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"constant wailing from some idiot in a tower"
"constant wailing from some idiot in a tower"
CC dissing the Muslim call to prayer.
Wonder what he thinks about church bells. It's functionally the same.
LIE AND DENY: SECRECY AND SU ION SURROUND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT
“The Sheriff’s Department is much worse than LAPD,” one lawyer said in a Knight Ridder investigation into the LASD. That was in the summer of 1991, blurry footage of Rodney King being beaten by four Los Angeles Police Department officers haunting the nation. The lawyer continued: “A growing joke in our circles is you never would have had the Rodney King videotape if they were sheriff’s deputies, because they just would have shot him.”
The sheriff at the time was Sherman Block, who died in 1998 and was replaced by Leroy “Lee” Baca, who had spent three decades rising steadily through the LASD ranks. The department was his from 1998 until 2014.
Now, though, Baca is probably headed to prison for lying to federal investigators looking into abuses in the jails run by his department. Because he took a plea deal, the sentence, to be doled out in May, won’t be longer than six months.
The sentence for Baca’s longtime undersheriff, Paul Tanaka, who was convicted earlier this month on a similar array of charges, could be up to 15 years.
Neither man had any direct connection to Richardson’s disappearance, but
the secrecy, tribalism and cynical dishonesty that tarnished that investigation have manifested elsewhere: in the horrific abuses in the Los Angeles jail system, the nation’s largest, which the LASD operates; in the racial profiling by LASD deputies across the Antelope Valley; in charges of fawning favoritism for celebrities but often belligerent disdain for the average citizen.
Bob Olmsted, a former LASD commander who mounted a failed bid for the department’s top spot in 2014, tells me the men in charge of the department had an modus operandi for all potentially troublesome situations: “lie and deny.”
“They destroyed the organization,” he says of Baca and Tanaka. “They destroyed the public trust.”
http://www.newsweek.com/los-angeles-... ion-450421
Last edited by boutons_deux; 04-29-2016 at 05:27 AM.
NYPD Chief: Police ‘Will Continue to Aggressively Enforce Nuisance Abatement’
“We have and will continue, and I will emphasize that, we will continue to aggressively enforce nuisance abatement as a cornerstone of our efforts to keep neighborhoods safe,” Bratton said.
"And bodega owners who want to continue to provide useful services to communities, fine. They want to continue to poison the communities with illegally selling knives, illegally selling alcohol, illegally selling drugs such as K2, well we’re coming. We’re going to come with every tool available to us.”
“Nuisance abatement is that tool,” he said. “I like it, and we’re gonna keep using it.”
the NYPD frequently brought nuisance cases against immigrant-owned shops, using stings to extract settlements in which storeowners agreed to warrantless searches, steep fines, and to install cameras and data-storing card readers that police can access at any time.
Many storeowners complained they’d been entrapped, describing instances in which undercover operatives came in during a rush, threw money down and walked out, obscuring what they had bought. Merchants said they often found out about nuisance cases when officers served them with closing orders shuttering their business until the matter was resolved.
In cases involving alcohol violations, merchants sometimes faced a kind of double jeopardy, getting hit with sanctions both by the State Liquor Authority and the city based on the same allegations.
The president of the Bodega Association, Ramon Murphy, said earlier this week that his group is considering a civil rights lawsuit over what he deemed disparate treatment.
“The police are picking on the most vulnerable stores, those with owners that are less educated about city laws and regulations,” Murphy said. “They are using intimidation tactics that force the owners to give up their legal rights. We will fight back with all of the legal weapons at our disposal.”
The Daily News and ProPublica reviewed 646 nuisance abatement cases filed by the NYPD against businesses over an 18-month period beginning in 2013. The review found that the businesses targeted were almost exclusively located in neighborhoods where most of the residents are minorities. Almost 60% of the cases cited alcohol violations.
https://www.propublica.org/article/n...ent=1461871781
If the police state wants to take you down, they will take you down.
A Death Sentence in Louisiana Rarely Means You’ll be Executed
Four out of five death sentences in Louisiana since 1976 have been reversed.
And for every three executions the state carried out, one death row prisoner was exonerated.
These statistics are among the most notable in an analysis of the death penalty in Louisiana,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2...ted#.HooJ7qW4q
Madness
In Florida prisons, mentally ill inmates have been tortured, driven to suicide, and killed by guards
an inmate whispered to her, “You know they starve us, right?”
Oh, this guy must be paranoid or schizophrenic,” she said recently. Moreover, she’d been warned during her training that prisoners routinely made false accusations against guards.
Then she heard an inmate in another wing of the T.C.U. complain that meal trays often arrived at his cell without food. After noticing that several prisoners were alarmingly thin, she decided to discuss the matter with Dr. Cristina Perez, who oversaw the inpatient unit.
In theory, the T.C.U. was designed to provide mentally ill inmates with a safe environment in which they would receive treatment that might allow them to return to the main compound. Krzykowski discovered, however, that many inmates were locked up in single-person cells.
Solitary confinement was supposed to be reserved for prisoners who had committed serious disciplinary infractions. In forced isolation, inmates often deteriorated rapidly. As Krzykowski put it, “So many guys would be mobile and interactive when they first came to the T.C.U., and then a few months later they would be sleeping in their cells in their own waste.”
Insuring that inmates with mental illnesses receive psychiatric care is a cons utional obligation, according to Estelle v. Gamble, a 1976 case in which the Supreme Court held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners” amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
“What’s going on with Rainey?” Krzykowski asked a guard.
“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll put him in the shower,” he told her.
Krzykowski remembers hearing this and feeling reassured. “I was thinking, O.K., lots of times people feel good after a shower, so maybe he will calm down. A nice, gentle shower with warm water.”
The next day, Krzykowski learned from some nurses that a couple of guards had indeed escorted Rainey to the shower at about eight the previous night. But he hadn’t made it back to his cell. He had collapsed while the water was running. At 10:07 P.M., he was pronounced dead.
Krzykowski assumed that he must have had a heart attack or somehow committed suicide. But the nurses said that Rainey had been locked in a stall whose water supply was delivered through a hose controlled by the guards. The water was a hundred and eighty degrees, hot enough to brew a cup of tea
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...-ill-prisoners
Dashcam video shows Chicago cop smiling while attacking reverend with kids in her car
A Chicago woman is suing local police over a 2013 incident in which two officers threatened her with their guns and pepper-sprayed her while her children were in the car, WBBM-TV reported.Rev. Catherine Brown said the two officers, Jose López and Mic e Morsi-Murphy, “beat me down to my underwear, pulled my skirt off me. They beat me with the sticks and hit me with their boots in my head.”
According to Brown, the encounter on May 13, 2013 began when she honked her horn to avert a collision with the officers’ squad car, which was speeding toward her in the alley leading to Brown’s home.
Dashcam video shows Morsi-Murphy leaving her vehicle. Brown said Morsi told her,
“B*tch, move that f*cking car back” while López pointed his gun at her head.
Brown then called police dispatchers to ask for a supervisor. Audio of the call captures her childrens’ screams.
Brown was initially charged with attempted murder, but was later convicted of reckless conduct for backing out of the alley.
She has filed an appeal on that sentence, while also suing the officers.
Records show that López has been the subject of 21 citizen complaints, while Morsi-Murphy has had 19 complaints filed against her.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/dash...e+Raw+Story%29
For-profit PIC, unstoppable.
Private juvenile center conceals abuse inquiries and pressures county to keep its business deal
Last spring, Caroline Mattson informed her superiors at Minnesota's largest private correctional facility for boys that three boys had told her they'd been sexually abused by an employee. They began an internal investigation, prompted either by that report or another.
But the leaders there — at Mesabi Academy in Buhl, Minn. — did not tell St. Louis County authorities about the allegations, a decision that avoided outside scrutiny and may have evaded state law.
Six months later, in October 2015, county officials learned of the alleged incidents, which both triggered their own investigation and contributed to a decision to end a contract critical to Mesabi's ability to operate in Minnesota.
As county officials proceeded down those paths, however, Mesabi Academy and an influential politician muscled up.
After Mesabi Academy objected to a certain investigator being on the case, St. Louis County removed him.
When the county alerted two other counties it had "health and safety" concerns about the facility, Mesabi threatened to sue.
And shortly after a St. Louis County official announced the contract was ending, a powerful politician intervened on Mesabi's behalf and expressed concern about potential job losses at the Iron Range facility. The contract was renewed.
Mesabi Academy in Buhl is Minnesota's largest privately run residential treatment facility for boys. Many residents in recent years have come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
On Friday, county officials said they had closed their six-month investigation into Mattson's allegations without determining any maltreatment had taken place. They said they had insufficient evidence.
But St. Louis County also confirmed Mesabi Academy didn't report several allegations of sex abuse to authorities.
State law required the academy to report such allegations to St. Louis County Child Protection or law enforcement within 24 hours of being told.
In all, the county said Friday it had closed its investigation into 20 allegations of maltreatment over the past 14 months, saying in each case that maltreatment could not be determined.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/05/02/mesabi-academy
The End of Prison Visitation
A new system called "video visitation" is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It's inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence — but god, it makes money.
Travis County ended all in-person visitations in May 2013, leaving video visitation as the exclusive method for people on the outside to communicate with the incarcerated. But Travis County is only on the leading edge of a new technological trend that threatens to abolish in-person visitation across the country.
Over 600 prisons in 46 states have some sort of video visitation system, and every year, more of those facilities do away with in-person visitation.
Extorting inmates' families is big business
You may have heard of the prison industrial complex, but the companies that provide corrections facilities with their communications technologies are an industrial complex all their own.
Three companies dominate the prison comms business: Securus, Telmate and Global Tel Link, also called GTL — the Verizon, AT&T and Sprint of jails.
Long before video visitation existed, prison phone calls were the bread and butter of these companies.
With exclusive contracts protecting them from compe ion, the trio of prison telecom giants ratcheted up the prices until a single phone call could cost upward of $14 a minute.
https://mic.com/articles/142779/the-...ion#.bf4mddey8
America's PIC and BigCorp s its own citizens more than Muslim terrorists could even dream of.
New Hampshire and Mass. troopers off duty after they’re caught beating motorist
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/new-...e+Raw+Story%29
probably suspended with pay a few weeks, typical punishment for cop crimes.
“I founded the SWAT team that killed my son-in-law”: A former Utah sheriff speaks out against police violence
William “Dub” Lawrence was a former sheriff who established and trained one of Utah’s first SWAT teams, only to watch in horror as that same unit killed his son-in-law in a controversial standoff years later.
The cases Dub investigates are contextualized within the growing frequency of SWAT raids and immunity laws established to prosecute the War on Drugs.
Officers in cities and small towns are routinely armed with military surplus weapons and equipment, backed by federal incentives to use what they are given.
These and other factors have led to a 15,000% increase in SWAT team raids in the United States since the late 1970s.
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/12/i_fo...lice_violence/
15,000% increase in SWAT team raids? to match the 15,000% increase in crime?
USA is a ing police state, with brutes, criminals, rapists, sadists, murderers throughout the PIC/police state.
America is ed and un able.
Any legislators gonna dare to be "soft on crime" and get voted out of office? no.
PIC/police state is only ratcheting up, never down.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-12-2016 at 11:37 PM.
As opposed to your well thought out shooting of the messenger?
more cops caring for the mentally ill
Delaware faults police but no charges in shooting of black man
The Delaware Department of Justice criticized the conduct of Wilmington police who shot dead a wheelchair-bound black man last year, but decided against filing criminal charges against any officers in the death of 28-year-old Jeremy McDole.
The report singled out one officer for "extraordinarily poor police work" and said he should be removed from any job requiring him to carry a gun in public.
Felony charges against that officer were warranted but the state opted against prosecution upon determining it was unlikely to convict him at trial, according to the report.
Three other Wilmington officers were justified in firing their weapons, the report said, in part because of uncertainty over who fired the first shot.
Police killed McDole last September after responding to a call about a man in a wheelchair who had shot himself.
About a minute after the first shot, as McDole reaches into his pants, police unload a volley of gunfire that kills him. McDole falls out of his wheelchair and into the street, where the report says police recovered a .38 that McDole had in his pants.
The report found "serious deficiencies" in how police were trained to deal with people with mental illness, disabilities, or cognitive impairments.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-de...e=domesticNews
The guy had a gun in his pants and reached in said pants. What's the problem here?
no problem at all ... for the cops. As always, their ONLY choice is to lay down a fusillade. There is absolutely no other option, is there?
What about that old white guy, mentally ill, standing in broad daylight on a street with a loaded rifle, why wasn't he shot dead, rather than talked down?
Why not? because he was white?
Or the black in a store holding a toy gun, aiming at no one. Only choice was to murder the knitter.
Try to focus on the article you posted. What's the problem here? He had a gun in his pants and reached in his pants. You cheered when Robert "Lavoy" Fini reached in his pants and was shot by the FBI. Your hypocrisy is amusing.
CIA Watchdog "Mistakenly" Destroys Its Sole Copy of Senate Torture Report
the CIA inspector general's office says it "mistakenly" destroyed its sole copy of the mass do ent "at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the do ent were being preserved."
While the deleted report was not the only copy in existence, the foul-up is already proving an embarrassment for the office, which is "responsible for independent oversight of the CIA," according to its materials.
Citing information obtained by "multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident," Isikoff explains:
The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified do ent under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.
…The deletion of the do ent has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight "out of the Keystone Cops," CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the do ent, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation methods.
This is not the first time CIA evidence has gone missing. Isikoff notes:
Ironically in light of the inspector general's actions, the intelligence committee's investigation was triggered by the CIA's admission in 2007 that it had destroyed another key piece of evidence -- hours of videotapes of the waterboarding of two "high value" detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
What's more, in 2014 the CIA hacked into the computers used by the Senate committee overseeing the report, but was later absolved for the breach by the inspector general's office.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...torture-report
The militarized police/Nat-Sec government-within-government is without restraint, oversight, beyond culpability, beyond the reach of Congress, the Exec, the courts, unstoppable, etc, etc.
America is ed and un able
Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds' Complicity
The idea that technology has a decisive role to play in improving policing was, in fact, a central plank of President Obama's policing reform task force.
In its report, released last May, the Task Force on 21st Century Policing emphasized the crucial role of technology in promoting better law enforcement, highlighting the use of police body cameras in creating greater openness. "Implementing new technologies," it claimed, "can give police departments an opportunity to fully engage and educate communities in a dialogue about their expectations for transparency, accountability, a
Police departments nationwide have been adopting powerful new technologies that are remarkably capable of intruding on people's privacy, and much of the time these are being deployed in secret, without public notice or discussion, let alone permission.
And while the task force's report says all the right things, a little digging reveals that the feds not only aren't putting the brakes on improper police use of technology, but are encouraging it -- even subsidizing the misuse of the very technology the task force believes will keep cops honest. To put it bluntly, a techno-utopia isn't remotely on the horizon, but its flipside may be.
The technology at issue is known as a "Stingray," a brand name for what's generically called a cell site simulator or IMSI catcher. By mimicking a cell phone tower, this device, developed for overseas battlefields, gets nearby cell phones to connect to it. It operates a bit like the children's game Marco Polo. "Marco," the cell-site simulator shouts out and every cell phone on that network in the vicinity replies, "Polo, and here's my ID!"
Thanks to this call-and-response process, the Stingray knows both what cell phones are in the area and where they are. In other words, it gathers information not only about a specific suspect, but any bystanders in the area as well. While the police may indeed use this technology to pinpoint a suspect's location, by casting such a wide net there is also the potential for many kinds of cons utional abuses -- for instance, sweeping up the iden ies of every person attending a demonstration or a political meeting.
Some Stingrays are capable of collecting not only cell phone ID numbers but also numbers those phones have dialed and even phone conversations. In other words, the Stingray is a technology that potentially opens the door for law enforcement to sweep up information that not so long ago wouldn't have been available to them.
All of this raises the sorts of cons utional issues that might normally be settled through the courts and public debate... unless, of course, the technology is kept largely secret, which is exactly what's been happening.
In a no-less-bizarre incident, the Sarasota Police Department was about to turn some Stingray records over to the ACLU in accordance with Florida's open-records law, when the U.S. Marshals Service swooped in and seized the records first, claiming ownership because it had deputized one local officer. And excessive efforts at secrecy are not unique to Florida, as those charged with enforcing the law commit themselves to Stingray secrecy in a way that makes them lawbreakers.
And it's not just the public that's being denied information about the devices and their uses; so are judges. Often, the police get a judge's sign-off for surveillance without even bothering to mention that they will be using a Stingray. In fact, officers regularly avoid describing the technology to judges, claiming that they simply can't violate those FBI nondisclosure agreements.
More often than not, police use Stingrays without bothering to get a warrant, instead seeking a court order on a more permissive legal standard.
This is part of the charm of a new technology for the authorities: nothing is settled on how to use it. Appellate judges in Tallahassee, Florida, for instance, revealed that local police had used the tool more than 200 times without a warrant.
In Sacramento, California, policeadmitted in court that they had, in more than 500 investigations, used Stingrays without telling judges or prosecutors.
That was "an estimated guess," since they had no way of knowing the exact number because they had conveniently deleted records of Stingray use after passing evidence discovered by the devices on to detectives.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...eds-complicity
BigCorp and the militarized NatSec state know EVERYTHING about you, but you can know nothing about them
FBI WANTS TO EXEMPT ITS MASSIVE BIOMETRIC DATABASE FROM SOME FEDERAL PRIVACY RULES
The FBI wants to block individuals from knowing if their information is in a massive repository of biometric records, which includes fingerprints and facial scans, if the release of information would "compromise" a law enforcement investigation.
The FBI’s biometric database, known as the “Next Generation Identification System,” gathers a wide scope of information, including palm prints, fingerprints, iris scans, facial and tattoo photographs, and biographies for millions of people.
On Thursday, the Justice Department agency plans to propose the database be exempt from several provisions of the Privacy Act -- legislation that requires federal agencies to share information about the records they collect with the individual subject of those records, allowing them to verify and correct them if needed.
Aside from criminals, suspects and detainees, the system includes data from people fingerprinted for jobs, licenses, military or volunteer service, background checks, security clearances, and naturalization, among other government processes.
Letting individuals view their own records, or even the accounting of those records, could compromise criminal investigations or "national security efforts," potentially revealing a “sensitive investigative technique” or information that could help a subject “avoid detection or apprehension,” the draft posting said.
http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech...-rules/128051/
Claiming "national security" alienates "inalienable rights" and destroys the Cons ution.
Machine Bias
There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.
Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.
Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.
Scores like this — known as risk assessments — are increasingly common in courtrooms across the nation. They are used to inform decisions about who can be set free at every stage of the criminal justice system, from assigning bond amounts — as is the case in Fort Lauderdale — to even more fundamental decisions about defendants’ freedom.
In Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, the results of such assessments are given to judges during criminal sentencing.
We obtained the risk scores assigned to more than 7,000 people arrested in Broward County, Florida, in 2013 and 2014 and checked to see how many were charged with new crimes over the next two years, the same benchmark used by the creators of the algorithm.
The score proved remarkably unreliable in forecasting violent crime: Only 20 percent of the people predicted to commit violent crimes actually went on to do so.
When a full range of crimes were taken into account — including misdemeanors such as driving with an expired license — the algorithm was somewhat more accurate than a coin flip. Of those deemed likely to re-offend, 61 percent were arrested for any subsequent crimes within two years.
We also turned up significant racial disparities, just as Holder feared. In forecasting who would re-offend, the algorithm made mistakes with black and white defendants at roughly the same rate but in very different ways.
- The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.
- White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants.
Could this disparity be explained by defendants’ prior crimes or the type of crimes they were arrested for? No.
We ran a statistical test that isolated the effect of race from criminal history and recidivism, as well as from defendants’ age and gender.
Black defendants were still 77 percent more likely to be pegged as at higher risk of committing a future violent crime and 45 percent more likely to be predicted to commit a future crime of any kind. (Read our analysis.)
The algorithm used to create the Florida risk scores is a product of a for-profit company, Northpointe. The company disputes our analysis.
https://www.propublica.org/article/m...nal-sentencing
as will all power, this power will be abused
FBI wants access to Internet browser history without a warrant in terrorism and spy cases
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...5565&tid=ss_tw
im sure hillary will grant their wish
The militarized, deeply, widely pervasive police state is irreversible, unstoppable.
The Cons utional "inalienable rights" have been, will be more alienated.
So where's God and his "God-given rights" enforcement team?
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