Baltimore police sought to recreate Freddie Gray trip in police van
By Justin George
The Baltimore Sun
May 2, 2015
In a fourth-floor conference room at Baltimore police headquarters, two training officers in blue T-shirts and blue pants lowered themselves onto the carpeted floor to demonstrate the leg hold officers used to restrain Freddie Gray the day he was arrested — and sustained a fatal spine injury.
As one officer played Gray's role, lying face down on the floor, the other bent his crossed legs back toward his head. Watching closely were members of the police task force investigating Gray's death, and Dr. David L. Higgins, a Maryland orthopedic surgeon who has worked with the U.S. Olympic team.
Higgins had already reviewed cellphone video showing the 25-year-old's arrest in West Baltimore, including scenes with him yelling in pain or protest as officers dragged him to a transport van. Now, Higgins was asked what injuries a person could suffer in such a leg hold.
"From that maneuver, even if you slammed him or dropped him like a wrestling move, you still won't have a neurological injury," said Higgins, continuing to explain in more detail.
"OK," said Maj. Stanley Brandford, the Homicide Unit commander who led the task force. He marked another task complete. Another question about Gray was answered.
The scene on Thursday was part of a high-stakes police investigation — and came as Baltimore was reeling from protests that brought thousands of marchers, and some violence, to city streets. International attention was focused on the city, and many residents were protesting alleged police brutality and calling for criminal charges.
The Baltimore Sun was granted exclusive access to the task force and monitored the investigation for days. The Sun agreed not to publish details about the investigation until Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby decided whether to prosecute any of the officers involved in the Gray incident, though reporters continued to use other sources for information. On Friday, she announced charges against six officers.
Mosby's announcement came just a day after police provided her with a lengthy report on their probe, but prosecutors had conferred with police from time to time, and Mosby said she also used an independent team of investigators. Her announcement Friday took members of the police task force by surprise.
Officers assigned to the task force had been working for two weeks to complete an investigation that might otherwise have taken months. They canvassed West Baltimore for witnesses and mapped out the locations of security camera footage. To recreate Gray's 45-minute ride in a police van, plainclothes officers rolled a $250,000 laser imaging system on a tripod down potholed roads and cracked sidewalks, ready to tell residents who questioned them that they were city surveyors.
At least 30 members of the Police Department were pulled onto the task force, including staff from the crime lab, Force Investigation Team, Internal Affairs, Homicide, and automobile CRASH team. Each brought with them an expertise to help answer the questions a volatile city desperately needed: how Gray sustained the severed spine and other injuries that led to his death on April 19, a week after his arrest.
They all realized the importance of their investigation and that they were part of a pivotal moment in Baltimore history. There were no days off.
"As I've said before," Col. Garnell Green told the task force Thursday morning. "What happens ... rests on our shoulders."
145 tasks
The investigation was run out of Green's conference room in the Administrative Bureau. Members of the task force met there two, sometimes three times a day, gathering around two large tables that had been pushed together. They employed a checklist to keep track of their investigation, and the list grew daily until it had 145 tasks — many completed, some still open — on Thursday.
On one wall was a timeline that plotted Gray's arrest and all of the police van's stops. Each point on the timeline was outfitted with pictures of Gray, the officers who interacted with him at that location, time stamps and blurry screen shots taken from surveillance video. On another wall, autopsy photos of Gray stared back near a color-coded map listing all the private and public surveillance cameras along the van's route. In the back was a table with Gatorade and water bottles.
The task force worked while being unable to question the six officers, beyond initial statements the officers had provided. Detectives were told to reconstruct the officers' actions not only for April 12 but several days and even years earlier, using internal records and "run sheets," which log officers' daily actions.
While each task force member focused on a specific task — interviewing witnesses, serving search warrants, updating a "living" timeline of events — top-level commanders looked at the big picture with the Police Department's credibility in mind. They knew the investigation would be picked apart by many people in Baltimore, including the thousands of protesters outside their door. Amid the allegations of brutality, they wanted to show that they would leave no stone unturned. They wanted an answer for any question prosecutors, attorneys and the public might ask.
They focused on the task of gathering information, and showed no sign of discomfort while investigating colleagues on the police force — knowing that the decision to bring criminal charges would rest with Mosby and not them. Over and over, they said they "would follow wherever the evidence leads."
Investigators tried to determine what had happened during the foot and bicycle chase that preceded the takedown of Gray. Did he fall? Had Gray been in a fight prior to the arrest? Was the Internet rumor about an insurance settlement for a car accident true (it was not). When was he sitting and when was he "prone," without a seat belt, in the van?
Task force members continued to investigate all possibilities even though they felt confident that Gray had suffered a "catastrophic injury" while being taken from the arrest at Gilmor Homes to the Western District police station. They discovered that the van's video camera was broken and that one of the officers during the transport said Gray had "jailitis" — a faked illness — when he complained about his condition.
And they spent many hours retracing the actions of Officer Caesar R. Goodson, Jr., the wagon driver. Goodson, the investigators said, had heard Gray ask for medical help a number of times — a key factor in the charges Mosby would bring against him. Still, there were gaps along the route where no video or witness statements existed.
The investigators sought to understand why Goodson had made a stop that was discovered in a review of video camera footage. All they could determine was that Goodson looked into the back of the van, but did not touch Gray. But they wondered: Were there other stops?
To find out more about the van route, officers took to the streets.
Last Sunday, at the spot Gray had been arrested, a makeshift memorial included a sign that said "[Expletive] the Police. I would kill all 6 of u bitches." A half block away, crime lab technician Tom Wisner and detectives Michael Boyd and Timothy Hamilton rolled the laser imaging device along a wheeled yellow tripod. They wore T-shirts and cargo pants to keep a low profile and avoid long conversations or, worse, a confrontation in a neighborhood where residents' anger was still raw from violent protests the previous night.
"Google-team rollout," Boyd said — a joking reference to Google's mapping process — after the trio finished a section of streets.
They had nearly 70 scans to do, each taking a circular image as far as 850 feet away, and a tight time frame to complete them.
On the clear sunny day, they went about their work without any interference. One man walked by with a rose in a pint bottle that his girlfriend had given him. A man in a car slowed to a near stop, but then moved on. No one really asked what they were doing.
The "Google team" scanned streets and avenues: Presbury, Cumberland, Calhoun, Gilmor, Dolphin and Druid Hill.
Wisner, who is not a sworn officer, was tasked with creating detailed multi-dimensional maps that would show the route and terrain. His job was to painstakingly stitch the maps together until the van's path was recreated — a process that was only partially completed by the time Mosby announced the charges.
Taken by surprise
Late last week, Brandford, the homicide commander, said he felt "confident" about where his investigation was pointing, but he never locked onto an explanation for Gray's spine injury. He left open the possibility that Gray was beaten or handled too roughly.
"We're still going strong as far as this task force is concerned. We have to fight fatigue," he told his team. "I feel confident we have a solid case here but we still have things to do."
On Friday, more remained. The task force was planning to go full-bore straight through the weekend, feeding supplemental reports to Mosby's office, and the investigation was to remain active indefinitely, according to Brandford..
"Important that the state's attorney continue to get things as we collect them," Brandford told his tired members Friday morning.
Then his cellphone rang. He stepped into the hall and didn't return.
Minutes later, task force members found out why: Mosby was holding a news conference on the steps of the nearby Baltimore War Memorial. From a flat-screen television in Green's office, they watched a live broadcast.
They stood motionless as Mosby began speaking. A lieutenant wearing a suit and bow tie rested his left hand on a leather chair; Green stood in uniform against the wall, hands behind his back. As Mosby read off the charges — including second-degree depraved-heart murder, the most serious, against Goodson — stunned looks crossed their faces.
They had not expected the state's attorney's office to act so soon.
Later on Friday, Mosby said the charges were the result of prosecutors working 12- and 14-hour days alongside police investigators. She also said prosecutors had been working on a "parallel investigation" that included using city sheriff's deputies.
"This was not something that was quick, fast and in a hurry," she said. "We reviewed hundreds of hours of camera footage and statements. This is something we worked really hard to get to the bottom of."
Still, plenty of items remained on the police task force's checklist. Members soon were back to their investigation.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A special task force of at least 30 Baltimore police officers was put together to investigate Freddie Gray’s death. Would they have done that had Freddie been white? No! The investigation would have been conducted by the Internal Affairs Unit and it would have taken weeks to complete.
Monday, May 04, 2015
Sunday, May 03, 2015
DIVERSITY AMONG BALTIMORE COPS CHARGED IN FREDDIE GRAY’S DEATH
Of the six cops charged, three are white and three are black, with one of the black officers being a female
The clarion call by academics and race experts calling for police reform has been more diversity.
Of the six Baltimore officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death, three are white and three are black, with one of the black officers being a female.
Now you can’t get much more diverse than that, with the possible exception that one of the three white officers should have been a Hispanic woman cop.
But how do you explain that half of the cops being held responsible for Freddie’s death are black? My son says that Al Sharpton would say the black officers were only there to prevent three white racist cops from beating up that poor black man.
The clarion call by academics and race experts calling for police reform has been more diversity.
Of the six Baltimore officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death, three are white and three are black, with one of the black officers being a female.
Now you can’t get much more diverse than that, with the possible exception that one of the three white officers should have been a Hispanic woman cop.
But how do you explain that half of the cops being held responsible for Freddie’s death are black? My son says that Al Sharpton would say the black officers were only there to prevent three white racist cops from beating up that poor black man.
A LOOK AT THE SIX BALTIMORE POLICE OFFICERS CHARGED IN THE GRAY CASE
By Paul Schwartzman
The Washington Post
May 1, 2015
The six officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray face a litany of charges that include second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.
The officers — three white, three African American — represent a broad spectrum of experience on Baltimore’s police force. Three of them joined the force three years ago. The driver, who faces the most serious charges, is African American and has been on the force since 1999.
One officer had his weapons confiscated after a former girlfriend contacted the Carroll County sheriff’s office to say she feared for his safety.
The officers include one woman, a sergeant, who joined the force in 2010.
All six officers were taken into custody Friday and released after posting bail that evening, according to online court records. The police officers facing charges are:
Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., 45, who has been on the force since 1999, according to Baltimore police. An African American, Goodson drove the van that transported Gray to jail.
Goodson, whose bail was set at $350,000, is the only officer in the group facing a murder charge. He is charged with ¬second-degree depraved-heart murder, a charge used when a suspect is accused of reckless disregard for another person’s life, in addition to involuntary manslaughter, second-degree -assault, manslaughter by vehicle and misconduct in office.
WBAL-TV in Baltimore reported last week that Goodson is facing internal disciplinary proceedings in a separate case for allegedly allowing a prisoner to escape from a hospital.
Goodson is the grandson of a police officer, according to the obituary for his mother, who died in Baltimore in 2012. He lives in Catonsville in Baltimore County, where two of his neighbors said Friday that he had minimal interactions with them.
Frances Hubbard, who lives on his street, described the officer as a “family man, always polite, always speaks. I see him eating with the family.”
Lt. Brian W. Rice, 41, the ¬highest-ranking officer among those charged Friday, is a 17-year veteran of the department.
Rice was the first officer to make eye contact with Gray while on bike patrol, State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby said. Rice then chased Gray, calling for backup on his police radio. Mosby said Rice failed to establish probable cause for Gray’s arrest.
The lieutenant helped load Gray onto a police wagon, then he ordered the driver to stop the vehicle so he and other officers could remove Gray, handcuff him and place leg shackles on his ankles.
Rice, whose bail was set at $350,000, is charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.
In 2012, Carroll County Sheriff’s deputies visited Rice at his Westminster home after a woman with whom he had a child asked officers to check on him, according to a report obtained by The Washington Post.
The woman, Karen Crisafulli, who also is a Baltimore police officer, told deputies that Rice had made statements that alarmed her. The details of those statements were blacked out by law enforcement.
The deputies confiscated Rice’s weapons, including two 12-gauge shotguns, an AK-47 ¬rifle, a small-caliber handgun, a BB gun and a Glock handgun he kept in a backpack inside his vehicle. The rifle and shotguns were kept in an unlocked safe.
Crisafulli, when reached by phone Friday, said she was under orders not to comment because of her position with the police department.
Officer William G. Porter, 25, who joined the force in 2012, became involved in Gray’s arrest after Goodson requested backup as he was driving to central booking, Mosby said. Porter, whose bail was set at $350,000, faces charges of involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Porter, who is black, checked on Gray and asked him whether he needed medical assistance. When Gray said he could not breathe, Porter helped him off the van floor and onto a bench. The officer failed to restrain Gray with a seat belt, Mosby said. Nor did Porter call for medical help, despite Gray’s request.
Sgt. Alicia D. White, 30, joined the force in 2010. She was dispatched to investigate two citizens’ complaints abut Gray’s arrest. At one point, according to Mosby, she “spoke to the back of his head,”even though Gray was unresponsive.
The prosecutor said White made no effort to assess Gray’s condition despite having been told he needed medical assistance. White, whose bail was set at $350,000, is charged with involuntary manslaughter, ¬second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
White’s attorney left Baltimore’s Central Booking and Intake office a little before 8 p.m. “Our client is innocent,” he said. “This is ridiculous.” He would not comment further.
Michael Gross, who identified himself as White’s uncle, said the family is “devastated” by the arrests. He described his niece as “a very good person, a very religious person.” He said she was engaged to be married.
White, who is African American, grew up in Baltimore, Gross said, and went to the University of Maryland’s Eastern Shore campus. She worked in education before joining the police force.
White was promoted to sergeant in January. The family celebrated that day, Gross said. “She was a very happy individual.”
Officer Edward M. Nero, 29, who joined the force in 2012, was on bike patrol with Rice and another officer when they chased Gray. Nero handcuffed Gray and held him down until the police wagon arrived, Mosby said. Nero, who is white, is charged with second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment. His bail was set at $250,000.
The officer lives in Bel Air, in Harford County. A neighbor, Krishna Pillalamarri, said Nero is married, has a young child and moved into his house less than a year ago.
Officer Garrett E. Miller is charged with second-degree ¬assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment. Miller, 26, has been on the force since 2012. Miller was on bike patrol with Rice and Nero when they apprehended Gray, according to the prosecutor. Miller helped load Gray into a police wagon and failed to restrain him with a seat belt, Mosby said. His bail was set at $250,000.
Miller lives in a stone-and-frame house on a fenced wooded lot in Kingsville, Md., 25 miles north of Baltimore, on land his family has owned for more than a century, neighbor Dominic Martino said. A woman who answered the door said the family did not want to talk. A neighbor also said he would have no comment.
Several descendants of the original landowners live in a cluster on one end of Miller Road, Martino said, adding that the family tends to keep to themselves. “It’s a big family,” he said. “They have signs posted that they don’t want people driving back there.”
The Washington Post
May 1, 2015
The six officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray face a litany of charges that include second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.
The officers — three white, three African American — represent a broad spectrum of experience on Baltimore’s police force. Three of them joined the force three years ago. The driver, who faces the most serious charges, is African American and has been on the force since 1999.
One officer had his weapons confiscated after a former girlfriend contacted the Carroll County sheriff’s office to say she feared for his safety.
The officers include one woman, a sergeant, who joined the force in 2010.
All six officers were taken into custody Friday and released after posting bail that evening, according to online court records. The police officers facing charges are:
Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., 45, who has been on the force since 1999, according to Baltimore police. An African American, Goodson drove the van that transported Gray to jail.
Goodson, whose bail was set at $350,000, is the only officer in the group facing a murder charge. He is charged with ¬second-degree depraved-heart murder, a charge used when a suspect is accused of reckless disregard for another person’s life, in addition to involuntary manslaughter, second-degree -assault, manslaughter by vehicle and misconduct in office.
WBAL-TV in Baltimore reported last week that Goodson is facing internal disciplinary proceedings in a separate case for allegedly allowing a prisoner to escape from a hospital.
Goodson is the grandson of a police officer, according to the obituary for his mother, who died in Baltimore in 2012. He lives in Catonsville in Baltimore County, where two of his neighbors said Friday that he had minimal interactions with them.
Frances Hubbard, who lives on his street, described the officer as a “family man, always polite, always speaks. I see him eating with the family.”
Lt. Brian W. Rice, 41, the ¬highest-ranking officer among those charged Friday, is a 17-year veteran of the department.
Rice was the first officer to make eye contact with Gray while on bike patrol, State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby said. Rice then chased Gray, calling for backup on his police radio. Mosby said Rice failed to establish probable cause for Gray’s arrest.
The lieutenant helped load Gray onto a police wagon, then he ordered the driver to stop the vehicle so he and other officers could remove Gray, handcuff him and place leg shackles on his ankles.
Rice, whose bail was set at $350,000, is charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.
In 2012, Carroll County Sheriff’s deputies visited Rice at his Westminster home after a woman with whom he had a child asked officers to check on him, according to a report obtained by The Washington Post.
The woman, Karen Crisafulli, who also is a Baltimore police officer, told deputies that Rice had made statements that alarmed her. The details of those statements were blacked out by law enforcement.
The deputies confiscated Rice’s weapons, including two 12-gauge shotguns, an AK-47 ¬rifle, a small-caliber handgun, a BB gun and a Glock handgun he kept in a backpack inside his vehicle. The rifle and shotguns were kept in an unlocked safe.
Crisafulli, when reached by phone Friday, said she was under orders not to comment because of her position with the police department.
Officer William G. Porter, 25, who joined the force in 2012, became involved in Gray’s arrest after Goodson requested backup as he was driving to central booking, Mosby said. Porter, whose bail was set at $350,000, faces charges of involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Porter, who is black, checked on Gray and asked him whether he needed medical assistance. When Gray said he could not breathe, Porter helped him off the van floor and onto a bench. The officer failed to restrain Gray with a seat belt, Mosby said. Nor did Porter call for medical help, despite Gray’s request.
Sgt. Alicia D. White, 30, joined the force in 2010. She was dispatched to investigate two citizens’ complaints abut Gray’s arrest. At one point, according to Mosby, she “spoke to the back of his head,”even though Gray was unresponsive.
The prosecutor said White made no effort to assess Gray’s condition despite having been told he needed medical assistance. White, whose bail was set at $350,000, is charged with involuntary manslaughter, ¬second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
White’s attorney left Baltimore’s Central Booking and Intake office a little before 8 p.m. “Our client is innocent,” he said. “This is ridiculous.” He would not comment further.
Michael Gross, who identified himself as White’s uncle, said the family is “devastated” by the arrests. He described his niece as “a very good person, a very religious person.” He said she was engaged to be married.
White, who is African American, grew up in Baltimore, Gross said, and went to the University of Maryland’s Eastern Shore campus. She worked in education before joining the police force.
White was promoted to sergeant in January. The family celebrated that day, Gross said. “She was a very happy individual.”
Officer Edward M. Nero, 29, who joined the force in 2012, was on bike patrol with Rice and another officer when they chased Gray. Nero handcuffed Gray and held him down until the police wagon arrived, Mosby said. Nero, who is white, is charged with second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment. His bail was set at $250,000.
The officer lives in Bel Air, in Harford County. A neighbor, Krishna Pillalamarri, said Nero is married, has a young child and moved into his house less than a year ago.
Officer Garrett E. Miller is charged with second-degree ¬assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment. Miller, 26, has been on the force since 2012. Miller was on bike patrol with Rice and Nero when they apprehended Gray, according to the prosecutor. Miller helped load Gray into a police wagon and failed to restrain him with a seat belt, Mosby said. His bail was set at $250,000.
Miller lives in a stone-and-frame house on a fenced wooded lot in Kingsville, Md., 25 miles north of Baltimore, on land his family has owned for more than a century, neighbor Dominic Martino said. A woman who answered the door said the family did not want to talk. A neighbor also said he would have no comment.
Several descendants of the original landowners live in a cluster on one end of Miller Road, Martino said, adding that the family tends to keep to themselves. “It’s a big family,” he said. “They have signs posted that they don’t want people driving back there.”
Friday, May 01, 2015
AUSCHWITZ GUARD OFFERS GERMANS SOMETHING RARE
A Nazi who admits what he did
By Matthew Schofield
McClatchy DC
April 23, 2015
BERLIN — On the opening day of his trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, the man known as the “accountant of Auschwitz” told of the moment he lost his “euphoria for Adolf Hitler.”
He was standing on a train platform after Hungarian Jews had been unloaded at the Nazi death camp. The unwitting condemned already had been sent to the gas chambers. The newly arrived slave laborers had been sent in a different direction.
Left behind on the platform was a crying infant. As the child cried, one of the now 93-year-old Oskar Groening’s fellow SS officers approached it, grabbed it by the leg, dashed its head against a nearby truck, then tossed the lifeless body into the truck.
As horrific as that story is, what might have been more shocking was Groening’s next observation.
“I don’t know what else I could have expected the guard to do with the baby,” he mused. “I suppose he could have shot it, though.”
The casual acceptance of brutality that the former Waffen SS officer displayed even 70 years after the Third Reich was destroyed provided a rare insight into the twisted nature of the Nazi death camp mindset. Even from a man who admitted in court that he carried “moral guilt” if not legal guilt for the Holocaust, there was no notion that, perhaps, the baby did not need to have been killed.
He made the same point in his testimony Thursday. “I did not expect any Jews to survive Auschwitz,” he said.
Efraim Zuroff, director and head Nazi hunter for the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Groening’s testimony, even in its cool detachment, is unique and historically important.
“In my 35 years of trying to bring Nazis to justice, I’ve not met one Nazi who expressed any regret,” he said. “Even now, his words show how deeply the attitudes that made the Holocaust possible run.”
Zuroff noted that Groening hardly deserves credit for coming forward, at 93. He said he once had hoped that nearing the ends of their lives, more old Nazis “would want to come clean before they had to meet their maker.”
That has not been the case with others. Zuroff noted that other Nazi war crimes defendants have tended to claim the wrong person was arrested or that they did not do what they were charged with doing. Groening, therefore, is different.
Still, his testimony exposes the flaws in a decades-long German policy of pursuing only Nazis who could be shown to have blood on their hands.
Groening fully admits he was enthusiastic in his backing of Hitler. He described standing with another guard as he dumped the poison Zyklon B into a panel above a mass “shower room” and how he could hear the screams diminish after that. He talked about how, upon arriving to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time, he was informed that a large part of the camp was devoted to “discarding” the arriving Jews deemed unfit for slave labor.
Groening knew about and watched all that happened at the death camp. He didn’t actively kill people, but as the prosecution in this case is arguing, his actions made what happened possible. In fact, prosecutors note that his collecting cash that the doomed Hungarian Jews carried when they arrived at Auschwitz, and eventually hauling boxes of it to Berlin, “made it possible for the Nazis not only to continue but to profit from mass murder.”
Previously, the attitude of the guards who staffed Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps has been inferred only from the experiences of survivors or liberators. That’s why Groening’s words fill a void, Zuroff said.
Groening is an important figure, others note, because he is German. Other recent trials have focused on Eastern Europeans. Groening was a proud product of Hitler’s Fatherland.
Michael Wolffsohn, a German historian and expert on German Jewish history, noted in an email answer to questions that Groening was “an exception to the rule. He DID admit his crimes.”
It’s difficult to see actual justice coming from the case, however, Wolffsohn said, when the defendant is 93.
“The trial as such is counterproductive,” he wrote. “A maximum sentence of six years for the murder of 300,000! It would have been better to just analyze Groening’s statement. Justice and law are not always identical.”
Still, the trial has had an impact. In a recent opinion poll, about half of all Germans said they believed it was time to “draw a line under the Holocaust” and move on. But the reaction to Groening’s testimony has overwhelmed such notions.
In particular, the German press has been highly critical that this case took decades to bring to trial. The influential Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper noted in an editorial that “German justice, after the court agreed to take this case, should have asked the victims and the world to be forgiven for having delayed the punishment of the Nazi killers for so long, and even until a point where punishment barely makes sense.”
The newspaper noted that one of the witnesses against Groening, Eva Moses Kor, 81, who was born in Romania, had been a 10-year-old who survived Auschwitz only because she was a twin, a class of people valued by Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele for medical experiments. During the trial, she stared at Groening and said, “Mr. Groening, I want you to come out clearly. Tell the young neo-Nazis that Auschwitz really existed and Nazi ideology has produced no winners, only losers.”
The neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers were not likely to listen, however. Ursula Haverbeck, one of Germany’s more infamous Holocaust deniers, was in court for Groening’s initial testimony. But after listening to his detailed description of what happened in the camp, she merely noted “he’s been turned.” To her, he’s now a traitor.
Thomas Wulff, a convicted German neo-Nazi, provided a similar view as he stood hoping to get in to see the trial. “This is a late, Allied revenge trial,” he said. “Groening was a victim of his time and now he’s a victim of the German justice system.”
Another newspaper, though, noted that the trial really isn’t about punishing an old man. “It’s about identifying the most severe injustice, as long as those responsible are still alive,” wrote the Stuttgarter Zeitung. “That this so far has not happened, as German justice was blind for so long, does not change the demands of justice.”
“Nazi perpetrators got away because statutes of limitations expired and the legislature failed to intervene,” added the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper. “Cases were terminated, leaving historians and critical lawyers stunned. . . . Many trials of elderly offenders imploded. The reasons were profane: illness and death.”
And Pascal Durain, writing in the newspaper Mittelbayrische Zeitung, said the trial is a reminder that Germany has debts to pay, as do all former death camp workers.
“Groening owes the truth to the audience,” Durain wrote. “The court owes him a verdict. The state of law owes justice to the survivors. And Germany owes all a message that no perpetrator will get away.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: I lost both sets of grandparents in the Holocaust, but I do not know whether they were sent to an extermination camp like Auschwitz or died in a Nazi concentration camp.
By Matthew Schofield
McClatchy DC
April 23, 2015
BERLIN — On the opening day of his trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, the man known as the “accountant of Auschwitz” told of the moment he lost his “euphoria for Adolf Hitler.”
He was standing on a train platform after Hungarian Jews had been unloaded at the Nazi death camp. The unwitting condemned already had been sent to the gas chambers. The newly arrived slave laborers had been sent in a different direction.
Left behind on the platform was a crying infant. As the child cried, one of the now 93-year-old Oskar Groening’s fellow SS officers approached it, grabbed it by the leg, dashed its head against a nearby truck, then tossed the lifeless body into the truck.
As horrific as that story is, what might have been more shocking was Groening’s next observation.
“I don’t know what else I could have expected the guard to do with the baby,” he mused. “I suppose he could have shot it, though.”
The casual acceptance of brutality that the former Waffen SS officer displayed even 70 years after the Third Reich was destroyed provided a rare insight into the twisted nature of the Nazi death camp mindset. Even from a man who admitted in court that he carried “moral guilt” if not legal guilt for the Holocaust, there was no notion that, perhaps, the baby did not need to have been killed.
He made the same point in his testimony Thursday. “I did not expect any Jews to survive Auschwitz,” he said.
Efraim Zuroff, director and head Nazi hunter for the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Groening’s testimony, even in its cool detachment, is unique and historically important.
“In my 35 years of trying to bring Nazis to justice, I’ve not met one Nazi who expressed any regret,” he said. “Even now, his words show how deeply the attitudes that made the Holocaust possible run.”
Zuroff noted that Groening hardly deserves credit for coming forward, at 93. He said he once had hoped that nearing the ends of their lives, more old Nazis “would want to come clean before they had to meet their maker.”
That has not been the case with others. Zuroff noted that other Nazi war crimes defendants have tended to claim the wrong person was arrested or that they did not do what they were charged with doing. Groening, therefore, is different.
Still, his testimony exposes the flaws in a decades-long German policy of pursuing only Nazis who could be shown to have blood on their hands.
Groening fully admits he was enthusiastic in his backing of Hitler. He described standing with another guard as he dumped the poison Zyklon B into a panel above a mass “shower room” and how he could hear the screams diminish after that. He talked about how, upon arriving to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time, he was informed that a large part of the camp was devoted to “discarding” the arriving Jews deemed unfit for slave labor.
Groening knew about and watched all that happened at the death camp. He didn’t actively kill people, but as the prosecution in this case is arguing, his actions made what happened possible. In fact, prosecutors note that his collecting cash that the doomed Hungarian Jews carried when they arrived at Auschwitz, and eventually hauling boxes of it to Berlin, “made it possible for the Nazis not only to continue but to profit from mass murder.”
Previously, the attitude of the guards who staffed Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps has been inferred only from the experiences of survivors or liberators. That’s why Groening’s words fill a void, Zuroff said.
Groening is an important figure, others note, because he is German. Other recent trials have focused on Eastern Europeans. Groening was a proud product of Hitler’s Fatherland.
Michael Wolffsohn, a German historian and expert on German Jewish history, noted in an email answer to questions that Groening was “an exception to the rule. He DID admit his crimes.”
It’s difficult to see actual justice coming from the case, however, Wolffsohn said, when the defendant is 93.
“The trial as such is counterproductive,” he wrote. “A maximum sentence of six years for the murder of 300,000! It would have been better to just analyze Groening’s statement. Justice and law are not always identical.”
Still, the trial has had an impact. In a recent opinion poll, about half of all Germans said they believed it was time to “draw a line under the Holocaust” and move on. But the reaction to Groening’s testimony has overwhelmed such notions.
In particular, the German press has been highly critical that this case took decades to bring to trial. The influential Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper noted in an editorial that “German justice, after the court agreed to take this case, should have asked the victims and the world to be forgiven for having delayed the punishment of the Nazi killers for so long, and even until a point where punishment barely makes sense.”
The newspaper noted that one of the witnesses against Groening, Eva Moses Kor, 81, who was born in Romania, had been a 10-year-old who survived Auschwitz only because she was a twin, a class of people valued by Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele for medical experiments. During the trial, she stared at Groening and said, “Mr. Groening, I want you to come out clearly. Tell the young neo-Nazis that Auschwitz really existed and Nazi ideology has produced no winners, only losers.”
The neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers were not likely to listen, however. Ursula Haverbeck, one of Germany’s more infamous Holocaust deniers, was in court for Groening’s initial testimony. But after listening to his detailed description of what happened in the camp, she merely noted “he’s been turned.” To her, he’s now a traitor.
Thomas Wulff, a convicted German neo-Nazi, provided a similar view as he stood hoping to get in to see the trial. “This is a late, Allied revenge trial,” he said. “Groening was a victim of his time and now he’s a victim of the German justice system.”
Another newspaper, though, noted that the trial really isn’t about punishing an old man. “It’s about identifying the most severe injustice, as long as those responsible are still alive,” wrote the Stuttgarter Zeitung. “That this so far has not happened, as German justice was blind for so long, does not change the demands of justice.”
“Nazi perpetrators got away because statutes of limitations expired and the legislature failed to intervene,” added the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper. “Cases were terminated, leaving historians and critical lawyers stunned. . . . Many trials of elderly offenders imploded. The reasons were profane: illness and death.”
And Pascal Durain, writing in the newspaper Mittelbayrische Zeitung, said the trial is a reminder that Germany has debts to pay, as do all former death camp workers.
“Groening owes the truth to the audience,” Durain wrote. “The court owes him a verdict. The state of law owes justice to the survivors. And Germany owes all a message that no perpetrator will get away.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: I lost both sets of grandparents in the Holocaust, but I do not know whether they were sent to an extermination camp like Auschwitz or died in a Nazi concentration camp.
INDONESIA TAKING AIM AT THE BLACK MARKET IN DRUGS
No Forgiveness for Drug Dealers in Indonesia: Late night wake-up call
By Richard Krupp, PhD
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 30, 2015
While various efforts to legalize illicit drugs in the United States are underway, Indonesia continues with a different approach.
Evidently a different view of the war on drugs can be found in this southeast Asian country comprising thousands of islands with more than 250 million people.
Indonesia views drug dealing and trafficking as a very serious matter and is not very forgiving when it comes to punishment.
According to Wikipedia:
Capital punishment in Indonesia is restricted to 16 crimes. Though the death penalty existed as a punishment from the inception of the Republic of Indonesia, the first execution did not take place until 1973.
The Indonesian government does not issue detailed statistics about every person facing the death penalty in the country. In fact, “the search for precise figures is hampered by prevailing state secrecy over the death penalty.” It is believed, however, that there are around 130 people, Indonesians and foreign nationals, currently (as of 2013) sentenced to die in Indonesia.
Prisoners (particularly those convicted of murder, terrorism or drug trafficking offences) spend a long time languishing in prison before their sentence is finally carried out. Usually their final appeal has been exhausted through the courts and President. Prisoners and their families are notified 72 hours in advance of their pending execution. They are usually transferred to Nusa Kambangan island. They are woken up in the middle of the night and taken to a remote (and undisclosed) location and executed by firing squad. The method has not changed since 1964.
Capital punishment is carried out in Indonesia by a firing squad. The prisoner blindfolded is led to a grassy area where they have an option to sit or stand. The 12 armed executioners shoot the prisoner in the chest from a range of five to ten meters. Only three fire live bullets and the rest fire blanks. If the prisoner does not die, the Commander is required to issue a final bullet to the prisoner’s head. (cited source at http://tinyurl.com/oq4xynw.)
Recently several inmates were on the wake-up call and caught some bullets. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported:
Indonesia Executes Seven Foreigners in Drug Cases
The government executed eight people—seven of them foreigners—for their roles in drug crimes, after 11th-hour appeals for clemency by families, heads of state, and international organizations failed to sway President Joko Widodo.
Attorney General H.M. Prasetyo said Wednesday that the eight convicts were shot simultaneously at 12:35 a.m. local time and were declared dead three minutes later.
“All (shots) were successful, none missed (the targets),” he told reporters in Cilacap after he inspected the maximum security prison in central Java, where eight firing squads with 13 shooters each shot the prisoners.
“Executing drug convicts is not a pleasant thing to do, but we have to fight against drug trafficking,” he added.
Those executed included two Australians, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, who were convicted in 2006 as leaders of the “Bali Nine” heroin-smuggling ring. The others included four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian. All eight had been in prison for years, convicted of possessing or trafficking drugs like heroin, cocaine and marijuana (for full story read http://tinyurl.com/p8844aj.)
Though Indonesia has been chastised by many countries, they have not backed down from the “unforgiving” approach to their drug problems. Is this a deterrent?
I don’t know if there are any studies, but I think the news of this event will certainly spread to those who are planning to get involved in drug dealing in Indonesia. Drug dealers/smugglers will find no forgiveness in Indonesia.
Meanwhile, various states in our country proceed to legalize marijuana, offer needle exchange programs, and various alternatives to incarceration.
EDITOR’S NOTE: During the past year, Dorina Lisson has sent me a number of Australian newspaper articles about the outrage and objections her government has expressed against the death sentences imposed on the two now executed Australian citizens. One report even said Indonesia was prepared to go to war against Australia over the issue. While Dorina is an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, she has no sympathy for the two Aussie drug traffickers.
And Bob Walsh says, “It [Indonesia’s policy on executing drug traffickers] might not be a deterrent, but it sure as hell cuts down on repeat offenders.”
By Richard Krupp, PhD
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 30, 2015
While various efforts to legalize illicit drugs in the United States are underway, Indonesia continues with a different approach.
Evidently a different view of the war on drugs can be found in this southeast Asian country comprising thousands of islands with more than 250 million people.
Indonesia views drug dealing and trafficking as a very serious matter and is not very forgiving when it comes to punishment.
According to Wikipedia:
Capital punishment in Indonesia is restricted to 16 crimes. Though the death penalty existed as a punishment from the inception of the Republic of Indonesia, the first execution did not take place until 1973.
The Indonesian government does not issue detailed statistics about every person facing the death penalty in the country. In fact, “the search for precise figures is hampered by prevailing state secrecy over the death penalty.” It is believed, however, that there are around 130 people, Indonesians and foreign nationals, currently (as of 2013) sentenced to die in Indonesia.
Prisoners (particularly those convicted of murder, terrorism or drug trafficking offences) spend a long time languishing in prison before their sentence is finally carried out. Usually their final appeal has been exhausted through the courts and President. Prisoners and their families are notified 72 hours in advance of their pending execution. They are usually transferred to Nusa Kambangan island. They are woken up in the middle of the night and taken to a remote (and undisclosed) location and executed by firing squad. The method has not changed since 1964.
Capital punishment is carried out in Indonesia by a firing squad. The prisoner blindfolded is led to a grassy area where they have an option to sit or stand. The 12 armed executioners shoot the prisoner in the chest from a range of five to ten meters. Only three fire live bullets and the rest fire blanks. If the prisoner does not die, the Commander is required to issue a final bullet to the prisoner’s head. (cited source at http://tinyurl.com/oq4xynw.)
Recently several inmates were on the wake-up call and caught some bullets. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported:
Indonesia Executes Seven Foreigners in Drug Cases
The government executed eight people—seven of them foreigners—for their roles in drug crimes, after 11th-hour appeals for clemency by families, heads of state, and international organizations failed to sway President Joko Widodo.
Attorney General H.M. Prasetyo said Wednesday that the eight convicts were shot simultaneously at 12:35 a.m. local time and were declared dead three minutes later.
“All (shots) were successful, none missed (the targets),” he told reporters in Cilacap after he inspected the maximum security prison in central Java, where eight firing squads with 13 shooters each shot the prisoners.
“Executing drug convicts is not a pleasant thing to do, but we have to fight against drug trafficking,” he added.
Those executed included two Australians, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, who were convicted in 2006 as leaders of the “Bali Nine” heroin-smuggling ring. The others included four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian. All eight had been in prison for years, convicted of possessing or trafficking drugs like heroin, cocaine and marijuana (for full story read http://tinyurl.com/p8844aj.)
Though Indonesia has been chastised by many countries, they have not backed down from the “unforgiving” approach to their drug problems. Is this a deterrent?
I don’t know if there are any studies, but I think the news of this event will certainly spread to those who are planning to get involved in drug dealing in Indonesia. Drug dealers/smugglers will find no forgiveness in Indonesia.
Meanwhile, various states in our country proceed to legalize marijuana, offer needle exchange programs, and various alternatives to incarceration.
EDITOR’S NOTE: During the past year, Dorina Lisson has sent me a number of Australian newspaper articles about the outrage and objections her government has expressed against the death sentences imposed on the two now executed Australian citizens. One report even said Indonesia was prepared to go to war against Australia over the issue. While Dorina is an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, she has no sympathy for the two Aussie drug traffickers.
And Bob Walsh says, “It [Indonesia’s policy on executing drug traffickers] might not be a deterrent, but it sure as hell cuts down on repeat offenders.”
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
FARE THEE WELL DEAR MICHELE!
DEA head Michele M. Leonhart, who courageously exposed medical marijuana as a hoax, comes under fire for the misconduct of some agents in a far-away foreign country
Michele M. Leonhart was appointed DEA Administrator in 2010, after having acted in that capacity for three years. Michele, the first woman to hold the top spot in a federal law enforcement agency, has done an outstanding job, both as Acting Administrator and for the past five years as the official head of the DEA.
On June 21, 2011, Michele infuriated the pro-pot crowd and liberals by refusing to reclassify marijuana andfor exposing medical marijuana as a hoax. The federal government ruled that marijuana has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a highly dangerous drug like heroin.
In a letter to organizations petitioning for a reclassification of marijuana, Michele Leonhart declared that marijuana "has a high potential for abuse," "has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States" and "lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision." The letter and 37 pages of supporting documents were published in the Federal Register.
Instead of being scorched for her positions on marijuana and medical pot, Leonhart deserves to be commended for having the courage to stand up against a rising tide of pro-pot sentiment.
But now it appears to be payback time. A senior administration official tells CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Bill Plante that Michele will be stepping down soon. It’s obvious that she will be forced out of office for the misconduct of some DEA agents stationed in a foreign country.
The DEA misconduct came to light when the Justice Department investigated the 2012 conduct of President Obama’s advance Secret Service security detail. Prior to Obama’s arrival in Cartagena, Columbia, quite a few of the Secret Service agents cavorted around and partied with local prostitutes. The misconduct became public when Dania Suarez, one of the hookers, went to the police to complain that Arthur Huntington, one of the agents, had refused to pay her for her services.
Subsequent investigations of that Secret Service scandal forced Director Mark Sullivan to retire in 2013. The investigations also uncovered the DEA misconduct.
As for the DEA scandal, CBS DC reports:
Leonhart came under fire after an internal report said government money was used to pay prostitutes at a farewell party for a high-ranking DEA official in Colombia.
DEA agents also rented undercover apartments in Colombia and used them for parties with prostitutes, the DEA said in an internal report.
Excerpts of the report were released last week by the oversight panel, which is investigating questionable behavior highlighted in a March report by the Justice Department’s inspector general that examined sexual harassment and misconduct allegations from 2009 to 2012.
The Justice Department report recounts allegations that DEA agents attended sex parties with prostitutes, funded by local drug cartels, in a foreign county. The report does not identify the country where the alleged sex parties occurred, but the DEA report identified it as Colombia.
Leonhart was scorched earlier this month by a Congressional oversight committee because none of the scandalous agents had been fired. One would expect the Democrats to jump all over her, which they did, but so did the Republicans. When Leonhart said that federal civil service regulations made it hard to fire agents, that she could not intervene in any disciplinary process, and in some cases cannot even revoke an agent’s security clearance, the Republicans pounced.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, said it was “stunning” that no one had been fired and asked, “What would it take to get fired at the DEA?” Then he demanded to know,, “What the hell do you get to do?”
Rep. Mark Walker, aNorth Carolina Republican, charged that “From what we’ve heard, this reflects a ‘spring break frat party’ mentality for the last 15 years at the DEA.”
Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Leonhart deserves much of the blame for a “cultural problem” at the DEA and concluded the hearing by saying, “You get called before this committee and say ‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s awful.’ But you personally have been responsible for this for more than a decade and you didn’t do anything about it.”
Chaffetz told The Associated Press that Leonhart has ignored problems at the DEA for more than 10 years. “It’s time for her to go. I don’t have confidence in her, nor does the majority of the committee.”
Chaffetz, a Reagan convert to the Republican Party, has never spent one minute in a cop’s shoes. He has never faced the daily stress and occasional moments of sheer terror faced by law enforcement officers. Unlike the DEA agents in Columbia, Chaffetz, Gowdy, Walker and the other committee members have never been stationed thousands of miles away from home and family facing danger at every turn.
The ‘frat party’ culture they are complaining about is quite common throughout the law enforcement profession. Policing is still mostly a man’s job, and boys will be boys! The stress and occasional terror leads to a lot of drinking and debauchery. During my forty years of association with law enforcement – both as a cop and criminal justice professor – I have attended many parties which I will not describe so as not to embarrass myself and my fellow party goers. But that’s how many cops blow off steam.
The DEA agents stationed in Columbia and other far-away drug producing countries not only face danger on a daily basis, but they are also pretty well isolated from others. And when they’re working undercover, they are not going to play the roles of Boy Scouts.
As for the DEA misconduct, paying prostitutes with government money at a farewell party for a high-ranking officer is certainly not kosher. Renting undercover apartments for parties with prostitutes is not kosher either, unless those parties were part and parcel of an undercover operation. But attending sex parties that were paid for by the very people the agents are trying to bring down is strictly verboten. That should be a firing offense!
Even if the parties were part of a legitimate undercover operation, having sex with a drug cartel hooker could compromise a whole investigation. There’s always that inevitable pillow talk and there is no way of predicting what a drunken agent might tell his bedmate.
On April 10, in one of his last acts as Attorney General, Eric Holder issued the following warning to all Justice Department employees:
"The solicitation of prostitution threatens the core mission of the Department, not simply because it invites extortion, blackmail, and leaks of sensitive or classified information, but also because it undermines the Department's efforts to eradicate the scourge of human trafficking. I want to reiterate to all Department personnel, including attorneys and law enforcement officers, that they are prohibited from soliciting, procuring, or accepting commercial sex at all times, including while off duty or on personal leave."
Yeah, right Eric, lots of luck with that one. Let’s see now, you’ve been Attorney General for more than six years and it took you this long to learn that Justice Department employees have been cavorting with prostitutes.
There are about 5,000 agents in the DEA, with many of them stationed in the dangerous drug producing countries of Asia and Latin America. I do not for one second believe that Michele condones any misconduct within her agency. With 5,000 agents there is bound to be misconduct by some of them. And information about some misconduct never rises all the way to the top. So, should Michele be held accountable for the conduct of each and every member of the DEA? Not in my book!
The members of Congress who want Leonhart ousted are nothing more than political hacks who will cut your throat to get one more vote. I strongly suspect that whoever replaces Michele as DEA Administrator will be an Obama administration ass-kisser who is likely to please the pro-pot crowd and the liberals.
Although Leonhart has not submitted her resignation yet, it seems obvious that due to the unjust Congressional committee criticism, she will step down soon. The announcement of her resignation is merely being held up until President Obama and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have decided on her successor.
So we say, fare thee well dear Michele! You have been both a foot-soldier and a commander in the war on drugs. You have done an outstanding job during your entire drug enforcement career. You can hold your head far higher than any of your shameless critics, both within and outside of the government. Those of us who are opposed to the liberalization and legalization of illicit drugs love you and will miss you.
Michele M. Leonhart was appointed DEA Administrator in 2010, after having acted in that capacity for three years. Michele, the first woman to hold the top spot in a federal law enforcement agency, has done an outstanding job, both as Acting Administrator and for the past five years as the official head of the DEA.
On June 21, 2011, Michele infuriated the pro-pot crowd and liberals by refusing to reclassify marijuana andfor exposing medical marijuana as a hoax. The federal government ruled that marijuana has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a highly dangerous drug like heroin.
In a letter to organizations petitioning for a reclassification of marijuana, Michele Leonhart declared that marijuana "has a high potential for abuse," "has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States" and "lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision." The letter and 37 pages of supporting documents were published in the Federal Register.
Instead of being scorched for her positions on marijuana and medical pot, Leonhart deserves to be commended for having the courage to stand up against a rising tide of pro-pot sentiment.
But now it appears to be payback time. A senior administration official tells CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Bill Plante that Michele will be stepping down soon. It’s obvious that she will be forced out of office for the misconduct of some DEA agents stationed in a foreign country.
The DEA misconduct came to light when the Justice Department investigated the 2012 conduct of President Obama’s advance Secret Service security detail. Prior to Obama’s arrival in Cartagena, Columbia, quite a few of the Secret Service agents cavorted around and partied with local prostitutes. The misconduct became public when Dania Suarez, one of the hookers, went to the police to complain that Arthur Huntington, one of the agents, had refused to pay her for her services.
Subsequent investigations of that Secret Service scandal forced Director Mark Sullivan to retire in 2013. The investigations also uncovered the DEA misconduct.
As for the DEA scandal, CBS DC reports:
Leonhart came under fire after an internal report said government money was used to pay prostitutes at a farewell party for a high-ranking DEA official in Colombia.
DEA agents also rented undercover apartments in Colombia and used them for parties with prostitutes, the DEA said in an internal report.
Excerpts of the report were released last week by the oversight panel, which is investigating questionable behavior highlighted in a March report by the Justice Department’s inspector general that examined sexual harassment and misconduct allegations from 2009 to 2012.
The Justice Department report recounts allegations that DEA agents attended sex parties with prostitutes, funded by local drug cartels, in a foreign county. The report does not identify the country where the alleged sex parties occurred, but the DEA report identified it as Colombia.
Leonhart was scorched earlier this month by a Congressional oversight committee because none of the scandalous agents had been fired. One would expect the Democrats to jump all over her, which they did, but so did the Republicans. When Leonhart said that federal civil service regulations made it hard to fire agents, that she could not intervene in any disciplinary process, and in some cases cannot even revoke an agent’s security clearance, the Republicans pounced.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, said it was “stunning” that no one had been fired and asked, “What would it take to get fired at the DEA?” Then he demanded to know,, “What the hell do you get to do?”
Rep. Mark Walker, aNorth Carolina Republican, charged that “From what we’ve heard, this reflects a ‘spring break frat party’ mentality for the last 15 years at the DEA.”
Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Leonhart deserves much of the blame for a “cultural problem” at the DEA and concluded the hearing by saying, “You get called before this committee and say ‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s awful.’ But you personally have been responsible for this for more than a decade and you didn’t do anything about it.”
Chaffetz told The Associated Press that Leonhart has ignored problems at the DEA for more than 10 years. “It’s time for her to go. I don’t have confidence in her, nor does the majority of the committee.”
Chaffetz, a Reagan convert to the Republican Party, has never spent one minute in a cop’s shoes. He has never faced the daily stress and occasional moments of sheer terror faced by law enforcement officers. Unlike the DEA agents in Columbia, Chaffetz, Gowdy, Walker and the other committee members have never been stationed thousands of miles away from home and family facing danger at every turn.
The ‘frat party’ culture they are complaining about is quite common throughout the law enforcement profession. Policing is still mostly a man’s job, and boys will be boys! The stress and occasional terror leads to a lot of drinking and debauchery. During my forty years of association with law enforcement – both as a cop and criminal justice professor – I have attended many parties which I will not describe so as not to embarrass myself and my fellow party goers. But that’s how many cops blow off steam.
The DEA agents stationed in Columbia and other far-away drug producing countries not only face danger on a daily basis, but they are also pretty well isolated from others. And when they’re working undercover, they are not going to play the roles of Boy Scouts.
As for the DEA misconduct, paying prostitutes with government money at a farewell party for a high-ranking officer is certainly not kosher. Renting undercover apartments for parties with prostitutes is not kosher either, unless those parties were part and parcel of an undercover operation. But attending sex parties that were paid for by the very people the agents are trying to bring down is strictly verboten. That should be a firing offense!
Even if the parties were part of a legitimate undercover operation, having sex with a drug cartel hooker could compromise a whole investigation. There’s always that inevitable pillow talk and there is no way of predicting what a drunken agent might tell his bedmate.
On April 10, in one of his last acts as Attorney General, Eric Holder issued the following warning to all Justice Department employees:
"The solicitation of prostitution threatens the core mission of the Department, not simply because it invites extortion, blackmail, and leaks of sensitive or classified information, but also because it undermines the Department's efforts to eradicate the scourge of human trafficking. I want to reiterate to all Department personnel, including attorneys and law enforcement officers, that they are prohibited from soliciting, procuring, or accepting commercial sex at all times, including while off duty or on personal leave."
Yeah, right Eric, lots of luck with that one. Let’s see now, you’ve been Attorney General for more than six years and it took you this long to learn that Justice Department employees have been cavorting with prostitutes.
There are about 5,000 agents in the DEA, with many of them stationed in the dangerous drug producing countries of Asia and Latin America. I do not for one second believe that Michele condones any misconduct within her agency. With 5,000 agents there is bound to be misconduct by some of them. And information about some misconduct never rises all the way to the top. So, should Michele be held accountable for the conduct of each and every member of the DEA? Not in my book!
The members of Congress who want Leonhart ousted are nothing more than political hacks who will cut your throat to get one more vote. I strongly suspect that whoever replaces Michele as DEA Administrator will be an Obama administration ass-kisser who is likely to please the pro-pot crowd and the liberals.
Although Leonhart has not submitted her resignation yet, it seems obvious that due to the unjust Congressional committee criticism, she will step down soon. The announcement of her resignation is merely being held up until President Obama and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have decided on her successor.
So we say, fare thee well dear Michele! You have been both a foot-soldier and a commander in the war on drugs. You have done an outstanding job during your entire drug enforcement career. You can hold your head far higher than any of your shameless critics, both within and outside of the government. Those of us who are opposed to the liberalization and legalization of illicit drugs love you and will miss you.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
DEADLY NEVADA PRISON BRAWL STOKES MYSTERY ABOUT GUARDS, GUNS
By Ken Ritter
Associated Press
April 27, 2015
LAS VEGAS -- This much is certain: Two handcuffed inmates at one of Nevada's toughest prisons brawled in a hallway, and one ended up dead from several shotgun blasts. The other was declared guilty of murder, even though he never touched a gun.
Prison officials acknowledged the death in November with only a short statement, and for months they never mentioned that a weapon was involved or that it had been fired by a trainee guard. Since then, the mystery of the shooting near the showers in a segregation unit at High Desert State Prison has only deepened.
Now attorneys for both inmates are accusing prison guards of instigating the fight to set up a gladiator-style contest and then trying to cover it up by blaming the surviving prisoner.
Prison officials have been slow to release essential details, and they recently withdrew the murder allegation after disclosing the trainee's involvement.
The many lingering questions have drawn in elected officials, too, with the attorney general reviewing an investigation and the governor promising to help get to the bottom of the incident.
"The shooting itself is highly disturbing," Alexis Plunkett, attorney for the surviving inmate, Andrew Arevalo, told The Associated Press. "But it's really over the top that (prison officials) immediately filed a murder charge against Andrew, who was absolutely the victim in every possible way."
It all started Nov. 12 deep inside the largest of Nevada's 22 prison facilities, which houses about a quarter of the state's 12,700 inmates.
Arevalo, 24, and Carlos Manuel Perez Jr., 28, were both released into the hall and soon were on the floor, kicking at each other with their hands cuffed behind their backs.
A Nov. 13 report by the trainee guard describes how he warned the men to stop fighting, fired one blank, issued more warnings and then fired three live rounds down the hall. At that point, he said, he stopped to reload.
"They continued kicking each other even though they were bleeding," the guard wrote.
Perez died of gunshot wounds to the head, neck, chest and arms. Arevalo suffered similar wounds but survived.
Guards have a history of using gunfire to control the 4,200 inmates at the prison about 45 miles outside Las Vegas.
Records show guards fired 215 shots in a five-year span, including 60 rounds in 2011, the latest year for which figures are available. That was nearly twice the total of 124 shots fired by guards during the same period at all the state's other prisons combined.
The practice continues. State prisons chief Greg Cox reported that several inmates were injured by a guard firing a shotgun to break up a fight Tuesday at Ely State Prison, the state's maximum-security facility. Most injuries were minor, Cox said.
Attorney Cal Potter, representing Perez's family in the wrongful-death lawsuit, alleges the High Desert trainee, another guard and a supervising lieutenant created a "gladiator-like scenario" before the shooting. He says they released Arevalo and Perez together into the shower hallway, where prisoners are supposed to walk alone.
By the end of January, prison administrators held a hearing and declared Arevalo responsible for murder, assault and battery. He was sentenced to 18 months in the isolation cell known as "the hole," according to prison disciplinary forms provided to the AP. The prison administrative process is separate from criminal courts.
Last week, months after Arevalo was put in isolation, prison officials withdrew the murder and assault allegations after objections from his lawyer and repeated questions from the AP.
"A review of the entire incident will result in some of the charges being reduced," prison Warden Dwight Neven wrote in an April 17 memo to Arevalo's lawyer. It said the hearing officer's Jan. 26 disciplinary decision was based on "some evidence," including the trainee's report. The memo did not say whether — or what — other evidence was considered.
"New information regarding the facts surrounding the charges" led to the reversal, the corrections department said Thursday in a statement.
Prison records provided by Plunkett show Arevalo's term in isolation was reduced from 18 months to 120 days. The battery charge is still pending.
Plunkett said she believes her client was blamed for Perez's death in a botched effort by prison officials to cover up the killing. She maintains that Arevalo did not kill Perez and only fought to defend himself.
Prison officials "never intended to make this shooting public," Plunkett said. "Andrew never had a gun in his hands. He was handcuffed."
Prisons officials have said little, citing the ongoing investigation.
The first news release, issued on Nov. 13, reported only that Perez had died. The 78-word announcement made no mention of a shooting or of Arevalo.
Prison officials did not publicly disclose that Perez had been fatally shot by a guard until March 25 — more than four months after the slaying and three weeks after a coroner declared the death a homicide caused by gunshot wounds.
In a March 27 interview, Brian Connett, the state's deputy prisons chief, said evidence gathered by state police, the coroner and Las Vegas police crime-scene investigators had been turned over to Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt.
A Laxalt spokeswoman, Patty Cafferata, has said the matter is being reviewed.
The three guards have remained on paid leave. Neither the Nevada Department of Corrections nor the attorney general has made their names public.
While filing the federal lawsuit, Potter called for an investigation by Gov. Brian Sandoval, who sits with Laxalt on the three-member Board of State Prison Commissioners.
The governor told the AP on April 17 — the same day Arevalo's murder charge was withdrawn — that he planned to get more information from his state prisons chief.
"Of course I'm concerned with what's going on within the walls of the prison," Sandoval said, "and I intend to get more details to see exactly what is going on and what the explanation is."
Associated Press
April 27, 2015
LAS VEGAS -- This much is certain: Two handcuffed inmates at one of Nevada's toughest prisons brawled in a hallway, and one ended up dead from several shotgun blasts. The other was declared guilty of murder, even though he never touched a gun.
Prison officials acknowledged the death in November with only a short statement, and for months they never mentioned that a weapon was involved or that it had been fired by a trainee guard. Since then, the mystery of the shooting near the showers in a segregation unit at High Desert State Prison has only deepened.
Now attorneys for both inmates are accusing prison guards of instigating the fight to set up a gladiator-style contest and then trying to cover it up by blaming the surviving prisoner.
Prison officials have been slow to release essential details, and they recently withdrew the murder allegation after disclosing the trainee's involvement.
The many lingering questions have drawn in elected officials, too, with the attorney general reviewing an investigation and the governor promising to help get to the bottom of the incident.
"The shooting itself is highly disturbing," Alexis Plunkett, attorney for the surviving inmate, Andrew Arevalo, told The Associated Press. "But it's really over the top that (prison officials) immediately filed a murder charge against Andrew, who was absolutely the victim in every possible way."
It all started Nov. 12 deep inside the largest of Nevada's 22 prison facilities, which houses about a quarter of the state's 12,700 inmates.
Arevalo, 24, and Carlos Manuel Perez Jr., 28, were both released into the hall and soon were on the floor, kicking at each other with their hands cuffed behind their backs.
A Nov. 13 report by the trainee guard describes how he warned the men to stop fighting, fired one blank, issued more warnings and then fired three live rounds down the hall. At that point, he said, he stopped to reload.
"They continued kicking each other even though they were bleeding," the guard wrote.
Perez died of gunshot wounds to the head, neck, chest and arms. Arevalo suffered similar wounds but survived.
Guards have a history of using gunfire to control the 4,200 inmates at the prison about 45 miles outside Las Vegas.
Records show guards fired 215 shots in a five-year span, including 60 rounds in 2011, the latest year for which figures are available. That was nearly twice the total of 124 shots fired by guards during the same period at all the state's other prisons combined.
The practice continues. State prisons chief Greg Cox reported that several inmates were injured by a guard firing a shotgun to break up a fight Tuesday at Ely State Prison, the state's maximum-security facility. Most injuries were minor, Cox said.
Attorney Cal Potter, representing Perez's family in the wrongful-death lawsuit, alleges the High Desert trainee, another guard and a supervising lieutenant created a "gladiator-like scenario" before the shooting. He says they released Arevalo and Perez together into the shower hallway, where prisoners are supposed to walk alone.
By the end of January, prison administrators held a hearing and declared Arevalo responsible for murder, assault and battery. He was sentenced to 18 months in the isolation cell known as "the hole," according to prison disciplinary forms provided to the AP. The prison administrative process is separate from criminal courts.
Last week, months after Arevalo was put in isolation, prison officials withdrew the murder and assault allegations after objections from his lawyer and repeated questions from the AP.
"A review of the entire incident will result in some of the charges being reduced," prison Warden Dwight Neven wrote in an April 17 memo to Arevalo's lawyer. It said the hearing officer's Jan. 26 disciplinary decision was based on "some evidence," including the trainee's report. The memo did not say whether — or what — other evidence was considered.
"New information regarding the facts surrounding the charges" led to the reversal, the corrections department said Thursday in a statement.
Prison records provided by Plunkett show Arevalo's term in isolation was reduced from 18 months to 120 days. The battery charge is still pending.
Plunkett said she believes her client was blamed for Perez's death in a botched effort by prison officials to cover up the killing. She maintains that Arevalo did not kill Perez and only fought to defend himself.
Prison officials "never intended to make this shooting public," Plunkett said. "Andrew never had a gun in his hands. He was handcuffed."
Prisons officials have said little, citing the ongoing investigation.
The first news release, issued on Nov. 13, reported only that Perez had died. The 78-word announcement made no mention of a shooting or of Arevalo.
Prison officials did not publicly disclose that Perez had been fatally shot by a guard until March 25 — more than four months after the slaying and three weeks after a coroner declared the death a homicide caused by gunshot wounds.
In a March 27 interview, Brian Connett, the state's deputy prisons chief, said evidence gathered by state police, the coroner and Las Vegas police crime-scene investigators had been turned over to Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt.
A Laxalt spokeswoman, Patty Cafferata, has said the matter is being reviewed.
The three guards have remained on paid leave. Neither the Nevada Department of Corrections nor the attorney general has made their names public.
While filing the federal lawsuit, Potter called for an investigation by Gov. Brian Sandoval, who sits with Laxalt on the three-member Board of State Prison Commissioners.
The governor told the AP on April 17 — the same day Arevalo's murder charge was withdrawn — that he planned to get more information from his state prisons chief.
"Of course I'm concerned with what's going on within the walls of the prison," Sandoval said, "and I intend to get more details to see exactly what is going on and what the explanation is."
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
IS MORE AND BETTER POLICE TRAINING THE ANSWER?
What good is more and better police training when no one is training blacks to obey police orders?
Ever since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, there has been a steady stream of news about the use of excessive force by the police, usually by white cops against black men. Turn on the evening TV news and you’re likely to see a video clip of cops kicking the shit out of someone or shooting at a fleeing man.
The latest incidents include:
A South Carolina white cop shooting a fleeing black man in the back
A horse thief being repeatedly beaten and kicked by sheriff’s deputies in the desert od San Bernardino County, California as the horse kooks down at the melee, probably wondering what’s going on.
A73-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma reserve officer shot a fleeing man in the back. He says he confused his firearm with his Taser and only meant to tase the man.
An Arizona cop drove his police car onto a sidewalk and ran down an armed robber carrying a high powered rifle.
Baltimore, Maryland cops arrested a man who died because his spine had been severed. His spine may have been severed between the time he was taken into custody and when he arrived at a hospital.
Academics and other armchair experts say the solution to the problem of excessive and deadly force is more police training and better training in people skills. What do these experts think the police have been doing since the Vietnam protests and the civil rights movement?
It’s true that when I became a Galveston cop in the late ‘40s there was no training in most police departments. I was told to buy a uniform and gun, given a badge, and ordered to walk a beat or patrol in a cop car. I learned my job from veteran officers, some of them good cops and some of them piss-poor. If someone came to the cop shop to complain about police brutality, they often had the shit beaten out of them as they were thrown out of the door.
By the time I became a California cop in the mid ‘50s, formal training had become quite common and police applicants were required to undergo psychological evaluations. Those evaluations may have weeded out some ass kickers, but I suspect they also eliminated some potentially good cops. And the police academies at that time did not put a lot of emphasis on good police-community relations.
All that changed with the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement. Since then police agencies have been emphasizing good police-community relations and better people skills in both their pre-service and in-service training programs. And many agencies have adopted the use of community-oriented policing in an effort to eliminate the minority community’s mistrust of the cops.
I have always maintained that policing is much more about dealing with people than it is about solving crimes and disputes, arresting crooks, proper use of firearms and restraining devices, etc. Dealing with people during a highly emotional and/or adversarial situation makes policing the hardest job in our society.
In 1829 the father of modern policing, Sir Robert Peel, put forth the principle that “No quality is more indispensable to a policeman than a perfect command of temper.” While there have been several shooting incidents where officers claimed to have confused their firearm with their stun gun, could that 73-year-old Tulsa reserve officer have lost his temper and deliberately drawn his pistol instead of his Taser? But there can be no doubt that horse in the desert was being entertained by some angry San Bernardino who had completely lost it.
Many incidents of excessive or deadly force by the police would not have happened had a cop not lost his temper, and that includes good cops as well as bad cops. The experts keep calling for more and better training, but how do you train someone not to losing temper in a highly charged situation? Anger management programs may work in domestic disputes, but will they work in police encounters?
There is another problem even the experts seem to overlook. What good is more and better police training when no one is training blacks to obey police orders? No one is training black men not to flee from or become combative during a police stop.
No amount of more and better training is going to keep cops from losing their tempers. No amount of training is going to prevent cops from fearing for their lives. Anger management programs may reduce the loss of temper, but will not prevent it. And all the police training available to cops will not change the behavior of black men.
There are more than 800,000 state and local “sworn” police officers with general arrest powers in the United States. I am not about to throw out that horseshit about 99 percent, 95 percent, or even 90 percent of all those officers being good cops. However, I do believe that 85 percent are good cops trying to do their best in a hard and thankless job.
Sunday, I watched CBS Face the Nation from my hospital bed. Host Bob Schieffer said that after a break he would be back with some personal thoughts about the police. Here is what he said.
Don’t Overlook The Good Cops
By Bob Schieffer
CBS Face the Nation
April 19, 2015
I have always said the great thing about being a reporter is the adventure, getting to talk to the people who make the news, seeing things with your own eyes that other people see only through eyes and lens of others.
And I have always said, the best training to be a reporter are or anything else is to work the police beat, because every story you cover is the worst moment in someone's life.
If you can learn to get the right information under those circumstances, you won't be fazed by the high and mighty and certainly not by on-the-make politicians and spin doctors, which is why I want to add a paragraph or two to the rash of stories lately about cops gone wrong.
This is not about them. This is about all the cops you don't read about. They deal much of the time with the dregs of our society, the schemers, murderers, those who prey on the weak. And most of the time, the police deal with them humanely and as they should.
What we overlook is just how difficult that can be sometimes. It's not easy to remain passive when a child beater looks you in the eye and tells you, you have to understand the kid was keeping him awake. It takes a lot of professional training and strong character not to respond in anger. I know, because I spent my early years listening to some of these awful people. Sometimes, I wanted to hit them myself.
I didn't. But it helped me understand how hard it is to do a cop's job right. As hard as it is, the great majority the cops still do just that.
Bob Schieffer, a native Texan, has been a member of the hated mainstream media since 1969, but I have always found him to be reasonable in his assessment of controversial issues. I think every good cop in this country should take the time to send Bob a thank you note for the fine commentary he made in their behalf. It’s a shame that few, if any, will do so!
Ever since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, there has been a steady stream of news about the use of excessive force by the police, usually by white cops against black men. Turn on the evening TV news and you’re likely to see a video clip of cops kicking the shit out of someone or shooting at a fleeing man.
The latest incidents include:
A South Carolina white cop shooting a fleeing black man in the back
A horse thief being repeatedly beaten and kicked by sheriff’s deputies in the desert od San Bernardino County, California as the horse kooks down at the melee, probably wondering what’s going on.
A73-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma reserve officer shot a fleeing man in the back. He says he confused his firearm with his Taser and only meant to tase the man.
An Arizona cop drove his police car onto a sidewalk and ran down an armed robber carrying a high powered rifle.
Baltimore, Maryland cops arrested a man who died because his spine had been severed. His spine may have been severed between the time he was taken into custody and when he arrived at a hospital.
Academics and other armchair experts say the solution to the problem of excessive and deadly force is more police training and better training in people skills. What do these experts think the police have been doing since the Vietnam protests and the civil rights movement?
It’s true that when I became a Galveston cop in the late ‘40s there was no training in most police departments. I was told to buy a uniform and gun, given a badge, and ordered to walk a beat or patrol in a cop car. I learned my job from veteran officers, some of them good cops and some of them piss-poor. If someone came to the cop shop to complain about police brutality, they often had the shit beaten out of them as they were thrown out of the door.
By the time I became a California cop in the mid ‘50s, formal training had become quite common and police applicants were required to undergo psychological evaluations. Those evaluations may have weeded out some ass kickers, but I suspect they also eliminated some potentially good cops. And the police academies at that time did not put a lot of emphasis on good police-community relations.
All that changed with the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement. Since then police agencies have been emphasizing good police-community relations and better people skills in both their pre-service and in-service training programs. And many agencies have adopted the use of community-oriented policing in an effort to eliminate the minority community’s mistrust of the cops.
I have always maintained that policing is much more about dealing with people than it is about solving crimes and disputes, arresting crooks, proper use of firearms and restraining devices, etc. Dealing with people during a highly emotional and/or adversarial situation makes policing the hardest job in our society.
In 1829 the father of modern policing, Sir Robert Peel, put forth the principle that “No quality is more indispensable to a policeman than a perfect command of temper.” While there have been several shooting incidents where officers claimed to have confused their firearm with their stun gun, could that 73-year-old Tulsa reserve officer have lost his temper and deliberately drawn his pistol instead of his Taser? But there can be no doubt that horse in the desert was being entertained by some angry San Bernardino who had completely lost it.
Many incidents of excessive or deadly force by the police would not have happened had a cop not lost his temper, and that includes good cops as well as bad cops. The experts keep calling for more and better training, but how do you train someone not to losing temper in a highly charged situation? Anger management programs may work in domestic disputes, but will they work in police encounters?
There is another problem even the experts seem to overlook. What good is more and better police training when no one is training blacks to obey police orders? No one is training black men not to flee from or become combative during a police stop.
No amount of more and better training is going to keep cops from losing their tempers. No amount of training is going to prevent cops from fearing for their lives. Anger management programs may reduce the loss of temper, but will not prevent it. And all the police training available to cops will not change the behavior of black men.
There are more than 800,000 state and local “sworn” police officers with general arrest powers in the United States. I am not about to throw out that horseshit about 99 percent, 95 percent, or even 90 percent of all those officers being good cops. However, I do believe that 85 percent are good cops trying to do their best in a hard and thankless job.
Sunday, I watched CBS Face the Nation from my hospital bed. Host Bob Schieffer said that after a break he would be back with some personal thoughts about the police. Here is what he said.
Don’t Overlook The Good Cops
By Bob Schieffer
CBS Face the Nation
April 19, 2015
I have always said the great thing about being a reporter is the adventure, getting to talk to the people who make the news, seeing things with your own eyes that other people see only through eyes and lens of others.
And I have always said, the best training to be a reporter are or anything else is to work the police beat, because every story you cover is the worst moment in someone's life.
If you can learn to get the right information under those circumstances, you won't be fazed by the high and mighty and certainly not by on-the-make politicians and spin doctors, which is why I want to add a paragraph or two to the rash of stories lately about cops gone wrong.
This is not about them. This is about all the cops you don't read about. They deal much of the time with the dregs of our society, the schemers, murderers, those who prey on the weak. And most of the time, the police deal with them humanely and as they should.
What we overlook is just how difficult that can be sometimes. It's not easy to remain passive when a child beater looks you in the eye and tells you, you have to understand the kid was keeping him awake. It takes a lot of professional training and strong character not to respond in anger. I know, because I spent my early years listening to some of these awful people. Sometimes, I wanted to hit them myself.
I didn't. But it helped me understand how hard it is to do a cop's job right. As hard as it is, the great majority the cops still do just that.
Bob Schieffer, a native Texan, has been a member of the hated mainstream media since 1969, but I have always found him to be reasonable in his assessment of controversial issues. I think every good cop in this country should take the time to send Bob a thank you note for the fine commentary he made in their behalf. It’s a shame that few, if any, will do so!
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
CAPITAL LIFE: ALTERNATIVE TO THE DEATH PENALTY
A living-death of imprisonment for life in absolute isolation without any of the privileges afforded the general prison population and no possibility of parole
As most of you know, I am a diehard supporter and proponent of the death penalty. With support for the death penalty in decline, I hereby offer an alternative that should be acceptable to my fellow hardcore proponents of the ultimate punishment. It is a special category of a life in prison sentence.
I’ve coined my proposal for a special category of life imprisonment as Capital Life.
Capital Life would be Imprisonment for life in absolute isolation without any of the privileges afforded the general prison population and no possibility of parole. No visitors, no mail, no TV or radio, no special meals for Thanksgiving or Christmas, no one-hour exercise period outside the cell.
Of course I realize Capital Life would never come to pass. Civil libertarians will oppose Capital Life with the same fervor they oppose Capital Punishment. The courts would rule that Capital Life violates the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
I agree that it’s cruel and unusual punishment. So what! The murders Capital Lifers committed were also cruel and unusual punishment and their victims did not have the benefit of trial by jury. And I also realize that Capital Lifers would have a high rate of suicide. So what! Good riddance of the vermin!
Absolute isolation for life without possibility of parole is the only alternative to the death penalty that I would accept. Come to think of it, a Capital Life sentence of living-death would be a far better punishment than the death penalty.
As most of you know, I am a diehard supporter and proponent of the death penalty. With support for the death penalty in decline, I hereby offer an alternative that should be acceptable to my fellow hardcore proponents of the ultimate punishment. It is a special category of a life in prison sentence.
I’ve coined my proposal for a special category of life imprisonment as Capital Life.
Capital Life would be Imprisonment for life in absolute isolation without any of the privileges afforded the general prison population and no possibility of parole. No visitors, no mail, no TV or radio, no special meals for Thanksgiving or Christmas, no one-hour exercise period outside the cell.
Of course I realize Capital Life would never come to pass. Civil libertarians will oppose Capital Life with the same fervor they oppose Capital Punishment. The courts would rule that Capital Life violates the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
I agree that it’s cruel and unusual punishment. So what! The murders Capital Lifers committed were also cruel and unusual punishment and their victims did not have the benefit of trial by jury. And I also realize that Capital Lifers would have a high rate of suicide. So what! Good riddance of the vermin!
Absolute isolation for life without possibility of parole is the only alternative to the death penalty that I would accept. Come to think of it, a Capital Life sentence of living-death would be a far better punishment than the death penalty.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
HOUSTIN’S 2009 OFFICER OF THE YEAR NOW A LOS ZETAS COCAINE TRAFFICKER
Houston police officer Noe Juarez got busted by the Feds for trafficking cocaine since 2012 for the Los Zetas drug cartel
The Feds announced April 8 that Houston police officer Noe Juarez has been indicted for “conspiracy to distribute five kilos or more of cocaine” and “conspiracy to possess firearms in connection with a drug trafficking offense.” The indictment came out of New Orleans and Juarez was busted April 7 at Houston’s police headquarters. He has been relieved of duty with pay pending the outcome of the investigation.
Juarez was honored as Houston’s Officer of the Year for 2009. According to the Feds, he began dealing cocaine for Mexico’s notorious Los Zetas drug cartel in 2012.
Perhaps Houston should take another look at what they pay their cops. When an Officer of the Year moonlights by dealing cocaine, “Houston, we have a problem.”
The Feds announced April 8 that Houston police officer Noe Juarez has been indicted for “conspiracy to distribute five kilos or more of cocaine” and “conspiracy to possess firearms in connection with a drug trafficking offense.” The indictment came out of New Orleans and Juarez was busted April 7 at Houston’s police headquarters. He has been relieved of duty with pay pending the outcome of the investigation.
Juarez was honored as Houston’s Officer of the Year for 2009. According to the Feds, he began dealing cocaine for Mexico’s notorious Los Zetas drug cartel in 2012.
Perhaps Houston should take another look at what they pay their cops. When an Officer of the Year moonlights by dealing cocaine, “Houston, we have a problem.”
ROBERT KENNEDY JR. BACKS OFF ‘HOLOCAUST’ IN VACCINE DEBATE
By Judy Lin
Associated Press
April 14, 2015
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Robert Kennedy Jr. on Monday apologized for describing the number of children injured by vaccines as "a holocaust" during a film screening last week.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy used the term last week at a screening in Sacramento of the film "Trace Amounts." The movie links autism to a vaccine preservative, even though the medical community says such claims have been scientifically disproved.
Kennedy said he was struggling for a way to convey the effects of autism on children and their families.
"I want to apologize to all whom I offended by my use of the word holocaust to describe the autism epidemic," Kennedy said in a statement. "I employed the term during an impromptu speech as I struggled to find an expression to convey the catastrophic tragedy of autism which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families."
He said he will use other words to describe the autism crisis in the future.
Kennedy opposes a California bill that would limit vaccination waivers for schoolchildren. It has generated such an acidic debate that some opponents have compared the proposal's author online to Adolf Hitler.
State Sen. Richard Pan, a Democratic pediatrician from Sacramento, said he was under added security in response to his bill. The proposal will be heard Wednesday in a Senate education committee.
Thursday marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"The word holocaust should never be used as a flippant throwaway line to make a point in a debate," said Assemblyman Marc Levine, vice chair of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, during a Holocaust remembrance event on Monday in the California Assembly.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As someone who lost both sets of grandparents to the Holocaust, I am sensitive to any trivializing of the word “Holocaust.” While the number of Autism victims is enormous and the disease is indeed catastrophic, there is no way that it can compare to the Holocaust where six million Jews were slaughtered systematically.
As for Kennedy, I do not think he meant to trivialize the Holocaust. His faux pax is just an example of someone putting his mouth in motion before putting his brain in gear. Apology accepted.
Associated Press
April 14, 2015
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Robert Kennedy Jr. on Monday apologized for describing the number of children injured by vaccines as "a holocaust" during a film screening last week.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy used the term last week at a screening in Sacramento of the film "Trace Amounts." The movie links autism to a vaccine preservative, even though the medical community says such claims have been scientifically disproved.
Kennedy said he was struggling for a way to convey the effects of autism on children and their families.
"I want to apologize to all whom I offended by my use of the word holocaust to describe the autism epidemic," Kennedy said in a statement. "I employed the term during an impromptu speech as I struggled to find an expression to convey the catastrophic tragedy of autism which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families."
He said he will use other words to describe the autism crisis in the future.
Kennedy opposes a California bill that would limit vaccination waivers for schoolchildren. It has generated such an acidic debate that some opponents have compared the proposal's author online to Adolf Hitler.
State Sen. Richard Pan, a Democratic pediatrician from Sacramento, said he was under added security in response to his bill. The proposal will be heard Wednesday in a Senate education committee.
Thursday marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"The word holocaust should never be used as a flippant throwaway line to make a point in a debate," said Assemblyman Marc Levine, vice chair of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, during a Holocaust remembrance event on Monday in the California Assembly.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As someone who lost both sets of grandparents to the Holocaust, I am sensitive to any trivializing of the word “Holocaust.” While the number of Autism victims is enormous and the disease is indeed catastrophic, there is no way that it can compare to the Holocaust where six million Jews were slaughtered systematically.
As for Kennedy, I do not think he meant to trivialize the Holocaust. His faux pax is just an example of someone putting his mouth in motion before putting his brain in gear. Apology accepted.
DOING COMMUNITY SERVICE
The Unconventional Gazette
April 14, 2015
One day a Washington, D.C. florist went to a neighboring barber for a haircut. After the cut, he asked about his bill, and the barber replied, 'I cannot accept money from you; I'm doing community service this week.' The florist was pleased and left the shop. When the barber went to open his shop the next morning, there was a 'thank you' card and a dozen roses waiting for him at his door.
Later, a cop comes in for a haircut, and when he tries to pay his bill, the barber again replied, 'I cannot accept money from you; I'm doing community service this week.' The cop was happy and left the shop. The next morning when the barber went to open up, there was a 'thank you' card and a dozen donuts waiting for him at his door.
Then a Congressman came in for a haircut, and when he went to pay his bill, the barber again replied, 'I cannot accept money from you. I'm doing community service this week.' The Congressman was very happy and left the shop. The next morning, when the barber went to open up, there were a dozen Congressmen lined up waiting for a free haircut.
April 14, 2015
One day a Washington, D.C. florist went to a neighboring barber for a haircut. After the cut, he asked about his bill, and the barber replied, 'I cannot accept money from you; I'm doing community service this week.' The florist was pleased and left the shop. When the barber went to open his shop the next morning, there was a 'thank you' card and a dozen roses waiting for him at his door.
Later, a cop comes in for a haircut, and when he tries to pay his bill, the barber again replied, 'I cannot accept money from you; I'm doing community service this week.' The cop was happy and left the shop. The next morning when the barber went to open up, there was a 'thank you' card and a dozen donuts waiting for him at his door.
Then a Congressman came in for a haircut, and when he went to pay his bill, the barber again replied, 'I cannot accept money from you. I'm doing community service this week.' The Congressman was very happy and left the shop. The next morning, when the barber went to open up, there were a dozen Congressmen lined up waiting for a free haircut.
Monday, April 13, 2015
REMOVE LETOURNEAU FROM SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY
Mary Kay Letourneau still has to register as a sex offender because she had sex with a 13-year old student; even though she served 7-1/2 years in prison, bore him two daughters, and has been married to him for 10 years
In 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau, a 34-year-old married Seattle teacher and mother of four, got busted for having sex with a 13-year old student. She was put on probation and ordered not to have any contact the boy, Vili Fualaau. She was sent to prison after getting caught with him again. She gave birth to their love-child while in prison. She served 7-1/2 years. Mary Kay, now 53, and Vili, now 31, have been married for 10 years and are the parents of two teen-age daughters. Alas, Mary Kay is still required to register as a sex offender.
The story of Letourneau’s affair with Vili Fualaau was sensationalized by the media in a frenzy not often seen. That was in 1996, this is now. Hardly a day goes by now without some female teacher getting busted somewhere for having sex with one or more of her students. Most of these teachers, like Mary Kay, are married with children. Unlike with Mary Kay, their ‘victims’ are not 13, but rather 15-17. The teacher-student sex affairs are so frequent that in most cases they receive only local news coverage.
Friday night I watched an ABC-TV Barbara Walters special. During the hour-long program, Walters not only interviewed Mary Kay Letourneau Fualaau and her husband Vili Fualaau, but she was also able to talk to their daughters. On their 10th anniversary, the couple appear to happily married and their teen-age daughters appear to be happy and well adjusted. Given all that, why in the hell is Mary Kay still required to register as a sex offender?
The sex offender registration laws are primarily designed to protect children from sexual predators and women from rapists. Weenie wavers are also included. So are boys who get caught diddling underage girls. I cannot understand why in the world a man would have to be placed on a sex offender registry because he had a consensual sexual relationship with his underage sweetheart when he was 16. What threat does he pose to anyone?
Mary Kay has been punished with a prison term for her misdeed. She has been married to her victim for 10 years and they have been raising two well-adjusted teenagers. Under these circumstances, if there is any logical reason for her to have to register as a sex offender, I’ll eat my beloved John Deere cap.
Mary Kay plans to apply for removal from the sex offender registration list. While I strongly disapprove of her affair with a 13-year-old boy, considering that she was punished with a prison term and has now been happily married for 10 years, I firmly believe that justice demands she be removed from the sex offender registry.
In 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau, a 34-year-old married Seattle teacher and mother of four, got busted for having sex with a 13-year old student. She was put on probation and ordered not to have any contact the boy, Vili Fualaau. She was sent to prison after getting caught with him again. She gave birth to their love-child while in prison. She served 7-1/2 years. Mary Kay, now 53, and Vili, now 31, have been married for 10 years and are the parents of two teen-age daughters. Alas, Mary Kay is still required to register as a sex offender.
The story of Letourneau’s affair with Vili Fualaau was sensationalized by the media in a frenzy not often seen. That was in 1996, this is now. Hardly a day goes by now without some female teacher getting busted somewhere for having sex with one or more of her students. Most of these teachers, like Mary Kay, are married with children. Unlike with Mary Kay, their ‘victims’ are not 13, but rather 15-17. The teacher-student sex affairs are so frequent that in most cases they receive only local news coverage.
Friday night I watched an ABC-TV Barbara Walters special. During the hour-long program, Walters not only interviewed Mary Kay Letourneau Fualaau and her husband Vili Fualaau, but she was also able to talk to their daughters. On their 10th anniversary, the couple appear to happily married and their teen-age daughters appear to be happy and well adjusted. Given all that, why in the hell is Mary Kay still required to register as a sex offender?
The sex offender registration laws are primarily designed to protect children from sexual predators and women from rapists. Weenie wavers are also included. So are boys who get caught diddling underage girls. I cannot understand why in the world a man would have to be placed on a sex offender registry because he had a consensual sexual relationship with his underage sweetheart when he was 16. What threat does he pose to anyone?
Mary Kay has been punished with a prison term for her misdeed. She has been married to her victim for 10 years and they have been raising two well-adjusted teenagers. Under these circumstances, if there is any logical reason for her to have to register as a sex offender, I’ll eat my beloved John Deere cap.
Mary Kay plans to apply for removal from the sex offender registration list. While I strongly disapprove of her affair with a 13-year-old boy, considering that she was punished with a prison term and has now been happily married for 10 years, I firmly believe that justice demands she be removed from the sex offender registry.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
EXCLUSIVE: WALTER SCOTT ATTACKED OFFICER SLAGER
A new look at the cellphone camera video clearly shows Officer Slager being attacked by Walter Scott
By Ima Schmuck
The Unconventional Gazette
April 12, 2015
In an exclusive interview, NY police officer Sean Murphy declared that North Charleston, S.C. police officer Mike Slager did not murder Walter Scott.
Murphy, executive director of Peace Officers Are Right (POAR) said a new look at the cellphone camera video clearly shows Officer Slager being attacked by Walter Scott.
“When you run that video tape backwards,” Murphy said, “it clearly shows Scott charging at Slager as the officer fired his weapon in an obvious act of self-defense.”
Murphy condemned the authorities and the public for rushing to judgement upon viewing the video tape being run only in one direction. “When you reverse that tape,” he said, “you get an entirely different perspective.”
He also blasted the media for doing its “usual hatchet job” on the police and criticized Fox News for being “just like the rest of them” in crucifying Officer Slager.
POAR is a nationwide organization of rank-and-file cops. Murphy claims that more than 70,000 cops are members of POAR. “Our members demand that murder charges against Office Slager be dropped immediately,” he said.
Concerning the video tape, Murphy said “It all depends on how you look at it, and we see the shooting of Mr. Scott as a justifiable act of self-defense. When you see somebody running backwards straight at you as fast as Mr. Scott did, that will scare the shit out of anyone.”
By Ima Schmuck
The Unconventional Gazette
April 12, 2015
In an exclusive interview, NY police officer Sean Murphy declared that North Charleston, S.C. police officer Mike Slager did not murder Walter Scott.
Murphy, executive director of Peace Officers Are Right (POAR) said a new look at the cellphone camera video clearly shows Officer Slager being attacked by Walter Scott.
“When you run that video tape backwards,” Murphy said, “it clearly shows Scott charging at Slager as the officer fired his weapon in an obvious act of self-defense.”
Murphy condemned the authorities and the public for rushing to judgement upon viewing the video tape being run only in one direction. “When you reverse that tape,” he said, “you get an entirely different perspective.”
He also blasted the media for doing its “usual hatchet job” on the police and criticized Fox News for being “just like the rest of them” in crucifying Officer Slager.
POAR is a nationwide organization of rank-and-file cops. Murphy claims that more than 70,000 cops are members of POAR. “Our members demand that murder charges against Office Slager be dropped immediately,” he said.
Concerning the video tape, Murphy said “It all depends on how you look at it, and we see the shooting of Mr. Scott as a justifiable act of self-defense. When you see somebody running backwards straight at you as fast as Mr. Scott did, that will scare the shit out of anyone.”
WORKPLACE SAFETY IS IMPORTANT
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 11, 2015
There was a very serious on-the-job accident in south Stockton yesterday afternoon. About 1:30 two men entered an electrical box without proper authority in an apparent attempt to help themselves to copper wire there.
It seems that they were not entirely clear on the concept however and one of them was turned into a crispy critter while stripping the insulation off of a live wire.
The as-yet unidentified dead guy’s colleague beat feet without hanging around to fill out an accident report, which I think was very rude and probably violated a bunch of OSHA regulations. Some people just don’t appreciate proper procedure.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Workplace safety, crispy critter, accident report, OSHA. Bob has outdone himself with this one. I love it!
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 11, 2015
There was a very serious on-the-job accident in south Stockton yesterday afternoon. About 1:30 two men entered an electrical box without proper authority in an apparent attempt to help themselves to copper wire there.
It seems that they were not entirely clear on the concept however and one of them was turned into a crispy critter while stripping the insulation off of a live wire.
The as-yet unidentified dead guy’s colleague beat feet without hanging around to fill out an accident report, which I think was very rude and probably violated a bunch of OSHA regulations. Some people just don’t appreciate proper procedure.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Workplace safety, crispy critter, accident report, OSHA. Bob has outdone himself with this one. I love it!
Saturday, April 11, 2015
POLICE UNDER SURVEILLANCE
Learning to work under watchful eye of camera phones
By Jeff Stone
International Business Times
April 9, 2015
Police officers are increasingly under the microscope. Almost literally. Now that the nightly news regularly features incidents where officers are being criticized for excessive force, even responsible members of the force are finding that having a camera thrust in their face is now just part of the job.
A white police officer was charged with murder this week in South Carolina after fatally shooting an unarmed black man running away from him. The death of Walter Scott was caught on video by a bystander, leading to a media frenzy. South Carolina lawmakers urged the public to remember that the officer who killed Scott is simply one bad apple among a state of good police officers, though police officials say the constant negative attention has an effect on even the most responsible police officials.
“It causes hesitation, and hesitation is a cause of risk,” said Rich Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. Roberts said it’s difficult for officers who are being filmed not to second-guess their actions, even if they’re in an unsafe situation. “I’m not sure being on the camera is exactly the problem, but with most people I talked to the problem is how people will interpret the images that are captured are on them.”
The news media, he said, needs to edit video clips to fit within certain time windows: If CNN only has 15 seconds to show a clip of a New York City detective berating a foreign-born Uber driver, for instance, the audience wouldn’t know what led up to that incident.
Courts consistently have ruled that it’s legal for citizens to film police without an officer’s consent, just as long as the person filming doesn’t interfere with the situation. Police, to put it mildly, don’t like being recorded by witnesses. YouTube is littered with footage of officers going ballistic on people watching events unfold from yards away.
All of which helps explain why the law enforcement community, for the most part, has greeted the advent of police body cameras with such enthusiasm. Police have complained that bystander cameras can present a safety risk -- though the IUPA’s Roberts said he couldn’t recall any instances where they interfered with the situation -- and body cameras promise to show events from an officer’s perspective.
“They realize their potential audience is now the entire world,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Police who have nothing to hide have already long since recognized they’re likely to be filmed any time anything dramatic goes down in public. I think that any problems police have with cameras originate in their own minds.”
At the heart of the matter is a stark difference in ideology. Police critics say cameras are necessary to expose and curb abuses of power. The law enforcement community says cameras will lead to fewer lawsuits and false complaints.
“I just think agencies accept that people are filming everyone anyway,” said Lindsay Miller, senior research associate at the Police Executive Research Forum and an author of one of the only studies on how cameras are used. An unrelated study found that police body cameras lead to a more than 50 percent reduction in use-of-force complaints.
“A lot of the things that have been happening recently are really good opportunities to find some reforms and move agencies into a better place,” Miller said. “I think police welcome that.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The problem with camera phone videos is not that they uncover police misconduct, but that they rarely if ever show any good police work.
By Jeff Stone
International Business Times
April 9, 2015
Police officers are increasingly under the microscope. Almost literally. Now that the nightly news regularly features incidents where officers are being criticized for excessive force, even responsible members of the force are finding that having a camera thrust in their face is now just part of the job.
A white police officer was charged with murder this week in South Carolina after fatally shooting an unarmed black man running away from him. The death of Walter Scott was caught on video by a bystander, leading to a media frenzy. South Carolina lawmakers urged the public to remember that the officer who killed Scott is simply one bad apple among a state of good police officers, though police officials say the constant negative attention has an effect on even the most responsible police officials.
“It causes hesitation, and hesitation is a cause of risk,” said Rich Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. Roberts said it’s difficult for officers who are being filmed not to second-guess their actions, even if they’re in an unsafe situation. “I’m not sure being on the camera is exactly the problem, but with most people I talked to the problem is how people will interpret the images that are captured are on them.”
The news media, he said, needs to edit video clips to fit within certain time windows: If CNN only has 15 seconds to show a clip of a New York City detective berating a foreign-born Uber driver, for instance, the audience wouldn’t know what led up to that incident.
Courts consistently have ruled that it’s legal for citizens to film police without an officer’s consent, just as long as the person filming doesn’t interfere with the situation. Police, to put it mildly, don’t like being recorded by witnesses. YouTube is littered with footage of officers going ballistic on people watching events unfold from yards away.
All of which helps explain why the law enforcement community, for the most part, has greeted the advent of police body cameras with such enthusiasm. Police have complained that bystander cameras can present a safety risk -- though the IUPA’s Roberts said he couldn’t recall any instances where they interfered with the situation -- and body cameras promise to show events from an officer’s perspective.
“They realize their potential audience is now the entire world,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Police who have nothing to hide have already long since recognized they’re likely to be filmed any time anything dramatic goes down in public. I think that any problems police have with cameras originate in their own minds.”
At the heart of the matter is a stark difference in ideology. Police critics say cameras are necessary to expose and curb abuses of power. The law enforcement community says cameras will lead to fewer lawsuits and false complaints.
“I just think agencies accept that people are filming everyone anyway,” said Lindsay Miller, senior research associate at the Police Executive Research Forum and an author of one of the only studies on how cameras are used. An unrelated study found that police body cameras lead to a more than 50 percent reduction in use-of-force complaints.
“A lot of the things that have been happening recently are really good opportunities to find some reforms and move agencies into a better place,” Miller said. “I think police welcome that.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The problem with camera phone videos is not that they uncover police misconduct, but that they rarely if ever show any good police work.
L.A. HAS CLOSED OVER 500 POT SHOPS SINCE JULY 2013
Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said over 500 medical marijuana dispensaries have been shut down over 20 months, some close to schools and day care centers
By Asher Klein
NBC Los Angeles
April 9, 2015
Los Angeles law enforcement has closed hundreds of shops illegally selling medical marijuana in under two years, according to City Attorney Mike Feuer.
Feuer announced Thursday that that the city has closed 503 shops since July 2013, nearly half of them in the Los Angeles Police Department's Valley Bureau.
"Many were close to schools, child care centers and other sensitive sites. Others were disrupting the quality of life in our neighborhoods," Feuer said in a press release.
In 2013, LA voters allowed medical marijuana to be sold at a set number of shops. But many shops that weren't approved under the law have sprung up anyway, along with a farmer's market that Feuer's office cracked down on as well.
Feuer said "several hundred" medical marijuana shops remain open around the city and urged the public to report any illegal medical marijuana shops to atty.medicalmarijuana@lacity.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE: They should shut down all the pot shops. Medical marijuana is a hoax. Where are the feds? Medical pot is a violation of federal law. Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s work just as well, and they’re legal. So does Four Roses, and it’s cheaper.
By Asher Klein
NBC Los Angeles
April 9, 2015
Los Angeles law enforcement has closed hundreds of shops illegally selling medical marijuana in under two years, according to City Attorney Mike Feuer.
Feuer announced Thursday that that the city has closed 503 shops since July 2013, nearly half of them in the Los Angeles Police Department's Valley Bureau.
"Many were close to schools, child care centers and other sensitive sites. Others were disrupting the quality of life in our neighborhoods," Feuer said in a press release.
In 2013, LA voters allowed medical marijuana to be sold at a set number of shops. But many shops that weren't approved under the law have sprung up anyway, along with a farmer's market that Feuer's office cracked down on as well.
Feuer said "several hundred" medical marijuana shops remain open around the city and urged the public to report any illegal medical marijuana shops to atty.medicalmarijuana@lacity.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE: They should shut down all the pot shops. Medical marijuana is a hoax. Where are the feds? Medical pot is a violation of federal law. Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s work just as well, and they’re legal. So does Four Roses, and it’s cheaper.
Friday, April 10, 2015
BUSTED FOR VOWING ‘I DO’ 10 TIMES
NY woman married 10 different men without bothering to get a single divorce
It has just come to light that a New York woman was busted last November for marrying 10 different men in 11 years without bothering to get a single divorce.
Liana Barrientos, 39, a native of the Dominican Republic, may have broken the record for serial brides. Six of her 10 wedding ceremonies were held within a span of six months. Her latest marriage, which occurred in March 2010, was to a man named Salle Keita.
From the April 9 New York Daily News:
A Bronx detective uncovered nine previous marriage licenses for Barrientos, including a half-dozen issued in the span of six busy months, the court documents filed last November charged.
The first license was dated Nov. 5, 1999, to husband Mohamed Gerbril, and the last on Aug. 3, 2002, to groom Kakhaber Khorbaladze — her sixth marriage that year.
Liana was scheduled to appear in Bronx Supreme Court today to be arraigned on two charges of filing a false instrument. She faces a maximum term of four years in prison on each count.
No motive was given for the bogus marriages. But looking at the names of her ‘husbands,’ I suspect that they were part of a citizenship scam.
It has just come to light that a New York woman was busted last November for marrying 10 different men in 11 years without bothering to get a single divorce.
Liana Barrientos, 39, a native of the Dominican Republic, may have broken the record for serial brides. Six of her 10 wedding ceremonies were held within a span of six months. Her latest marriage, which occurred in March 2010, was to a man named Salle Keita.
From the April 9 New York Daily News:
A Bronx detective uncovered nine previous marriage licenses for Barrientos, including a half-dozen issued in the span of six busy months, the court documents filed last November charged.
The first license was dated Nov. 5, 1999, to husband Mohamed Gerbril, and the last on Aug. 3, 2002, to groom Kakhaber Khorbaladze — her sixth marriage that year.
Liana was scheduled to appear in Bronx Supreme Court today to be arraigned on two charges of filing a false instrument. She faces a maximum term of four years in prison on each count.
No motive was given for the bogus marriages. But looking at the names of her ‘husbands,’ I suspect that they were part of a citizenship scam.
INSTANT MURDER CHARGE AND FIRING
A South Carolina cop who shot a fleeing man multiple times in the back is charged with murder and fired several hours after a video of the shooting surfaced
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 8, 2015
Michael Thomas Slager is a North Charleston, S.C. police officer. He is white. He made a traffic stop of a man who happened to be black. The situation went sideways and it ended up with the motorist, Walter Lammer Scott, 50, dead and Slager facing a flat-out murder charge for his actions.
A video of the shooting (but not the lead-in to the shooting) surfaced yesterday. It showed Scott running away from Slager. Scott’s hands were pretty obviously empty. Slager shot Scott five times in the back as he was running away. It also shows Slager picking up something on the ground, carrying it over to Scott’s body and dropping it on the ground. The speculation is that this object was the Taser.
Within hours of the video being released Slager was arrested for murder.
Slager stated that Scott tried to grab his Taser and he felt threatened. Slager’s lawyer dropped him after he made that statement. The state is handling the investigation at the request of the local authorities. The FBI has invited themselves in.
I am inclined to say that Officer Slager is in very deep doodoo on this one.
The officer’s wife is eight months pregnant. The city has agreed to continue her medical insurance until after the baby is born. The laws in S.C. must be very much different than those in CA as they fired Officer Slager in less than one day.
EDITOR’S COMMENT: I viewed the dash-cam video. There was no physical altercation. After making a traffic stop, Slager walks up to Scott’s car. After a couple of moments, Slager walks back to his cop car and Scott bails out of his car and beat feet. There was a gap between then and the start of the smartphone video which appears to show Scott getting up – probably after having been tased - with Slager standing next to him, then running away again. That’s when the officer opened fire.
SCOTUS long ago ruled that the police do not have the right to shoot a fleeing suspect unless he poses an imminent threat to the officer or if his escape would put the public at serious risk. The video taken by a witness clearly shows the officer violating that SCOTUS ruling.
Slager’s mother said what her son did was so out of character that she could not understand it.
I believe that Slager’s actions were out of character. Accordingly, it is important to ascertain why he shot Scott. Did the victim piss him off? Or was Slager pissed-off for some reason before he started his shift, thereby taking his anger out on the fleeing man? If so, why didn’t Slager's supervisor observe a change in his usual mood when he came to work? It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to see that someone is in a foul mood.
A cop who shows up for work pissed-off is a dangerous cop!
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 8, 2015
Michael Thomas Slager is a North Charleston, S.C. police officer. He is white. He made a traffic stop of a man who happened to be black. The situation went sideways and it ended up with the motorist, Walter Lammer Scott, 50, dead and Slager facing a flat-out murder charge for his actions.
A video of the shooting (but not the lead-in to the shooting) surfaced yesterday. It showed Scott running away from Slager. Scott’s hands were pretty obviously empty. Slager shot Scott five times in the back as he was running away. It also shows Slager picking up something on the ground, carrying it over to Scott’s body and dropping it on the ground. The speculation is that this object was the Taser.
Within hours of the video being released Slager was arrested for murder.
Slager stated that Scott tried to grab his Taser and he felt threatened. Slager’s lawyer dropped him after he made that statement. The state is handling the investigation at the request of the local authorities. The FBI has invited themselves in.
I am inclined to say that Officer Slager is in very deep doodoo on this one.
The officer’s wife is eight months pregnant. The city has agreed to continue her medical insurance until after the baby is born. The laws in S.C. must be very much different than those in CA as they fired Officer Slager in less than one day.
EDITOR’S COMMENT: I viewed the dash-cam video. There was no physical altercation. After making a traffic stop, Slager walks up to Scott’s car. After a couple of moments, Slager walks back to his cop car and Scott bails out of his car and beat feet. There was a gap between then and the start of the smartphone video which appears to show Scott getting up – probably after having been tased - with Slager standing next to him, then running away again. That’s when the officer opened fire.
SCOTUS long ago ruled that the police do not have the right to shoot a fleeing suspect unless he poses an imminent threat to the officer or if his escape would put the public at serious risk. The video taken by a witness clearly shows the officer violating that SCOTUS ruling.
Slager’s mother said what her son did was so out of character that she could not understand it.
I believe that Slager’s actions were out of character. Accordingly, it is important to ascertain why he shot Scott. Did the victim piss him off? Or was Slager pissed-off for some reason before he started his shift, thereby taking his anger out on the fleeing man? If so, why didn’t Slager's supervisor observe a change in his usual mood when he came to work? It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to see that someone is in a foul mood.
A cop who shows up for work pissed-off is a dangerous cop!
Thursday, April 09, 2015
Wednesday, April 08, 2015
WHAT DOES THE WORD ‘FIGHT’ REALLY MEAN?
Social crusaders like to say they “fight” for change, justice, equality, peace, etc., but moist, if not all, have never fought an enemy that is shooting at them, dropping mortar rounds on them and planting IEDs in their path
By Lee Lawrence
Ideological zealots, social crusaders, left-wing radicals, political activists – call them what you will – all love to use the word “fight.” They like to say “fight for change, fight for justice, fight for equality, fight for peace, fight for transparency, fight for ______” – you fill in the blank. The reality is none of them have any concept whatsoever what it truly means to “fight.”
Most, if not all, have never fought for anything in their life, neither metaphorically nor actually, having never been in any semblance of a physical confrontation or even anything resembling a struggle. Nor have they had to “fight” for an education, a place to live, their next meal, their next paycheck, most of them being pampered, wealthy, highly-educated intellectual elitists who, maybe once, had to “fight” for a parking spot near their next class on campus.
They have certainly never fought for their country or their freedom, never worn a uniform of any kind, never carried a weapon and been willing to give their life or take another’s for a cause greater than their own. During the Vietnam War those social crusaders fled to Canada and Sweden or cursed and spit on the soldiers coming back home. They are thankless and ungrateful, depending on others to fight in their place for the very rights they exercise regularly to promote their chosen cause and to condemn those who disagree.
They have never stood a post in some frozen, god-forsaken place in the middle of the night, crawling with others wanting to kill them, merely because they exist, and fought to stay awake because the lives of thirty or more of their brethren depend on them being ready to fight in the blink of any eye. They’ve never fought to fall asleep at night, wondering if the next rocket or mortar round was going to come through the roof of their tent and land on their cot. They have never walked along a path fearing that their next step will set off an IED. Nor have they gazed out into a crowd and wondered which one is wearing a suicide vest, which one is going to blow themselves and all of us into tiny, unrecognizable pieces?
Nor have they found themselves on the wet, cold, muddy ground beneath another human being, who is many times bigger and stronger than they, bent on taking their weapon and killing them with it, merely because as police officers they represent authority and stand between them and doing what they will. No, they have never experienced that terror, or anything like it.
The truth is, when confronted with a deadly threat, when the wolf’s hot breath is on their face, be it a homicidal-suicidal active shooter who sees them merely as a convenient target and their next victim, or someone willing to take their life for the change in their pocket or those Air Jordan shoes on their feet, they will, most likely, expect the very ones they despise and reject to fight for them, to take the bullet meant for them instead. They will, almost invariably, cry out to the God they also deny and reject to save them. They will be the sheep, and at that moment, will pray for the intervention of a sheep dog.
John Moynihan, a Boston police officer, was shot point-blank in the face on March 27. Shot without provocation, he never had a chance to draw his weapon. Although he is recovering, his life will never be the same.
Moynihan has dedicated his life to service, as have many others, he being an Army Ranger who survived a combat tour of duty in Iraq, only to come home and be critically wounded in an unprovoked attack by a convicted felon, free out on the streets, with a history of violence and weapon violations. Moynihan was also named Police Officer of the Year for his role in the fire fight with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombing terror suspects. Now, he fights again, this time for his life.
Officer John Moynihan happens to be white and Angelo West, who shot Moynihan, happens to be black. I mention this only because had it been reversed with Moynihan shooting West, our President, our Attorney General and the Reverend Al Sharpton would be calling for the officer’s career and his freedom. And yes, some of the above described zealots would join in and call for his very life – and all this before any of the facts are even known, readily passing judgment based on lies and speculations. Barrack, Eric, Al – where are you now??
So, the next time you or someone you know throws the word “fight” out there, take a moment to reflect on what it really means.
__________
Lee Lawrence is a sergeant with the Houston Police Department. Lee is also a U.S. Army Ranger. He took two military leaves of absence from HPD to fight with his Reserve Unit, first in Iraq, and later in Afghanistan.
By Lee Lawrence
Ideological zealots, social crusaders, left-wing radicals, political activists – call them what you will – all love to use the word “fight.” They like to say “fight for change, fight for justice, fight for equality, fight for peace, fight for transparency, fight for ______” – you fill in the blank. The reality is none of them have any concept whatsoever what it truly means to “fight.”
Most, if not all, have never fought for anything in their life, neither metaphorically nor actually, having never been in any semblance of a physical confrontation or even anything resembling a struggle. Nor have they had to “fight” for an education, a place to live, their next meal, their next paycheck, most of them being pampered, wealthy, highly-educated intellectual elitists who, maybe once, had to “fight” for a parking spot near their next class on campus.
They have certainly never fought for their country or their freedom, never worn a uniform of any kind, never carried a weapon and been willing to give their life or take another’s for a cause greater than their own. During the Vietnam War those social crusaders fled to Canada and Sweden or cursed and spit on the soldiers coming back home. They are thankless and ungrateful, depending on others to fight in their place for the very rights they exercise regularly to promote their chosen cause and to condemn those who disagree.
They have never stood a post in some frozen, god-forsaken place in the middle of the night, crawling with others wanting to kill them, merely because they exist, and fought to stay awake because the lives of thirty or more of their brethren depend on them being ready to fight in the blink of any eye. They’ve never fought to fall asleep at night, wondering if the next rocket or mortar round was going to come through the roof of their tent and land on their cot. They have never walked along a path fearing that their next step will set off an IED. Nor have they gazed out into a crowd and wondered which one is wearing a suicide vest, which one is going to blow themselves and all of us into tiny, unrecognizable pieces?
Nor have they found themselves on the wet, cold, muddy ground beneath another human being, who is many times bigger and stronger than they, bent on taking their weapon and killing them with it, merely because as police officers they represent authority and stand between them and doing what they will. No, they have never experienced that terror, or anything like it.
The truth is, when confronted with a deadly threat, when the wolf’s hot breath is on their face, be it a homicidal-suicidal active shooter who sees them merely as a convenient target and their next victim, or someone willing to take their life for the change in their pocket or those Air Jordan shoes on their feet, they will, most likely, expect the very ones they despise and reject to fight for them, to take the bullet meant for them instead. They will, almost invariably, cry out to the God they also deny and reject to save them. They will be the sheep, and at that moment, will pray for the intervention of a sheep dog.
John Moynihan, a Boston police officer, was shot point-blank in the face on March 27. Shot without provocation, he never had a chance to draw his weapon. Although he is recovering, his life will never be the same.
Moynihan has dedicated his life to service, as have many others, he being an Army Ranger who survived a combat tour of duty in Iraq, only to come home and be critically wounded in an unprovoked attack by a convicted felon, free out on the streets, with a history of violence and weapon violations. Moynihan was also named Police Officer of the Year for his role in the fire fight with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombing terror suspects. Now, he fights again, this time for his life.
Officer John Moynihan happens to be white and Angelo West, who shot Moynihan, happens to be black. I mention this only because had it been reversed with Moynihan shooting West, our President, our Attorney General and the Reverend Al Sharpton would be calling for the officer’s career and his freedom. And yes, some of the above described zealots would join in and call for his very life – and all this before any of the facts are even known, readily passing judgment based on lies and speculations. Barrack, Eric, Al – where are you now??
So, the next time you or someone you know throws the word “fight” out there, take a moment to reflect on what it really means.
__________
Lee Lawrence is a sergeant with the Houston Police Department. Lee is also a U.S. Army Ranger. He took two military leaves of absence from HPD to fight with his Reserve Unit, first in Iraq, and later in Afghanistan.
Tuesday, April 07, 2015
CAUGHT UP IN THE MOMENT
Brain fart or deliberate lie
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 6, 2015
Michael Berlo, 31, is a cop in Cleveland, Ohio. He is now on trial for two counts of voluntary manslaughter related to an on-duty incident. The situation is somewhat murky.
Berlo was one of the officers involved in the stopping of a car carrying Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in November of 2012. A total of 13 officers fired a total of 146 shots into the car, resulting in the death of both occupants. He is the only one being charged. He fired 49 of those rounds.
The incident started with a police chase in which the car refused to stop. As they blew past a Cleveland P D Headquarters their car backfired leading both cops and civilian bystanders to believe the occupants of the car were armed and shooting. Neither was in fact the case.
The chase eventually involved 104 cops, 60 plus police vehicles and speeds of over 100 mph. It ran more than 20 minutes. The bad guys made a turn in the school parking lot and tried to continue to flee, striking a cop car in the process, which legitimately qualifies as ADW on a peace officer. The shooting then started. Both occupants were hit at least 20 times.
Brelo, however, MIGHT have overdone it. He apparently jumped onto the hood of the car and emptied his gun through the windshield beginning at least 4 second after everybody else stopped shooting. His lawyer is maintaining that the situation was not fully stabilized until Brelo reached into the car and pulled the keys.
Brelo’s foot prints are on the hood of the car and at least one cop has testified that the above description is how it went down. Brelo now asserts he doesn’t remember being up on the hood of the car even though at least one officer has testified that Brelo spoke about if for several days afterwards. He now does not denied it happened that way, he says he doesn’t remember it happening that way.
Eric Holder says the Cleveland P D has a pattern and practice of using excessive force. (Gee, what a surprise that is.)
Brelo could get 25 years if found guilty. The city has already paid out $3 million to the families of the dead people.
EDITOR’S COMMENT: Keystone Cops!
What else can you call a chase by 104 cops in more than 60 cop cars with hundreds of shots fired but a Keystone Cop event.
I don’t like to be an armchair critic where cops are concerned, but this case leaves me flabbergasted. In a highly charged situation like this, the shooting frenzy is explained by one cop opening fire and, like lemmings following their leader, other officer open up with a fusillade of gunfire.
As for Officer Michael Berlo, where did he ever learn police tactics? It could not have been on this planet. Jumping on the hood of the suspect’s car is just plain lunacy. Emptying his gun through the windshield four seconds after all the other cops had stopped firing made this Keystone cop a candidate for murder charges. He more than just ‘overdone’ it.
Latest news reports say that other officers are refusing to cooperate with prosecutors. By trying to protect Berlo under these circumstances, his fellow officers will be seen like the dipshit he is.
I’d say Berlo is both a brain fart and a liar!
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 6, 2015
Michael Berlo, 31, is a cop in Cleveland, Ohio. He is now on trial for two counts of voluntary manslaughter related to an on-duty incident. The situation is somewhat murky.
Berlo was one of the officers involved in the stopping of a car carrying Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in November of 2012. A total of 13 officers fired a total of 146 shots into the car, resulting in the death of both occupants. He is the only one being charged. He fired 49 of those rounds.
The incident started with a police chase in which the car refused to stop. As they blew past a Cleveland P D Headquarters their car backfired leading both cops and civilian bystanders to believe the occupants of the car were armed and shooting. Neither was in fact the case.
The chase eventually involved 104 cops, 60 plus police vehicles and speeds of over 100 mph. It ran more than 20 minutes. The bad guys made a turn in the school parking lot and tried to continue to flee, striking a cop car in the process, which legitimately qualifies as ADW on a peace officer. The shooting then started. Both occupants were hit at least 20 times.
Brelo, however, MIGHT have overdone it. He apparently jumped onto the hood of the car and emptied his gun through the windshield beginning at least 4 second after everybody else stopped shooting. His lawyer is maintaining that the situation was not fully stabilized until Brelo reached into the car and pulled the keys.
Brelo’s foot prints are on the hood of the car and at least one cop has testified that the above description is how it went down. Brelo now asserts he doesn’t remember being up on the hood of the car even though at least one officer has testified that Brelo spoke about if for several days afterwards. He now does not denied it happened that way, he says he doesn’t remember it happening that way.
Eric Holder says the Cleveland P D has a pattern and practice of using excessive force. (Gee, what a surprise that is.)
Brelo could get 25 years if found guilty. The city has already paid out $3 million to the families of the dead people.
EDITOR’S COMMENT: Keystone Cops!
What else can you call a chase by 104 cops in more than 60 cop cars with hundreds of shots fired but a Keystone Cop event.
I don’t like to be an armchair critic where cops are concerned, but this case leaves me flabbergasted. In a highly charged situation like this, the shooting frenzy is explained by one cop opening fire and, like lemmings following their leader, other officer open up with a fusillade of gunfire.
As for Officer Michael Berlo, where did he ever learn police tactics? It could not have been on this planet. Jumping on the hood of the suspect’s car is just plain lunacy. Emptying his gun through the windshield four seconds after all the other cops had stopped firing made this Keystone cop a candidate for murder charges. He more than just ‘overdone’ it.
Latest news reports say that other officers are refusing to cooperate with prosecutors. By trying to protect Berlo under these circumstances, his fellow officers will be seen like the dipshit he is.
I’d say Berlo is both a brain fart and a liar!
POLICE AGENCIES TESTING BULLET SHELL CASINGS FASTER IN TEAM EFFORT TO NAB ACTIVE SHOOTERS
The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN helps investigators link cartridge casings found at different crime scenes using a national database
By Sadie Gurman
Associated Press
April 6, 2015
DENVER -- Detectives in Denver were on the hunt for an increasingly brazen shooter.
A burglar fired through a woman's dining room window when she threatened to call police. Ten minutes later and a mile away, someone broke into another home and shot a Bernese Mountain Dog.
Officers scooped up the spent shell casings and wondered where he would strike next.
Their break came when a witness said he was fired upon in a street fight two days later. Police gathered six more casings that were quickly entered into a national ballistics database and matched all three crimes. The evidence helped put Anthony Dennis in jail and keep him there.
In many U.S. police departments, that evidence might have been shelved in an overworked crime lab, where analysts would only run it through the database to prepare a case for trial.
But authorities in Denver are leading a national trend to put ballistics evidence into the hands of investigators much more quickly — before leads dry up and suspects disappear.
"Police are beginning to understand that if you don't quickly respond and address gun violence it can spread over space, and it can escalate much like a measles outbreak," said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, which is studying whether these efforts create sustained reductions in gun violence.
Matched shell casings have helped lead to at least 35 arrests in more than 50 shootings in the two years since Denver began operating its Crime Gun Intelligence Center. At least 13 other suspects were charged with federal gun crimes, and five more had their parole revoked, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The goal is to stop "active shooters," people who "have already proven they have no qualms about pulling the trigger multiple times," said Jeff Russell, supervisory special agent in the Denver ATF office. "The urgency is there to stop that person before they commit the next shooting."
In Denver, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans and other cities, shell casings are now loaded into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network within days of a crime. A machine takes images of the unique, microscopic markings at the base of each casing. Computer software then produces potential matches, and detectives and ATF agents study the linked cases for other similarities, such as suspect or vehicle descriptions.
"You've got to be timely," said Greggory LaBerge, who directs the Denver Police crime lab. "If even a week or two goes by, you may lose the advantage of having those connections."
Russell and LaBerge agreed to move two ATF investigators into Denver's crime lab to enter recovered shells into the database, using $150,000 in ATF equipment. Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities are now developing similar programs.
Agencies using the national database have entered nearly 2.4 million cartridge cases recovered from crime scenes, producing more than 67,000 "hits" as of February.
But there are as many as 400 million guns in circulation in the United States, and by law, the federal database was constrained from the start to include only ballistics evidence that comes from crimes. By law, test-fired shells of newly manufactured guns cannot be entered before they are sold.
Still, with every new entry of a shell left behind by a criminal, the database becomes more robust. And when officers gather shell casings from shooting scenes as often as they can, they increase the likelihood of finding matches that provide clues to a shooter's identity.
"It's like the computer you have at home. If you feed it a little, it will do a little work for you. If you don't feed it at all, it's not going to do any work for you," said Pete Gagliardi, a former ATF agent who is now senior vice president of Forensic Technology Inc., a private company that studies ballistics evidence.
Unlike with DNA or fingerprints that link people to crimes, this system catalogues the distinct characteristics of a firearm, not the person who used it. And the software only suggests potential hits, leaving it to analysts to verify any matches.
Denver's early results are mixed, but promising, said Webster. The homicide rate dropped for at least five months in places where police made arrests as a result of the program, he said, although he wouldn't provide details, since the study hasn't been published.
Even so, it can take some convincing to put crime lab ballistics machines at the service of detectives, said George Lauder, a resident agent in charge of the ATF in Milwaukee. But soon after that city started using the technology in the immediate aftermath of shootings, investigators discovered a pattern of armed robberies based on their locations and times, he said.
"We've been successful in homicides where we've been able to identify a lead within 45 minutes," said Lauder's partner, Alex Kopeck. "In the past, it could have taken us months and sometimes never to identify these leads."
New Orleans authorities credit ballistics analysis by their Multi-Agency Gang Unit for helping them solve a 2013 gang-related shooting at a Mother's Day parade that wounded 19 people, said Phillip Durham, special agent in charge of the New Orleans ATF office.
"Our murder rate is the lowest it has been in 30 years," he said. "Most of the credit is going to the MAG Unit. We're targeting the shooters."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This looks very good, but some previous ballistic work has been deemed as junk science after many years of acceptance by the courts. Will the same fate befall shell casing comparisons?
By Sadie Gurman
Associated Press
April 6, 2015
DENVER -- Detectives in Denver were on the hunt for an increasingly brazen shooter.
A burglar fired through a woman's dining room window when she threatened to call police. Ten minutes later and a mile away, someone broke into another home and shot a Bernese Mountain Dog.
Officers scooped up the spent shell casings and wondered where he would strike next.
Their break came when a witness said he was fired upon in a street fight two days later. Police gathered six more casings that were quickly entered into a national ballistics database and matched all three crimes. The evidence helped put Anthony Dennis in jail and keep him there.
In many U.S. police departments, that evidence might have been shelved in an overworked crime lab, where analysts would only run it through the database to prepare a case for trial.
But authorities in Denver are leading a national trend to put ballistics evidence into the hands of investigators much more quickly — before leads dry up and suspects disappear.
"Police are beginning to understand that if you don't quickly respond and address gun violence it can spread over space, and it can escalate much like a measles outbreak," said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, which is studying whether these efforts create sustained reductions in gun violence.
Matched shell casings have helped lead to at least 35 arrests in more than 50 shootings in the two years since Denver began operating its Crime Gun Intelligence Center. At least 13 other suspects were charged with federal gun crimes, and five more had their parole revoked, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The goal is to stop "active shooters," people who "have already proven they have no qualms about pulling the trigger multiple times," said Jeff Russell, supervisory special agent in the Denver ATF office. "The urgency is there to stop that person before they commit the next shooting."
In Denver, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans and other cities, shell casings are now loaded into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network within days of a crime. A machine takes images of the unique, microscopic markings at the base of each casing. Computer software then produces potential matches, and detectives and ATF agents study the linked cases for other similarities, such as suspect or vehicle descriptions.
"You've got to be timely," said Greggory LaBerge, who directs the Denver Police crime lab. "If even a week or two goes by, you may lose the advantage of having those connections."
Russell and LaBerge agreed to move two ATF investigators into Denver's crime lab to enter recovered shells into the database, using $150,000 in ATF equipment. Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities are now developing similar programs.
Agencies using the national database have entered nearly 2.4 million cartridge cases recovered from crime scenes, producing more than 67,000 "hits" as of February.
But there are as many as 400 million guns in circulation in the United States, and by law, the federal database was constrained from the start to include only ballistics evidence that comes from crimes. By law, test-fired shells of newly manufactured guns cannot be entered before they are sold.
Still, with every new entry of a shell left behind by a criminal, the database becomes more robust. And when officers gather shell casings from shooting scenes as often as they can, they increase the likelihood of finding matches that provide clues to a shooter's identity.
"It's like the computer you have at home. If you feed it a little, it will do a little work for you. If you don't feed it at all, it's not going to do any work for you," said Pete Gagliardi, a former ATF agent who is now senior vice president of Forensic Technology Inc., a private company that studies ballistics evidence.
Unlike with DNA or fingerprints that link people to crimes, this system catalogues the distinct characteristics of a firearm, not the person who used it. And the software only suggests potential hits, leaving it to analysts to verify any matches.
Denver's early results are mixed, but promising, said Webster. The homicide rate dropped for at least five months in places where police made arrests as a result of the program, he said, although he wouldn't provide details, since the study hasn't been published.
Even so, it can take some convincing to put crime lab ballistics machines at the service of detectives, said George Lauder, a resident agent in charge of the ATF in Milwaukee. But soon after that city started using the technology in the immediate aftermath of shootings, investigators discovered a pattern of armed robberies based on their locations and times, he said.
"We've been successful in homicides where we've been able to identify a lead within 45 minutes," said Lauder's partner, Alex Kopeck. "In the past, it could have taken us months and sometimes never to identify these leads."
New Orleans authorities credit ballistics analysis by their Multi-Agency Gang Unit for helping them solve a 2013 gang-related shooting at a Mother's Day parade that wounded 19 people, said Phillip Durham, special agent in charge of the New Orleans ATF office.
"Our murder rate is the lowest it has been in 30 years," he said. "Most of the credit is going to the MAG Unit. We're targeting the shooters."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This looks very good, but some previous ballistic work has been deemed as junk science after many years of acceptance by the courts. Will the same fate befall shell casing comparisons?
Monday, April 06, 2015
CAR THIEF OR NUT?
Patton State Hospital inmates who escaped by stealing cars from the hospital parking lot were returned as nuts, but not by me!
In today’s PACOVILLA Corrections blog Spotlight, Bob Walsh had an interesting post about the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation getting ready to give “nutters” a free pass for misbehavior, such as assaulting a correctional officer. No more doing time in the ‘hole’ or other disciplinary measures. It will be counseling from now on.
This begs the question: What do we mean by “mentally ill?” Some would have us believe that the mentally ill do not know right from wrong. Horseshit!
Back when I was a cop, there wasn’t a month that went by without one or more inmates – Oops, I think I’m supposed to say patients – escaping from Patton State Hospital. They simply left through a hospital door, leisurely walked over to the parking lot, and stole a hospital staff member’s or visitor’s car.
When the cops caught these escapees, they were taken directly back to Patton, unless they committed another crime after their escape. Not by me!
It took me only a couple of minutes to determine that they knew they were breaking the law by stealing a car. Being the asshole that I was, I took them directly to the San Bernardino County Jail and booked them for car theft. Of the five escapees I caught, everyone was prosecuted and convicted for car theft. And instead of being returned to Patton as patients, they were imprisoned.
There is a big difference between the “mentally ill” and out-and-out psychopaths. I don’t think I have to be a psychiatrist to know the difference. To treat all of the mentally ill in prison as if they were psychopaths is a travesty. It will give many inmates a free pass to assault correctional officers and to commit other serious violations. Counseling? What a Joke!
Do you want to know who is really mentally ill? It’s U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton whose ruling forced CDCR to institute its new free pass policy.
In today’s PACOVILLA Corrections blog Spotlight, Bob Walsh had an interesting post about the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation getting ready to give “nutters” a free pass for misbehavior, such as assaulting a correctional officer. No more doing time in the ‘hole’ or other disciplinary measures. It will be counseling from now on.
This begs the question: What do we mean by “mentally ill?” Some would have us believe that the mentally ill do not know right from wrong. Horseshit!
Back when I was a cop, there wasn’t a month that went by without one or more inmates – Oops, I think I’m supposed to say patients – escaping from Patton State Hospital. They simply left through a hospital door, leisurely walked over to the parking lot, and stole a hospital staff member’s or visitor’s car.
When the cops caught these escapees, they were taken directly back to Patton, unless they committed another crime after their escape. Not by me!
It took me only a couple of minutes to determine that they knew they were breaking the law by stealing a car. Being the asshole that I was, I took them directly to the San Bernardino County Jail and booked them for car theft. Of the five escapees I caught, everyone was prosecuted and convicted for car theft. And instead of being returned to Patton as patients, they were imprisoned.
There is a big difference between the “mentally ill” and out-and-out psychopaths. I don’t think I have to be a psychiatrist to know the difference. To treat all of the mentally ill in prison as if they were psychopaths is a travesty. It will give many inmates a free pass to assault correctional officers and to commit other serious violations. Counseling? What a Joke!
Do you want to know who is really mentally ill? It’s U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton whose ruling forced CDCR to institute its new free pass policy.
IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHO IS GORING THE OX
At a final-four postgame press conference, a Kentucky player directed a racial slur at a Wisconsin player
Even if you are not a basketball fan, unless you live under a rock, by now you know that Wisconsin trounced undefeated and heavily favored Kentucky in college basketball’s final-four playoff game on Saturday.
The Kentucky players were so pissed–off at the end of the game that they stormed off the court without shaking hands with the winning team. But the best was yet to come during a postgame press conference.
With several Kentucky players lined up at a table, a reporter asked a question about Wisconsin’s star white player Frank Kaminsky. Andrew Harrison, who is black and whose microphone was hot, was heard saying, “Fuck that nigger.”
That remark started a shitstorm of comments on social media, with most defending Harrison. And most sports reporters gave the racial slur a pass, saying that when blacks use the ‘N’ word, it does not have the same meaning as when whites use it.
Harrison made several apologies, including one to Kaminsky who believes the apology was sincere.
Just imagine what the reaction would have been if Kaminsky had directed that remark at Harrison. First of all, he would not have been allowed to play in the championship game against Duke. There would have been boisterous protest demonstrations on the Wisconsin campus. Then he would be expelled from the university with a blast from the university’s president. And he would have been so poisoned that no NBA team would ever pick him up.
The moral of this story is that it all depends on who is goring the ox. Harrison got a pass, whereas Kaminsky would have been dead meat.
Even if you are not a basketball fan, unless you live under a rock, by now you know that Wisconsin trounced undefeated and heavily favored Kentucky in college basketball’s final-four playoff game on Saturday.
The Kentucky players were so pissed–off at the end of the game that they stormed off the court without shaking hands with the winning team. But the best was yet to come during a postgame press conference.
With several Kentucky players lined up at a table, a reporter asked a question about Wisconsin’s star white player Frank Kaminsky. Andrew Harrison, who is black and whose microphone was hot, was heard saying, “Fuck that nigger.”
That remark started a shitstorm of comments on social media, with most defending Harrison. And most sports reporters gave the racial slur a pass, saying that when blacks use the ‘N’ word, it does not have the same meaning as when whites use it.
Harrison made several apologies, including one to Kaminsky who believes the apology was sincere.
Just imagine what the reaction would have been if Kaminsky had directed that remark at Harrison. First of all, he would not have been allowed to play in the championship game against Duke. There would have been boisterous protest demonstrations on the Wisconsin campus. Then he would be expelled from the university with a blast from the university’s president. And he would have been so poisoned that no NBA team would ever pick him up.
The moral of this story is that it all depends on who is goring the ox. Harrison got a pass, whereas Kaminsky would have been dead meat.
Sunday, April 05, 2015
PUT PETE ROSE IN BASEBALL’S HALL OF FAME!
Banned from baseball for life in 1989 for betting on games, one of the greatest baseball players of all times deserves a place in Baseball’s Hall of Fame
On this Easter Sunday, when Christians are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, it is way past time for the resurrection of Peter ….. former baseball great Pete Rose that is.
Pete Rose was without question one of the greatest players ever to put on a baseball uniform. And he achieved his many records without resorting to the use of steroids.
From Wikipedia:
Rose, a switch hitter, is the all-time Major League leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215), and outs (10,328). He won three World Series rings, three batting titles, one Most Valuable Player Award, two Gold Gloves, the Rookie of the Year Award, and also made 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions.
In 1989, Rose was banned from baseball for life because he gambled on baseball games. Rose admitted he bet on games, but he adamantly denied that he ever bet on games involving his own team. There has never been one shred of evidence that Rose ever bet on a game in which he played.
Baseball’s longtime Commissioner Bud Selig rejected numerous requests by Rose and others to lift that lifetime ban. To this day, Selig insists that Rose must never be reinstated.
Now baseball has a new commissioner. Rob Manfred has received a formal reinstatement request from Rose. Last month he told reporters that he would speak with Rose. “I'm prepared to deal with that request on its merits,” Manfred said.
The new commissioner has also said that Rose could still be elected to the Hall of Fame without being reinstated because the Hall is not operated by MLB.
It has been my opinion for many years that Pete Rose deserves to be in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. His many records cannot be erased by his sins. Even though Rose has been a premier asshole on many occasions, being an asshole should not disqualify him from membership in the Hall. As for betting on games, a one or two year suspension would have been an adequate punishment. A lifetime ban was way out of line.
On this Easter Sunday, when Christians are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, it is way past time for the resurrection of Peter ….. former baseball great Pete Rose that is.
Pete Rose was without question one of the greatest players ever to put on a baseball uniform. And he achieved his many records without resorting to the use of steroids.
From Wikipedia:
Rose, a switch hitter, is the all-time Major League leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215), and outs (10,328). He won three World Series rings, three batting titles, one Most Valuable Player Award, two Gold Gloves, the Rookie of the Year Award, and also made 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions.
In 1989, Rose was banned from baseball for life because he gambled on baseball games. Rose admitted he bet on games, but he adamantly denied that he ever bet on games involving his own team. There has never been one shred of evidence that Rose ever bet on a game in which he played.
Baseball’s longtime Commissioner Bud Selig rejected numerous requests by Rose and others to lift that lifetime ban. To this day, Selig insists that Rose must never be reinstated.
Now baseball has a new commissioner. Rob Manfred has received a formal reinstatement request from Rose. Last month he told reporters that he would speak with Rose. “I'm prepared to deal with that request on its merits,” Manfred said.
The new commissioner has also said that Rose could still be elected to the Hall of Fame without being reinstated because the Hall is not operated by MLB.
It has been my opinion for many years that Pete Rose deserves to be in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. His many records cannot be erased by his sins. Even though Rose has been a premier asshole on many occasions, being an asshole should not disqualify him from membership in the Hall. As for betting on games, a one or two year suspension would have been an adequate punishment. A lifetime ban was way out of line.
Saturday, April 04, 2015
CALIFORNIA TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 3, 2015
A federal judge has just ordered CDCr to spend a buttload of money for sexual reassignment surgery for one of the guests of the state
U. S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar has ordered that Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy, 51, be given surgery to make him into Michelle Lael Norsworthy.
The department is actually contemplating appealing the ruling. I am not sure why they are bothering, it will only cost us about $100,000. Maybe they think the precedent is dangerous. You never know, it is barely possible that there are enough people high up in the department that think this is a stretch to make a point.
Convicted of murder, Norsworthy has been in prison since 1987.
I’ve seen Jeff’s mug shot and I don’t think changing him to Michelle will help.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The appeal will cost more than the operation. The 9th Circuit will probably uphold the District Court Ruling. And if CDCR wants to take the appeal to SCOTUS, that court will probably refuse to accept the case.
Those appeals are lengthy and costly. Maybe CDCR thinks that, because it will take years for the appeal to run its course, Norsworthy will croak before it’s rejected by SCOTUS.
Judge Tigar’s ruling is outrageous! The state should never be burdened with the sex change operation of a convict. Let his family, the ACLU and the human rights groups pay for that operation – not the taxpayers! What’s next – nose jobs and boob jobs? How about penile implants?
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 3, 2015
A federal judge has just ordered CDCr to spend a buttload of money for sexual reassignment surgery for one of the guests of the state
U. S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar has ordered that Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy, 51, be given surgery to make him into Michelle Lael Norsworthy.
The department is actually contemplating appealing the ruling. I am not sure why they are bothering, it will only cost us about $100,000. Maybe they think the precedent is dangerous. You never know, it is barely possible that there are enough people high up in the department that think this is a stretch to make a point.
Convicted of murder, Norsworthy has been in prison since 1987.
I’ve seen Jeff’s mug shot and I don’t think changing him to Michelle will help.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The appeal will cost more than the operation. The 9th Circuit will probably uphold the District Court Ruling. And if CDCR wants to take the appeal to SCOTUS, that court will probably refuse to accept the case.
Those appeals are lengthy and costly. Maybe CDCR thinks that, because it will take years for the appeal to run its course, Norsworthy will croak before it’s rejected by SCOTUS.
Judge Tigar’s ruling is outrageous! The state should never be burdened with the sex change operation of a convict. Let his family, the ACLU and the human rights groups pay for that operation – not the taxpayers! What’s next – nose jobs and boob jobs? How about penile implants?
SERIOUSLY STUPID ROAD-RAGE INCIDENT
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 3, 2015
In the realm of seriously stupid, wacked-out and pointless this one is up for the record books.
Two days ago Denise Berry, 36, and her 12-year old son were driving along in their Mercedes in Hawthorne, CA. minding their own business. The boy pointed at, and laughed at, a man in a nearby Cadillac who had his feet hanging out of the car. That apparently really pissed off somebody in the Caddy. They started after her.
Ms. Berry stopped her car right next to a marked Hawthorne P D cruiser. She reported to the officer that a car was following. At that moment the Caddy pulled up and a man in the car opened fire, killing the woman and wounding her son. The officer returned fire, killing the shooter from the Caddy. The shooter has been identified as Robert Washington, 38. Two other men in the Caddy were arrested.
How messed up do you have to be to either not see the police car right there, or not care that the police car is right there?
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 3, 2015
In the realm of seriously stupid, wacked-out and pointless this one is up for the record books.
Two days ago Denise Berry, 36, and her 12-year old son were driving along in their Mercedes in Hawthorne, CA. minding their own business. The boy pointed at, and laughed at, a man in a nearby Cadillac who had his feet hanging out of the car. That apparently really pissed off somebody in the Caddy. They started after her.
Ms. Berry stopped her car right next to a marked Hawthorne P D cruiser. She reported to the officer that a car was following. At that moment the Caddy pulled up and a man in the car opened fire, killing the woman and wounding her son. The officer returned fire, killing the shooter from the Caddy. The shooter has been identified as Robert Washington, 38. Two other men in the Caddy were arrested.
How messed up do you have to be to either not see the police car right there, or not care that the police car is right there?
Friday, April 03, 2015
ANTI-VIOLENCE PROGRAM WORKERS ARRESTED FOR MULTIPLE MURDERS
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 3, 2015
Two men who were employed in San Francisco’s anti-violence program were arrested for a double homicide at a parking lot near Amazon Playground.
Davante Robinson and Gregory Morton III were charged with the March 9 deaths of Kenyatta Butler Jr., 18, of San Leandro and Donzel Gaines, 19, of S.F. The cops believe that the two anti-violence program workers committed the murders on behalf of a street gang.
The program is called Interrupt, Predict and Organize. The program is supposedly intended to give work experience to at-risk youth. The two men had been working for about six months with the Parks and Rec Department doing maintenance in city parks.
Trent Rhoer, the executive director of the agency that oversees the funding of the program, has said, “We feel that, so far, it has been a successful diversion in keeping people off the streets.”
I can think of at least four people Interrupt, Predict and Organize has been successful with by keeping them off the streets - the two dead guys and the two now locked up guys.
The two suspects are being held pending a $5 million bond.
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 3, 2015
Two men who were employed in San Francisco’s anti-violence program were arrested for a double homicide at a parking lot near Amazon Playground.
Davante Robinson and Gregory Morton III were charged with the March 9 deaths of Kenyatta Butler Jr., 18, of San Leandro and Donzel Gaines, 19, of S.F. The cops believe that the two anti-violence program workers committed the murders on behalf of a street gang.
The program is called Interrupt, Predict and Organize. The program is supposedly intended to give work experience to at-risk youth. The two men had been working for about six months with the Parks and Rec Department doing maintenance in city parks.
Trent Rhoer, the executive director of the agency that oversees the funding of the program, has said, “We feel that, so far, it has been a successful diversion in keeping people off the streets.”
I can think of at least four people Interrupt, Predict and Organize has been successful with by keeping them off the streets - the two dead guys and the two now locked up guys.
The two suspects are being held pending a $5 million bond.
IT’’S NOT THIEVES THAT ARE STUPID
Stupid is leaving purses, wallets, cellphones, GPS and car registration/insurance cards in a parked car
Here are some examples of the consequences experienced by stupid theft victims:
1. LONG-TERM PARKING:
Some people left their car in the long-term parking at San Jose while away, and someone broke into the car. Using the information on the car's registration in the glove compartment, they drove the car to the people's home in Pebble Beach and robbed it. So I guess if we are going to leave the car in long-term parking, we should NOT leave the registration/insurance cards in it, nor your remote garage door opener. This gives us something to think about with all our new electronic technology.
Even leaving a purse and other valuables in a car momentarily while the driver picks up a child from a day care facility or a six-pack from a convenience store is an invitation for thievery.
2. GPS:
Someone had their car broken into while they were at a football game. Their car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans. Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard. When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen. The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house. They then used the garage remote control to open the garage door and gain entry to the house. The thieves knew the owners were at the football game, they knew what time the game was scheduled to finish and so they knew how much time they had to clean out the house. It would appear that they had brought a truck to empty the house of its contents. Something to consider if you have a GPS - don't put your home address in it... Put a nearby address (like a store or gas station) so you can still find your way home if you need to, but no one else would know where you live if your GPS were stolen.
3. CELLPHONES:
I never thought of this....... This lady has now changed her habit of how she lists her names on her cell phone after her handbag was stolen. Her handbag, which contained her cell phone, credit card, wallet, etc., was stolen. Twenty minutes later when she called her hubby, from a pay phone telling him what had happened, hubby says, "I received your text asking about our Pin number and I've replied a little while ago." When they rushed down to the bank, the bank staff told them all the money was already withdrawn. The thief had actually used the stolen cell phone to text "hubby" in the contact list and got hold of the pin number. Within 20 minutes he had withdrawn all the money from their bank account.
Some Cellphone Dos and Don’ts:
a. Do not disclose the relationship between you and the people in your contact list. Avoid using names like Home, Honey, Hubby, Sweetheart, Dad, Mom, etc....
b. And very importantly, when sensitive info is being asked through texts, CONFIRM by calling back.
c. Also, when you're being texted by friends or family to meet them somewhere, be sure to call back to confirm that the message came from them. If you don't reach them, be very careful about going places to meet "family and friends" who text you.
4. PURSE IN THE GROCERY CART:
A lady went grocery-shopping at a local mall and left her purse sitting in the children's seat of the cart while she reached something off a shelf... wait till you read the WHOLE story! Her wallet was stolen, and she reported it to the store personnel. After returning home, she received a phone call from the Mall Security to say that they had her wallet and that although there was no money in it, it did still hold her personal papers. She immediately went to pick up her wallet, only to be told by Mall Security that they had not called her. By the time she returned home again, her house had been broken into and burglarized. The thieves knew that by calling and saying they were Mall Security, they could lure her out of her house long enough for them to burglarize it.
Here are some examples of the consequences experienced by stupid theft victims:
1. LONG-TERM PARKING:
Some people left their car in the long-term parking at San Jose while away, and someone broke into the car. Using the information on the car's registration in the glove compartment, they drove the car to the people's home in Pebble Beach and robbed it. So I guess if we are going to leave the car in long-term parking, we should NOT leave the registration/insurance cards in it, nor your remote garage door opener. This gives us something to think about with all our new electronic technology.
Even leaving a purse and other valuables in a car momentarily while the driver picks up a child from a day care facility or a six-pack from a convenience store is an invitation for thievery.
2. GPS:
Someone had their car broken into while they were at a football game. Their car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans. Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard. When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen. The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house. They then used the garage remote control to open the garage door and gain entry to the house. The thieves knew the owners were at the football game, they knew what time the game was scheduled to finish and so they knew how much time they had to clean out the house. It would appear that they had brought a truck to empty the house of its contents. Something to consider if you have a GPS - don't put your home address in it... Put a nearby address (like a store or gas station) so you can still find your way home if you need to, but no one else would know where you live if your GPS were stolen.
3. CELLPHONES:
I never thought of this....... This lady has now changed her habit of how she lists her names on her cell phone after her handbag was stolen. Her handbag, which contained her cell phone, credit card, wallet, etc., was stolen. Twenty minutes later when she called her hubby, from a pay phone telling him what had happened, hubby says, "I received your text asking about our Pin number and I've replied a little while ago." When they rushed down to the bank, the bank staff told them all the money was already withdrawn. The thief had actually used the stolen cell phone to text "hubby" in the contact list and got hold of the pin number. Within 20 minutes he had withdrawn all the money from their bank account.
Some Cellphone Dos and Don’ts:
a. Do not disclose the relationship between you and the people in your contact list. Avoid using names like Home, Honey, Hubby, Sweetheart, Dad, Mom, etc....
b. And very importantly, when sensitive info is being asked through texts, CONFIRM by calling back.
c. Also, when you're being texted by friends or family to meet them somewhere, be sure to call back to confirm that the message came from them. If you don't reach them, be very careful about going places to meet "family and friends" who text you.
4. PURSE IN THE GROCERY CART:
A lady went grocery-shopping at a local mall and left her purse sitting in the children's seat of the cart while she reached something off a shelf... wait till you read the WHOLE story! Her wallet was stolen, and she reported it to the store personnel. After returning home, she received a phone call from the Mall Security to say that they had her wallet and that although there was no money in it, it did still hold her personal papers. She immediately went to pick up her wallet, only to be told by Mall Security that they had not called her. By the time she returned home again, her house had been broken into and burglarized. The thieves knew that by calling and saying they were Mall Security, they could lure her out of her house long enough for them to burglarize it.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN RAMPANT
By Bob Walsh
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 2, 2015
A group of hard-core liberal idiot teachers are pressing CalSTRS, the California state teachers pension fund, to divest from a profitable investment because the company makes guns that are illegal to sell in the formerly great state of California.
Cerberus Capital Management is a private equity firm. They own the Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster. A Bushmaster rifle was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and that investment really pisses off the liberals. They are holding a teach-in with video presentation (after all, what is a teach-in without visual aids) at the CalSTRS building and at the Cerberus office in Brentwood today.
So far CalSTRS has expressed sympathy, but pointed out they can not force Cerberus to sell the gun maker and can not at this time unload its investment in Cerberus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If CalSTRS has invested in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will the protesters demand that CalSTRS divest these two companies because their fighter jets are bombing civilians in Iraq and Syria? Boeing makes the F/A 18 and Lockheed Martin makes the F 16.
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
April 2, 2015
A group of hard-core liberal idiot teachers are pressing CalSTRS, the California state teachers pension fund, to divest from a profitable investment because the company makes guns that are illegal to sell in the formerly great state of California.
Cerberus Capital Management is a private equity firm. They own the Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster. A Bushmaster rifle was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and that investment really pisses off the liberals. They are holding a teach-in with video presentation (after all, what is a teach-in without visual aids) at the CalSTRS building and at the Cerberus office in Brentwood today.
So far CalSTRS has expressed sympathy, but pointed out they can not force Cerberus to sell the gun maker and can not at this time unload its investment in Cerberus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If CalSTRS has invested in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will the protesters demand that CalSTRS divest these two companies because their fighter jets are bombing civilians in Iraq and Syria? Boeing makes the F/A 18 and Lockheed Martin makes the F 16.
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