The Fugitive

Well as the under-utilized naval ship sailed away from the harbor (whosever idea that was showed how tax payer dollars are abused that one was it) to the temporary closing (as in still set up but not being used) Javitz Center and the tents of the Salvation Army or whatever weird fucking religious crew run by homophobe Franklin Graham on public lands, which could have been used well for the public to go while being locked down, get folded up we are back to just the overworked and underprepared/supplied public hospitals, and those private ones stocked by Warren Buffet, to treat the  new/next/more Covid patients. The ones in the prisons or in Convents, nursing homes well you will be fine if no one notices you are dead.  And well even those on the Subway, again wondering how many hours those bodies were there shedding viruses or whatever caused them to die.  Remember if you are not tested POS for Covid and you die you die of that but still are likely counted as dead by Covid, maybe or maybe not. Who knows?  Does anyone care?  Well apparently law enforcement does.

I had read about arrests, chases and hunts of others in other less democratic countries who had escaped Covid treatment facilities; such as the woman in Chile, Russia, India , Africa and even Israel. 

When I read this article in the Tennessean about a homeless man who “escaped” the Covid facility from the fairgrounds (where I lived only about a mile away) and was set up exclusively for homeless it again made me wonder who was being treated at the varying satellite facilities in New York and New Jersey. Something tells me not the insured or the white but what do I know? Well nothing as they don’t tell you shit screaming HIPAA laws. Well wrong again.

Yes folks buried in the article was the policy regarding HIPAA and the ruling on public safety (of which there are many guidelines) .  Good times as this is what I had been looking for when I tried to explain to someone that HIPAA does not apply in the case of COVID as it is highly infectious and back in the day during the height of the AIDS crisis that debate raged as it was believed solely blood born and sexually transmitted.  Then came the Ryan White story and the affect on the blood supply and well game on and hence the law in New York that if you have had sex in the last 6 months you cannot donate blood despite that all blood regardless of donors sexual history is tested for any disease including AIDS.  That is called the work-around. And of course with Covid that is contagious via close contact,  the same way but without sex, meaning that coughing, sneezing, drooling, vomiting, diarrhea,  heavy sweat (as in a fever) makes this virus virulent and highly transmittable.  No it is not again in the air like measles, whooping cough or TB all by coming into contact via the air.  Covid is  flu like and that means close prolonged contact.  So keep moving and when out wash your hands immediately upon returning from those essential errands, then clean the surfaces that anything you brought in touched and dispose of those items, toss the gloves, the mask in the trash or in turn wash your mask after wearing and then finally clean your skin, such as a face or exposed areas again to eliminate any potential infection.  But no the virus is not floating in the air in the same way airborne diseases are unless again in a confined space.. you know the ones I keep mentioning.  But if you live in an apartment or home with others they have to follow the exact same protocol which means intense cleaning and agreement on that policy and good luck with that.  You might want to escape too.

I am all for my civil rights being ignored in a public health crisis and in a state of emergency, again 9/11 anyone. And that little office that housed ex-patriot Edward Snowden, is an example of what they did in the surveillance state. We have the capability and technology, Stingray’s anyone?  All available to monitor and track and trace people. So to have corporations such as Google and Apple come up with an App for that, I say no thanks.  Sorry but no. They are already underfire for either not providing or providing such information to law enforcement to use at their discretion and those cases of SWAT arriving at doors and taking down bad guys has worked out so well or not. What.ever. you decide.  And that is the problem, the lack of consistency, oversight, regulations and other issues that well ended up with stop and frisk, the drug wars and the new Jim Crow and the incarcerations of black men. It ends up with immigrants being detained for no actual crime and of course just innocent people getting caught in the crossfire.  So no thanks on that one.

I don’t take my phone anywhere.  I have a daily journal that I mark where I go and what I did that day and in turn most likely would provide that info if asked but most likely I would also tell the usual suspects whom I do contact regularly what my status is.  I also would do the testing at a private physician to speed up the results and also keep them private as unless I go to a hospital as it is a need to know basis and who needs to know?  I also know that as I am single, a woman and without an advocate I would be shoved onto a ventilator or put in some satellite facility as I don’t have health insurance.  So yes death panels do exist.   It is also why the journal along with all my directives, will and the like sits on my desk.  I have no ICE and there is no need as I am quite clear and there can be no confusion with it clearly marked and dated.  It is also notarized and updated annually.  So I have learned first hand how neglectful and abusive hospitals are.  Ask me about my experience at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in 2012. They treated me like animal and I will never cheer medical personnel for as long as I live as a result.

Why this is so bad is  because right now no one is tracking, testing or tracing.  A woman here in Jersey City died from a heart attack brought on by an asthma attack; she originally was turned away from a hospital as she did not exhibit ALL of the symptoms(as if anyone does), got worse and by the time she returned to the same facility she was too ill and died.  Her death is listed as the result of a heart attack. Okay then, as she was never tested even in post mortem and yet since that time 9 others in her same building have all tested positive, a sort of mini hot zone if you will.  None of them knew about the other and there you go and the building was not cleaned or even touched to reduce the spread from day one.. at least in my building where we “know” of three units none of the staff knew until after and they are pissed, one quit.  So there you go. So much for public safety. Again the virus from symptoms to actual affects on the body varies and so if you are in at “at risk” group you should be tested immediately if one symptom is present, not because of a checklist, and in turn if you have other health issues immediately put on a 24-48 hour watch (many times it is week two when all hell breaks lose)  and that can be at a satellite facility with close contact upon release to ensure you are receiving appropriate, contactless care and in turn tested upon having no symptoms. That has not happened and again if it has what are the numbers for those cases and the results?

So why would you not escape as you aint’ getting shit. And neither are we.  And I would be happy to allow these facilities or organizations and hotels that are open of these kind of business to be available to treat all kinds of COVID patients and the like if they are just that, equipped, trained and able to do so.  Not so sure about that either as if you are short of PPE, etc then what do they have and are they able to do anything but handle the most minor of cases and if they do code then what?  So if this is about public safety and tax dollars we have the right to know and HIPAA has allowed us that much so cough it up… pun intended.

Tennessee, Nashville health officials provide names of those testing positive for coronavirus to police

Natalie Allison and Yihyun Jeong, Nashville
 Tennessean May 8, 2020

Gov. Bill Lee says the state’s release to police departments and sheriff’s offices the names and addresses of Tennesseans who have tested positive for the coronavirus is necessary to protect officers’ lives — information that is also being independently shared between city health officials and police in Nashville.

Lee told reporters at Second Harvest Food Bank in Nashville on Friday the details are only for those working “from a law enforcement standpoint” to know who has tested positive.

“We believe that that’s appropriate to protect the lives of law enforcement,” Lee said when asked why police need the information

The Tennessee Lookout, a new nonprofit news organization, first reported the agreement between local law enforcement agencies and the state Department of Health, which is releasing the information.

The agencies receiving lists from the state of individuals who have contracted the coronavirus include the Knoxville Police Department, the Nashville Airport Authority, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and dozens more.
Nashville health officials share coronavirus patient data with police, fire officials

Separately, in Nashville, the Metro Health Department confirmed to The Tennessean Friday that officials have been providing to the Metro Nashville Police Department the addresses of people who have tested positive or are quarantined for COVID-19.

The data is inputted into the police department’s computer system so that any officer who has contact with an individual who has tested positive for the virus can take additional precautions, Metro Health spokesperson Brian Todd said.

Metro police spokesman Don Aaron said in a similar statement the department uses the information so officers can “take additional precautions.”

The information is also put into the Department of Emergency Communications dispatch system so that fire and EMS workers responding to an address can take steps to use increased personal protective equipment and distancing protocols.

“At no time is this data shared with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office,” Todd said in a statement.

In a statement, Cooper spokesperson Chris Song reiterated Todd’s comments, and said the information is “safely kept” among Metro agencies.

“We are taking necessary precautions to protect both our first responders and our residents, including those who are part of Nashville’s diverse immigrant communities,” Song said, adding officials are communicating with community partners that the information will not be shared with federal immigration authorities.

“As Mayor Cooper has stated repeatedly, everyone deserves to feel safe in our community, including our front line personnel and the valued members of our immigrant communities,” he said in a statement.

Though the data isn’t not shared with the sheriff’s office, the health department said if a police officer arrests a person who has tested positive for COVID-19, they will inform sheriff’s personnel when releasing them into their custody.

All public safety personnel have been noticed that the information cannot be publicly released and is for “official use only,” Todd and Aaron said. Unauthorized use is a violation of Metro police policy.

The information is updated regularly, and once a person has recovered from COVID-19, they are removed from the list.

According to the Tennessee Department of Health, as of Friday 68 police chiefs and sheriffs have signed on to a memorandum of understanding that they will receive a running list of names and addresses of individuals in Tennessee “documented as having tested positive, or received treatment for COVID-19.”

The list is updated for law enforcement each day, the MOU states, and individuals’ names are removed from the list after 30 days.

Metro police and the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office have no plans to move into an agreement with the state, according to both Aaron and Todd.

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, criticized the policy’s impact on privacy and said it’s more important for law enforcement “Protecting the health of first responders is certainly an important priority. However, as public health experts have noted, disclosing names and addresses of positive cases does not protect first responders, as many people have not been tested and many people who do carry the virus are asymptomatic,” Weinberg said in a statement.

“Disclosing the personal information of individuals who will never have contact with law enforcement raises fundamental concerns about privacy without yielding a significant public health benefit. It is incumbent that any government policy implemented during the pandemic be grounded in science and public health and be no more intrusive on civil liberties than absolutely necessary.”

The Tennessee Immigration and Refugee Rights Coalition has worked during the pandemic to reduce barriers preventing immigrants statewide from getting care and have formally partnered with Metro Nashville and other organizations to increase more community outreach.

In a statement posted on Twitter Friday, TIRRC said the state’s policy to share information with law enforcement should be “rescinded immediately.”

“This completely undermines all of the work organizations like ours are doing to encourage people to go get tested. This will exacerbate the public health crisis,” TIRRC said.

The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Nashville’s policy.

Lee said Friday the state was providing this information to law enforcement agencies in compliance with guidelines put forth by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

A document published by DHHS’ Office for Civil Rights states the HIPAA Privacy Rule permits an entity like a health department to release protected health information to first responders “to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the health and safety of a person or the public.”

Shelley Walker, spokesperson fro the Tennessee Department of Health, said in a statement the department “believes these disclosures are necessary to avert a serious threat to health or safety.”

More than 14,000 people in Tennessee have tested positive for the virus.

Lee defended the information only being made available to law enforcement and not other front-line workers, such as grocery store employees who also must interact with possible coronavirus patients, by saying that officers are “required to come into contact with these people.

“We know that first responders are required to and law enforcement are required to come into contact with these people as part of their job,” Lee said. “That’s why Health and Human Services gave that guidance to states and that’s why we’re implementing that.” to focus on offering officers proper protective gear as a way to keep them safe.

“Protecting the health of first responders is certainly an important priority. However, as public health experts have noted, disclosing names and addresses of positive cases does not protect first responders, as many people have not been tested and many people who do carry the virus are asymptomatic,” Weinberg said in a statement.

“Disclosing the personal information of individuals who will never have contact with law enforcement raises fundamental concerns about privacy without yielding a significant public health benefit. It is incumbent that any government policy implemented during the pandemic be grounded in science and public health and be no more intrusive on civil liberties than absolutely necessary.”

Dukes of Hazzard

So the first messages you get from Waylon Jennings’ theme song are also the most essential: Bo and Luke were “good ol’ boys” and not kissing cousins but they were boys who were also “fightin’ the system.” They were traditionalists, but they were also rebels. The Duke boys weren’t political, but they were at least small-c conservative–they stood for old ways and ancient traditions.   The cousins’ primary mode of transportation is an orange 1969 Dodge Charger that the boys affectionately refer to as the “General Lee”  pained with a charming Confederate flag theme naturally.  On their journey the family is tormented by corrupt Hazzard County Commissioner Jefferson Davis Hogg, widely known as “Boss Hogg”), and his willing but dimwitted henchman, Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane.  It seems so charming now doesn’t it or it doesn’t?

I live in Tennessee where I have seen many vehicles and many stickers, flags and other accoutrements that identify and horrify anyone having the tragedy of being behind them at a stop line.  In other words I see many Hogg’s and the like on my daily travels. 

Do I loathe living here. No, I am bored here. I have things that I like and could do anywhere and when I realized that my dental reconstruction was going to push a year into more of an 18 month process I reconciled that quite easily.  I see the finish line and I will get there and in all honesty I am bored, exhausted talking, working and thinking about the public schools and working in them. If I had a part time gig doing something such as working in a hotel and meeting travelers I might be “happier” but that is not an option with a schedule that needs flexibility.

So to make it work to coin a Tim Gunn phrase I rent cars I try to plan things to do that can keep me sane and that too sometimes backfires but laughing helps.  Watching our local news is usually sufficient.  The freaks that run for office or are in office boggle the mind with their stupidity.  We are gunning up for a Governor race and I am inundated with ads that profess family and god as their qualifications. And today a Legislator is working towards bill to have “IN GOD WE TRUST” prominently displayed in all public schools throughout the state.  The phrase – Separation of Church and State is another anomaly here, like hospitality.

And then I read this and went yeah.. Three Billboards anyone?   Because that is the only way anyone would know of this. Again if I want a laugh I watch our local news stations as this is not a story they would cover as Law Enforcement is sacrosanct.

Tennessee sheriff taped saying ‘I love this shit’ after ordering suspect’s killing

Oddie Shoupe is being sued for excessive force after telling deputies to shoot unarmed Michael Dial rather than risk damage to police cars

Jamiles Lartey
UK Guardian
Tue 6 Feb 2018 1

A Tennessee sheriff is being sued for using excessive force after he was recorded boasting he had told officers to shoot a man rather than risk damaging police cars by ramming him off the road.

“They said ‘we’re ramming him,’” Sheriff Oddie Shoupe of White County said on tape in the aftermath of the killing of suspect Michael Dial. “I said, ‘Don’t ram him, shoot him.’ Fuck that shit. Ain’t gonna tear up my cars.”

Shoupe arrived on the scene shortly after police had shot Dial at the conclusion of a low-speed chase, clearly upset he had missed the excitement.

“I love this shit,” Shoupe said, apparently unaware that his comments were being picked up by another deputy’s body-worn camera. “God, I tell you what, I thrive on it.

“If they don’t think I’ll give the damn order to kill that motherfucker they’re full of shit,” he added, laughing. “Take him out. I’m here on the damn wrong end of the county,” he said.

Shoupe’s comments have prompted a federal lawsuit from Dial’s widow, Robyn Dial, alleging the use of excessive force against her late husband, who was unarmed.

“It was not only inappropriate but also unconscionable for Defendant Shoupe to give the order to use deadly force,” the filing states, calling his decision proof of a “malicious and sadistic mindset”. The suit also names the county, the city of Sparta and the two officers who fired their weapons.

“The comments as seen on the video are extremely disturbing. I’m not sure how anybody can thrive on the taking of a life, let alone somebody in law enforcement,” Dial’s attorney David Weissman told the Guardian.

Police had initially attempted to pull Dial over in April last year for driving on a suspended licence. He drove away, but the fact that he was driving a 40-odd-year-old pickup truck with a fully loaded trailer severely restricted his speed.

DeKalb County deputies, who began the pursuit before White County deputies took over, told investigators it was “more like a funeral procession” than a highway chase, with speeds topping out around 50mph.

Deputies tried using a PIT (Pursuit Intervention Technique) maneuver to slow Dial’s car, a common police tactic involving a police car nudging another vehicle to turn it sideways.

But Shoupe radioed officers to tell them to stop attempting to do that, instead ordering them to shoot the driver.

When a deputy had successfully nudged Dial off the road, Reserve Deputy Adam West, who was in pursuit in his own personal vehicle, fired three shots as the vehicle went down into a ditch. Dial died of a gunshot wound to the head.

In June, the county district attorney declared the shooting justified.

Dial told Tennessee’s News Channel 5 that she believed her husband had tried to drive away from the police because he was scared, and said she could not make sense of the order to shoot. “I feel with every part of me that’s exactly what they wanted to do was kill him.”

The sheriff’s office declined to comment to the Guardian.

Cop Talk

The entire center of Black Lives Matter is with regards to how Police elect to encounter Black Men and in turn ends with usually the black man being killed. True we have had some women and in turn we have had white individuals killed as well by Cops who were called to investigate someone with a gun, someone driving erractically or without proper licensing, a mental health check or just ’cause.

When a Police Officer sees an individually doing anything they deem irregular be it illegal or not the encounter can largely fall on how the Officer perceives you and how they elect to do so.  This weekend I was not paying attention to the lights and ran a red light.  I jumped out of the car as my purse was in the trunk he immediately goes “Don’t jump out of the car!” The irony was I stopped in front of a Church on a Sunday morning and chose that location to stop as the presumption could be I was going to Church, they would be witness to anything or it just seemed like a good idea.  My encounter ended up to be a positive one.  I received no ticket and he could tell I had been crying. I had long before the stop and hence the running the light.  He was actually quite gracious and I was appreciative but I am white, over 50 and was driving a rental car as that is where I was headed to return the vehicle.   But I am lucky for two reasons: I could have been seriously hurt when I ran that light and I did not get a ticket which would have seriously damaged  my driving record which I want to keep squeaky clean.

But my first encounter with Police was when the bucket of shit Patient Coordinator called the Police on me to do a mental health check when I ranted to her about the billing issues that I had encountered.  Funny once again I received a bill for 1900 bucks and this time I just threw it in the trash and told my Dentist directly that I had gotten a bill which I am not paying and to fix it whenever.  I said we don’t need Cops on this one as I did nothing to invite them.

The last few days have seen the protests in St. Louis and another death gone unresolved.  But I can assure you that if a Black man had killed a white man the outcome would be different. Then we had the Georgia Tech shooting, a man in Oklahoma killed by Police, and the release of the video of the Bronx man holding a fake knife killed by Police.

Then I read the article below about Police learning about Autism and how to connect and in turn relate and respond to those who are on the spectrum.  I think they will follow the status quo and shoot first diagnose later.

Police are not Social Workers, Mental Health Workers, Drug Treatment Agents or Physicians,  Psychologists or any kind of licensed professional familiar with learning disabilities or behavioral disorders nor any kind of physical disability such as deafness or even vision issues that can lead people to neither respond nor act in ways that are defined as “normal.”  And even that concept of normal runs wide when it comes to people when they encounter the Police or any stressful situation.

And yet we continue to call them and they are the ones sent by the morons who work 911 often giving the Officers misinformation or insufficient information to lend them to make rational decisions and in turn calling for appropriate back up or support in the situation.  Cops are not geniuses they are law enforcement. Good for traffic bad for social issues.

The Police Need to Understand Autism

By STEVE SILBERMAN
The New York Times
Sept 19, 2017

Diane Craglow was caring for a 14-year-old autistic boy named Connor Leibel in Buckeye, Ariz., one day in July. They took a walk to one of his favorite places, a park in an upscale community called Verrado. She was not hesitant to leave Connor alone for a few minutes while she booked a piano lesson for his sister nearby, because he usually feels safe and comfortable in places that are familiar to him, and he learns to be more independent that way.

When Ms. Craglow returned, she couldn’t believe what she saw: a police officer looming over the now-handcuffed boy, pinning him to the ground against a tree. Connor was screaming, and the police officer, David Grossman, seemed extremely agitated.

As Ms. Craglow tried to piece together what had happened, more officers arrived, spilling out of eight patrol cars in response to Officer Grossman’s frantic call for backup. Soon it became clear to Ms. Craglow that the policeman was unaware that Connor has autism, and had interpreted the boy’s rigid, unfamiliar movements — which included raising a piece of yarn to his nose to sniff it repeatedly — as a sign of drug intoxication.

As a graduate of Arizona’s Drug Evaluation and Classification program, Officer Grossman is certified as a “drug recognition expert.” But no one had trained him to recognize one of the classic signs of autism: the repetitive movements that autistic people rely on to manage their anxiety in stressful situations, known as self-stimulation or “stimming.” That’s what Connor was doing with the string when Officer Grossman noticed him while he was on patrol.

Images from Officer Grossman’s body camera show how the encounter turned into a situation that rapidly escalated beyond Connor’s ability to make sense of what was happening to him.

When an unfamiliar policeman rushed up to Connor and asked, “What are you doing?” he was honest, as autistic people usually are. “I’m stimming,” the boy said brightly. But Officer Grossman was unfamiliar with the word. On the body-cam audio, you can hear the officer’s uncomprehending response: “What?” You can also hear Connor try to calm himself down by saying “I’m O.K., I’m O.K.,” as he sustains abrasions on his back, arm and cheek by being held on the ground by the officer.

This is basically a worst-case scenario for anyone who cares for someone with a developmental disability, as well as for disabled people themselves, who live every day in fear that their behavior will be misconstrued as suspicious, intoxicated or hostile by law enforcement. And the encounter could have ended up a lot more tragic. Imagine if instead of being fair-haired and rail-thin, Connor had been powerfully built and black or Hispanic. A tense police officer, approaching a young man he thought was a threat to himself or others, might have been tempted to reach for his Taser or service weapon instead of his handcuffs.

That’s precisely what happened last year in North Miami, Fla., when a young autistic man named Arnaldo Rios briefly wandered from a group home to play with his toy truck on the street, and a passer-by called the police to report an “armed and suicidal” man sitting in the road.

When Officer Jonathan Aledda arrived, he had no idea that Mr. Rios had autism; no idea that the black man trying to calm him down, Charles Kinsey, was his behavioral therapist; and no idea that the flashing silver object in Mr. Rios’s hands was a toy, not a weapon. Officer Aledda fired at Mr. Rios. The bullet missed him, but struck Mr. Kinsey in the leg. The therapist survived, but the trauma of the incident resulted in Mr. Rios’s being placed into more restrictive institutions. He was unable to eat, suffered from night terrors and said to himself over and over, “I hate the police.” In April, state prosecutors charged Officer Aledda with attempted manslaughter and culpable negligence.

Studies show that these kinds of interactions between disabled people and law enforcement are terrifyingly common, and often go unreported. A white paper published last year by the Ruderman Family Foundation reported, “Disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers.”

Connor Leibel’s mother filed a complaint about her son’s treatment that resulted in an internal investigation by the Buckeye Police Department. It not only cleared Officer Grossman but also came to the unsatisfying conclusion that because the autism label covers a large spectrum of symptoms and behaviors it “would be very difficult to teach officers to recognize them all.”

That’s certainly true: Another way to frame the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s estimate that one in 68 American schoolchildren is on the spectrum is that autistic people make up a large and extremely diverse minority population. But police officers do not have to become experts in every aspect of autism to learn how to recognize people on the spectrum and treat them with respect.

Last year I attended a presentation by Rob Zink, an officer from the St. Paul Police Department in Minnesota, who started the Cop Autism Response Education Project to train his fellow officers how to interact with autistic people, inspired by his experience of having two sons on the spectrum. Officer Zink pointed out that sirens and flashing lights alone can be catastrophic sensory overload for people with autism, while a calm voice and a reassuring demeanor can go a long way toward de-escalating a tense confrontation.

He also stressed that law enforcement personnel should not expect autistic people to behave in the ways that non-autistic people do. For example, officers should not regard a refusal to look them in the eyes as a sign of guilt, as Officer Grossman did with Connor Leibel. In fact, many autistic people find it easier to interpret spoken instructions if they’re not compelled to simultaneously look the speaker in the eyes.

Similar programs are underway in several police departments across the country and around the world, but they are still too few and far between. The scarcity of these programs is a sad legacy of the decades when autism was mistakenly believed to be a rare condition, and many autistic people lived out their lives in state-run institutions.

Now that we know that autism is common, and comes in all the hues and shades of a broad human spectrum, we need to give law enforcement officers the knowledge that they need to avoid turning a routine call into a life-altering calamity.

Asset Not Forfeit

As we move into a new era, which I am unclear of exactly, we are sure that whatever reforms regarding criminal justice will be utterly abandoned. One of the many issues of course will be the return of the 1033 program that at one point Obama had halted, but like the Terminator (don’t say Arnold Schwarzenegger) its back!! I for one am thrilled that Podunk Town will now have missile launchers as a part of their police equipment.

But what is more disturbing is the notion of civil asset forfeiture. Yes, this is the money maker when it comes to law enforcement. The article below discusses just what the DEA has in cash, not property nor does it break down what local agencies have taken in their search and seizures. So yes America you can be driving across country and then end up on the bus.

Since 2007, the DEA has taken $3.2 billion in cash from people not charged with a crime

By Christopher Ingraham
The Washington Post
March 29 2017

The Drug Enforcement Administration takes billions of dollars in cash from people who are never charged with criminal activity, according to a report issued today by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

Since 2007, the report found, the DEA has seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of involvement with the drug trade. But 81 percent of those seizures, totaling $3.2 billion, were conducted administratively, meaning no civil or criminal charges were brought against the owners of the cash and no judicial review of the seizures ever occurred.

That total does not include the dollar value of other seized assets, like cars, homes, electronics and clothing.

These seizures are all legal under the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture, which allows authorities to take cash, contraband and property from people suspected of crime. But the practice does not require authorities to obtain a criminal conviction, and it allows departments to keep seized cash and property for themselves unless individuals successfully challenge the forfeiture in court. Critics across the political spectrum say this creates a perverse profit motive, incentivizing police to seize goods not for the purpose of fighting crime, but for padding department budgets.

Law enforcement groups say the practice is a valuable tool for fighting criminal organizations, allowing them to seize drug profits and other ill-gotten goods. But the Inspector General’s report “raises serious concerns that maybe real purpose here is not to fight crime, but to seize and forfeit property,” said Darpana Sheth, senior attorney of the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law form that has fought for forfeiture reform.

The Inspector General found that the Department of Justice “does not collect or evaluate the data necessary to know whether its seizures and forfeitures are effective, or the extent to which seizures present potential risks to civil liberties.”

In the absence of this information, the report examined 100 DEA cash seizures that occurred “without a court-issued warrant and without the presence of narcotics, the latter of which would provide strong evidence of related criminal behavior.”

Fewer than half of those seizures were related to a new or ongoing criminal investigation, or led to an arrest or prosecution, the Inspector General found.

“When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution,” the report concludes, “law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution.”

The scope of asset forfeiture is staggering. Since 2007 the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, which collects proceeds from seized cash and other property, has ballooned to $28 billion. In 2014 alone authorities seized $5 billion in cash and property from people — greater than the value of all documented losses to burglary that year.

In most of the seizures examined by the Inspector General, DEA officers initiated encounters with people based on whether they met certain criteria, like “traveling to or from a known source city for drug trafficking, purchasing a ticket within 24 hours of travel, purchasing a ticket for a long flight with an immediate return, purchasing a one-way ticket, and traveling without checked luggage.”

Some of the encounters were based on tips from confidential sources working in the travel industry, a number of whom have received large sums of money in exchange for their cooperation. In one case, officers targeted an individual for questioning on a tip from a travel industry informant that the individual had paid for a plane ticket with a pre-paid debit card and cash.

Most individuals who have cash or property seized by law enforcement do not dispute the seizure. There’s no right to an attorney in forfeiture proceedings, meaning defendants must foot the bill for a lawyer themselves. In many cases, forfeiture amounts are so small that they’re not worth fighting in court.

Forfeiture cases are also legally complex and difficult for individuals to win. Forfeiture cases are brought against the property, rather than the individual, leading to Kafkaesque case titles like United States v. $8,850 in U.S. Currency and United States of America v. One Men’s Rolex Pearl Master Watch.

While criminal proceedings assume the defendant’s innocence, forfeiture proceedings start from the presumption of guilt. That means that individuals who fight forfeiture must prove their innocence in court.

For these reasons, many defendants don’t bother disputing forfeitures. The Inspector General’s report, however, finds that those who do often get at least a portion of their cash returned. Only one-fifth of people who had their cash seized by the DEA disputed the seizures in court. But among those who contested the seizure, nearly 40 percent ended up getting all or some of their cash returned, suggesting that the DEA’s forfeiture net ensnares many individuals not involved in wrongdoing.

In a written response to the Inspector General, the Department of Justice said it had “significant concerns” with the report, noting that global criminal enterprises launder trillions of dollars annually and calling asset forfeiture “a critical tool to fight the current heroin and opioid epidemic that is raging in the United States.”

It also took issue with the Inspector General’s analysis of the 100 DEA cash seizures it examined, saying more of them were connected with criminal activity than the report suggested.

The Inspector General stood by the report and dismissed the Department’s concerns as “assumptions and speculation.” The Drug Enforcement Administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“Nobody in America should lose their property without being convicted of a crime,” said the Institute for Justice’s Sheth. “If our goal is to curb crime, we should simply abolish civil forfeiture” and only forfeit property after a criminal conviction is obtained, she added.

Up in your business

When you see the below headline you think that is quite normal or natural. Of course nothing of this is in fact normal and/or natural when the AP feel compelled to write an investigative piece about the subject.

When I saw the documentary, Cannibal Cop, a year ago the subject was about a former Police Officer fighting his conviction on using police databases and having “immoral thoughts.” There was nothing illegal about the latter despite how weird it was but the former was the reason he was let go from the Police force and in fact tried.

He was not alone, probably in either. Why this does not shock me is the fact that they have no qualms doing so for their own personal use but using that same access to investigate and in turn find evidence to ensure that they are prosecuting the right persons seems to be the last reason they would do so.

I have said repeatedly that I loathe the Police but I have no desire to kill them, hunt them down or in fact have anything unless absolutely compelled to, to do with them.

AP: Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases

Associated Press

By SADIE GURMAN and ERIC TUCKER
September 27 2016

DENVER — Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Criminal-history and driver databases give officers critical information about people they encounter on the job. But the AP’s review shows how those systems also can be exploited by officers who, motivated by romantic quarrels, personal conflicts or voyeuristic curiosity, sidestep policies and sometimes the law by snooping. In the most egregious cases, officers have used information to stalk or harass, or have tampered with or sold records they obtained.

No single agency tracks how often the abuse happens nationwide, and record-keeping inconsistencies make it impossible to know how many violations occur.

But the AP, through records requests to state agencies and big-city police departments, found law enforcement officers and employees who misused databases were fired, suspended or resigned more than 325 times between 2013 and 2015. They received reprimands, counseling or lesser discipline in more than 250 instances, the review found.

Unspecified discipline was imposed in more than 90 instances reviewed by AP. In many other cases, it wasn’t clear from the records if punishment was given at all. The number of violations was surely far higher since records provided were spotty at best, and many cases go unnoticed.

Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department.

“It’s personal. It’s your address. It’s all your information, it’s your Social Security number, it’s everything about you,” said Alexis Dekany, the Ohio woman whose ex-boyfriend, a former Akron officer, pleaded guilty last year to stalking her. “And when they use it for ill purposes to commit crimes against you — to stalk you, to follow you, to harass you … it just becomes so dangerous.”

The misuse represents only a tiny fraction of the millions of daily database queries run legitimately during traffic stops, criminal investigations and routine police encounters. But the worst violations profoundly abuses systems that supply vital information on criminal suspects and law-abiding citizens alike. The unauthorized searches demonstrate how even old-fashioned policing tools are ripe for abuse, at a time when privacy concerns about law enforcement have focused mostly on more modern electronic technologies. And incomplete, inconsistent tracking of the problem frustrates efforts to document its pervasiveness.

The AP tally, based on records requested from 50 states and about three dozen of the nation’s largest police departments, is unquestionably an undercount.

Some departments produced no records at all. Some states refused to disclose the information, said they don’t comprehensively track misuse or produced records too incomplete or unclear to be counted. Florida reported hundreds of misuse cases of its driver database, but didn’t say how often officers were disciplined.

And some cases go undetected, officials say, because there aren’t clear red flags to automatically distinguish questionable searches from legitimate ones.

“If we know the officers in a particular agency have made 10,000 queries in a month, we just have no way to (know) they were for an inappropriate reason unless there’s some consequence where someone might complain to us,” said Carol Gibbs, database administrator with the Illinois State Police.

The AP’s requests encompassed state and local databases and the FBI-administered National Crime and Information Center, a searchable clearinghouse that processes an average of 14 million daily transactions.

The NCIC catalogs information that officers enter on sex offenders, immigration violators, suspected gang members, people with outstanding warrants and individuals reported missing, among others. Police use the system to locate fugitives, identify missing people and determine if a motorist they’ve stopped is driving a stolen car or is wanted elsewhere.

Other statewide databases offer access to criminal histories and motor vehicle records, birth dates and photos.

Officers are instructed that those systems, which together contain data far more substantial than an internet search would yield, may be used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes. They’re warned that their searches are subject to being audited and that unauthorized access could cost them their jobs or result in criminal charges.

Yet misuse persists.

____

‘SENSE OF BEING VULNERABLE’

Violations frequently arise from romantic pursuits or domestic entanglements, including when a Denver officer became acquainted with a hospital employee during a sex-assault investigation, then searched out her phone number and called her at home. A Mancos, Colorado, marshal asked co-workers to run license plate checks for every white pickup truck they saw because his girlfriend was seeing a man who drove a white pickup, an investigative report shows.

In Florida, a Polk County sheriff’s deputy investigating a battery complaint ran driver’s license information of a woman he met and then messaged her unsolicited through Facebook.

Officers have sought information for purely personal purposes, including criminal records checks of co-workers at private businesses. A Phoenix officer ran searches on a neighbor during the course of a longstanding dispute. A North Olmsted, Ohio, officer pleaded guilty this year to searching for a female friend’s landlord and showing up in the middle of the night to demand the return of money he said was owed her.

The officer, Brian Bielozer, told the AP he legitimately sought the landlord’s information as a safety precaution to determine if she had outstanding warrants or a weapons permit. But he promised as part of a plea agreement never to seek a job again in law enforcement. He said he entered the plea to avoid mounting legal fees.

Some database misuse occurred in the course of other misbehavior, including a Phoenix officer who gave a woman involved in a drug and gun-trafficking investigation details about stolen cars in exchange for arranging sexual encounters for him. She told an undercover detective about a department source who could “get any information on anybody,” a disciplinary report says.

Eric Paull, the Akron police sergeant who pleaded guilty last year to stalking Dekany, also ran searches on her mother, men she’d been close with and students from a course he taught, prosecutors said. A lawyer for Paull, who was sentenced to prison, said Paull has accepted responsibility for his actions.

“A lot of people have complicated personal lives and very strong passions,” said Jay Stanley, an American Civil Liberties Union privacy expert. “There’s greed, there’s lust, there’s all the deadly sins. And often, accessing information is a way for people to act on those human emotions.”

Other police employees searched for family members, sometimes at relatives’ requests, to check what information was stored or to see if they were the subjects of warrants.

Still other searchers were simply curious, including a Miami-Dade officer who admitted checking dozens of officers and celebrities including basketball star LeBron James.

Political motives occasionally surface.

Deb Roschen, a former county commissioner in Minnesota, alleged in a 2013 lawsuit that law enforcement and government employees inappropriately ran repeated queries on her and other politicians over 10 years. The searches were in retaliation for questioning county spending and sheriff’s programs, she contended.

She filed an open-records request that revealed her husband and daughter were also researched, sometimes at odd hours. But an appeals court rejected her suit and several similar cases this month, saying the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the searches were unpermitted.

“Now there are people who do not like me that have all my private information … any information that could be used against me. They could steal my identity, they could sell it to someone,” Roschen said.

“The sense of being vulnerable,” she added, “there’s no fix to that.”

___

BETRAYAL OF TRUST

Violations are committed by patrol officers, dispatchers, civilian employees, court personnel and high-ranking police officials. Some made dozens of improper searches. Some were under investigation for multiple infractions when they were punished, making it unclear whether database misuse was always the sole reason for discipline.

Agencies uncover some violations during audits, or during investigations into other misconduct. Some emerge after a citizen, often the target of a search, finds out or grows suspicious. A Jacksonville, Florida, sheriff’s officer was found to have run queries on his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend after she raised concerns she was being harassed, an internal affairs report says.

The AP sought to focus on officers who improperly accessed information on others but also counted some cases in which officers divulged information to someone not authorized to receive it, or ran their own names for strictly personal purposes, including to check their car registrations.

The tally also includes some cases in which little is known about the offense because some agencies provided no details — only that they resulted in discipline.

The AP tried when possible to exclude benign violations, such as new employees who ran only their own names during training or system troubleshooting. But the variability in record-keeping made it impossible to weed out all such violations.

Agencies in California, for instance, reported more than 75 suspensions, resignations and terminations between 2013 and 2015 arising from misuse of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, state records show. But because the records didn’t identify officers or specify the allegations, it’s unclear whether multiple violations were committed by the same person or how egregious the infractions were.

Colorado disclosed about 35 misuse violations without specifying punishment. Indiana listed 12 cases of abuse but revealed nothing about them. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles reported about 400 violations in 2014 and 2015 of its Driver and Vehicle Information Database, or DAVID, but didn’t include the allegations or punishment.

The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division offers training to state and local law enforcement agencies on NCIC use, and conducts audits every three years that include a sample of local departments, said spokesman Stephen Fischer.

But it doesn’t track how often NCIC information is misused. Violations, which are not required to be reported directly to the FBI, are inconsistently disclosed to the federal government. The FBI relies on local agencies to address violations that are identified, Fischer said.

The AP requested records from large police departments and state agencies tasked with administering NCIC usage within their districts. The responses included cases where officers misused motor vehicle data, including driver’s license and registration information, and also more sensitive criminal history records.

Officers are only occasionally prosecuted, and rarely at the federal level.

One recent exception is a former Cumming, Georgia, officer charged in June with accepting a bribe to search a woman’s license plate number to see if she was an undercover officer. Another involved Ronald Buell, a retired New York Police Department sergeant who received probation for selling NCIC information to a private investigator for defense attorneys.

At his July sentencing, Buell said he hoped other officers would learn “to never put themselves in the position I’m in.”

It’s unsettled whether improper database access is necessarily a federal crime and whether it violates a trespass statute that criminalizes using a computer for other than authorized purposes.

A federal appeals court last year reversed the computer-crime conviction of ex-NYPD officer Gilberto Valle, whom tabloids dubbed the “cannibal cop” for his online exchanges about kidnapping and eating women and who improperly used a police database to gather information. Valle argued that as an officer, he was legally authorized to access the database. The court deemed the statute ambiguous and said it risked criminalizing a broad array of computer use.

Misuse has occasionally prompted federal lawsuits under a statute meant to protect driver’s license data.

A Florida Highway Trooper, Donna Watts, accused dozens of officers of searching her in the state’s driver database after she stopped a Miami-Dade officer for speeding in 2011. She alleged in lawsuits that she was harassed with prank calls, threatening posts on law enforcement websites and unfamiliar cars that idled near her home.

Each unlawful access, she said in a court document, “has either caused or worsened anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other medical/physical/psychological conditions I suffer.”

Law enforcement officials have taken steps to try to limit abuse, though they say they know of no foolproof safeguard given the volume of inquiries and the need for officers to have information at their fingertips.

“There’s no system that could prohibit you from looking up your ex-wife’s new boyfriend, because your ex-wife’s new boyfriend could come in contact with the criminal justice system,” said Peggy Bell, executive director of the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety said it changed the way officers access a state driver database after a 2013 legislative audit found over half of the 11,000 law enforcement personnel who use it made searches that appeared questionable. The audit was conducted after a former state employee was charged with illegally viewing thousands of driver’s license records.

In Florida, a memorandum of understanding this year increased the amount of field audits law enforcement agencies must undergo regarding DAVID usage. Troopers in the Florida Highway Patrol sign usage warnings when they access the DAVID system and a criminal sanctions acknowledgment. Users are audited and instructed to select a reason for a search before making inquiries.

Denver’s independent monitor, Nicholas Mitchell, argued for strong policies and strict discipline as a safeguard, especially as increasing amounts of information are added to databases. His review found most of the 25 Denver officers punished for misusing databases over 10 years received at most reprimands.

Miami-Dade police cracked down after the Watts scandal and other high-profile cases. The department now does quarterly audits in which officers can be randomly asked to explain searches. A sergeant’s duties have been expanded to include daily reviews of proper usage and troubleshooting, said Maj. Christopher Carothers of the professional compliance bureau.

Even if the public is unaware of the amount of available information, Carothers said, “The idea that police would betray that trust out of curious entertainment or truly bad intent, that’s very disturbing and unsettling.”

Gun vs Car

I cannot stress enough that the reality of our criminal justice system and the need for reform is absolutely necessary and in turn absolutely impossible.  The players in this kabuki theater have too much vested, too much at stake and in turn it will cost more money and time than anyone is willing to provide.  Most people don’t even have time to wait for a bus let alone take on an institution as vast as the Judicial one.  We can’t save our Schools, do you honestly think we will our Courts?

I am deeply pessimistic, angry and utterly frustrated with how ignorant most are with regards to the system and how it works and how they inadvertently contribute to it by voting in Prosecutors, Judges, Sheriffs, and Legislators who have neither interest nor inclination to change a system that is awash with campaign contributions and wealthy ad hoc lobbyists that actually write the laws that they simply sign on to.

Why do we have several laws regarding Manslaughter? Ask a Lawyer and they will give you the regular bullshit response that is about pleas and level of crime.  No it is about ways to prosecute and persecute people dependent on the relationship the Prosecutor has to the Attorney, to the Community or their superiors.  

 So why is Defendant X charged with 1 degree over another? I have no fucking clue is one meaner than another. The same with sentencing.  Why is it a minimum and maximum sentence for one crime over another?  Who knows that shit was pulled out of the ass of a legislator who was given that figure by a lobbyist for private industry that claims that is the average time one needs to “rehabilitate.’ What.the.fuck.ever.

Even Lawyers admit it is all bullshit. They have no clue as half of this shit is based on junk science and the other half emotional Politicians pandering to the victims or eponymous acronym group that gets in front of the media in tears demanding JUSTICE. 

Funny when it was the Mothers of victims of gun violence I only heard words of forgiveness, understanding and the need to work together to change and stop this from going on. No off with their heads, JAIL THEM or any cry for vengeance.  Each party seems to have a different demand depending on who they think is breaking the law.

When a person is beaten, raped, killed or harmed they are just that and nothing will change that. Charging an individual with a different charge or code doesn’t change that reality. When a man beats his wife how is it any different then him assaulting his best friend?  It is all assault except to the law and then suddenly the same crime means different time? Huh? 

Kill someone drunk at home with a gun versus kill them drunk in car well they are still dead and still the victim of a crime.  But one is manslaughter as you were drunk so it is not murder really is it not murder. Then you get behind a car after a few drinks and that is vehicular manslaughter.  But wait it is now a DUI with much more serious consequences, but you were drunk so it is worse in a car but not with a gun?  Really? 

Hire a prostitute of legal age and agree to pay them well you are now a Sex Trafficker vs just an idiot who committed a crime and you go on sex registry.  Really you do unless of course your Attorney pleas that down and the issue is not one the media is blaring about.  Versus a rapist who abuses a woman, harms her and manages to somehow plea his down to assault and he on the other hand avoids that life sentence. See the logic?

These are our laws, convoluted, bizarre, and all with exceptions and demands that somehow do what? Stop and prevent these things from happening? Well that is working out clearly.

So when a person commits rape you lock up the rapist right? Well no there are again exceptions to that rule.  Read and weep, I did.

Rape Survivor Sues After Texas Authorities Jailed Her For A Month

July 22, 2016  NPR  Merrit Kennedy

Guards watch over a single cell area in an acute unit of the mental heath unit at the Harris County Jail in Houston in 2014. Eric Gay/AP

A rape survivor is suing Texas’ Harris County after she was jailed for more than a month and subjected to beatings and “psychological torture.”

According to court documents, she had suffered a mental breakdown while testifying against her rapist, and authorities checked her into the general population at Houston’s Harris County Jail because they feared she would flee before finishing her testimony.

“Jane Doe found herself hopelessly trapped in a bizarre plot pulled from a Kafka novel,” the court documents read. She “was imprisoned in the hellhole of the Harris County Jail for no reason other than being a rape victim who struggles with a mental disability.”

The anonymous woman was raped in Houston in 2013, according to court documents, and was cooperating with prosecutors when she suffered a breakdown while testifying in December 2015.

She has bipolar disorder and was admitted to a local hospital for mental health treatment when the judge ordered a recess for the holiday break until January 2016.

According to the documents, authorities were scheduled to be on vacation and “did not want the responsibility of having to monitor Jane Doe’s well being or provide victim services to her during the holiday recess.”

The complaint alleges that the district Attorney’s office obtained an order from the Harris County sheriff to take the woman into custody so she would not flee before completing her testimony.

The employee booking her into Harris County Jail identified her as a “defendant in a sexual assault case, rather than the victim.” That impacted her treatment from jail staff, as the complaint reads:

“The Harris County Jail psychiatric staff tormented Jane Doe and caused her extreme emotional distress and mental anguish by further defaming her, falsely insisting to her that she was being charged with sexual assault, and refusing to acknowledge her status as an innocent rape victim.”

Doe also suffered beatings from other inmates and from a guard, who then requested assault charges to be filed against her “in an attempt to cover up the brutal abuse,” according to the complaint.
The complaint also alleges that the jail failed “to provide Jane Doe’s prescribed medications.”

She eventually testified against her rapist, and a month after she was imprisoned, the district attorney’s office dismissed the felony assault case against her and ordered she be released as a material witness.

The Harris County district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment. The Harris County sheriff’s office defended its actions in a statement to The Two-Way.
“The request for detainment was made by prosecutors at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office,” it said. “When so ordered by the court, the Sheriff’s Office had no authority but to follow the court’s order to detain Jane Doe.”

The complaint notes that her “rapist was also an inmate in the same facility” and treated more humanely. “Her rapist was not denied medical care, psychologically tortured, brutalized by other inmates, or beaten by jail guards,” it reads.

The Good The Bad the Ugly

When I read the blog post from Open File my first instinct was to laugh. There is some odd misguided belief that Seattle is a liberal bastion of loving people who seem to think a hug and a pat on the back and a “welfare” check is the standard.  Wrong again. We are no different than any number of cities under investigation by the Feds, our Cops shooting people in the street, on buses or light rail and and our Prosecutors as equally corrupt and malfeasance as the ones in any other city.  Apparently Los Angeles and Orange County are duking it out (maybe literally)  with us but West Coast rules right the midwest?  Or how about East Coast or down South? Let us be honest the reality is that the Criminal Justice Paradigm is filled with a lot of shit, it is like the Catholic Church only with less molestation and nowhere near the cool outfits.

The Judge who calls out the Prosecutors for contempt, not as in contempt as that is an entirely different legal meaning, no longer work for King County Prosecutor’s Office. It appears they left before the scathing ruling, but the irony or hilarity (no ecstay here that is a bad drug! Just say no!) is that they are now Defense Attorneys.  Takes a scumbag to know a scumbag!   I would love Kozinski to be a Supreme Court nominee he would be quite the contender. But no stick with the usual and that we have with Judge Garland, a former Prosecutor.

The system is as corrupt if not more so than any crime ring that has ever stood before it, only less functional. 

WA: The Prudent Course: The Ninth Circuit Flags Unethical Prosecutorial Actions in King County; Judge Kozinski Names the Prosecutors Involved

by Bert | Mar 23, 2016 | Washington

Judge Alex Kozinski, who has made headlines over the past few years for raising concerns about our nation’s epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct, is making good on his promise to “name names” when prosecutors engage in chicanery. On Monday, Kozinski authored the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ majority opinion in Frost v. Gilbert, a state prisoner’s appeal from a denial of habeas corpus in the Western District of Washington. After identifying the members of the prosecutor’s office involved in the misconduct, Judge Kozinski wrote these blunt words:

The individuals we have named may wish to furnish a copy of this opinion to the state bar and seek to clear their names by providing an explanation for its consideration. This would seem to be the prudent course.

Mr. Frost had been convicted for committing a spree of armed robberies and a burglary. His case had already appeared before the Ninth Circuit, which had granted him a new trial because the trial court improperly restricted the defense team’s closing argument. But, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, holding that the court of appeals did not properly apply the strictures of the (draconian) Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. It threw the ball back into the Ninth Circuit’s court for further proceedings.

This time around, the Ninth Circuit not only revisited the closing argument issue—quickly ruling against Mr. Frost—but also explored for the first time claims about prosecutorial misconduct. The opinion explains the role of one of the state’s key witnesses, Edward Shaw:Shaw . . . was an acquaintance who testified about how Frost interacted with ringleader Matthew Williams, who Frost claimed coerced him into participating in the crimes. In April 2003, Shaw met with detectives to discuss what he knew about Frost’s involvement. At that time, Shaw had pending charges for unlawful possession of drugs and a firearm.

 Shaw asked for favorable treatment in exchange for information about Frost’s criminal activity but the prosecution refused to make a deal. Nevertheless, Shaw disclosed what he knew. Frost was arrested the same day. . . . Subsequently, but before Frost’s trial, Shaw was charged with second-degree assault with a deadly weapon growing out of a domestic-violence incident. In November 2003, a few weeks before Frost’s trial, Shaw signed two plea agreements. He received a nine-month sentence for all his crimes, conditioned on his testifying truthfully against Frost.

At trial, Shaw deflated Frost’s duress claim, testifying that Frost giggled when he spoke to Shaw about the crimes after-the-fact. Shaw acknowledged that he had made a plea agreement about his unlawful possession charges, but he made no mention of the domestic violence charges. Moreover, the prosecution only put into the record an unsigned copy of the one plea Shaw disclosed; it turned out the signed copy was actually different because it contained a handwritten reference to the domestic violence case number. Over five years passed before any member of the defense team ever learned of the undisclosed plea agreement.

Judge Kozinski’s majority opinion first explains why the Ninth Circuit should consider the Petitioner’s prosecutorial misconduct claims. The lower court ruled that Mr. Frost was prohibited from presenting the claims because he did not raise them in a timely fashion. But, the majority opinion points out that Mr. Frost—without a lawyer at the time—diligently and repeatedly requested the information that the prosecutor’s office originally concealed. In response to those requests, the State continued to provide inaccurate and incomplete responses, which forced Mr. Frost to present his misconduct claims late. He only learned fully about Shaw’s plea agreements after a lawyer was appointed to represent him on his habeas petition, after the filing deadline had already passed.

Despite finding “cause” for Mr. Frost bringing his Brady and Napue claims late, the court went on to explain that it could not grant him a new trial unless he proved “prejudice.” In other words, he needed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood that the allegedly false testimony Shaw gave at the trial affected the jury’s decision to find him guilty. Because it was unlikely that Shaw would have gotten significantly more time on the undisclosed domestic violence charges than he was already facing on the unlawful possession charges, and because other evidence—Frost’s own testimony—cast doubt on the duress defense, the court found that there was no prejudice.

In most judicial opinions about Brady issues, the discussion ends there. If the court does not find prejudice, it denies the defendant relief and moves on. Indeed, one of the most confounding things about the Brady doctrine is that the Supreme Court has held there is no “violation” of an individual’s due process rights unless there is prejudice. A prosecutor hiding exculpatory evidence is not enough to trigger constitutional concerns, apparently. And, without a violation, reprimanding prosecutors for their misdeeds is much more difficult. But, as Professor Eugene Volokh reported in the Washington Post, Judge Kozinski recognizes that “[n]aming names and taking prosecutors to task for misbehavior can have magical qualities in assuring compliance with constitutional rights.” Thus, even though the court found no prejudice upon which it could reverse Mr. Frost’s conviction, Kozinski took the critical step of identifying the people who withheld exculpatory evidence and continued to conceal it.

The goods can be found in Part II(C) of the opinion. Importantly, this part is not a holding of the Ninth Circuit because one of the judges in the majority did not join this section. Therefore, with a minority of the court behind him, Kozinski included Part II(C) as a way to make clear that prosecutors should not expect continued judicial silence about State misconduct.

Although we conclude that Frost is not entitled to relief, we find the facts giving rise to his Brady and Napue claims most troubling. As the matter has been presented to us, there is cause to believe that the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office violated Brady and Napue by willfully withholding evidence of Shaw’s domestic-violence plea deal and by permitting Shaw to lie on the stand. . . . So far as we are aware, the individuals involved have never been held to account for their conduct. As the dissent acknowledges, the deputy prosecuting attorney in Frost’s case, Zachary Wagnild, introduced into evidence an unsigned plea agreement . . . . [with a] difference [from the signed agreement] . . . [that] was material . . . . The dissent chalks this all up to a case of ‘the left hand [not knowing] what the right hand was doing’ in a busy office with multiple prosecuting attorneys. But it’s more akin to one hand washing the other.

And:

We are also troubled by the conduct of Gary Ernsdorff, the deputy prosecuting attorney who handled Shaw’s domestic-violence case. . . . The domestic-violence plea agreement had been signed on November 3, a month before Frost’s trial even began, but it was kept secret until it was too late for Frost to use it in his defense. . . . Finally, we are concerned by the actions of Kelli Williams, the public records officer for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office at the time Frost sought information about Shaw. . . . Williams provided incorrect or misleading information in response to his requests.

Perhaps most remarkably, this Part concludes with the specific reference to the state bar and how these individuals should handle potential disciplinary repercussions. Kozinski’s words are worth repeating:
The individuals we have named may wish to furnish a copy of this opinion to the state bar and seek to clear their names by providing an explanation for its consideration. This would seem to be the prudent course.

The Ninth Circuit sharply divided in this case, and Judge Richard Tallman wrote a heated partial-dissent, which called out Kozinski for going too far in launching “ad hominem attacks.” The opinion puts plenty of blame at the feet of Frost and his lawyers for failing to uncover the undisclosed plea agreement by consulting the public docket on Shaw’s cases two days after his trial ended in a conviction. As if the defense attorneys were not entitled to rely on the propriety of the witness’s testimony and the State’s obligation to correct false testimony. Incredibly, it also faulted Frost for not paying the $195 fee for copying materials about Shaw’s criminal cases while he was incarcerated and unrepresented and without access to resources. The partial-dissent also takes Kozinski to task for drawing conclusions about prosecutorial misconduct where there has been no evidentiary hearing or official fact-finding. Tallman, once an Assistant US Attorney in the jurisdiction from which Frost’s case emerged, expressed evident displeasure that someone “tarnished” the “character and integrity of several public employees” in King County under these circumstances.

One major question is whether Kozinski’s opinion—which takes the laudable if unusual step of identifying misbehaving members of the prosecutor’s office by name—will inspire other judges to follow suit. And, more generally, will courts recognize what Kozinski expressed about prosecutorial suppression of exculpatory evidence in his now-famous dissent in Olsen in late 2013: “Only judges can put a stop to it.” Or, will the status quo—in which judges are “strangely reluctant” to call out prosecutors let alone hold their convictions to account—continue to prevail?

Double Jeopardy

I have long said that the Criminal Justice and Medical Industrial Complex are co-joined twins that even Dr. Ben Carson cannot divide.

The varying members of the Justice system, from Police to Prison Guards, abuse and bring harm to those in their custody.  At times they circumvent that by simply killing them down in the street, think of it as a cost saving measure.

There have been not one but NUMEROUS cases where EMT’s, Medical personnel such as Nurses have stood by as Police and Prison Guards beat and ostensibly torture individuals as well as neglect them when in care.

These are just some of the cases:

• The Northwest boy who died in jail due a food allergy.
• The gay man who died being denied medication.
• Sandra Bland or this man
• Clinton Correction Facility
• Eric Garner

There are so many cases of death by neglect that it is full time job to document the cases.

Then we have the medical staff that ignore and mistreat misdiagnose those who are brought in via Police involvement and are given acronyms that determine the type of care or frankly lack thereof as a result.  And this is not just the great unwashed as this story about the New York Times reporter validates.

Then of course the medical professionals who notify and aid Police in taking blood tests or releasing the results of the tests without warrant to ensure that the patient can be arrested and prosecuted for a crime including legally prescribed drugs and take children from families as a result.

Any forensic patient (as that is the term for patients brought in by police)  are prioritized usually the bottom of the trauma list,  but they are from the moment of entry considered more a risk to the staff, which  in turn that places their care and needs as secondary.    They have a point but again shackling a woman during birth is a risk, to whom exactly?  And it doesn’t even apply to just those “type” of patients hospitals might actually be responsible for some of these problems. Gosh go figure!

The bizarre co-dependence and symbiosis between Police and Hospitals cannot be ignored and those who refuse are placed at risk, only by the Police.  Those who are entrusted with your care even when you are in no position to demand anything but the basics don’t even bother to do so due to self interest and job retention.  

Again, I am not making this shit up.  Who has to?   And then there is this case which brings on a whole new meaning of double jeopardy.

Woman Dies After Release from Hospital
Autopsy Results Expected

By JOE REEDY, Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Police expect autopsy results to be released Wednesday in the death of a woman who refused to leave a Florida hospital when doctors discharged her and collapsed when police arrested and forcibly removed her.

Barbara Dawson, 57, collapsed Monday while being escorted in handcuffs from the Liberty Calhoun Hospital, where she sought treatment for breathing difficulties, Blountstown police Chief Mark Mallory said Tuesday. An officer had arrested Dawson for disorderly conduct and trespassing, Mallory said.

Autopsy results should be released Wednesday, Mallory said. Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials have been called in to investigate, department spokesman Steve Arthur said. He declined to comment further.

Mallory said the officer who arrested Dawson removed the handcuffs after she collapsed and escorted her back into the hospital.

“We were told by a doctor once she got back in the hospital that her vital signs were good and it was their decision to readmit her,” he said. He said dashcam footage from the officer’s car does not show the incident but does pick up the audio.

Hospital officials did not return telephone calls from The Associated Press on Tuesday night. The Tallahassee Democrat reported (http://on.tdo.com/1QWbGOW) that Ruth Attaway, administrator and CEO of the 25-bed hospital, said staff did everything they could for Dawson.

“They did their best trying to save her,” Attaway said. “Our staff was very aggressive with her treatment.”

While doctors initially thought Dawson was stable and should be released, she felt as if she still had breathing issues and wanted to stay, said Tallahassee attorney Daryl Parks, who is representing Dawson’s family.

“The most reasonable thing to do is to let her sit there and be able to settle down until she felt well. Instead, she is forcibly removed and put in cuffs,” Parks said. “The early facts of this case should cause a great concern for everyone.”

The Calhoun-Liberty County chapter of the NAACP held an emergency meeting Tuesday. Dale R. Landry, who is the regional vice president for the Florida State chapter of the NAACP, met with local leaders and the family.

Landry said he and others are glad state law enforcement officers are getting involved, “but we strongly believe the death was due to negligence by the police department and hospital.”

Big Guns

And Clarissa will explain it all to you.  Meet the big gun who gets the cops off and not in a fun sex way.

This is the expert behind the Police response and training that excuses, explains, and justifies why cops kill.  Its necessary ma’am.

Well where to begin with this one. Ex cop now “Dr” from what appears to be one step removed from an online university or one of those for profit colleges.

And we have a white man over 70 who is still living in the 70s. And he is Canadian. Does he know Ted Cruz? Remember when we thought Canadians were clean and liberal and polite? Ever met my ex-husband? That ex part is the telling part right there.

Then we have the “science” which is non-existent and untested or reviewed. Aka junk or the dollar word – pseudoscience.

Then we have Lawyers, Guns and Money and not the Warren Zevon kind

I have said this repeatedly this is just bullshit and we have Lawyers who write, enable, defend and support this bullshit. Thin blue line is just another in a long line of cover up, button up and white coat wearers who hide and obfuscate the truth and protect murderers, executioners, and torturers.   (The American Psychology association is backpedaling on the whole torture thing, shocking not in a torture way) And why would this be any different?  I just refuse to couch my language when it comes to this breed, they don’t extend the courtesy when speaking of us the great unwashed so I am going to call this spade a shovel or whatever euphemism is appropriate.

And given that he is the “training” officer for the “new” Seattle PD, the adage also goes from a song – old boss same as the new boss.

Read and learn that the more things stay the same is because people like this.

Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later

By MATT APUZZO
AUG. 1, 2015

WASHINGTON — The shooting looked bad. But that is when the professor is at his best. A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead.

The driver was unarmed.

Taking the stand at a public inquest, William J. Lewinski, the psychology professor, explained that the officer had no choice but to act.

“In simple terms,” the district attorney in Portland, Ore., asked, “if I see the gun, I’m dead?”

“In simple terms, that’s it,” Dr. Lewinski replied.

When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country.

His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer’s story.

He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.

A string of deadly police encounters in Ferguson, Mo.; North Charleston, S.C.; and most recently in Cincinnati, have prompted a national reconsideration of how officers use force and provoked calls for them to slow down and defuse conflicts. But the debate has also left many police officers feeling unfairly maligned and suspicious of new policies that they say could put them at risk. Dr. Lewinski says his research clearly shows that officers often cannot wait to act.

“We’re telling officers, ‘Look for cover and then read the threat,’ ” he told a class of Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs recently. “Sorry, too damn late.”

A former Minnesota State professor, he says his testimony and training are based on hard science, but his research has been roundly criticized by experts. An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Civil rights lawyers say he is selling dangerous ideas.

“People die because of this stuff,” said John Burton, a California lawyer who specializes in police misconduct cases. “When they give these cops a pass, it just ripples through the system.”

Many policing experts are for hire, but Dr. Lewinski is unique in that he conducts his own research, trains officers and internal investigators, and testifies at trial. In the protests that have followed police shootings, demonstrators have often asked why officers are so rarely punished for shootings that seem unwarranted. Dr. Lewinski is part of the answer.

An Expert on the Stand

While his testimony at times has proved insufficient to persuade a jury, his record includes many high-profile wins.

“He won’t give an inch on cross-examination,” said Elden Rosenthal, a lawyer who represented the family of James Jahar Perez, the man killed in the 2004 Portland shooting. In that case, Dr. Lewinski also testified before the grand jury, which brought no charges. Defense lawyers like Dr. Lewinski, Mr. Rosenthal said. “They know that he’s battle-hardened in the courtroom, so you know exactly what you’re getting.”

Dr. Lewinski, 70, is affable and confident in his research, but not so polished as to sound like a salesman. In testimony on the stand, for which he charges nearly $1,000 an hour, he offers winding answers to questions and seldom appears flustered. He sprinkles scientific explanations with sports analogies.

“A batter can’t wait for a ball to cross home plate before deciding whether that’s something to swing at,” he told the Los Angeles deputy sheriffs. “Make sense? Officers have to make a prediction based on cues.”

Of course, it follows that batters will sometimes swing at bad pitches, and that officers will sometimes shoot unarmed people.

Much of the criticism of his work, Dr. Lewinski said, amounts to politics. In 2012, for example, just seven months after the Justice Department excoriated him and his methods, department officials paid him $55,000 to help defend a federal drug agent who shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old in California. Then last year, as part of a settlement over excessive force in the Seattle Police Department, the Justice Department endorsed sending officers to Mr. Lewinski for training. And in January, he was paid $15,000 to train federal marshals.

If the science is there, Dr. Lewinski said, he does not shy away from offering opinions in controversial cases. He said he was working on behalf of one of two Albuquerque officers who face murder charges in last year’s shooting death of a mentally ill homeless man. He has testified in many racially charged cases involving white officers who shot black suspects, such as the 2009 case in which a Bay Area transit officer shot and killed Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, at close range.

Dr. Lewinski said he was not trying to explain away every shooting. But when he testifies, it is almost always in defense of police shootings. Officers are his target audience — he publishes a newsletter on police use of force that he says has nearly one million subscribers — and his research was devised for them. “The science is based on trying to keep officers safe,” he said.

Dr. Lewinski, who grew up in Canada, got his doctorate in 1988 from the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities, an accredited but alternative Cincinnati school offering accelerated programs and flexible schedules. He designed his curriculum and named his program police psychology, a specialty not available elsewhere.

In 1990, a police shooting in Minneapolis changed the course of his career. Dan May, a white police officer, shot and killed Tycel Nelson, a black 17-year-old. Officer May said he fired after the teenager turned toward him and raised a handgun. But an autopsy showed he was shot in the back.

Dr. Lewinski was intrigued by the apparent contradiction. “We really need to get into the dynamics of how this unfolds,” he remembers thinking. “We need a lot better research.”
Continue reading the main story
Raising a Gun and Running Away

A video, taken as part of one of William J. Lewinski’s studies, shows how quickly suspects can raise a gun and turn to run. Dr. Lewinski uses videos like this to explain why police officers shoot suspects in the back.
Courtesy of the Force Science Institute

He began by videotaping students as they raised handguns and then quickly turned their backs. On average, that move took about half a second. By the time an officer returned fire, Dr. Lewinski concluded, a suspect could have turned his back.

He summarized his findings in 1999 in The Police Marksman, a popular magazine for officers. The next year, it published an expanded study, in which Dr. Lewinski timed students as they fired while turning, running or sitting with a gun at their side, as if stashed in a car’s console.

Suspects, he concluded, could reach, fire and move remarkably fast. But faster than an officer could react? In 2002, a third study concluded that it takes the average officer about a second and a half to draw from a holster, aim and fire.

Together, the studies appeared to support the idea that officers were at a serious disadvantage. The studies are the foundation for much of his work over the past decade.

This video simulates a driver with a gun stashed in the center console. It is used to help demonstrate how officers cannot always wait to see a gun before reacting.

Because he published in a police magazine and not a scientific journal, Dr. Lewinski was not subjected to the peer-review process. But in separate cases in 2011 and 2012, the Justice Department and a private lawyer asked Lisa Fournier, a Washington State University professor and an American Journal of Psychology editor, to review Dr. Lewinski’s studies. She said they lacked basic elements of legitimate research, such as control groups, and drew conclusions that were unsupported by the data.

“In summary, this study is invalid and unreliable,” she wrote in court documents in 2012. “In my opinion, this study questions the ability of Mr. Lewinski to apply relevant and reliable data to answer a question or support an argument.”

Dr. Lewinski said he chose to publish his findings in the magazine because it reached so many officers who would never read a scientific journal. If he were doing it over, he said in an interview, he would have published his early studies in academic journals and summarized them elsewhere for officers. But he said it was unfair for Dr. Fournier to criticize his research based on summaries written for a general audience.While opposing lawyers and experts found his research controversial, they were particularly frustrated by Dr. Lewinski’s tendency to get inside people’s heads. Time and again, his reports to defense lawyers seem to make conclusive statements about what officers saw, what they did not, and what they cannot remember.

Often, these details are hotly disputed. For example, in a 2009 case that revolved around whether a Texas sheriff’s deputy felt threatened by a car coming at him, Dr. Lewinski said that the officer was so focused on firing to stop the threat, he did not immediately recognize that the car had passed him.

Such gaps in observation and memory, he says, can be explained by a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, in which the brain is so focused on one task that it blocks out everything else. When an officer’s version of events is disproved by video or forensic evidence, Dr. Lewinski says, inattentional blindness may be to blame. It is human nature, he says, to try to fill in the blanks.

“Whenever the cop says something that’s helpful, it’s as good as gold,” said Mr. Burton, the California lawyer. “But when a cop says something that’s inconvenient, it’s a result of this memory loss.”

Experts say Dr. Lewinski is too sure of himself on the subject. “I hate the fact that it’s being used in this way,” said Arien Mack, one of two psychologists who coined the term inattentional blindness. “When we work in a lab, we ask them if they saw something. They have no motivation to lie. A police officer involved in a shooting certainly has a reason to lie.”

Dr. Lewinski acknowledged that there was no clear way to distinguish inattentional blindness from lying. He said he had tried to present it as a possibility, not a conclusion.

Almost as soon as his research was published, lawyers took notice and asked him to explain his work to juries.

In Los Angeles, he helped authorities explain the still-controversial fatal shooting of Anthony Dwain Lee, a Hollywood actor who was shot through a window by a police officer at a Halloween party in 2000. The actor carried a fake gun as part of his costume. Mr. Lee was shot several times in the back. The officer was not charged.

The city settled a lawsuit over the shooting for $225,000, but Mr. Lewinski still teaches the case as an example of a justified shooting that unfairly tarnished a good officer who “was shooting to save his own life.”

In September 2001, a Cincinnati judge acquitted a police officer, Stephen Roach, in the shooting death of an unarmed black man after a chase. The officer said he believed the man, Timothy Thomas, 19, was reaching for a gun. Dr. Lewinski testified, and the judge said he found his analysis credible. The prosecutor, Stephen McIntosh, however, told The Columbus Dispatch that Dr. Lewinski’s “radical” views could be used to justify nearly any police shooting.

“If that’s the sort of direction we, as a society, are going,” the prosecutor said, “I have a lot of disappointment.”Since then, Dr. Lewinski has testified in many dozens of cases in state and federal court, becoming a hero to many officers who feel that politics, not science or safety, drives police policy. For example, departments often require officers to consider less-lethal options such as pepper spray, stun guns and beanbag guns before drawing their firearms.

“These have come about because of political pressure,” said Les Robbins, the executive director of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. In an interview, Mr. Robbins recalled how he used to keep his gun drawn and hidden behind his leg during most traffic stops. “We used to be able to use the baton and hit people where we felt necessary to get them to comply. Those days are gone.”

Positions of Authority

Dr. Lewinski and his company have provided training for dozens of departments, including in Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Seattle. His messages often conflict, in both substance and tone, with the training now recommended by the Justice Department and police organizations.

The Police Executive Research Forum, a group that counts most major city police chiefs as members, has called for greater restraint from officers and slower, better decision making. Chuck Wexler, its director, said he is troubled by Dr. Lewinski’s teachings. He added that even as chiefs changed their use-of-force policies, many did not know what their officers were taught in academies and private sessions.

“It’s not that chiefs don’t care,” he said. “It’s rare that a chief has time to sit at the academy and see what’s being taught.”

Regardless of what, if any, policy changes emerge from the current national debate, civil right lawyers say one thing will not change: Jurors want to believe police officers, and Dr. Lewinski’s research tells them that they can.

On a cold night in early 2003, for instance, Robert Murtha, an officer in Hartford, Conn., shot three times at the driver of a car. He said the vehicle had sped directly at him, knocking him to the ground as he fired. Video from a nearby police cruiser told another story. The officer had not been struck. He had fired through the driver’s-side window as the car passed him.

Officer Murtha’s story was so obviously incorrect that he was arrested on charges of assault and fabricating evidence. If officers can get away with shooting people and lying about it, the prosecutor declared, “the system is doomed.”

“There was no way around it — Murtha was dead wrong,” his lawyer, Hugh F. Keefe, recalled recently. But the officer was “bright, articulate and truthful,” Mr. Keefe said. Jurors needed an explanation for how the officer could be so wrong and still be innocent.

Dr. Lewinski testified at trial. The jury deliberated less than one full day. The officer was acquitted of all charges.

Ass.Set.Forfeit

Municipalities and particularly law enforcement profit from what is called forfeiture.  It is legal and it is utterly unchallenged many times as it is often the poor whom they take it from and with those resources gone there is little one can do to legally regain the monies/properties back.

As we already know the monopoly of legal representation have no interest in those cases as to get that back it might end up costing you the same amount you lost so in other words its lose lose.

The tow charges for cars, the endless penalties in tickets and other assorted fees lead those whose victimless crimes are now enhanced by their inabilities to pay the fines for the supposed crimes.

Radley Balko did an outstanding column last week discussing the affects of this type of prosecution and persecution of those too poor to pay tickets and in turn find themselves further in debt and in jail. As Barbara Emmerich has written it is the criminalization of poverty.  Balko’s piece discusses the area in St Louis but there are many towns, such as the one I have discussed, Mountainview Colorado, that generates most of its operative income from tickets to support a police twice the needed size of a town that is the size of a postage stamp.

The Washington Post has decided to devote a three part series on the issue of asset forfeiture.

The first discusses the shadow network of how this program works:

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country.
One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop. 

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections. 

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

This is how the program works

In case after case, highway interdicts appeared to follow a similar script. Police set up what amounted to rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling. They quickly issued warnings or tickets. They studied drivers for signs of nervousness, including pulsing carotid arteries, clenched jaws and perspiration. They also looked for supposed “indicators” of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks or air fresheners hanging from rear view mirrors. 

This is another way of making DUI stops or drug charges. The ticket offenses climb as the Officers assess the ability to generate fees and fines to anything as bizarre as road rage or other violent offenses by simply your demeanor when they approach to search and seize.   Having a car means you agree via implied consent for law makers to do whatever they want to you to prevent you from supposedly doing something criminal.

Driving is the easiest way for law to avoid warrants and other raids that draw attention but this method is no less obtuse and of course difficult to assess in both legitimacy and effectiveness.

In part 2 of the series the nefarious dealings of the Black Asphalt crew are parallel to the very supposed drug dealers they are supposed to be stopping.

Operating in collaboration with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal entities, Black Asphalt members exchanged tens of thousands of reports about American motorists, many of whom had not been charged with any crimes, according to a company official and hundreds of internal documents obtained by The Post. For years, it received no oversight by government, even though its reports contained law enforcement sensitive information about traffic stops and seizures, along with hunches and personal data about drivers, including Social Security numbers and identifying tattoos. 

Black Asphalt also has served as a social hub for a new brand of highway interdictors, a group that one Desert Snow official has called “a brotherhood.” Among other things, the site hosts an annual competition to honor police who seize the most contraband and cash on the highways. As part of the contest, Desert Snow encouraged state and local patrol officers to post seizure data along with photos of themselves with stacks of currency and drugs. Some of the photos appear in a rousing hard-rock video that the Guthrie, Okla.-based Desert Snow uses to promote its training courses.

I have been stopped for traffic violations only twice in my life. The first in Arizona by the Grand Canyon.  It was an empty highway and my dog and I were driving along,  I honestly don’t recall even how fast but not very as I was very protective of my dog but I suspect at least 10 miles over.  The next thing I see is a car speeding by and then I am pulled over.  My car was a Mercedes the one that passed a lesser model.

The woman officer was utterly overly aggressive.  My dog naturally was barking and protective. She threatened to kill the dog, I started screaming and crying. Her partner was a younger man and said just restrain the dog.. I said how about I get out of the vehicle.  The woman threatened to arrest me for aggressive driving and road rage.  I was horrified, I was alone on a lone road.  I said I am in transit for a move my husband has flown ahead and I would need him to come to take the dog and get the car. There was much talk between the two Officers and I was cited for speeding.  I never heard from the State of Arizona, received any bills, tickets or warrants. That was over 10 years ago. So maybe I am wanted there.

The next time I was in a coma on a ventilator. The Officer took my blood and left.  I did not know for 3 months that this had happened. I was tried and convicted for DUI.  I have always professed my innocence and I  know what happened to me, being drugged and raped I cannot prove but I know it. But to the Officer Michael Lewis, to the Prosecutor Jennifer Miller and to Judge Willie Gregory I am scum.   I will never have the opportunity to tell them I feel the same.

This is our system, broken, battered and utterly useless.  I can say that even when you pay, buy or hire Attorneys you end up on the end of a broken stick.  I laughed when I read the comments by a Defense Attorney claiming that Prosecutors won’t plea negotiate with well respected defense Attorneys as they know they are willing to go to trial, thankfully the PD who writes a great blog called Grits for Breakfast said otherwise.  That is an honest blog from an honest Attorney who knows how fucked the system is and how fucked you are when you enter it.  Anyone who pretends to be some noble intellect is fucking kidding you. They are just lawyers with a specific trade and skill set, nothing more.

Any of them in that industry and profession will take whatever they can – your money, your pride, your innocence, your respect and in many cases your life.  You can only wish the same for them.

Money for nothing but the chicks are free.