in a strip mall in the Santa Fe Springs area of Los Angeles County. They then followed a vehicle and had the California Highway Patrol stop it in the San Bernardino County desert town of Victorville. 50 kilos (110 pounds) of cocaine were seized from the vehicle and Eligio Alvarez Manriquez, 24, Jose Manuel Lopez, 22, and Cintia Ferro Barazza, 24, all of Victorville, were arrested.

A further investigation led them to a house in Santa Fe Springs Wednesday where 256 kilos (564 pounds) of cocaine were seized and Eddie Perez, 41, and Jose Garcia Samano, 39, both of Santa Fe Springs, were arrested. A woman from the house was questioned and then released, and three children were taken into protective custody.

It is estimated that the 306 kilos of cocaine has a street value of $35 million. Authorities called it the largest cocaine bust in California in recent memory.

To all the officers involved in this case: Good Going Guys!

HE NOW SHE?

If you look at Jenner’s photo shots in Vanity Fair, what you see is a glamorous woman. I'm sure that without a ton of make-up and considerable air -brushing, those glamor shots would have shown an ugly ‘woman.’

I see Jenner chose the first name of Caitlyn. I thought Brucella was more appropriate. Aah well.

Bruce Jenner was married three times and had two children with each of his three wives. I don’t see where he had a gender identification problem until he got mixed up with the Kardashians.

I’ll believe Caitlyn is a woman when Jenner can get pregnant.

TEXAS EXECUTES INNOCENT MAN, HE SAID

67-year-old Lester Bower Jr. was executed Wednesday after 30 years on death row claiming he was innocent of four murders with his last words

Lester Bower Jr. was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1983 murders of B&B Ranch owner Bob Tate, 51, Grayson County Sheriff's Deputy Philip Good, 29, Jerry Brown, 52, a Sherman interior designer and Ronald Mayes, 39, a former Sherman police officer. Prosecutors said Bower killed Tate at his ranch near Sherman to steal an ultralight aircraft Tate was trying to sell and killed the other three when they unexpectedly showed up at the scene, a hangar on the ranch.

Bower maintained his innocence to the bitter end. He had no criminal record and no physical evidence linked him to the murders, although parts of the aircraft were found at his Arlington home.

He came within hours of being put to death six times, thanks to numerous appeals filed in his behalf.

While strapped on the death chamber gurney, Bower’s last words were: “Much has been said about this case. Much has been written about this case. Not all of it has been the truth. But the time for discerning truth is over and it's time to move on.” 18 minutes later he was pronounced dead from a single dose of pentobarbital.

Unlike appeals in states that rely on a three-drug execution cocktail, Bower’s last minute appeal did not argue that the use of pentobarbital could subject him to excruciating pain in violation of the 8th amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Texas has held a number of executions using only pentobarbital, and all of them resulted with the condemned prisoner falling asleep unremarkably, thus muting any question about this type of single dose execution.

BLACK AMERICANS KILLED BY POLICE TWICE AS LIKELY TO BE UNARMED AS WHITE PEOPLE

Guardian analysis finds 102 people killed by police so far this year were unarmed, and that law enforcement agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by the U.S. government

By Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland and Jamiles Lartey

The Guardian
June 1, 2015

NEW YORK -- Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people, according to a Guardian investigation which found 102 of 464 people killed so far this year in incidents with law enforcement officers were not carrying weapons.

An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.

The findings emerged from a database filled by a five-month study of police fatalities in the US, which calculated that local and state police and federal law enforcement agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by the US government’s official public record of police homicides. The database names five people whose names have not been publicly released.

The Guardian’s statistics include deaths after the police use of a Taser, deaths caused by police vehicles and deaths following altercations in police custody, as well as those killed when officers open fire. They reveal that 29% of those killed by police, or 135 people, were black. Sixty-seven, or 14%, were Hispanic/Latino, and 234, or 50%, were white. In total, 102 people who died during encounters with law enforcement in 2015 were unarmed.

The figures illustrate how disproportionately black Americans, who make up just 13% of the country’s total population according to census data, are killed by police. Of the 464 people counted by the Guardian, an overwhelming majority – 95% – were male, with just 5% female.

Steven Hawkins, the executive director Amnesty International USA, described the racial imbalance as “startling”. Hawkins said: “The disparity speaks to something that needs to be examined, to get to the bottom of why you’re twice as likely to be shot if you’re an unarmed black male.”

Relatives of unarmed people killed by police in high-profile incidents during the past year – including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tony Robinson and Walter Scott – described the Guardian project as a breakthrough in the national debate over the use of deadly force by law enforcement.

“Giving this kind of data to the public is a big thing,” said Erica Garner, whose father’s killing by police in New York City last year led to international protests. “Other incidents like murders and robberies are counted, so why not police-involved killings? With better records, we can look at what is happening and what might need to change.”

The initiative was also praised by a range of policing experts and by campaigners who are urging government authorities to make the official recording of fatalities mandatory for all 18,000 police departments and law enforcement agencies operating in the US.

“It’s troubling that we have no official data from the federal government,” said Laurie Robinson, the co-chair of Barack Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing. “I think it’s very helpful, in light of that fact, to have this kind of research undertaken.”

Beginning on Monday, the Guardian is publishing The Counted, a comprehensive interactive database monitoring all police killings in the US through 16 data points including age, location, gender, ethnicity, whether the person killed was armed and which policing agency was responsible.

The Counted logs the precise location of each fatal incident, providing what is the most detailed map of police killings ever published. California, America’s most populous state, has the highest total with 74 fatalities so far this year.

However, an analysis of location data shows that Oklahoma, where 22 people have died through encounters with law enforcement, is the state with the highest rate of fatal incidents per person in 2015, at one fatality per 175,000 people over five months.

Over the weekend, Nehemiah Fischer, a 35-year-old pastor, was shot dead by an Oklahoma state trooper after getting into a fight when told to evacuate his truck in rising flood waters south of Tulsa. Police have said Fischer had a firearm but have not explained whether he was armed during the confrontation.

The database, which will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information, has logged 464 police killings for the first five months of 2015. The US government’s record, which is run by the FBI, counted 461 “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement in all of 2013, the latest year for which official data is available.

The vast majority of deaths recorded – 408 – were caused by gunshot. Of the 27 deaths that occurred after a Taser was deployed by law enforcement, all but one involved an unarmed person.

On Sunday, Richard Davis, an unarmed black 50-year-old, died after being shocked with a Taser by police in Rochester, New York. Davis was said by authorities to have run from his truck towards officers with clenched fists after being told to put his hands up following a crash. Relatives said he was a veteran of the US marines.

The Guardian has also identified 14 officer-involved deaths following altercations in custody. The total includes Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old resident of Baltimore whose death from a broken neck sustained in a police van led to protests, rioting and the indictment of six city police officers.

Another 12 people died following collisions with law enforcement vehicles. The family of Bernard Moore, who was 62, are calling for the criminal prosecution of an officer who fatally struck Moore with his squad car in Atlanta, allegedly while speeding without emergency lights or sirens on.

By logging each law enforcement agency involved in the 464 deaths, the Guardian can also now report that the Los Angeles police department, the country’s third largest local police department, has been involved in the highest number of deaths of any local department. This year, 10 people have died in encounters with LAPD officers, of whom five were unarmed.

The Oklahoma City police department and the Los Angeles sheriff’s office were both involved in five deaths, two individuals in both of these jurisdictions being unarmed.

High-profile cases in Los Angeles, like the death of unarmed Charly “Africa” Keunang, shot dead by LAPD officers on 1 March in the city’s homeless district of Skid Row, garnered national attention.

But cases like those of Sergio Navas, an unarmed Hispanic man shot dead by LAPD officers in the same month as Keunang, after police said he stole a vehicle and was chased down, have had less media scrutiny. Navas’s family have launched an excessive force lawsuit against the LAPD and accused them of a covering up the circumstances of the 35-year-old’s death.

The Guardian has also monitored whether mental health issues were identified, either by family members, friends or police following each fatal encounter. In total 26% of people killed by police exhibited some sort of mental illness, with at least 29 cases identified where the person killed was suicidal.

For example, Monique Deckard, a black woman with a long history of mental illness, was shot and killed by police officers in Anaheim, California, after she was accused of stabbing a woman at a laundromat and allegedly charging at officers. Her family had called police just hours before the attack, warning that they could not get in contact with her and that she might be trying to find a gun.

The average age of a person killed by police in 2015 was 37, but The Counted identifies a huge diversity in the ages of those killed.

The oldest, 87-year-old Louis Becker, was killed during a collision with a New York state trooper patrol car in upstate New York. Eighty-two-year-old Richard “Buddy” Weaver was killed by Oklahoma City police after he allegedly raised a machete at an officer who opened fire; neighbors later described Weaver as having schizophrenia.

The three youngest people identified were all 16 years old. A’donte Washington, a black American, was shot dead by Millbrook police officers in Alabama on 23 February during an alleged burglary after the teenager was described as pointing a weapon at arriving officers. His family have questioned the police narrative, while the city mayor described the shooting as “110% justified”.

A week earlier, on 14 February, Jason Hendrix, a white 16-year-old was shot dead in a gunfight by Baltimore County police after the teenager murdered his mother, father and sister in Corbin, Kentucky, and drove to Maryland, where he is reported to have opened fire on an officer after a car chase. Six returned fire and killed him.

A month later, on 19 March, black 16-year-old Kendre Alston was shot dead by a deputy of the Jacksonville sheriff’s office in Florida. Police claimed Alston fled from a stolen car and brandished a weapon at the pursuing official who then opened fire. Deneane Campbell, Alston’s mother, claimed in an interview two weeks later she had not been given any further details by police.

Some relatives of people killed by police said they had been unaware of the dearth of publicly available information on police-involved fatalities until their family became affected. Anthony Scott, whose brother Walter was shot dead in April by police officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina, said the lack of public information “came as a surprise”.

“I was not informed, I was not aware, I just had an idea these situations were happening in the United States,” Scott told the Guardian. “The public need to know what is happening and be made more informed. With them being more informed they would be able to react differently, in a positive way, to make changes, to make sure some of these things don’t happen again.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Blacks killed by cops are twice as likely to be unarmed as whites? Could it be that unarmed blacks are twice as stupid to attack police officers as unarmed whites?

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), have introduced a bill that will require all states to report to the Justice Department anytime a police officer is involved in a shooting, including non-fatal ones, or any other use of force that results in death. This looks like a veiled attempt by two very liberal senators to keep cops from shooting people.

DRESSING DOWN FOR A WINE AND WHIPPED CREAM DATE CAN BE DANGEROUS

By Bob Walsh

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 2, 2015

Dressing down on date night can be downright dangerous to your health. You could ask Samantha Shrestha about it but that would be hard as she is dead.

Jessica Michelle Ewing, 24, was just sentenced to 45 years for the 2014 murder of Ms. Shrestha, who was at the time 21 and a biology student at Virginia Tech. Ewing and Shrestha were having a sexual relationship with Ewing was serious about but it seems that Shrestha was not so much. Ewing invited Shrestha over for a wine and whipped cream date and Shrestha showed up in sweats and a t-shirt, angering Ewing who was wearing a dress.

Shrestha eventually borrowed a dress from Ewing and the two engaged in a friendly whipped cream fight after downing a bottle of vino. As the evening progressed however it was obvious that Shrestha was just an experimental lesbian, while Ewing was the real deal and wanted a solid relationship with Shrestha. So Ewing beat Shrestha, strangled her to death, stuffed her body in a sleeping bag, put her in the back seat of her Mercedes and abandoned the car and body.

The actual sentence is 80 years plus five years for transporting a body illegally, but 40 years will be suspended more-or-less automatically at the half-way point.

AMERICA’S SMARTEST PRESIDENT EVER

The Unconventional Gazette
June 3, 2015

There were five passengers on an airplane about to crash. The problem was that there were only four parachutes.

Kim Kardashian, the first passenger, said, “I have my own reality show and I am the smartest and most beautiful woman on TV, so Americans don’t want me to die.” She took a pack and jumped out of the plane.

Then the Rev. Al Sharpton stood up and said, “I am the leader of all the disadvantaged people of color and President Obama always calls on me for advice on matters of race.” He grabbed another pack and jumped out.

Barack Obama then said, I am the President of the United States and I am the smartest president ever in the history of our country. Some even refer to me as the ‘Anointed One.’” So he snatched the pack lying next to him and jumped out.

That left the Rev. Billy Graham and a 10-year-old schoolgirl on the doomed plane.

Billy Graham turned to the girl and said, “I am old and in poor health. You are young and have a long life ahead of you. I have served my God to the best of my ability. I will gladly sacrifice my life by letting you have the last parachute.”

The little girl then grinned and said, “That’s okay Mr. Graham, there’s another parachute left for you. America’s smartest president ever put on my school backpack.”

67 OUT OF 70

The results have been tabulated on a TSA airport screening test and the score is 95 percent

Now if you take a test of 70 questions and get 67 right, you made a score of 95 percent, which is damned good. On the other hand, if you take that test and get 67 answers wrong, you've failed miserably. And that is exactly what has happened with the TSA.

An inspector general's report reveals that undercover agents at airports throughout the country were able to get through TSA checkpoints undetected while carrying mock weapons and explosives 67 out of 70 times. That's a failure rate of 95 percent.

Past tests of the TSA airport screenings have also failed miserably. Billions of dollars have been spent on these screenings, the purpose of which is to protect us from terrorists.

Perhaps our tax dollars would work better if the TSA would adopt Israel's airport security measures. The Jewish state is under constant threat from Palestinian terrorists and their sympathizers, yet their screening system has prevented any hijackers or suicide bombers from boarding planes in Israel. Between 1968 and 1977, Palestinians attempted or carried out 29 plane hijackings, but all the boardings occurred at European or other airports outside Israel.

FIGHT OVER LAST BBQ’D RIB RACK LEAVES WOMAN WITH FORK IN EYE

When two women at a Muncie, Indiana barbeque got into a fight over the last rack of ribs, one stabbed the other one in the eye with a fork

The Associated Press reports that a Muncie, Indiana barbeque turned into a ruckus Sunday, May 24. It seems as though guest Sabrina Davis, 45, went into the kitchen and grabbed the last rack of ribs. That pissed off the host’s daughter. She and Sabrina got into a fight during which Sabrina stabbed her in the eye with a fork.

Sabrina told the cops that the victim accused her of "taking all the food" and came after her with a knife. She claimed she stabbed the victim in self-defense. Apparently the cops didn’t buy Sabrina’s story because she was arrested on a preliminary charge of criminal recklessness.

Here I’ve always thought us Texans took our barbequing more seriously than anyone else. And that piss-poor excuse of a Muncie BBQ wasn’t even cooked the way real barbeque is supposed to be cooked – slow cooked outdoors in a special BBQ pit with smoke from indirect heat.

NOW IT’S THE POLICE WHO PROTEST IN BALTIMORE

By Thomas Taschinger

Beaumont Enterprise
May 31, 2015

If you think that things couldn't get any worse in Baltimore after the riots last month following Freddie Gray's death, guess again. Police have responded to the indictment of six officers in that case and the resultant chaos by pulling back. Arrests are way down, with bookings decreasing by 50 percent. Cops are either angry over the indictments or afraid of making another arrest that could end up on the front page. So consciously or unconsciously, they are standing aside instead of charging in.

Not too coincidentally, crime is up. By this weekend the city will probably exceed 40 murders for the month of May, its worst 30-day span in 15 years.

"Usually, you can't walk up and down the street drinking or smoking weed," said Donnail "Dreads" Lee to the AP. He lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Freddie Gray was chased down. "Now, people are everywhere smoking weed, and police just ride by, look at you, and keep going. There used to be police on every corner. I don't think they'll be back this summer."

It's a mess, and it won't change soon. And this is in a city that some say never recovered from the 1968 riots that closed many mom-and-pop businesses and sent middle-class residents fleeing to the suburbs.

Let's start by making it clear that nothing excuses police brutality - ever. Officers should use no more force than necessary to make an arrest - and preferably none at all. Police who cross the line should absolutely be held accountable. That's not politics, it's justice.

But the reality is that a lot of police work is inherently violent. It can be so in a small country town, and it can be more so in a gritty urban environment. Cops know this, and so does anyone who did a ride-along or saw a nasty arrest being made. Heck, you can watch TV shows like "Cops" or "Alaskan State Troopers" and see this from the comfort of your living room.

Some people submit calmly to arrest. Good for them - that's the quickest way to get booked in and bonded out.

Other people don't go quietly. They run and resist. They must be chased down, neutralized and handcuffed, sometimes while squirming or resisting vigorously. Some are mentally unbalanced or high on drugs and really can't react in a rational way. Some are dangerous career criminals who can hurt the cop trying to arrest them.

Police may not know which kind of person they're dealing with until the try to put the cuffs on. If they're not firm enough, they could get hurt. If they overreact, they could face charges. It's a tough needle to thread, and they must make split-second decisions that could be criticized later.

So it's no surprise that police in Baltimore are backing off. They feel stuck in a no-win situation, so they stay in their cars more and get out on the streets less. To make things worse, public anger hasn't abated either. Police Commissioner Anthony Batts told the AP, "Our officers tell me that when officers pull up, they have 30 to 50 people surrounding them at any time."

The result is the exact opposite of the proactive police work needed to fight crime effectively. It's been replaced by a reactive approach that often leads to no questioning of suspects, no confrontations and therefore no arrests.

But criminals aren't backing off. They're rushing into the vacuum and will keep pushing forward as long as they can. And they don't play by any rules.

The real losers are, of course, the law-abiding people of Baltimore, the silent majority in any neighborhood, rich or poor. They need cops to be cops again. Let's hope that happens while Baltimore can still be saved.

THE NEW NATIONWIDE CRIME WAVE

The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing. The main victims of growing violence will be the inner-city poor

By Heather Mac Donald

The Wall Street Journal
May 30, 2015

across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, before he stepped down last month, embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.

Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.

Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound, but New York state seems especially enthusiastic about the idea.

The state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, wants to create a special state prosecutor dedicated solely to prosecuting cops who use lethal force. New York Gov.Andrew Cuomo would appoint an independent monitor whenever a grand jury fails to indict an officer for homicide and there are “doubts” about the fairness of the proceeding (read: in every instance of a non-indictment); the governor could then turn over the case to a special prosecutor for a second grand jury proceeding.

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chiefSam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014.

“Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being indicted and losing his job and family,” a New York City officer tells me. “Everything has the potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the climate for the next couple of years is going to be nonstop protests.”

Police officers now second-guess themselves about the use of force. “Officers are trying to invent techniques on the spot for taking down resistant suspects that don’t look as bad as the techniques taught in the academy,” says Jim Dudley, who recently retired as deputy police chief in San Francisco. Officers complain that civilians don’t understand how hard it is to control someone resisting arrest.

A New York City cop tells me that he was amazed to hear people scoffing that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, only looked a “little red” after Brown assaulted him and tried to grab his weapon: “Does an officer need to be unconscious before he can use force? If someone is willing to fight you, he’s also willing to take your gun and shoot you. You can’t lose a fight with a guy who has already put his hands on you because if you do, you will likely end up dead.”

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward A. Flynn, discussing hostility toward the police, told me in an interview on Friday: “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m guessing it will take five years to recover.”

Even if officer morale were to miraculously rebound, policies are being put into place that will make it harder to keep crime down in the future. Those initiatives reflect the belief that any criminal-justice action that has a disparate impact on blacks is racially motivated.

In New York, pedestrian stops—when the police question and sometimes frisk individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—have dropped nearly 95% from their 2011 high, thanks to litigation charging that the NYPD’s stop, question and frisk practices were racially biased. A judge agreed, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, upon taking office last year, did too, embracing the resulting judicial monitoring of the police department. It is no surprise that shootings are up in the city.

Politicians and activists in New York and other cities have now taken aim at “broken windows” policing. This police strategy has shown remarkable success over the past two decades by targeting low-level public-order offenses, reducing the air of lawlessness in rough neighborhoods and getting criminals off the streets before they commit bigger crimes. Opponents of broken-windows policing somehow fail to notice that law-abiding residents of poor communities are among the strongest advocates for enforcing laws against public drinking, trespassing, drug sales and drug use, among other public-order laws.

As attorney general, Eric Holder pressed the cause of ending “mass incarceration” on racial grounds; elected officials across the political spectrum have jumped on board. A 2014 California voter initiative has retroactively downgraded a range of property and drug felonies to misdemeanors, including forcible theft of guns, purses and laptops. More than 3,000 felons have already been released from California prisons, according to the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles County. Burglary, larceny and car theft have surged in the county, the association reports.

“There are no real consequences for committing property crimes anymore,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Armando Munoz told Downtown News earlier this month, “and the criminals know this.” The Milwaukee district attorney, John Chisholm, is diverting many property and drug criminals to rehabilitation programs to reduce the number of blacks in Wisconsin prisons; critics see the rise in Milwaukee crime as one result.

If these decriminalization and deincarceration policies backfire, the people most harmed will be their supposed beneficiaries: blacks, since they are disproportionately victimized by crime. The black death-by-homicide rate is six times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other black civilians, not the police. The police could end all use of lethal force tomorrow and it would have at most a negligible impact on the black death rate. In any case, the strongest predictor of whether a police officer uses force is whether a suspect resists arrest, not the suspect’s race.

Contrary to the claims of the “black lives matter” movement, no government policy in the past quarter century has done more for urban reclamation than proactive policing. Data-driven enforcement, in conjunction with stricter penalties for criminals and “broken windows” policing, has saved thousands of black lives, brought lawful commerce and jobs to once drug-infested neighborhoods and allowed millions to go about their daily lives without fear.

To be sure, police officers need to treat everyone they encounter with courtesy and respect. Any fatal police shooting of an innocent person is a horrifying tragedy that police training must work incessantly to prevent. But unless the demonization of law enforcement ends, the liberating gains in urban safety over the past 20 years will be lost.

CALIFORNIA’S PROPOSITION 47 IS INCREASING CRIME

Drug users who used to be incarcerated are now free to commit robberies, burglaries and other crimes

Proposition 47 was approved by Kookfornia voters in November last year. It was designed to reduce the overcrowding in the state’s prisons by reducing some ‘non-violent’ felonies to misdemeanors. Whether it puts a noticeable dent in the prison population remains to be seen, but Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer blames Prop. 47 on a significant increase in crime.

Here is an excerpt from yesterday’s Fresno Bee:

Fresno has seen a nearly 30% increase in robberies this year —380 through Sunday afternoon compared with 293 over the same time last year. Chief Jerry Dyer blamed the surge in robberies in part on a new state law that limits drug arrests.

Dyer said Fresno has seen a nearly 30% increase in robberies this year —380 through Sunday afternoon compared with 293 over the same time last year.

“We’re seeing more and more people out in our community addicted to methamphetamine and fewer consequences, especially since the passage of Proposition 47 (last November), which has made the possession of drugs a misdemeanor,” Dyer said. “A number of these people that are addicted to these drugs are not just committing lower-level offenses like burglary or petty theft, but they’re also involved in armed robberies to support their drug addiction.”

Drug users are now issued citations, Dyer said, rather than being arrested. Arrests, he said, gave police an effective tool to take addicts off the street and give them a chance at treatment. “That’s not happening, which is why we have so many empty treatment beds in Fresno.”

“I believe…the voters in California were misled regarding Prop. 47, the (idea) that these are harmless individuals addicted to drugs. As we know in law enforcement, they are oftentimes very violent, and there have to be consequences for these individuals prior to them going out and committing armed robberies,” Dyer said.

As for Prop. 47, the path to hell is paved with the stones of good intentions.