Cops

Breaking: FBI Caught Lying in Court

Here is the story:

Not only has the FBI been hiding exculpatory evidence, it was also found that agents were altering testimony and documents, as well as destroying other documents, all at the explicit orders of a supervisory agent. Not only that, but it came out during the trial that the FBI was illegally intercepting communications between defendants in jail and their attorneys before then forwarding the contents of those communications to the prosecutor in the case. This is a clear violation of the Constitutional rights of the defendants.

The defense attorneys immediately filed motions in the case, but instead of considering those motions, the judge had the jury leave the room and then “paused” the trial so that the FBI and prosecutors could review this new development, or in other words, work together to get their story straight.

Corruption. The ballot box destroyed on November 20, 2020. Now the jury box is gone. What boxes are left?

By Divemedic, ago

Why is the Answer Always College?

The latest trend in the press thinking that they are experts in all things, is the claim that US police training needs to be more like police training in Europe. They claim that police in other countries receive more training than the 6 months that is typical in the US.

police recruits in Japan get between 15 and 21 months of training. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training. And in Finland, police education takes three years to complete.

So they want to make police training a 4 year degree? What will that cost? I do agree with them that police training is too much like military boot camp. If you train your police like soldiers, you can expect that your police will act like soldiers. I don’t think that the problem is in how long the training is, I think the problem is in the institutional mindset- “War on crime,” the “War on drugs,” that sort of thing. When you think of criminal justice as warfare, you get police who act as if they are on a battlefield.

That’s where my agreement with them ends. The next claim simply tells me that they have never dealt with someone who needs to be taken somewhere, but isn’t going to go. You are assuming that the people who police contact are rational.

As a street medic, and even in the ED, we encounter people who can’t be reasoned with, yet still need to go somewhere or do something. Whether it’s due to mental illness or simply because they are assholes, some people just need to be forced into compliance. Talking only works on people who are rational.

Imagine negotiating with a spree shooter. Someone who believes in what they are doing so strongly that they are willing to gun down a dozen or more people isn’t going to be negotiated out of their act.

You can tell that some people have juts never had to deal with those kinds of people.

By Divemedic, ago

Thousands of Rounds?

ATF should be called Agents That Fib. They are on the record as claiming someone with a Glock switch is capable of firing ‘thousands of rounds per minute’ from a Glock handgun. Anyone with gun knowledge knows that they are talking about cyclic rate when they say that a gun is firing 1,200 rounds per minute. That would require a weapon to have an unlimited supply of ammunition. It’s an attempt at dishonest manipulation of soccer moms.

“It turns a semi-automatic firearm into, essentially, a machine gun,” explained [ATF Agent] Estevan. “So, instead of one round being discharged from a firearm with the single pull of the trigger, when the switch is installed onto a firearm, you’re looking at 1,200 rounds with the single pull of the trigger within a minute.”

If you have to lie in order to make your point, perhaps your point isn’t worth making.

By Divemedic, ago

Cops Harassing People

Falling asleep on a park bench will get the cops to check up on you. Ok, I’m fine with that. Then they decided that he wasn’t giving them the information they wanted, so they decided to arrest him. This sort of thing is why police immunity should be conditional on whether or not the police were acting within the law, within department policy, or at least making an attempt to do so.

Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off getting rid of the cops and handling criminals ourselves.

By Divemedic, ago

Eat Your Gun

The Uvalde Police Chief was interviewed the day after the school shooting. During that interview, he admitted that – well, you can read it for yourself:

When I opened the [school] door, I saw the smoke,” he recalled, saying “shots started firing” again as he and a colleague started nearing the classroom where Ramos was holed up with kids and teachers. “Obviously, I backed off and started taking cover,” the lead officer said, which CNN noted was in clear defiance of training that insists officers risk their own lives to “neutralize” active shooters.

“I know there’s probably victims in there and with the shots I heard, I know there’s probably somebody who’s going to be deceased,” he acknowledged of the room he backed away from.

But he felt the “priority” was the “preservation of life” of those not under the “immediate threat.”

“Once I realized that was going on, my first thought is that we need to vacate” the rest of the school, he said, telling arriving officers that “we’re taking [other] kids out first.”

You know what else would have saved the lives of those who weren’t under imminent threat? Enter the room and shoot the murdering bastard in the fucking face!

If he had any scruples at all, he would eat the barrel of his service pistol. Then again, if he had any scruples at all, this would never have happened.

Sorry, but cops are seldom heroes and when push comes to shove, they back out and hope someone else will take care of it. Parkland, Uvalde, and others have proven this to be the case.

By Divemedic, ago

Professional Negligence

Imagine that a man’s truck with half a dozen guns inside of it is stolen. The man uses the “Find My Phone” app to locate his phone, which is presumably still in the stolen truck. The app tells him that his phone is somewhere within a 4 block radius of a location, so he drove around the area in a rented car and somehow came to the conclusion that his phone, and presumably his stolen guns and truck, were located in a woman’s garage.

The cop assigned to the case somehow bought into this hunch, secured a warrant, and performed a SWAT raid of the house. The resident of the house, a 77 year old woman, opened her door to an armed and armored SWAT team who handcuffed her and placed her in the back of a patrol car, leaving her in there for hours without food, water, or her medication. The search, which lasted for several hours, didn’t turn up a truck, a cell phone, or any guns. In fact, there was no evidence of any criminal activity found there at all. The entire incident happened in Denver.

The woman has filed a lawsuit against the police (pdf alert), as she rightly should have. A search warrant is only supposed to be issued on “probable cause” that evidence of a crime is located on the property to be searched. The circle drawn by “find my phone” is an approximate location based upon the cell tower that the phone is connected to. In this case, the circle was four blocks wide and covered six different properties. That isn’t an indication that HER house was the one where the phone was. It isn’t even an indication that the phone is located within that circle.

The lawsuit alleges that the detective failed to disclose his inexperience using the “Find My” app, failed to explain how the ‘Find My’ app works, identify what technology it uses to produce its results, or establish that the app was working correctly. Going only on a screenshot from the “Find My” app that pointed to Johnson’s home, the search warrant was approved.

The police damaged the woman’s home by breaking her garage door and climbing atop her new dining room chairs to break holes into her ceiling, they also damaged irreplaceable collectables in the home. The detective then told the elderly woman on the day of the raid that the Denver police would pay nothing to cover any of these damages.

People need to have a belief that the police are not just another criminal street gang. The more I interact with and see how police work, the more I come to believe that we would be better without them. I have only called them a few times, and each time they did nothing more than write a report. It was a waste of time.

I have said before: the police need to clean up their ranks. I don’t think you can, because I believe that the bad cops far outnumber the good ones. The police have become just another group of criminals who prey on the people in this nation who actually produce wealth. They are a street gang with badges and qualified immunity.

By Divemedic, ago

It Gets Worse

On the Brevard county deputy ND homicide. He pointed the gun at the other deputy and pulled the trigger. When it didn’t go bang, he racked the slide and did it again. The second time he pulled the trigger, the pistol functioned as designed.

One thing that makes it worse is what the Sheriff got from the entire event:

he still believed the firearm was unloaded but should have known the magazine containing ammunition was possibly in the firearm by the weight of the gun,

Just like the Baldwin shooting, the shooter in this case deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I would also suggest that the entire Sheriff’s department be forced to undergo a 4 hour firearm safety refresher course. This incident is a sure sign that training is lacking and attention to firearm safety is not being taken seriously.

By Divemedic, ago

Only Ones

Another case proving how police officers are more trained than us in the handling of weapons. One Brevard county deputy shot and killed another, his roommate, when he pointed his pistol at him and pulled the trigger. He claimed that he thought it was “unloaded.” Fucking dumbass. What the fuck passes for police firearm training in Brevard county? Apparently, they haven’t heard of the four rules.

  1. Treat all guns as if they are always loaded.
  2. Don’t point a gun at anything you aren’t willing to destroy
  3. Don’t put your finger on the trigger until ready to shoot.
  4. Know what your target is, and what is behind it.

You can get away with violating one, maybe even two. Unintentionally shooting someone requires that you violate at least three of them at the same time. This is no different than the Baldwin shooting.

I have had a negligent discharge. Two, in fact.

One of them was when I was dry firing a handgun. I had done it for a bit, then loaded it. In a moment of stupidity, I again pulled the trigger and shot my dresser. I was 19 years old at the time.

The second came while I was at the range. I pulled the trigger on a Smith and Wesson 4506, and nothing happened. The hammer never even fell. Keeping the firearm (mostly) pointed down range, I looked at it as I pulled the trigger again. This time, it fired and blew a hole in the ceiling of the pistol range. I was 21 at the time.

Note that, even though there was a negligent discharge, no one was hurt. Why? Because I am not a complete dumbass and wasn’t pointing it at another person. That was a long time ago, when Reagan was still President. I learned my lessons.

The worst part of all of this is that we gun owners will see this “gun death” used as an example on why gun rights should be taken from us while we hear about how cops should be the only ones trusted to have guns.

By Divemedic, ago

Bad Apple, again

A rookie cop is answering a disturbance call at a local McDonald’s. In the parking lot, he sees a car unrelated to the call that looks like one that had fled from him the day before for having the wrong plates attached to the car. Having never seen My Cousin Vinny and realizing that you can mistake a metallic mint green 64 Skylark with a 63 Tempest, he decided that running the tag to confirm it was the same car was silly, and figured that he would just walk over to this car and demand that the driver step out of the car.

Since there was obviously no reasonable suspicion that the driver had committed a crime, much less probably committed a crime, what came next was an entirely illegal stop. Let’s see what happened next:

So he dumped 10 shots into a car with a 17 year old in the driver’s seat. Now there are many who will jump in and say that the kid should have complied. Here is the issue- the entire stop was illegal to begin with. It doesn’t matter what the kid did or didn’t do.

Multiple bullets struck the teen, who stopped his car just down the road. He was transported to the hospital and is now on life support. He is not expected to live. Get this- the cops arrested the kid for evading detention with a vehicle and assault on a peace officer. The local prosecutor, realizing that this was a shitty case, refused to prosecute.

The San Antonio cops fired this cop immediately, which they can do because he is still in his probationary period. My guess is that this kid’s family has got a very large paycheck coming. I’m sure that they would rather have their child back.

Perhaps if this kid had been armed with an AR-15, the cops would have stood around for an hour and a half before deciding what to do. This was a cop who was pissed that a ‘bad guy’ got away, and was looking for a little cop revenge. Instead, the cop lost his job and has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault by a police official. When this kid dies, and he probably will, the cop will be facing a murder charge.

Here is Donut’s take on the shooting:

By Divemedic, ago

Surprising Restraint

A female cop who safely took cover outside while children were being slaughtered for over an hour in the Uvalde incident was seen on body cam video saying that, if her kid was in there, she would have gone into the school to save him. I guess other people’s kids weren’t important enough to her. She was fired, and rightly so.

Less than three months later, the department quietly rehired her. It wasn’t until the parents of dead kids discovered it that she was re-fired. To the parents of Uvalde, the lesson should be clear: their local politicians and cops don’t give a flying rats ass about them or their children. If some parents in that town don’t start demanding that every, single. cop. in that town be fired, then they and their kids deserve whatever happens to them. The contempt that is evident in the stealth rehiring of this cowardly bitch speaks volumes on how they feel about the children of their town.

What surprises me even more is that some distraught parent of a dead child hasn’t decided on some vengeance. The first kid who was killed is on the shooter. Most of the ones that were killed later? Those all lie at the feet of the cops, and I am surprised at the restraint shown by the parents.

Is it restraint, or herd mentality?

By Divemedic, ago