Police State

Police Dogs

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.

On Using Dogs as Weapons

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?

Constitutional Rights

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 Want Treats

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.

By Divemedic, ago

Entrapment

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:

By Divemedic, ago

Sad, but Necessary

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.

By Divemedic, ago

CCW= Arrest at Gunpoint

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.

By Divemedic, ago

Policing For Profit, Episode CXVII

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.

By Divemedic, ago

Policing for Profit

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.

By Divemedic, ago

Isn’t it Still Tyranny?

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.

By Divemedic, ago

Still Counting Bullet Holes

Two cars full of NRA members white men gang members unidentified young men engaged in a running gun battle in Winter Haven, Florida. All four people riding in one car, and at least on person in the other car, were hit. The Sheriff’s Department spokesman said that they are still counting casings and bullet holes to try and determine how many shots were fired.

Winter Haven is known as the bailiwick of Sheriff Grady Judd. Some try to make him into some sort of ‘tough guy’ hero cop. While I certainly commend his stance on people who commit violent crimes, he is also the sort of grandstanding cop that I can’t abide.

Don’t forget that Grady Judd is also one of the Sheriffs who has broken Florida law by lobbying state legislators to defeat open carry and defeat Constitutional carry. It is illegal for government officials to lobby the State Legislature for changes to the law, but that doesn’t matter to a police official who supports ‘law and order’ when the law is in opposition to his orders.

His opinion on guns seems to change, depending on who is listening:

By Divemedic, ago

Third World Policing

Wirecutter over at Knukledraggin my Life Away points out a story of a tiny Alabama town that has discovered that it can use cops as a money making machine and has become the worst speed trap in the entire nation. The town has less than 1300 residents, but has at least sixteen full time cops and a number of part time cops. (The police chief, claiming “security” won’t tell how many cops he has) Those cops make over 1,000 arrests, write over 3,000 traffic citations, and have their own SWAT team, complete with an armored vehicle that they call a “riot control vehicle.” (How big of a riot can that small of a town have?)

Read the article that the post is based on, and think about this quote:

Chief Jones testified under oath that just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems, and seven are tinted all the way around, making it impossible to see inside. Jones testified his officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias.

These dumbasses think that they are badasses because they carry the authority of a badge that they don’t even wear. Thinking that they are some kid of secret agents, they act more like a street gang that is shaking down the citizens for protection money. They refer to themselves as “agents” and do not provide their identification, even on arrest affidavits:

The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside. Instead, the arresting officer was listed as “Agent JS,” while the assisting officer was “Agent AR.”

Arrests in Alabama come from all sorts of things that you wouldn’t think are a crime. For example: It is considered road rage in Alabama to drive in the left lane for more than a mile and a half. One of my favorite legal Youtube channels is Lehto’s Law. Take a look:

The entire thing is a scam. The traffic court judge is a local lawyer who was hired as the municipal traffic court judge to hold court one day a month. When audited, the town had no written budget. Wanna take odds on some skimming off the top by the police chief, Mayor, and judge?

These idiots are so predictable, it begs for an ambush. The kinder version would have a person with hidden cameras break a traffic law in full view of Roscoe Coaltrain, and when he pulls you over it seems like it would be easy to get some civil rights violations on film. Then they can be taken down by some good attorneys.

The more aggressive ambush would be to goad them into a traffic stop, coming to a halt in a kill zone, then having an ambush team light up one of these would be secret agents. Since they are in unmarked vehicles and wearing clothes with no insignia, one could argue that they look more like a criminal gang conducting an ambush than they do a legitimate police force.

By Divemedic, ago