Cops

DEI and the Cops

A high ranking New York police administrator was arrested for assisting while her husband (a gang member) and her son (also a gang member) were performing a drive by shooting of a rival gang member. My guess is that she is also a gang member.

She is the (get this) “Deputy Commissioner of Wellness” for the Mount Vernon Police Department. WTF is a “Deputy Commissioner of Wellness?” My guess is it’s a DEI position that pays lots of money and was created solely as a showcase position that allows the department to show how woke they are without having to place a lot of responsibility on the HNIC’s shoulders.

Just don’t be dissin them, or they might do a drive-by on you and your hood and shit.

Gnome sayin? Dat hoe be represenin.

By Divemedic, ago

Lying By Omission

Police are now being instructed to hide the fact that a Flock camera was used in your case.

Meanwhile, I live in a town so small that half of it doesn’t even have water/sewer service.

But we just got three Flock cameras. There aren’t even 2000 people in this town. A quarter of my property tax bill pays for police and Flock cameras. I can’t wait to vote to cut taxes in November.

EDITED TO ADD: Some people chose to engage in petty personal attacks in comments. All comments to this post have been locked.

By Divemedic, ago

Every Time

Every time I see a story like this, cops comment on here about how I am “anti-cop.” No, I am anti criminal. This cop beat the shit out of someone, breaking 8 ribs, puncturing his lung, and giving him a concussion. Then he compounded it by turning off his body camera (thereby destroying evidence) and lied in his arrest report (thereby committing perjury).

By Divemedic, ago

Above the Law

A police officer was caught using his lights and sirens to get to work while driving at speeds up to 124 miles per hour, all because he was late for work. The internal affairs investigation used the GPS tracker in his patrol car to verify his speed. He was caught when other officers saw him driving by with his emergency lights on. I applaud those officers for trying to be good cops.

I want you to consider that the new law in Florida declares a person to be a “super speeder” for going 50 mph or more over the limit or traveling at 100 mph or more. “Super speeding” is a criminal offense.

In the end, the cop in question was given a slap on the wrist when he received a three-day unpaid suspension, lost his take-home police vehicle for 30 days and was placed on six months of employment probation. I’m sure he also was given a good, stern talking to. The police chief said GPS can’t be used to establish speed, therefore they couldn’t do anything more.

Under Florida Statute § 316.2398, the unauthorized or improper display of emergency red warning lights by a volunteer firefighter on a private vehicle is a nonmoving traffic violation, and results in mandatory dismissal from their firefighting organization.

Why aren’t cops held at least to the standard that volunteer firefighters have to follow?

By Divemedic, ago

So Which Is It?

There are people who comment on this site that Flock cameras are simply filming you in a public place, and they don’t have a problem with it. OK, so then why do cops have a problem with you filming them in a public place, to the point where they will approach you with a threat of arrest while off duty?

If cameras aren’t a threat, then why are these cops taking action?

Again, cameras aren’t the issue. A person filming me isn’t a threat to me, as long as he is doing it in public. What’s the issue is what is being done with that footage. Are government officials building a database? That’s an issue.

Is the guy filming the cops just posting the videos online? Not an issue.

Is the guy filming using that footage to threaten or harm cops or anyone else? Then it is an issue, but you have to have more evidence to arrest or even detain than “guy is filming.” That’s why the standard is “reasonable articulable suspicion.”

Discuss

By Divemedic, ago

Legal Blood

Years ago, when I was still a paramedic with the fire department, we would occasionally draw blood from patients and turn it over to the police. More than once, I drew a resisting patient’s blood while a police officer held a taser to their neck.

Why would I do that, you ask?

Florida has long had a specific statute, § 316.1933, covering crashes involving death or serious bodily injury. It provides that when an officer has probable cause to believe an impaired driver caused a death or serious bodily injury, the officer shall require a blood test. The statute also expressly authorizes the officer to use reasonable force if necessary, and it authorizes physicians, nurses, paramedics, and other qualified personnel to draw the blood at the officer’s request. It also grants immunity to those assisting with the draw when acting under the statute at the direction of a law enforcement officer.

For many years, the prevailing view, based largely on the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision in Schmerber v. California (1966), was that alcohol dissipating from the bloodstream created an exigency justifying a warrantless blood draw in many DUI cases. The person’s liver was literally destroying the evidence every minute, and the delay in obtaining a warrant was the difference between a DUI homicide and a drunk walking away.

I understood why the law was there, and I also disagreed with it. My favorite quote is “better 1,000 guilty go free than 1 innocent person be convicted.” The truth is that the DUI law changes have had no discernible effect on the rate of traffic fatalities. Of course, the fact that the government uses traffic offenses as a cash cow, with Florida making $100 million a year from traffic tickets has nothing to do with it. In California, it was discovered that 1,600 DUI checkpoints yielded only 3,200 DUI arrests (two per checkpoint), but resulted in $40 million in traffic tickets and 24,000 vehicle confiscations. Cops also won, being paid $30 million in overtime to staff the checkpoints.

That was the law when I retired from the fire department in 2011. Then in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Missouri v. McNeely. The Court held that the natural metabolization of alcohol by itself does not automatically create an exigency. Instead, officers generally need a warrant unless the facts of the particular case make obtaining one impractical.

After McNeely, Florida appellate courts repeatedly held that, despite § 316.1933, the State still had to show either:

  • a warrant,
  • valid consent,
  • or a recognized exception to the warrant requirement (such as genuine exigent circumstances).

By Divemedic, ago

Your Cars Are Snitches, Bitches

In a sign of things to come, a Waymo autonomous vehicle in California pulled into a parking lot, locked the passengers inside, and notified police when two 15 year old passengers were drinking alcohol and shooting nearby pedestrians with water guns.

There are those who would call me a criminal lover for being opposed to that. Consider where this is going- your car will monitor you for everything illegal and drive you to the cops when it detects lawbreaking behavior. Tore the tags off your mattress? Didn’t follow the instructions on that can of bug spray to the letter? I promise you that each and every one of us breaks the law each and every day.

  1. If you are using a household cleaner, and the label tells you to mix a cap full of the cleaner with a gallon of water, and you only mix it with 3.5 quarts of water, you have just used a labeled product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Felony.
  2. In Texas, it is a felony to own more than 4 sex toys (chapter 43). 11 of the 2,324 acts that the Texas Legislature thinks are worthy of being called felonies, have to do with acts that you can commit with or to an oyster.
  3. In Montana It is a felony for a wife to open her husband’s mail.
  4. In Florida, it is a felony to access WiFi without permission. There was a man who was convicted in 2005 of using the WiFi of a restaurant that advertised free WiFi for customers, because he was using the access from the parking lot while the establishment was closed. Since it was advertised as free WiFi for customers, and he could not be a customer while the business was closed, hello felony.
  5. It’s a felony to have a raffle in Georgia, unless you are registered as a non-profit organization with the state.
  6. In Michigan, it is a felony for a man to seduce an unmarried woman, punishable by 5 years in prison. Adultery is also a felony in Michigan, but only if the spouse being cheated on is the one who complained.
  7. In Mississippi, if you promise to marry a woman, have sex with her, and then decide not to marry, you are guilty of a felony punishable by ten years in prison.

Soon, your television, car, cell phone, and everything else you own will be monitoring you to ensure you are following the rules. All of them, even those that no sane person would consider to be a crime. Again, the only power a government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Making more criminals makes the government, and those who are employed by it, more powerful.

Of course, not everyone will be tossed in jail. Instead, you will be used as a confidential informant to help convict your friends and acquaintances. Being an informant means getting away with continuing your criminal career, but with protection from the cops. My brother found that out firsthand when a couple of meth users who were CIs for the local cops tried to rob him at his place of business, and he was the one arrested when the criminals escaped and then called their cop handlers.

I don’t know how I got on this dystopian timeline, but I really wish I were in a different one.

By Divemedic, ago

Only Ones

Here are a couple of cops who were arrested for billing a neighborhood for security service they didn’t perform. One of the officers ripped them off for over $15k. I’ve long had a problem with cops working as security.

They wear their department issued uniform, carry a department issued firearm and radio while driving a department issued patrol car. They reimburse the agency they work for for the use of those items, then are free to rent themselves out. Depending on the situation, they are considered to be security guards or police.

If they want to search you but don’t have a warrant or probable cause, they are security guards. If they ask you a question and you lie, they are then cops and you have broken the law. If you resist them in any way, they are cops. They get to have things however it works out best for them. As this great grandmother found out, when Disney security searched her bags as a part of a security check and she was arrested for having CBD oil. The charges were later dropped, but this illustrates the problem I have with cops as security. They can search you, and you have no constitutional protections. But let them find something illegal, and they instantly can use the fruits of what would otherwise be an unconstitutional search and arrest you.

Oh, and should that cop have to use any sort of force, you can bet your ass that they will be fully covered by magic police immunity.

This entire practice is also a clear conflict of interest. There are quite a few Orlando Police who work for Universal Studios. I once watched a famous singer use a shit load of drugs while backstage at a concert at Universal Studios, right in front of uniformed OPD officers working off duty security. Those cops didn’t do shit, because they know that pissing off their employer (the Studios) by arresting performers will ensure that their cushy and lucrative off duty gig will go away. In some cases, they make more working as security than they do as police officers. They aren’t going to let anything like the oath they took to the law and the constitution get in the way of that.

I don’t think the general practice of off duty security should be legal.

By Divemedic, ago

Nope

Several members of Congress have introduced a bill that would allow current and former members of the US military’s special forces to carry concealed weapons nationwide, despite any other laws to the contrary. I’ve seen stories about this bill in a few places over the past few weeks, and I just can’t support it. The idea that we are going to pass a Federal law that grants some sort of “super citizen” status to certain people, who then have rights not available to the rest of us?

No.

I would note that all three of the congressmen who sponsored this bill are former special forces. It’s typical self serving crap that politicians vote to give themselves more rights than the rest of us. The same thing happened with LEOSA. The entire premise behind that travesty of a law was cops might run into some criminal they arrested and need to defend themselves, as if some cop from Bumfukt, Iowa has a higher chance of running into a criminal while spending the day at Disneyland in California than I would is simply ridiculous, and there is no evidence that it actually happens.

The same for special forces soldiers. They don’t need such a permit while carrying out their duties, because they are on duty. For former soldiers, there is no need for them to have more rights than the rest of us. Don’t give me the line that this will be used as a stepping stone for more bills later- as soon as cops got their special LEOSA rights, they promptly turned around and lobbied against our right to carry. I’m not falling for that one again.

If these Republicans want to expand carry rights: do it for everyone, not just yourselves and your friends.

By Divemedic, ago