It’s looking more and more like the FBI staged the entire pipe bomb incident last January 6. Read this from American Greatness for more details. The summary?
So, either the Secret Service missed the device in clear view outside the DNC headquarters that day before the arrival of Kamala Harris or there never was an explosive at either location and the FBI is not telling the truth. Again.
I know where I am going to put my money.
A restaurant owner filed a complaint about a Federal cop with that cop’s supervisor. The cop responded by getting other Federal agencies (including the IRS) to place the owner under a microscope. The restaurant owner sued, and now that case is headed to SCOTUS.
If SCOTUS holds that this cop is immune from lawsuits, even while he is willingly and knowingly violating someone’s Constitutional rights, expect police behavior to get worse. We all know that SCOTUS is likely to support the cop’s behavior.
It’s almost like we live in a police state where the only way you can get justice is to mete it out yourself.
JKB over at GunfreeZone and Wirecutter over at Knuckledraggin My Life Away each posted an article about a woman who had her scalp removed by a police K9. Now I don’t feel sorry for that particular woman, but the comments over at Wirecutter’s took a turn into whether or not police should be using dogs for law enforcement. I found the topic to be interesting enough for its own post.
Dogs are unreliable as weapons. They frequently bite those that they shouldn’t, and refuse to stop biting when commanded to stop. As a medic, I had two memorable wrong bites. One was a female police officer that was bitten high up on her thigh when a police K9 bit her during a foot pursuit, instead of biting the suspect that she was chasing.
The second was a guy who was fleeing a traffic stop. When his vehicle got stuck in traffic, he fled on foot. The pursuing officer released the K9, and it caught up to him a quarter of a mile later. During the several minutes that it took for the handler to arrive, the dog removed the suspect’s right but cheek. Was that a proportional use of force?
A dog can’t read the Constitution. It can’t understand the finer legal issues involved in the use of force or probable cause. All the dog knows is that if it pleases its handler, it gets a reward. It doesn’t know that if it removes a suspect’s butt cheek for nothing more than running from a cop, that this level of force is legally lethal force. The dog’s cop handler would know that, but he is sometimes blocks away. If a cop isn’t authorized to shoot someone, why should they be permitted to sic a body deforming fur missile on them?
Dogs are very good at reading people. They know that if they give their handler what he wants, they get a reward. If the cop wants the dog to alert on a car, the dog will alert on a car. There was one study that actually supported that, but once the study was published, cops have refused to participate in any more studies unless those studies are being performed by pro-policing organizations.
Cops don’t even keep records of how often dogs alert to drugs and then no drugs are found. The police say:
“There’s been cars that my dog’s hit on… and just because there wasn’t a product in it, doesn’t mean the dog can’t smell it,” says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer with the Walla Walla Police Department. “[The drug odor] gets permeated in clothing, it gets permeated in the headliners in cars.”
The problem here is obvious- even giving the dog the benefit of the doubt, probable cause means that the search is being done because drugs are probably there. What the cop in the above quote is saying is that by alerting, the dog is indicating that drugs may have been there at some time in the past. The dog indicates the odor of drugs, but not the presence of drugs. That isn’t the same thing and shouldn’t be enough to trigger a warrantless search of someone’s property.
So in short, I think that dogs should not be used to attack people or manufacture probable cause. I would be OK with them being used in bomb or cadaver detection (as long as they don’t trigger warrantless probable cause searches of people’s property) and in tracking people, rescue work, and searching for missing people or bodies. K9’s have been misused and abusing people’s rights for too long.
Remember when I said “How do you spot the Fed or the police informant? He is the one urging you to break the law?”
This is proof of how far the cops will go to frame people:
It isn’t time yet. The people who would oppose government don’t have enough popular support to win the fight. Yet. That is why scenes like this, as sad and infuriating as they are, have to happen:
The average American isn’t going to take sides unless one side or the other overtly plays the cowboy in the black hat. Scenes where frail old ladies with walkers are trampled by horses and cops butt stroke unarmed protesters who actually ARE peaceful will have to be played dozens of times before support rises to the point where things turn.
Every time a scene like this happens, a few people change their minds. The cops aren’t doing themselves any good by being this heavy handed.
A woman in Minneapolis is pulled over for a seatbelt violation and for using a cell phone while driving. The cop who pulls her over sees her CCW in her wallet and loses his shit.
The woman says that this is common behavior for black motorists. I disagree. I had a similar experience at the hands of an Orange County Deputy Sergeant a few years ago. I don’t think it is necessarily a black/white thing. It’s a cop combat mentality thing.
There is an old quote where a bank robber was asked why he robs banks. He replied, “Because that is where the money is.” It seems that the police have decided to take his advice and begin robbing the modern day version of the stagecoach. The Feds are helping them.
Sheriffs in California and Kansas have exploited the fact that marijuana distribution, while legal in those states, is illegal under Federal Law. Because of this fact, they are having deputies conduct traffic stops on the armored cars and confiscating all of the money. In the case of Kansas, no law is being broken in Kansas. The cops are merely stopping the armored cars that are transporting the cash from Missouri pot shops to Colorado banks.
As soon as the money is seized, the cops turn the money over to the Feds, which places it out of the jurisdiction of state judges, who are then unable to intervene. Under Federal forfeiture laws, the local cops get 80% of whatever the Federal government confiscates. Getting $800,000 for a traffic stop is a pretty lucrative business move.
This is purely an attempt to use badges to conduct armed robbery. The cops want people not to oppose them, but that is pretty hard to do when you are acting more like a criminal gang than you are a legitimate law enforcement agency.
After my post from a couple of days ago, it has become apparent that some people think that speed cameras are a good idea, saying that they don’t speed, and are tired of people who do. It’s cute that those people think that speed cameras have anything to do with traffic safety or actual speeding.
In Baltimore, a speed camera issued a speeding ticket to a stationary car. The real story here isn’t that one car was erroneously ticketed. No, the real story is the fact that Baltimore’s 164 cameras have issued $48 million in tickets over the last three years. If the amount of the ticket, $40, is typical, this means that 400,000 tickets a year are issued by those 164 cameras: roughly 2400 tickets for each camera. The officers that review the pictures before a ticket is issued review and issue 1200 tickets per day. On an 8 hour workday, that leaves just 24 seconds for each picture to be reviewed and a citation issued. In other words, this is nothing but a revenue generator with few safeguards or oversight.
Officials in Heath, Ohio installed 2 speed cameras to watch for excessive speed on Route 79, an area that had seen only one crash in the previous two years. Those two cameras alone accounted for 5,000 traffic citations in just 4 weeks.
Since it was such a money maker, ten more cameras were installed to watch intersections in town and look for red light runners. Those ten cameras were responsible for 5,000 more tickets their first month. At those intersections, light runners had been responsible for only 16 traffic accidents over the previous two years.
In all, the traffic tickets will cost the drivers in the area more than $12,000,000 in fines each year, of which the city will keep $10,00,000.
Then there was the Long Island traffic cameras that were responsible for $2.4 million in School Zone speeding tickets during the summer, when there was no school in session.
The big winner here is actually the private company that installs and runs the cameras. They frequently are involved in kickback schemes.
Miami, Washington, DC, and half a dozen other cities have been involved in this fleecing of the public. No oversight, with a private company running the camera while giving some of the take back to the city.
The Biden infrastructure bill? It’s bringing speed cameras to Florida.
I need to look into devices to block my plates from camera view. Suggestions?
Let’s say that the cops want to see if you have anything illegal in your house, but don’t have any probable cause with which to get a warrant. So instead, they coerce a local burglar into breaking into your home and reporting on what he sees, so they can use his report to obtain a warrant. Has the government still violated your rights? Many people would say yes.
Now let’s say that the government wants to control what you can say. It would be against the highest law of the land for them to do so. With that being the case, the government instead gets private industry to shut down what you have to say. Has the government still violated your rights? Many people would say yes, although sadly, many would also be OK with that.
So what if the FBI bought spyware that enabled them to break into your phone? Would that be OK? Even if they promised not to actually use it? Just the tip, I swear.