Government

Psychological Torture

In August 2018, Thomas Perez Jr. called the police in Fontana, California, to report that his 71-year-old father, who had dementia, was missing. Police arrived, searched the house with his permission, and claimed to find “visible bloodstains.” A police dog allegedly “detected the presence of a corpse.” Despite Perez Jr.’s cooperation, the officers found his demeanor “suspicious” and brought him to the station for questioning.

Police questioned him for over 17 hours. Detectives falsely claimed they found his father’s corpse and bloodstains, denied him blood pressure and anxiety medication, and brought in his dog to falsely claim the animal would be euthanized because it witnessed the murder.

The interrogation began with hours of questioning while police obtained warrants to seize Perez Jr.’s electronic devices. After some time, they took him for a drive, claiming they were looking for his father. The ride was a pretense, just another way to continue questioning him. All it accomplished was a visible decline in Perez Jr.’s mental state.

Back at the station, Perez Jr. asked for his medication and requested to be taken to a hospital. The officers refused, saying, “We’re not going to go to the hospital, because that’s not going to help you.” From there, the pressure intensified.

By this point, Perez Jr. was in clear mental distress—rocking, pulling his hair, crying, shaking, and pleading for help. When he fell to the floor and hugged his dog, the officers laughed and told him he was stressing the animal out. Sixteen hours into the interrogation, the detectives told Perez Jr. they had found his father’s body in the morgue with stab wounds. It was a lie. But Perez Jr., mentally broken and physically exhausted, confessed. Under severe psychological distress and a complete mental breakdown, Perez falsely confessed to killing his father.

The detectives then received a call from Perez Jr.’s sister: Thomas Sr. was alive and at LAX, about to board a flight to visit her. They didn’t rush back to tell Perez Jr. the good news. Instead, they let him sit alone in the interrogation room for another hour. During this time, Perez Jr., hopeless and defeated, untied his shoes and attempted to hang himself.

The officers intervened—not to reassure him but to Mirandize him for the first time. They then sent him to a psychiatric hospital, leaving instructions with the staff that he was to have no contact with family members. On their way out, they dropped the dog at the pound as a stray.

In May 2023, a federal judge ruled the interrogation tactics were unconstitutional, stating:

“[Perez] was berated, worn down, and pressured into a false confession after 17 hours of questioning. [The officers] did this with full awareness of his compromised mental and physical state and need for his medications.”

Perez filed a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the Fontana Police Department of false imprisonment, due process violations, and what a judge described as unconstitutional “psychological torture.” The city agreed to a nearly $900,000 settlement to resolve the lawsuit, admitting no formal wrongdoing while maintaining that their tactics, though involving extreme ruses, did not break laws.

This would be illegal to do to a POW in time of war, a violation of the Geneva convention. The cops of Fontana think this is good police procedure.

When the police want to talk to you about anything, pretend that you are a POW in time of war:

  • Shut the fuck up. Don’t answer questions.
  • Ask if you are free to leave
  • If you are not, the law requires that you identify yourself.
  • After you do that, tell them you want a lawyer.
  • Then shut the fuck up.
  • The police aren’t your friends. They can lie to you. They can use your weaknesses against you.
  • Did I mention that you shouldn’t answer questions, and should just shut the fuck up?
By Divemedic, ago

Firefighters

I spend a good number of posts in pointing out police malfeasance. Now I am going to take some firefighters to task. Those who read this blog know that I was a firefighter for more than 2 decades, and I have a drawer full of certifications that back this up. I want you to look at this video, then I will give you my 2 cents’ worth.

Firefighters are permitted to break and move things, as well as forcibly damage property in order to deal with exigent circumstances. The emergency does not give them unlimited authority, but firefighters are not generally permitted to do more than is reasonably necessary for the exigency. Courts assess the need and the response in light of what responders reasonably knew at the time. The controlling court case here is Bowditch v. Boston, 101 U.S. 16 (1879).

The exact authority, compensation rules, and potential liability also depend on the state and local law governing the fire department. Bowditch, for example, addressed a Massachusetts statutory compensation scheme, while the Fifth Circuit’s Baker v. City of McKinney limited its ruling against compensation to damage objectively necessary to prevent imminent harm during an active emergency.

So the question becomes: Was that path for the hose objectively necessary to gain access to the water supply? I would argue that there was a better path for that hose, and taking that alternate path to gain access to the water supply would have taken less time than breaking the windows on the car. Here is a picture of Engine 82 (the same exact fire truck). If you look at the area within the red circle, you will see that there is pump intake in the middle of the fire truck, and the yellow circle is the front bumper intake of the fire truck.

Looking at the video, the firefighters spent 41 seconds breaking out the windows on the car, and another full minute passing the hose through the car from the hydrant to the front intake. So, it was nearly two minutes to connect the hose by going through the car.

Now take a look from the video of the firefighters breaking the window:

Which method do you think would be faster? The question then turns, according to the court cases involved, was it necessary for the firefighters to break this car’s windows?

Note the New York firefighter who posted this admits they weren’t doing it to gain access to the hydrant, they did what they did to “deliver justice like this to the bad guys,” and also calling this an “act of justice.”

Delivering justice as some sort of ad hoc parking enforcement court is not the firefighters’ job. Go ahead, Google “FDNY engine 82 break car windows” and see just how many times FDNY is “delivering justice” by doing thousands of dollars in damage to car owners whose only transgression is illegal parking.

This is wrong. Had I done this in my department, I would have been fired, and rightfully so.

By Divemedic, ago

Watch

Watch how these cops walk on to this guy’s property. They are raiding his house because he called one of them out for speeding. Now imagine the guy whose home they are raiding is waiting for them.

By Divemedic, ago

Pearl Clutching

Trump excluded certain left leaning members of the MSM from the White House grounds. The left is losing their collective minds, claiming this to be an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment, and of course making comparisons to Hitler, their standard accusation. They have almost completely memory holed the fact that both Obama and Biden did the same thing.

In October 2009, amid a feud in which White House officials (including Communications Director Anita Dunn) publicly described Fox News as not a legitimate news organization but more like “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party” and said they would treat it “the way we would treat an opponent,” even while saying the network’s point of view was “ultimately destructive” to the nation, then ordered the Treasury Department to exclude a Fox journalist from a multi-network interview pool.

Obama’s administration was widely criticized by journalists (including from outlets not aligned with Fox) for tight control of information, fewer formal press conferences than many predecessors, restricted photographer access (favoring official White House images), delays or stonewalling on FOIA, and “blackballing” or limiting access for some critical reporters at agencies.

Obama’s efforts to plug leaks and persecute leakers even exceeded those of George W. Bush’s administration. The administration prosecuted Stephen Kim, a former State Department official, merely for discussing a classified report about North Korea with Fox News reporter James Rosen, even going so far as to seize Associated Press phone records for two months and used the FBI to conduct surveillance on James Rosen (naming him as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in one case) and New York Times reporter James Risen while trying to identify sources.

Even in earlier times, the actions were hardly unprecedented:

  • Woodrow Wilson investigated journalists critical of his administration by invoking the espionage act of 1917.
  • During the late 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt harassed activists, including members of the press, who sought to keep the United States out of the war raging in Europe.
  • Richard Nixon went to great lengths attempting to prevent the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers because those documents exposed how US policymakers repeatedly lied to Congress and the American people about the Vietnam War.

Cato institute has a lengthy article about the abuses of opposing press outlets by Presidents. As for my blog, I detailed how the Bush administration and Republicans used laws against pornography. One of the Florida enforcers of this is none other than Sheriff Grady Judd.

Christopher Michael Wilson was investigated by Judd because he ran a website that allowed people to post nude pictures of women on the site, and it required a credit card to access so that the Wilson would know that people accessing the site were adults. Military men deployed in the Iraq war complained that they could not do so while in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, because the web servers in those countries blocked credit cards from being processed by companies who promoted pornography. Because of this, Wilson allowed members proving they were deployed by posting pictures from the war zone to have access to the site. Because of those pictures, the site became a photo journal that chronicled the Iraq war. It was one of the first sites to publish the Abu Grhaib pictures that so embarrassed former President Bush. The pictures being posted to that site caused major problems for the Bush administration.

Judd arrested Wilson on 301 counts of distributing pornography, even though Wilson did not post the pictures, he merely ran a site where people posted content, and the servers were not in Polk County (they were in the Netherlands). A plea deal was reached where Wilson had to turn the website over to Judd.

Even though the charges themselves were over pornography, according to Judd, the investigation was because of the Iraq pictures, also according to Judd.

Don’t forget that Grady Judd is also one of the Sheriffs who broke the law in 2011 when they lobbied the state legislators to defeat the open carry law. I am one of the few people not on the left who think Judd is a grandstanding, authoritarian asshole. He also has previously engaged in arresting people who are critical of his policies, including arresting one woman for “lewd activity in the presence of a minor” because her neighbor and his child heard a “sexual sounding noise” coming from the woman’s home 48 days earlier. Of course, it was only a coincidence that the woman had been critical of the sheriff and his policies. The charges were dropped, but the woman had to sign an agreement to stop criticizing the sheriff.

Yeah, so using political power to silence dissent is nothing new. It’s been going on as long as we have had a nation. Both parties do it, but each claims the other is the evil one. I have news for you: they both are evil, power grabbing assholes who will stop at nothing to gain power.

By Divemedic, ago

Being Overrun

To those who keep supporting immigrants, watch as the city commission of Lake Worth Beach, FL disqualifies a candidate for City Manager because he isn’t Guatemalan and doesn’t speak Spanish.

By Divemedic, ago

Stepping on Your Johnson

Three times I voted for Trump. He was and remains a better choice than any of the three who ran against him. That being said, the Iran war clearly shows him to be stepping on his dick.

Iran is clearly prolonging the conflict until November, because their aim is obviously to influence the election. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the Democrats are conspiring with Iran to make that happen.

Still,this is a disaster in the making for the Republicans. Fuel prices are sky high. Gasoline is averaging more than $4.30 a gallon. Inflation is high, and the Fed is expected to raise interest rates by a quarter percent today.

The nation, and perhaps the world, is about to enter a recession. Americans vote with their wallets. Republican lawmakers, sensing vulnerability to anti-Trump election pressures, are beginning to turn on him.

All of this signals a return to Democrat control of Congress. Trump is about to become a powerless lame duck.

That also means a likely stranglehold of both Congress and the Whitehouse. Imagine President AOC, but backed by Control of both the Senate and the House.

By Divemedic, ago

It’s Not Your Job

Here is a case of a woman who decided that, because she had a gun, she was going to chase down what she believed was a criminal and be a hero. The story goes like this:

She was a witness to a car accident, along with an off duty police officer, another witness. Hannah saw the accident and believed him to be intoxicated, according to her own statements on the phone to 911. (It actually turns out he was having a diabetic emergency) The man who caused the accident left the scene. Hannah called 911 and engaged in a vehicle pursuit.

The dispatcher, upon finding out Hannah was engaged in a vehicle pursuit, said “We actually don’t want you to chase him,” then asked her to return to the scene of the accident.

Hannah replied, “There is a police officer at the scene, but this guy is drunk, and I am not NOT going to follow him, because he is going to cause another accident.”

When she caught up to him, Hannah pulled her vehicle into the path of the man’s car, to block him from going further. She got out of her car to confront him, yelling for him to get out of the car. She is heard to say, “He was fighting with me, and he pulled the trigger on my gun.” The thing is, he was still in his pickup with his seatbelt on. She claims her finger was indexed and not on the trigger. You decide, here is a screen grab from the video:

In 2023, Hannah was convicted of felony murder, false imprisonment, and weapons charges, and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, plus 8 years and 5 years. The story would end there, a wanna be cop with a gun who decided to shoot someone over a traffic accident she wasn’t even involved in, but there is more.

The Supreme Court of Georgia weighed in on her appeal just this spring. The prosecutor in the case had used AI to write her legal briefs and motions. The case law cited by the AI was fake, either made up cases, or the cases cited didn’t say what the lawyer claimed they did. So the Supreme Court of Georgia, as they should have, ordered the conviction tossed out, and granted Hannah a new trial.

By Divemedic, ago

Warrants? We Don’t Need Warrants

This case is a great example of why you should never open your door to anyone you don’t intend on allowing into your home. That’s the purpose of doorbell cameras, after all. Police in Greenville, North Carolina approached a woman who had a Ring camera on her house in the belief that the camera caught video evidence of a crime. They demanded she show them the video, and she refused, claiming the camera didn’t record. There are numerous reasons for this. You can set Ring cameras to record on motion, and it’s entirely possible that the camera simply didn’t record the incident because the motion was too far away to trigger the motion sensor. Even so, I wouldn’t want cops going through my phone. So the answer from me is going to be no.

The cop replied, “Listen to me, you pull it up and show me that it isn’t working, or I will rip it off the wall, get a warrant, and I will keep you up all night.”

  • First, ripping the camera off the wall won’t get you any footage. It’s an Internet camera. My cameras aren’t Ring cameras, but they don’t store any footage. Either this cop is a dumbass, or is going to destroy the camera because she can.

Listen:

So what did the cops do? They entered the home, took the woman’s phone, forcibly unlocked it, and stole the video, all without a warrant. The woman wasn’t suspected of committing a crime.

At some point, you are tempted to wonder if the officers are wearing Level IV plates, or if the plates they do happen to be wearing are capable of stopping .308 or .300 Blackout.

Look, I am not against it. I once had a thief in my neighborhood and the cops believed my cameras might have caught the thief on film. They contacted me while I was on vacation in Colorado and ASKED me for footage. they were a bit panicked because they were afraid the video would get deleted before I got back. They wanted me to give them permission to enter the home and get the hard drive. I refused, but I assured them it would not. I reviewed my videos, pulled up the relevant footage, copied it to a USB drive, and handed it over. They wound up catching and convicting the guy.

He was charged with 9 felonies, including arson, armed burglary, several counts of grand larceny, and theft of a firearm. He reached a plea agreement where he got 6 months’ probation and his records were sealed.

Then it became a habit. After that, the cops came over for every single incident that occurred anywhere near my house and wanted my camera footage. The cops wouldn’t even reimburse me for the USB drives. It started getting expensive after the 5th or 6th time, both in free USB drives and in the use of my time. I told them I should be eligible for a crime stoppers award. When they refused, I eventually had to tell them to get bent. I’m not going to keep doing your jobs for you for free, the cops were getting paid while I did their jobs for them at my expense.

I want to see cops defend the cops’ actions at this point. The person here wasn’t suspected of a crime. They weren’t even awake- it was 3am. The cops are investigating.

I will say it again- qualified immunity needs to be replaced with a requirement for liability insurance. The dirty little secret is there is no law establishing qualified immunity. That particular little benefit for dirty cops was created by the courts, who supposedly don’t have the power to make law, in a blatant example of legislating from the bench.

I ran a travel agency, and Florida law REQUIRES a bond in order to do so. Don’t you think liability for police with the power to take your life is more important than insurance for the travel agent who can ruin your vacation?

Here is another video on the incident, but it includes actual Ring camera video and some applicable court cases.

By Divemedic, ago

Called It

I said the Clancy trial was jury nullification. The jurors now admit it was.

By Divemedic, ago