Your Threat Score

In my profession there are still dead heads complaining why we need to use computers to write offense or accident reports. "Paper is find...just press hard for your third copy...", etc. Now here is some really good stuff. Fresno Police are using a new technology to assess the threats their officers face as they respond to calls for service. To use the phrase, Fascinating.

The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’

FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call — it turned out he had a gun.

As a national debate has played out over mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a new generation of technology such as the Beware software being used in Fresno has given local law enforcement officers unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens.

Police officials say such tools can provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases. They say that last year’s attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have only underscored the need for such measures.

But the powerful systems also have become flash points for civil libertarians and activists, who say they represent a troubling intrusion on privacy, have been deployed with little public oversight and have potential for abuse or error. Some say laws are needed to protect the public...

False analogy. The question of the NSA is them monitoring private conversations without court authority and for little purpose. They are collecting so much data it cannot be analyzed. Arrest reports, property records, commercial databases and especially social media postings are open to the public. You don't want people to know your write gang bang crap, don't write it on Facebook. Not to mention these inquiries are targeted to a specific person.

In many instances, people have been unaware that the police around them are sweeping up information, and that has spawned controversy. Planes outfitted with cameras filmed protests and unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. For years, dozens of departments used devices that can hoover up all cellphone data in an area without search warrants. Authorities in Oregon are facing an internal investigation after using social media-monitoring software to keep tabs on Black Lives Matter hashtags.

“This is something that’s been building since September 11,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it...”

Padon me, worthless argument. "Planes outfitted with cameras filmed protests and unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo." Hate to tell you but if you are in the public, you have no expectation of privacy and can be photographed. I've often said as a cop I have no expectation of privacy while on patrol and you can use your iPhone to take pictures of me.

...An arsenal of high-tech tools

Fresno’s Real Time Crime Center is the type of facility that has become the model for high-tech policing nationwide. Similar centers have opened in New York, Houston and Seattle over the past decade.

Fresno’s futuristic control room, which operates around the clock, sits deep in its headquarters and brings together a handful of technologies that allow the department to see, analyze and respond to incidents as they unfold across this city of more than 500,000 in the San Joaquin Valley.

On a recent Monday afternoon, the center was a hive of activity. The police radio crackled over loudspeakers — “subject armed with steel rod” — as five operators sat behind banks of screens dialing up a wealth of information to help units respond to the more than 1,200 911 calls the department receives every day.

On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.

The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs.

Fresno police said having the ability to access all that information in real time is crucial to solving crimes.

They recently used the cameras to track a robbery suspect as he fled a business and then jumped into a canal to hide. He was quickly apprehended.

The license plate database was instrumental in solving a September murder case, in which police had a description of a suspect’s vehicle and three numbers from the license plate.

But perhaps the most controversial and revealing technology is the threat-scoring software Beware. Fresno is one of the first departments in the nation to test the program.

As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

In promotional materials, Intrado writes that Beware could reveal that the resident of a particular address was a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had criminal convictions for assault and had posted worrisome messages about his battle experiences on social media. The “big data” that has transformed marketing and other industries has now come to law enforcement.

Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said officers are often working on scant or even inaccurate information when they respond to calls, so Beware and the Real Time Crime Center give them a sense of what may be behind the next door.

“Our officers are expected to know the unknown and see the unseen,” Dyer said. “They are making split-second decisions based on limited facts. The more you can provide in terms of intelligence and video, the more safely you can respond to calls.”

Intelligence is for the Commander, a saying from my army days on why we need information before going into an operation. This is a updated version of this process and I think it's great. Naturally you have the straw man threats...

But some in Fresno say the power and the sheer concentration of surveillance in the Real Time Crime Center is troubling. The concerns have been raised elsewhere as well — last year, Oakland city officials scaled back plans for such a center after residents protested, citing privacy concerns.

Rob Nabarro, a Fresno civil rights lawyer, said he is particularly concerned about Beware. He said outsourcing decisions about the threat posed by an individual to software is a problem waiting to happen.

Nabarro said the fact that only Intrado — not the police or the public — knows how Beware tallies its scores is disconcerting. He also worries that the system might mistakenly increase someone’s threat level by misinterpreting innocuous activity on social media, like criticizing the police, and trigger a heavier response by officers.

“It’s a very unrefined, gross technique,” Nabarro said of Beware’s color-coded levels. “A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen.”

You know who else it can be dangerous for idiot, the cop going into a hostile place. This may shock you counselor, but I go where other people need someone to restore order. And idiots expect me to restore order to a situation that took years to deteriorate. So yes, I need information to safety and efficiently accomplish that task.

...Dyer said such concerns are overblown, saying the scores don’t trigger a particular police response. He said operators use them as guides to delve more deeply into someone’s background, looking for information that might be relevant to an officer on scene. He said officers on the street never see the scores.

The Fresno City Council called a hearing on Beware in November after constituents raised concerns. Once council member referred to a local media report saying that a woman’s threat level was elevated because she was tweeting about a card game titled “Rage,” which could be a keyword in Beware’s assessment of social media.

Councilman Clinton J. Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, said Beware was like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel and asked Dyer a simple question: “Could you run my threat level now?”

Dyer agreed. The scan returned Olivier as a green, but his home came back as a yellow, possibly because of someone who previously lived at his address, a police official said.

“Even though it’s not me that’s the yellow guy, your officers are going to treat whoever comes out of that house in his boxer shorts as the yellow guy,” Olivier said. “That may not be fair to me.”

He added later: “[Beware] has failed right here with a council member as the example.”

Really, it's failed. It described you as "Green", low threat, while the house is "Yellow", medium threat. BTY, we don't know if you have a record from this article. You may have been busted for a few fights back in your young and stupid days. Just saying. And please Mr Oliver, don't use that four letter F word with me. The world ain't fair.

The rest of the article is the expected "balance" of ACLU comments in every "objective" media report. Again, this may disturb some but understand, as long as the data is from open sources, it's available for analysis. The ACLU types who seem to have no issue with certain high officials of our government using FBI data files which do contain restricted sensitive information will object to law enforcement using open sources like this. I will say as long as the information is available to the civilian (and yes, the criminal) it's available to the cops.

Thank you Darren at RotLC for the link.

The crime committed by Mrs. Bill Clinton...translated into English.

Friend, fellow Army veterans and long time sharer of 1835 Bourbon, Mike Ford, has written another article for American Thinker and again, he's knocked out out the park. This explains in good details how the former Secretary of State tried to get around established federal law in handling classified data.

Hillary's Email: It's a Felony!

The constant "drip, drip drip," regarding former Secretary of State Clinton's e-mail is starting to sound like so much inside baseball. Secretary Clinton continues to stand on her statement that none of the e-mail she sent or received had classified markings. Other folks in the conversation comment that many of the e-mails Secretary Clinton wrote and received were "born classified," at the time she wrote or received them.

We need to cut to the chase. Somebody committed a felony, likely several. If, as some reports have indicated, there was certain overhead imagery, marked or unmarked on Secretary Clinton's e-mail server, someone committed a serious crime. The way government information/automation systems are set up, someone had to take a deliberate series of felonious actions in order for that imagery to get there. Period.

One such action appears to be confirmed yesterday in an article in National Review by Brendan Bordelon entitled: Clinton Pushed Aide to Strip Markings from Sensitive Documents, Send through ‘Nonsecure’ Channel:

During a 2011 e-mail exchange, Hillary Clinton urged top aide Jake Sullivan to strip classified talking points of all markings and send them through “nonsecure” means after a secure fax line failed to function. On the night of June 16, 2011, Sullivan told Clinton that important talking points on an undetermined issue would be faxed to her the following morning. When Clinton informed Sullivan that the talking points had not yet materialized, he began a frantic search for the problem. “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax,” he wrote to Clinton 15 minutes later. “They’re working on it.” “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper with no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton replied. (Emphasis mine)

Instead of getting into a detailed primer on Department of Defense and Department of State electronic communications, I'll give you the short version. Although the State Department and the Department of Defense use different systems for their unclassified communications, they do share some of the same systems for their classified traffic.

The unclassified systems used by Defense and State have e-mail, file sharing and teleconferencing capabilities. Those systems also have access to the Internet. Some agencies allow their employees to use their unclassified computers to conduct limited personal business, such as sending e-mails and looking at The Weekly Standard online, during their breaks. These employees can also send e-mail to private addressees from this system.

The classified systems the agencies use jointly are:

SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network): used to transmit material that is classified CONFIDENTIAL or SECRET. It may not be used to transmit TOP SECRET material.

JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System): used to transmit TOP SECRET information, to include highly classified satellite imagery. The JWICS system is where Private Bradley Manning obtained the information he later gave to Wikileaks. This is also the system the State Department uses to routinely receive and access satellite imagery and imagery analysis, along with other TOP SECRET information.

What is important to understand is that, except for extremely rare and tightly controlled circumstances, JWICS, SIPRNet and the in-house unclassified systems do not connect to each other. Except for that very rare exception, the only way to get information from one system to another is to use a system I have yet to introduce, the SneakerNet. "SneakerNet" is IT slang, referring to someone taking information on one system, saving it to portable media, disk or thumb drive and walking ("sneakering") it over to the other system and uploading it, thereby bypassing the procedural safeguards inherent in separate, unconnected systems. An alternative, using the same concept, would be to print the data from a JWICS terminal (possibly inside the State Department) and then scan the hard copy into an unclassified system. This method would also work were someone get access to a hard copy document or photo handed out at a meeting.

One of the advantages of this unconnected system of systems is that it virtually eliminates "spillage," the accidental release of one level of classified information into an arena not cleared for it. If there was reconnaissance satellite imagery or analysis of that imagery on Secretary Clinton's server or any other unclassified system, then someone had to take a series of deliberate and felonious steps to put it there.

A photo would have had to have its markings deliberately removed. Then it would have had to have been copied from JWICS onto removable media (or printed out) and uploaded (or scanned) to either an unclassified computer & e-mailed to Secretary Clinton, or directly uploaded to her server. In the case that what was on her server was merely a written assessment of what the imagery shows, the above still pertains. Someone had to make a series of deliberate decisions and steps to either copy or transcribe the assessment from JWICS and send it via a nonsecure e-mail to Secretary Clinton.

What this means is that the conversation about this being a mistake, accident, or minor error in judgment, is a flat out lie. In my humble opinion, this lie should be rolled into an obstruction of justice charge -- yet another felony.

Disclosure: The last time I personally used any of these systems was in 2012. Systems and procedures have likely changed since then.

Mike Ford is a former Infantry Colonel. He has served in Europe, Central America and in Southwest Asia, Commanding at the Detachment, Company, Battalion and Brigade Levels.

One of the points I made on a recent FB post is before being allowed access to classified data, all employees (civilian and military) must sign a Standard Form-312 Classified Information Non-Disclosure Agreement. I pointed out the beginning of the form, (emphasis mine)

AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN Mrs. Bill Clinton AND THE UNITED STATES

1. Intending to be legally bound, I hereby accept the obligations contained in this Agreement in consideration of my being granted access to classified information. As used in this Agreement, classified information is marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications, that is classified under the standards of Executive Order 13526, or under any other Executive order or statute that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of information in the interest of national security; and unclassified information that meets the standards for classification and is in the process of a classification determination as provided in sections 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4(e) of Executive Order 13526, or under any other Executive order or statute that requires protection for such information in the interest of national security. I understand and accept that by being granted access to classified information, special confidence and trust shall be placed in me by the United States Government.

2. I hereby acknowledge that I have received a security indoctrination concerning the nature and protection of classified information, including the procedures to be followed in ascertaining whether other persons to whom I contemplate disclosing this information have been approved for access to it, and that I understand these procedures.

3. I have been advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling of classified information by me could cause damage or irreparable injury to the United States or could be used to advantage by a foreign nation. I hereby agree that I will never divulge classified information to anyone unless: (a) I have officially verified that the recipient has been properly authorized by the United States Government to receive it; or (b) I have been given prior written notice of authorization from the United States Government Department or Agency (hereinafter Department or Agency) responsible for the classification of information or last granting me a security clearance that such disclosure is permitted. I understand that if I am uncertain about the classification status of information, I am required to confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before I may disclose it, except to a person as provided in (a) or (b), above. I further understand that I am obligated to comply with laws and regulations that prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

4. I have been advised that any breach of this Agreement may result in the termination of any security clearances I hold; removal from any position of special confidence and trust requiring such clearances; or termination of my employment or other relationships with the Departments or Agencies that granted my security clearance or clearances. In addition, I have been advised that any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by me may constitute a violation, or violations, of United States criminal laws, including the provisions of sections 641, 793, 794, 798, *952 and 1924, title 18, United States Code; *the provisions of section 783(b}, title 50, United States Code; and the provisions of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. I recognize that nothing in this Agreement constitutes a waiver by the United States of the right to prosecute me for any statutory violation...

She knew what she was doing, but the law doesn't apply to her. Why is it the Obama Regime's Just-Us Department is actively sabotaging the campaign of Mrs. Bill Clinton? They know this will seriously damage the chances of the Democrats in retaining the presidency. Two crazy theories I throw out. One, B Hussein Obama knows had hardly the country is suffering under his economic policies, Obamacare, etc and the real pain will come in after January 2017. He may want the Republicans in the hot seat. Or his hatred of the Clintons may extend past his hatred of the Republican, so he will do what he can to keep her out of the Oval Office. Stay tuned folks!

You can't stop stupid!

I've often said you think you've hit rock bottom with stupidity, someone breaks out the pick ax and starts breaking the rock.

Moron, the officer's K9 is ten feet away and already want to bring your dumb ass down, and then you decide to hit him. Enjoy.

Trying to keep things real to her as possible!
Posted by Josh Hazel on Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Geopolitical Weekly: The International Banking System Faces an Existential Threat, July 5, 2016

By Mark Fleming-Williams

Christmas did not offer much good cheer to the world's bankers, who have received a sustained kicking since the financial crisis erupted in 2008. In the latest blow, Switzerland announced that it would hold a referendum on a radical proposal that would strip commercial banks of the ability to create money, depriving them of a great deal of their profit-making capabilities. If the Swiss proposal catches on around the world, it could shred core business assumptions that have underpinned the banking model over the past three centuries.

From Babylon to Central Bank

The earliest banks we know of, in ancient Babylon, were temples that doubled as repositories where one could store wealth. At some point, the guardians of the stored treasure realized they could put this accumulated wealth to work, and banks accordingly began to lend capital. Borrowers would pay interest on what they borrowed, and this interest would ultimately find its way back to the lenders after the banks had taken a cut. The banks became trusted intermediaries that brought lender and borrower together and ensured neither would be cheated. Paper money emerged after people found it was easier to buy things using deposit slips from their bank than carrying gold around.

The next evolution happened when bankers realized that since depositors almost never simultaneously withdrew all their funds, banks could lend more capital than had been deposited. This allowed banks to "create" money in the sense that bankers could issue loans not necessarily backed up by hard deposits. Creating revenue in this way proved lucrative, but it brought banks into conflict with rulers, who were notionally in charge of the state's money supply and any gains to be made from it. In England, whose financial system is in many ways the progenitor of today's global system, this battle was played out between banker and ruler in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Ultimately, in 1666 King Charles II — well aware of the limits of his own power thanks to the beheading of his father 17 years earlier — put control of the money supply into private hands. The privatization of the money creation process gave birth to the system we use today, in which private or commercial bank loans are responsible for 97 percent of the money circulating in the modern global economic system. In another change, 28 years after Charles II's reform, an enterprising group of businessmen offered the government cheaper loans in exchange for certain privileges, such as a monopoly over the printing of physical currency, and so the Bank of England was born.

The benefits of the new system proved immediately apparent. Interest rates on government borrowing dropped from 10-14 percent in the 1690s to 5-6 percent in the early 1700s. This allowed Britain a great deal of leeway when it came to military spending, which it soon put to use. But the privatization of money creation also came with drawbacks, namely the economic cycle of boom and bust. Leaving the money-lending and -creating decisions up to banks resulted in a system of extremes where bankers created speculative bubbles via vast quantities of loans and money when times were good, only to refuse to lend — in a sense destroying money — once an ensuing speculative bubble burst.

This led to liquidity crises, with the South Sea Bubble of 1720 providing early evidence of this mechanism kicking into action. The fact that banks were lending more money than they could back up with capital also left them exposed to bank runs whenever the public lost confidence in them. The reserve ratio, which requires banks to keep a fraction of their loans backed by safer assets such as government debt or central bank money, is an attempt to keep this threat at bay. But it is an inherent characteristic of so-called fractional reserve banking that the risk of bank runs is ultimately inescapable.

Britain, and indeed all the other countries that came to adopt the system, grew accustomed to a regular waxing and waning of the money supply and to the consequent up-and-down economy. There were ways to palliate this cycle, with the Bank of England slowly developing into the stabilizing force it is today. In times of crisis, the Bank of England would lower interest rates and flood the market with liquidity, bailing out any solvent but illiquid banks to keep the system functioning, thus smoothing the money supply's wilder fluctuations.

As British and then American influence spread, so did banks' power, and capital flowed ever more freely around the world as domestic deposits were used to finance international projects. The system was heading for a fall, however, when World War I created great economic imbalances between Europe and the United States. In the 1920s, the Federal Reserve attempted to restore prewar parity by keeping interest rates artificially low, but this led to abundant speculative U.S. capital flooding across the Atlantic, particularly into Germany. The ensuing giant bubble finally popped in 1929, leading to the dramatic liquidity shortages of the Great Depression and creating the circumstances that culminated in World War II. The experience led to the partial reining in of banks, with the Glass-Steagall legislation in the United States in the early 1930s limiting their ability to take part in speculative investments.

Time has a way of chipping away at such precautions, however, and the banks gradually escaped their shackles and capital came to flow freely around the world once again. More countries became accustomed to the ebb and flow of bubble and crisis, though these crises tended to be more regional in scope (e.g., Latin America, Asia, Scandinavia). When global crisis finally struck again in 2008 it was different from 1929 in that there was no world war to blame for the global economic imbalances; this crisis followed an extended period of the banks having had things pretty much their own way. Instead, it was a giant version of the regular crises inherent in the system. This led to the thinking that it is the banks, and indeed the system they created around themselves, that need changing. In the eight years since 2008, layer upon layer of 1933-style regulation and restriction have thus been heaped on the banking sector.

A Radical Reform

It is into this atmosphere that the idea of stripping banks of their money-creating abilities has gained currency (regained, in fact, since calls for it date back at least to the 1930s). According to its proponents, the way to root out the instability inherent to the system is to require banks to back their loans 100 percent with reserves. This essentially would be a step back to the point where banks would again function as conduits rather than creators of capital. Under the reformed system the creation of new money would instead be the prerogative of the central bank and the government. These national institutions would in theory be motivated by the needs of the state rather than by short-term profit and would keep the money supply growing at a fixed rate, doing away with the wild fluctuations of the credit cycle. (One challenge to overcome would be politicians attempting to hijack the money supply for short-term political gain.) Proponents of such a system point to many expected benefits: bank runs would be eliminated, the proceeds of money creation would go to the government and thus the taxpayer rather than to the banking elite, government debt would be a thing of the past, and private debt would be greatly reduced. (Indeed, the predominance of debt in today's world is partly a product of it being required in the money creation process.)

But there also would be great risks involved, the main one being the fear of the evil unknown. Though the economic instabilities of the past 300 years appear to have resulted largely from the fractional reserve system, was it also responsible for the relatively breakneck growth over the same period? Moreover, the changeover from one system to the other would be extremely tricky, requiring vast quantities of central bank money-printing and debt buybacks. That would be a recipe for an extremely fraught period carrying immense risks of mismanagement. In truth, another full-blown financial crisis may have to take place before such a changeover could be made at the global level.

But the theoretical upsides are great, as are frustrations with the current system, and the idea has begun to gather momentum. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund published an influential research paper laying out the case for the proposed system, and in 2015 the Icelandic government commissioned a report on the prospect of undertaking the changes. In Switzerland, a law requiring a referendum to take place should 100,000 signatures be gathered has set the country on a course to possibly being first to undertake the great experiment. Strikingly, the revolution is being considered at both ends of the spectrum: Iceland has lately proved among the most financially adventurous players on the global economic scene, while Switzerland has long been one of the most conservative. Considering the risks involved, adoption in a smaller economy such as Iceland or Switzerland would be a useful test case from a global perspective. It would limit the cost of failure to the global economy while helping establish the best way of adopting the changes should the reforms actually work.

For banks, the prospect is of course nothing less than a nightmare scenario, especially coming on top of all of their existing woes. These have included not only increased regulation but also the threat from a disruptive new technology undercutting their basic model in the form of Bitcoin, the new electronic currency that emerged almost exactly as the financial crisis struck. While Bitcoin has suffered its own wild fluctuations in the eight years since its birth, the technology that underpins it, Blockchain, has truly historic potential. The architects appear to have created an electronic system in which both parties in a transaction can act with confidence without the need for an intermediary, though there is some added risk for the payer, since reversing transactions is more difficult than in traditional banking. The world's banks therefore face both the prospect of losing their money-creation privileges, as well as a potential usurper threatening their long-established role as the middleman through which all capital must flow. As 2015 fades into 2016, it is hard to think of a time in the past 300 years when the banker's position in society has been more at risk.

COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM

An excellent overview of Tamir Rice

I've never read this author before, but his overview and points are excellent. Take a few minutes for a great explanation of the Tamir Rice incident.

Explaining the Unexplainable: The Tamir Rice Shooting

Chris Hernandez

On November 22, 2014, a twelve year-old boy named Tamir Rice, playing with a toy pistol at a park, was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer. Rice was no Michael Brown; he hadn’t committed a crime, didn’t do anything to deserve being shot, and wasn’t posing a threat to anyone. His tragic death understandably generated massive public outrage. Last week’s announcement that the officer who killed him wouldn’t be charged was both expected and dreaded; expected because officers are rarely indicted for killing suspects, and dreaded because of the additional fuel it would pour onto anti-police fire.

Rice’s death was undeniably tragic. But was it a crime?

The evidence says it wasn’t.

The Question:

Why would police kill a twelve year-old with a toy gun? The simple answer is that Rice didn’t appear to be a child, and his weapon looked real. Perhaps the most emotional responses to this shooting have been a result of Rice’s age and the fact that he just had a toy. But the officers involved had no way of knowing those things.

Boiled down to basics, here’s what happened:

Someone called the police and reported a suspicious person with a gun;

Police responded and found the suspect;

The suspect reached for what looked like a real weapon in his waistband;

One of the responding officers believed his life was in imminent danger;

The officer shot and killed the suspect.

That’s why the officers weren’t indicted. They answered a call, thought their lives were in danger, and one officer used deadly force. If a police officer is lawfully performing his duties and reasonably believes he’s in imminent danger of being killed by a suspect, he’s justified in using deadly force to protect himself.

Here’s what I know about the shooting:

The 911 call:

The incident began with a 911 call from a man drinking beer at Cleveland’s Cudell Commons Park. The caller reported a black male was pulling a gun from his pants, “pointing it at everybody”, and “scaring the shit out of people”. Early in the call he reported “it’s probably fake”, and he repeated “it’s probably fake” thirty seconds later. Near the end of the two-minute call he said, “he’s probably a juvenile.” Just before getting off the phone he said, “I don’t know if it’s real or not.”

Two officers were dispatched to investigate. They were NOT told the weapon might be fake, or that the suspect might be a juvenile. They were only told to investigate “a black male sitting on a swing pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people.”

Much blame has been laid at the dispatcher’s feet for not telling the officers the gun might be fake and that Rice might be a juvenile. But in Cleveland, as in many large police departments, dispatchers don’t answer 911 calls. “Call takers” answer those calls, record the information and forward it to police, fire or EMS dispatch. Call takers often make mistakes or miss important facts (I’ve been dispatched to many calls with incomplete or incorrect information, and have had a couple of call slips I literally couldn’t understand).

Listen to the 911 call embedded in the article I linked above; the call taker didn’t press the caller for information about the gun, didn’t ask about the suspect’s demeanor, didn’t follow up on the “he might be a juvenile” and “it’s probably fake” comments, and didn’t even ask the caller’s name. She recorded the bare minimum, “black male on a swing pulling a gun from his pants and pointing it at people”, and sent that to dispatch. And that’s all the officers knew when they arrived.

Tamir Rice’s Size:

I knew Rice was twelve from the beginning, but didn’t learn until a few days ago that Rice was 5’7″ and 195 pounds. I’m in my 40’s, also 5’7”, and weigh substantially less than 195 pounds. 5’7” and 195 isn’t huge, but it definitely isn’t the height and weight you’d expect from a twelve year old. The 911 caller said the male with the gun might be a juvenile, but later told investigators he thought the male was around twenty because he was a “big boy”. Incessant media reports remind everyone Rice was a child, but rarely say he was built like an adult. I doubt the officers involved saw Rice and thought, “that’s a child.”

The Gun:

Rice was carrying a very realistic-looking Airsoft 1911 .45 replica. The pistol originally had an orange tip, which had been removed. People with extensive experience around weapons would identify it as fake in a sterile environment, but under stress and movement it’s likely they wouldn’t spot the differences.

I’ve been shooting and collecting guns for over thirty years, and was a weapons repairman and marksmanship coach in the Marine Corps. I’ve fired thousands upon thousands of rounds from many weapons in the Marines and Army, and have carried a gun almost every day as a cop for over twenty years. And I can’t say I would have immediately recognized Rice’s gun as a toy that day, under those conditions.

The Officers Involved:

Two officers in one patrol car were dispatched to investigate. The driver was a six-year veteran named Frank Garmback. His partner, Timothy Loehmann, was a probationary officer with less than one year on Cleveland PD. In 2012 Loehmann worked for the Independence, Ohio Police Department for less than six months. He resigned from IPD in December 2012 for “personal reasons”, but IPD considered him unfit to be a police officer and was about to fire him (see the last few pages of the document). Cleveland PD hired him in December 2013.

While Loehmann had displayed emotional problems and “dismal weapons handling skills” during training at IPD two years earlier, his actions during the Rice shooting showed neither. Whatever his problems before, his actions that day were reasonable and legal if he believed his life was in danger.

The Arrival:

The two officers drove down a road into a dead end next to the park, pulled over the curb onto the grass, and drove toward a gazebo where Rice was sitting alone. Rice stood as the police car approached and walked toward the car’s path. Garmback, the driver, stopped the car within a few feet of the gazebo. He stopped with the passenger side facing Rice, which put Loehmann in what he believed was immediate danger. Rice, only a few feet from the police car, raised his jacket and reached to the pistol on the right side of his waistband.

The Shooting:

Approximately two seconds passed between the moment the car stopped and the moment Officer Loehmann shot Rice.
Loehmann, the rookie officer, bailed from the car and fired two shots from no more than seven feet away. One round hit Rice in the lower torso. Rice fell. Loehmann backpedalled, tripped and fell, jumped back up and scrambled to the driver’s side of the car for cover. The driver also bailed out and took cover. Both officers then covered Rice with their weapons while calling for backup. Their actions immediately after the shooting are significant, because they show that the officers believed they were facing a real, not fake, pistol.

Initially, Cleveland police claimed Rice had been sitting with a group and that the officers had seen him pick up the gun from the table and put it in his pants. However, surveillance video released later refuted that. The video shows nobody else nearby, and doesn’t show the gun at all. The police also claimed an officer ordered Rice to show his hands three times before firing. That’s actually plausible.

People think of verbal commands as slow and clear orders (just like on TV), but in real life, especially if the officer believes his life is in danger, they’re likely to be rapidly blurted and probably not understood. Officer Loehmann couldn’t have calmly said “Put your hands up, sir” three times in two seconds, but he could have shouted “Hands up hands up hands up!” as he was drawing his weapon (I just timed myself and did it in 1.28 seconds).

Immediately after the shooting, Officer Garmback notified dispatch that shots had been fired and called for EMS. He also said “Step it up”, which is copspeak for “Hurry the hell up because something really bad just happened”. Additional officers arrived, and according to the police report they all believed Rice to be an adult and the gun to be real.

Medical Care:

Neither Garmback nor Loehmann administered first aid. That sounds negligent, but probably wasn’t. Police traditionally aren’t trained to perform trauma care, and our response when someone needs medical care is to call for an ambulance. Police departments are finally starting to train for trauma care and issue bandages and tourniquets, but not long ago many police administrators discouraged officers from attempting first aid because they thought it would open the agency to liability. In the Rice case, the officers apparently fell back on the old “hold the scene and call an ambulance” first aid method.

According to the autopsy, Rice “suffered a single gunshot into the left side of his abdomen, near his navel. The bullet traveled through his intestines and lodged into the right side of his pelvis, causing hemorrhaging”. With internal injuries that severe, the officers probably couldn’t have rendered effective aid anyway. Rice had a heartbeat so chest compressions wouldn’t have been required. If he was breathing (I don’t know if he was) mouth-to-mouth wasn’t necessary. For internal bleeding a tourniquet would be useless and pressure bandage of only limited worth. Without additional training and equipment, the officers couldn’t do much more than call for an ambulance.

For several minutes after the shooting the officers covered Rice with their weapons, called for EMS, and stopped Rice’s sister from rushing to his side (we have to keep bystanders away from a crime scene, no matter who the bystanders are or how the victim was shot). A federal agent who happened to be nearby heard the shots fired call, arrived approximately four minutes later and gave some type of medical care. An ambulance arrived and transported Rice to a trauma center, where he died nine hours later.

The officers can be criticized for not administering mouth to mouth if Rice wasn’t breathing. They had perhaps one free minute where they could have begun a medical assessment; the results of that assessment would undoubtedly have been “We need an ambulance.” But police duties, not medical, were their priority. By calling an ambulance they provided the minimum medical care required; they could have done better, and as police officers, we need to start doing more than just call for help.

“But Ohio is an Open Carry state!”

Some people have claimed the police had no authority to shoot because a pistol can be carried openly in Ohio. That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Open Carry has literally nothing to do with this incident, and that argument is being made by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Open Carry doesn’t mean you can walk down the street with a pistol in your hands, and it doesn’t mean you can walk around a park pointing a pistol at people. Publicly carrying a pistol in a combat ready hold in any OC state will get the police called on you, will get you arrested, and will likely get you shot.

Why did the officers pull up so close if they thought Rice was armed?

My gut reaction from watching the video is that they didn’t realize Rice was their suspect until they were right on top of him. That would explain why the driver approached so closely and why the passenger seemed to have fired almost out of panic. It’s not unusual for officers to unexpectedly encounter suspects; anyone who works the street for any length of time will have some unpleasant surprises. But Cleveland PD initially claimed the officers saw Rice pick up the gun from the table and put it in his pants. If they truly did see that, since it isn’t on video it had to have happened long before the police car reached the gazebo; the surveillance video shows Rice without the gun on the table for sixteen seconds before we see the police car.

If the officers had sixteen seconds advance notice, there would be no tactical reason for them to drive that close. And it would just be a stupid move. The smart thing to do would have been to stop some distance away, draw, take cover and give verbal commands. The driver’s decision to get that close and stop right next to Rice forced the passenger to make a snap shoot/don’t shoot decision.

Officer Loehmann chose to shoot, and I can’t fault him for that. But I do blame his partner for putting him in a position that almost demanded he shoot. Driving that close was like a cop intentionally standing in front of a suspect’s car, then shooting because “he was coming right at me”. It can be technically legal for the officer to shoot, but he should never have put himself in that situation to begin with. Likewise, the Rice shooting could have been avoided if the officers had kept their distance.

If Officer Loehmann was wrong, why wasn’t he charged?

Because we put people in prison for committing crimes, not for being wrong. There’s a difference. Contrary to popular belief, it’s possible to kill an innocent person yet still not commit a crime.

In March 2014, a Texas woman killed a man she thought was breaking into her home. She was home alone, it was late, someone tried to force her door open, she reasonably believed her life was in danger, and she fired through her door. The man turned out to be her firefighter neighbor, who came home drunk and tried to get into the wrong house. The woman killed an innocent man, and was objectively wrong about him being a threat. But she wasn’t criminally wrong, and wasn’t charged.

In February 2014, a small-time marijuana dealer killed a Texas police officer serving a search warrant on his house. The dealer admitted he killed the officer. He wasn’t charged, because a Grand Jury decided he reasonably could have thought he was being robbed, not raided, and that he reasonably acted to defend himself and his girlfriend.

Guilt isn’t decided by what we find out after the fact, it’s decided by what the killer reasonably perceived before they pulled the trigger. And as the two cases above show, a Grand Jury’s job is NOT to indict no matter what; it’s to decide whether or not the facts of a case justify a criminal charge. In those cases, and in the Rice shooting, the Grand Juries correctly determined no crime had been committed.

Officer Loehmann’s decision has to be evaluated based on the facts as they appeared to him, not as they appear a year later to an uninvolved person who knows all the facts. Loehmann didn’t know Rice was a child, didn’t know the gun was a toy, and was put nearly knife-fighting distance from someone he thought was drawing a gun on him. Anyone can look at the objective reality, which we know now, that Rice was no threat. But Loehmann didn’t know that, and couldn’t have known.

In the end…

Some police shootings should rightly be celebrated, like Austin PD’s one-shot kill of an anti-government extremist. Some police shootings are controversial but 100% justified, like the killing of Michael Brown. Some police shootings are blatant crimes, like the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina. And some police shootings, like this one, are ugly, tragic, unnecessary and completely suck, but are still legal. There is no “good guy” in this shooting, and I’m sure Officer Loehmann isn’t at home celebrating his decision. After this, I’d be surprised if he ever puts on a badge again.

The Tamir Rice shooting showed a serious flaw within the 911 reporting system, exposed what may have been false reporting from someone in Cleveland PD (not necessarily the officers involved), and may have proven one officer engaged in horrible tactics. It may have shown that the officers had time to medically assess Rice, but chose not to. Those are all bad things.

But it did not show that an officer committed murder, or that he was wrong to believe his life was in danger. That’s why the Grand Jury’s decision not to indict was correct, no matter how much it sucks.
-CH

Thank you Josh P for the link.

You think politicians cannot get any dumber....

I've often said I've seen rock bottom for stupidity...then someone breaks the rock.

Tucson News Now
Jackson Councilman says' Let's throw rocks at police'

JACKSON, MS

Jackson Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes wants to send a message to police from other jurisdictions who chase misdemeanor suspects through Jackson.

He says he wants to send that message with rocks, bricks and bottles.

Today the councilman told reporters that police from surrounding cities put Jackson children in danger when they chase people on neighborhood streets. He says he'd like black leadership to team up and use force.

"What I suggest is we get the black leadership together, and as these jurisdictions come into Jackson we throw rocks and bricks and bottles at them. That will send a message we don't want you in here," he says.

Stokes also suggests taking court action against outside police agencies that chase misdemeanor offenders into Jackson.

I wonder if the libtard Democrat realizes if they throw rocks, bricks and bottles at the cops, people open themselves up to being arrested for assault on a police officer and interference with public duties? Of if the cops are treated like this, there will be reaction from the police, like delays in response time for other calls for serve. Probably does, but he doesn't care.

Has to be an Obamaite.

YouTube Lawyers....

Another great example of not hiring the professionals. Remember the Budweiser Frogs commercials had some advise:

Never send a ferret to do a weasel's job

Security Weekly: How Protective Intelligence Can Prevent Armed Assaults, December 24, 2015

By Scott Stewart

Over the past several weeks, the Paris, Bamako and San Bernardino attacks have focused my writing on armed assaults. I've written about how, contrary to the hype, armed assaults are not a new tactic, and the threat they pose should not be allowed to push politicians to rashly adopt security measures that undermine personal liberties while doing little to actually keep people safe. I have also written about ways that security forces and individuals can respond to such attacks to help mitigate their impact. Finally, I discussed how advances in medical equipment and the procedures followed by medical first responders and trauma centers have helped to save the lives of many armed assault victims.

But all of these themes are reactive and do very little to help prevent such attacks. However, while I've been writing on these reactive topics, I have also been working with a team to forge a new Stratfor product that focuses on protective intelligence, which is inherently proactive. The confluence of these two concepts — armed assaults and protective intelligence — has me again thinking about ways to prevent armed assaults rather than merely responding to them. Obviously, prevention is always better than mitigation.

Understanding Attacks

The first step in working to prevent any type of attack is to understand how such attacks are conducted. This pertains not just to the tactics and techniques used in the actual attack but also to the planning process that must occur before the attack can be launched. Viewing attacks as the result of a discernible planning process — what we refer to as the terrorist attack cycle — and then breaking that process into its distinct phases and tasks makes it possible to identify times during the attack cycle when those conducting it are vulnerable to detection.

Different types of actors carried out the recent armed assaults. The operatives in the Paris attacks had received small-arms training at camps in Syria and had fought in Syria and Iraq, but the San Bernardino attackers were grassroots jihadists who had not received such training. However, despite differences in their levels of training and experience, all actors must follow the same steps if they are going to plan an attack. Individuals who have received advanced training in terrorist tradecraft skills such as pre-operational surveillance are likely to be more sophisticated during the attack cycle than untrained individuals, but training does not absolve them of having to follow it.

Sometimes individuals do conduct ill-conceived and poorly executed attacks that involve shortcuts in the planning process. But this type of spur-of-the-moment attack is usually associated with mentally disturbed individuals rather than terrorists. It is extremely rare for a terrorist to conduct a spontaneous attack without first following the steps of the attack cycle.

Furthermore, the cycle is independent of ideology. It does not matter if the person planning an attack is a white supremacist, a radical environmentalist, a grassroots jihadist or a member of the al Qaeda core. They must all follow the same steps, accomplish the same tasks and operate in the same predictable areas. Understanding this helps to guard against different types and levels of threats.

Protective intelligence is the process of studying the attack cycle and using an understanding of the cycle to proactively identify, assess and mitigate potential threats. Protective intelligence practitioners carefully study the tactics, tradecraft and behavior associated with militant actors. This then allows security teams to search for and identify elements of those tactics and behaviors that can provide indications of attack planning prior to the launch of an assault. Many of these indicators are not inherently criminal. For example, visiting a public building and observing security measures or standing on the street to watch the arrival of a VIP at an office building are not illegal, but they could indicate that someone is plotting an attack. Even in cases where such behaviors cannot be stopped legally, steps can be taken to identify the potential assailants and let them know that they have been detected, or measures can be put in place to help mitigate the threat.

Some of the points during the attack cycle when potential attackers are most vulnerable to detection are during surveillance, while they are acquiring weapons or building bombs, and while they are testing bomb components. There are other, less obvious points when people on the lookout can spot preparations for an attack, such as while the potential assailants are training for an attack or even during pre-attack deployment.

To really understand the intricacies involved in planning attacks, protective intelligence practitioners cannot simply acknowledge that something like surveillance occurs. They must carefully deconstruct the activity to gain an in-depth understanding of it. Dissecting an activity like pre-operational surveillance requires not only examining aspects such as the demeanor demonstrated by those conducting surveillance and the specific methods and cover used; it also requires identifying particular times when surveillance is most likely and noting certain optimal vantage points (called "perches" in surveillance jargon) from which a surveillant is most likely to observe a specific facility or event. This complex understanding of surveillance can then be used to help focus human or technological countersurveillance efforts to make them most effective. This same type of deconstruction must be done for every step and activity of the planning process.

Applying Knowledge Proactively

But in many cases, especially those involving grassroots jihadists and other poorly trained operatives, the selected target will not have the kind of formal protective intelligence assets mentioned above. Attackers with little training tend to avoid targets that have robust security and countersurveillance teams. Does this mean that armed assaults against such soft targets can't be stopped? The answer is an emphatic no.

Even though there are no formal security teams watching for signs of hostile surveillance at soft targets, aspiring attackers still need to conduct pre-operational surveillance, and this activity is vulnerable to detection by an outside observer. Such observation is aided by the fact that most terrorist operatives practice poor surveillance technique and exhibit terrible demeanor while conducting it — and grassroots terrorists tend to display even worse demeanor than professionals. This opens them up to detection by what I refer to as "grassroots defenders" — ordinary citizens who practice good situational awareness and who report people engaged in suspicious activity such as building or testing bombs, suspiciously acquiring weapons or conducting pre-operational surveillance. I also consider regular police officers to be important grassroots defenders. Attentive police officers on patrol and conducting traffic stops have discovered and thwarted a number of terrorist plots.

It is important to note here that grassroots defenders are not vigilantes, and this is not a call to institute the type of paranoid informant network that existed in East Germany. It is also not a call to Islamophobia; indeed, the Muslim community is an important component of grassroots defense, and many plots have been thwarted based on tips from the Muslim community. Grassroots defenders are simply citizens who possess the proper mindset to take responsibility for their own security and the security of others and who report possible terrorist behavior to the authorities. Some have scoffed at the "If you see something, say something" campaign, but the principle works, especially when people are educated about terrorist behavior — one of our goals at Stratfor.

If people know what they are looking for, it is often possible to tell if your neighbor is making bombs, or if someone is involved in other pre-operational activity. But aside from such discreet indicators, there are frequently far more overt signs. It is very common after an attack to hear witnesses talk about how the attacker had made threats or had showed signs of becoming increasingly radicalized. Reporting such signs to the authorities can stop — and has stopped —attacks.

One recent example of a grassroots defender saving lives by preventing an armed assault was when a concerned citizen called the police department in Waseca, Minnesota, to report a person with a suspicious demeanor entering a storage facility. When police responded, they found that the suspect was storing gunpowder, pyrotechnic chemicals, a pressure cooker, steel ball bearings and other items used in bombmaking inside the locker. After interviewing the suspect, 17-year-old John LaDue, the police learned that he was planning a Columbine-style gun and bomb attack against his school.

In another example, an alert gun store employee in Killeen, Texas, called the police after a customer behaved suspiciously while purchasing a large quantity of smokeless powder. The police were able to track the suspect based on the license plate the employee provided. Their investigation determined that the subject, Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, was an Army deserter who had planned to conduct a bombing and armed assault against a Killeen restaurant frequented by soldiers from the nearby Fort Hood.

Obviously, not every person lurking suspiciously outside a shopping mall is a terrorist, and not every small explosion indicates terrorist bombmaking activity. But reporting such incidents to the authorities will give them an opportunity to investigate and determine whether the incidents are innocuous or sinister. The grassroots threat may be amorphous, but it is not invisible; it can be detected and stopped.

COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM

I think I see the problem

A few years ago I was one of the responding officers in an officer down shooting. We had the suspect cornered in a building, there were over 100 cops out all with weapons, an armored vehicle and a helicopter surrounding the place. And we had idiots walking up to us asking, "What's going on?" We were screaming, "Get the hell out of here.." and forgive us, a few other choice words, to get them to move.

This was an article from this morning's Houston Chronicle, of the shooting in San Bernardino, CA, with the vetted imported terrorist. Decent read, but I want to point out something on this picture.



I've had disagreements with conservative/libertarian friends on the need for heavy vehicles in law enforcement.  If you want to know why, look at what happened in San Bernardino.  But this is what drives me nuts.  Look at the right side of the picture and you see a civilian, obviously in a business suit, in his personal vehicle with his phone out to photo it.  IDIOT!  If things start going south, you have an excellent shot (pardon the pun) of getting killed!  The cops have body armor on and an armored vehicle to stop small arms fire.

This desire to have the next Rodeny King video is going to lead to an unrelated third person getting shot.  And then the usual suspects who are always calling, "Cops are infringing on our rights!..." will not be screaming "Why didn't the police stop this civilian getting hurt?"

If we got guns drawn,  there is a reason.  Stay away.

The American Thinker: The Baltimore Judicial Railroad

The American Thinker was nice enough to publish another article by me, The Baltimore Judicial Railroad

The usual suspects are outraged Officer William Porter was not convicted of a felony in the transport and eventual death of Freddie Gray. From the Baltimore Sun editorial of December 17, "...after jurors failed to come to an unanimous decision on any of the four charges on Mr. Porter no doubt will serve as a disappointment to those wished for the verdict in this case to send a clear and unambiguous message."

In contrast, the statue of Lady Justice shows her with a blindfold and balance. She's not there to "send a message" but to determine if the accused is guilty of a criminal act. And one of the basic tenets of Western jurisprudence is the burden of proof falls upon the prosecution. The obvious desire for railroading the officer by the editors of the Sun (And let's be honest, the City Attorney and Mayor, the Department of Justice, and the usual race baiting poverty pimps like Jesse and Al) reminded me of something from my first district court case.

I booked a suspect for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) and five months later I was subpoenaed. After the jury was selected, the judge spoke to them for a few minutes. After thanking them for doing their civic duty (Truthfully, a lot of people do dodge it), he explained masterfully to the jury of laypersons (and a rookie cop) how justice works. (From an almost 15 year old memory and the names have been changed to protect the guilty!):

"Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant, Mr. Smith, sits behind the table, he sits there innocent and only you can make him guilty in the eyes of the law. Mr. Smith has the absolute presumption of innocence. He is under no obligation to speak and none of us here, including myself, can force him to answer a question. Mr. Smith is under no obligation to present a defense, although he has hired one. And I am instructing you that you cannot make any inference of his guilt or innocence because of his not speaking or presenting a defense. Those are his rights.

The burden of proof in this matter falls completely on the shoulders of the prosecution, Mr.Jones. He must prove every element of his case to you, individually and in full. Mr. Jones must prove all elements of his case, in your mind, beyond a reasonable doubt (emphasis his). If he fails in doing that, or the defense successfully raises a reasonable doubt in just one element of the prosecution's case, you must acquit the defendant. Mr. Jones doesn’t have to prove beyond all doubt; that is an impossibility. And the prosecution is further at a disadvantage because he must present all of his evidence to the defense prior to trial so they can prepare for it. Mr. Jones cannot give the defense any surprises. However the defense is under no obligation to present any evidence to the prosecution until the trial."

Looking at the officers who have been railroaded by the Baltimore City State's Attorney, this case has been a travesty to the cause of justice. Ms. Marilyn Mosby, with at best evidence of department policy violation, indicted six officers for multiple felonies. Announcing the charges last summer, she praised herself multiple times, referred to “I” (26 times), “my” (12 times) but “me” thankfully only once (for a moment I thought I was listening to an Obama press conference) and basically condemned the defendants in a blatant attempt to poison the jury pool. Ms. Mosby then basked in the limelight, being the subject of multiple friendly news stories, brought up on the stage by Prince during his concert, and topped off by a full spread for Vogue magazine, a mélange of political ambition and inappropriate behavior. These facts did not stop the judge from refusing the defense motion for a change of venue because the defendants could not get an unbiased jury. So much for justice being blind.

Ms.Mosby denied the officers had probable cause to arrest Gray because he didn't have an "illegal weapon," yet her office refused to present the knife he was carrying to the officers’ lawyers for examination. She accused the officer of a false arrest, because the knife was found subsequent to his arrest. Any criminal attorney (or cop on the street) knows after a suspect has been detained he can be searched, and once the weapon is found, it’s fair game for prosecution. Knowing she had a very flimsily case, she tried to stop the release of the Gray autopsy report. Ridiculously she said her prosecutors, “…’have a duty to ensure a fair and impartial process for all parties involved’ and ‘will not be baited into litigating this case through the media.’”

Almost ten years ago America witnessed a major travesty of justice when a politically motived prosecutor named Mike Nifong attempted to make his career with the prosecution of a group of white college students accused of raping a black stripper. After his case fell apart, Nifong was removed from the case and the North Carolina Attorney General took over. The three students were completely exonerated and Nifong eventually lost his law license and was jailed. As she tried to railroad Officer Porter and the other officers, will Ms. Mosby face justice like Mr. Nifong? Time will tell. Only if she faces justice in the future, Ms. Mosby should pray she receives a more justice from the attorney who judges her.

Michael Thiac is a police patrol sergeant and a retired Army intelligence officer.

Our New Boris and Natasha....

A satire of our great vetting process....

Boris's and Natasha's new identities

Hammer and Loupe

Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, formerly known as Boris and Natasha, had changed their looks, names, and religion to make a new future and escape the harassment by Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The Fearless Leader joined the U.S. Department of Justice, making sure that Rocky and Bullwinkle be held responsible for disrupting any of Syed's and Tashfeen's activities.

Syed became a government health inspector to pay the bills, since bomb-throwing didn't bring much income. That allowed him to inspect many soft targets in the area unobstructed. Tashfeen stayed home making bombs, plotting, and communicating with the network.

In other words, they had a normal lifestyle of a well-adjusted family in Las Humanas, actively participating in social media, vacationing at training camps, and having a blast.

At the same time, Rocky and Bullwinkle continued to bitterly cling to their guns and religion, scorned by the mainstream media, shunned by Hollywood, and out of touch with the new generation of America's children. The patriotic duo was classified as "domestic terrorists" and placed under 24/7 government surveillance.

Yes, they are vetted.

Why cops can shoot unarmed people.....

And why we can't relax.

To all my liberal/libtard friends out there, who said of Darren Wilson “He din’t have to shoot Mike Brown…” watch this. The action starts at just past 5 minutes, but watch the whole video the first time to set it up. See how the turd-hopefully dead-sack of shit (forgive me, I’m a bit worked up after watching that video) was “acting’ calm, cooperative, he was in a hospital, being moved down the hall for treatment, completely unarmed, jumps out and grabs for the cop’s gun. For all you YouTube lawyers out there, that shows he intends to have a deadly weapon in his possession, while disarming the peace officer. That shows intent to potentially use the deadly force against the officer or a third person. Now, for all you legal geniuses out there, what have you now reached?

Come on, you know what a cop “shouldn’t have done”, you always love playing Monday morning quarterback, come on, what have you now know?

The officer has “reasonable fear for himself or a third person suffering loss of life or serious bodily injury”. And according to Graham vs O’Connor, USSC, 1989, he can now use deadly force, in this case a pistol.

Observed something else, see how the sack of shit, after being fired upon (don’t know if the first shot hit him) and having the officer, with his weapon pointed at him, says “fuck this!” and again charges the officer, after he’s already been shot. He acted like an animal, charging the officer.

To the officer in this scene, your restraint is incredible. You called for help, warned him multiple times, scream “do no do that!…you can’t go for my weapon!!!” and only shot his ass twice (that I can tell) when he charged. I think if that was me I would have unloaded my Sig-Sauer…don’t know if every round would have hit, but every one would have been fired.

I’ve had multiple discussions over law enforcement use of force over social media and in person, I’ve had several rather heated discussions recently, including the Mike Brown incident. This punk was already injured, was being treated at a hospital, was surrounded with, from his perspective, “hostiles”, and he tried to disarm the officer. Again to my liberal/libtard friends, you know, those of you who think “All we need are camera’s on cops to show the racism, sexism, Islamafobia (whatever is the flavor of the week)”, I say look at this. You are getting a look at the real world is like for police on the street. And to borrow the phrase from Jefferson Parish (LA) Sheriff Newell Normand, “WAKE UP!”

This is what this animal would try on an armed cop, what do you think he (Or Mikey Brown, or Treyon “B Hussein Obama Junior” Martin) would do to you when your unarmed.

Think about that as you walk to visit a sick friend in the hospital…where a prisoner may be being moved down the hall…if he had gotten the gun, do you think you would be safe?

Think about it.

Watch the full video first, but the rear action start at 5.00



Here is the story of the sack of shit. He was stopped for an accident with a stolen truck and suspicion of DWI.

Police release video from hospital shooting

FARMINGTON — The Farmington Police Department released video footage Thursday that depicts the violent struggle on Sept. 6 between Officer David Rock and Heriberto Nava-Martinez at San Juan Regional Medical Center moments before the officer shot the man.

The footage, which is from Rock's body camera, shows the officer conversing with Martinez in Spanish outside a hospital room shortly after 10 p.m. Sept. 6, less than an hour after Farmington police arrested Nava-Martinez on allegations he crashed a stolen pickup truck through the front gates of a Farmington business and then drove it erratically up and down East Main Street.

Nava-Martinez, 23, was transported to San Juan Regional Medical Center after the incident due to health concerns and to have his blood tested for drugs and alcohol...

Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart, what ya gonna do.....

Many a cop has had to deal with picking up a shoplifter from a store and the incumbent issues. Whenever I pick one up, the first thing I do is "Cuff em!", because they see me, they know it's up. Now here we go, what happens before we get there.

Hopefully the cop was able to get assault charges on the turds.

Seattle PD takes on thug and wins

From the great northwest, Seattle PD did a great job handling business. As we say in the Lone Star State, "Nice shooting Tex!"




At 2:26 notice how they held fire until the lady in the SUV got the hell out of dodge and for all the YouTube lawyers out there, yes, that is justified use of deadly force. The officers had reasonable fear for loss of life or serious bodily injury of themselves and others, seeing the suspect was driving with complete disregard for the safety of other.

These are not the rights you are looking to take....

I've recently subscribed to Reason magazine and it's defiantly a good read. Libertarian point of view, I can see the writing appealing to the young people of today. But they put up this short video base on the Star Wars series, making points on current issues. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

The Star Wars Libertarian Special

Just in time for the holidays, The Star Wars Libertarian Special features Senate filibusters, border patrol stops, eminent domain, a guest appearance by Edward Snowden, and rarely seen footage from Chewbacca's galaxy-trotting documentary series about free-market economics. May the market forces be with you.

Posted by Reason Magazine on Friday, December 4, 2015

Drones and smuggling into prison. What to do?

From the "I never saw this one coming" file, prisons are having to deal with prisoners getting contraband into the prison. And they are limited to what they can do, which is understandable. Shotguns? Besides the FAA saying we can't shoot at them, I'll bet the guards have their weapons loaded with buckshot, more useful for large slower moving target. If anything, they would need bird shot to get the drones! :) And the FCC will have a hit if they try to interferer with the communication system.

Over the Wire: Prison Guards Handcuffed in Battle With Drones

Like firefighters and those who just want to relax in the privacy of their own backyards, U.S. prisons have a drone problem.

Guards at the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, S.C., recently found 17 illegal cellphones in one inmate’s cell — all of them (according to a report in the New York Times) smuggled in using drones.

In Mansfield, Ohio, a drone delivery of tobacco and drugs caused a near riot in a prison yard as inmates fought over the payload. In Cumberland, Md., officers had better luck, arresting two men in a car outside the Maryland state prison there. In the car were tobacco, pornography, and drugs — and a drone.

Similar reports have come in from Oklahoma and Georgia, as well as places outside the U.S., including Canada and Russia.

Breaking into jail

The point is that these unmanned aircraft systems are clearly capable of delivering contraband over prison walls. Furthermore, it’s hard to spot them, much less find out who is controlling them.

Worse, when it comes to policing the problem at federal prisons, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BoP) is severely handcuffed. Despite having tons of shotgun-armed guards at its prisons, the bureau can’t simply shoot down any drone that happens to appear near a prison; the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t allow it.

Guards can’t blast drones with radio waves to interfere with the control signals from their operators either: Intentional interference of that sort is illegal, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

All of which is why the BoP has issued an RFI (request for information) looking for a solution.

The RFI — a preliminary step before the agency actually hires someone to implement a solution — is soliciting ideas that will help the BoP detect and neutralize drones trying either to conduct surveillance of prisons and the areas around them or to deliver contraband (such as weapons, drugs, or pornography).

(While the BoP has jurisdiction over federal prisons only, the solutions it finds should also be available eventually to state and local facilities.)

Unfortunately for the BoP, other federal government agencies aren’t being particularly helpful. The FAA would not discuss the issue, except to say that if anyone were to drop something into a prison, that person would be guilty of violating the law. The Department of Justice would not discuss the issue of drones on the record, except to say that Yahoo Tech should contact the FAA. The FCC did not respond to requests for comments.
Complicating matters, the BoP’s RFI seems to be attracting little interest. So far, only one question has been posted regarding the issue, and that was to find out whether the BoP will fund research. (It won’t.)

Detection and registration

Still, the agency does have some options. The law does not prohibit the deployment of sensors at prisons to alert guards that a drone is approaching. Nor does it prohibit sensors that would detect a drone launch at its source. This could allow law enforcement to get to the site of the drone launch and arrest those involved.

And, it should be stated, sending a drone into a prison does violate a long list of federal laws and, if it’s a state prison, state laws as well...

Good read all in all. I spent a year as a jail supervisor and we never had this issue to deal with because we did not have an outside area for the inmates. The only times they saw outside was when they entered and left the facility. Not much of an issue for the county prison but defiantly can be something for Texas Department of Corrections. Then again they can ask the locals for a little help, "Hey, you keep what you kill, no limit, we'll lose you in the pursuit..." :<)

Shoot/Don't Shoot

Not as cut and dry as it seems.

Yesterday I had a Facebook debate with an old friend over a recent officer shooting in Chicago. Today while I was checking my posts I found this and it's a good example of how things are difficult to judge, even when you have the weapon drawn.

Shoot or Don't Shoot

Suicide by cop scenario: Jonathan T Gilliam tells us if he presents the threat, then you have the right to present deadly force.

Posted by Carol Costello on Friday, November 27, 2015

Remember these words, to the day you die, "Action beats reaction, every time!"

Or this video:

Shoot or Don't Shoot

Inside the mind of a police officer: When do you decide to use deadly force? #RaceAndReality

Posted by Carol Costello on Friday, November 27, 2015

Saying this on a Sunday morning at home, no threat, I say I would have not let him get that close to me. Again, I'm saying that not on the scene. You can see she is excited (the heart rate is up) and she doesn't want to shoot. But she made a decision, in this case the right one.

War story from my career, we were searching for a robbery suspect on Main Street, and I discover a man who matched the description. I approached (he had two other males next to him) and he had his right hand in his packet, but his left hand was lying out. I asked "Let me see your right hand." He just gave me a strange look. I ordered him "Let me see your right hand, now!" He pulled his right hand out and immediatley put it behind his back. To say the least this concerned me and I pulled my pistol out, aimed it and screamed, "Let me see your f%^&ing hand, now!" He got the message and put both hands forward. And his buddies started to point to his ears, he was deaf. And not the suspect.

Could I justify deadly force in those circumstances, probably. But thank God it didn't go to that level.

Again, not as cut and dry on the street.

Obama's going after your pension.

 

                                                Even paranoids have enemies.

                                                Unofficial motto of the KGB.

With the Obama regime soon entering its final year (Thank you God!), we know his “pen and phone” will be working overtime to fundamental transform the United States into a second rate socialist nation.  He has made our foreign policy such a joke and weakened our military that our enemies don’t fear us, our friends don’t rely on us, and neither respect us.  With an administration that openly says the best way to handle ISIS is through a “Climate Change Summit”, can you expect much?  And with the  economy a disaster, Obama’s decided in the sunset of his administration to concentrate on gun control and “climate change” (Or whatever the hell it’s called next week  (Global cooling, global warming, criminate disruption, I loose track).

But an interesting article came out of the Wall Street Journal last week, below the radar, on something completely different.  The Obama regime’s Labor Department cleared regulatory hurdles to allow left leaning states (e.g. California, Illinois and Oregon) to establish publicly backed “individual retirement accounts”, which are IRAs in name only.  From the WSJ article,

California’s inchoate program requires all employers with more than five workers that do not offer retirement plans to enroll workers in a state plan that includes a to-be-specified guaranteed return. Employers will have to automatically deduct contributions from worker paychecks, though employees could opt out.

While Democrats call the plans IRAs, nothing in California’s law guarantees ownership or portability. Private financial institutions will putatively insure the plans, but with an implicit taxpayer guarantee. Illinois’s law allows the state retirement board to “procure as needed, insurance against any and all loss” and “accept any grants, appropriations, or other moneys from the State.” Rest assured that if Illinois officials refused to pay up, labor unions would cite this language in suing to make them pay.

It reminded me of something I wanted to blog about ages ago, 2010 to be exact.  I went into my files, found the unpublished post and the article from The Washington Examiner (link no longer working):

Unions target yourprivate retirement savings

By: Mark Hemingway

October 31, 2010 Will the government outlaw your 401(k) plan? It seems like an absurd possibility, yet earlier this month two Democratic senators, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., held a hearing on Capitol Hill exploring the possibility of doing exactly that.

On Oct. 8, the two senators from the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing on "Retirement (In)security in America." Among the proposals discussed was "Guaranteed Retirement Accounts," or GRAs.

The purpose of the GRA proposal is simple: To force Americans to stop putting their retirement savings money into private 401(k) accounts and send their money to the government instead.

GRAs would "eliminate the favorable tax treatment currently afforded to 401(k) plans, and instead use those dollars to fund government-invested GRAs into which all employees would be required to contribute a portion of their salary," according to a letter signed by House Minority Leader John Boehner and 12 other Republican representatives…

…Testifying at the hearing in favor of GRAs was Ross Eisbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal economic think tank located in the same building as the liberal Center for American Progress...

…EPI’s work on retirement security issues also has some suspect backing. The think tank has teamed up with two of the most powerful unions in the country -- the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union -- to push a public campaign for a "Retirement USA" initiative (see Retirement-USA.org).

One of the proposals being touted on Retirement USA's Web site is, you guessed it, GRAs. At the hearing, Eisbrey noted that Retirement USA had not specifically endorsed GRAs, but did "affirm that it meets all of the 12 principles the coalition set out as essential to deliver retirement income that is universal, secure, and adequate."

But why are unions pushing this? The average union pension plan is only 62 percent funded, far below the point at which the government considers a pension plan "endangered." Estimates suggest unions' multi-employer pension plans are underfunded by $165 billion and could be on the verge of collapse.

Union leaders see these "retirement security" ideas like GRAs as vehicles to a back-door pension bailout, where union leaders will no longer have to worry about the fact they've underfunded their rank and file members' pension plans. Just let Uncle Sucker take care of it.

Labor is the biggest source of campaign cash for Democrats (Retirement USA backers AFL-CIO and SEIU are spending $88 million this election),..

Regardless, forcing everybody into a government retirement system that pays out equally to Americans who have scrimped and saved and to those in organized labor who have grossly mismanaged their pension plans seems almost too crazy to contemplate…

This is not the first time the radical left has lusted after pension funds.  Jesse Jackson has proposed multiple times since the 1980s to seize thefunds to “rebuild” inner cites.  And there is money to get.  As of 2014, Americans have over 15 trillion in private pension funds.  Is there reason to be concerned?  “If you like your health care plan….”, need I say more?

The basics of the current IRA/401 system is you get an immediate tax advantage, the fund builds tax shielded (you generally pay taxes when it’s withdrawn) and if you die, the fund is passed to your estate.  This gives the individual a degree of independence.  With the proposed GSA, your money is pooled with others, you are guaranteed by “full faith and credit of the United States” and upon your death half (ain’t that nice of them) goes to your estate.  Don’t we already have things like this?  Social Security, the assets of which are only two safes of IOUs in a building in, I believe, West Virginia.  Similar to the Medicaid Trust Fund and the Federal Highway Trust fund, they have nothing but IOUs.  The “full faith and credit of the United States” ain’t worth much.

But again, look at something over the last seven years.  A point I’ve made countless times is Obamacare is working perfectly.  What is the purpose of Obamacare?  It is the bridge to single payer.  You destroy the private health care system and the only thing left is government, a form of “Medicaid for All”.  Remember him saying to AFL-CIO:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care plan. The United States of America–the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent–14 percent of its gross national product on health care and cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody and that’s what Jim is talking about when he says, ‘Everybody in. Nobody out.’ A single payer health care credit–universal healthcare credit. That’s what I’d like to see, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House and we’ve got to take back the Senate and we’ve got to take back the House.”

Or to the SEIU on March 24, 2007:

“But I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out..”

Some of the first acts of B Hussein Obama in January 2009 included having the Department of Education take over student loans, increased government control of housing, establish government control over multiple industries (e.g. banking through Dodd-Frank).  Going full fore for gun control and industry regulation through climate regulation.  Do you see a pattern here?  All critical functions of life are now requiring government interaction.  Over the next 13 months you can see the metastasis of the Julia cartoon from the 2012 election campaign.  Retirement planning?  Need I say more.