Police, TSA and other "Authorities"

[American Patriot]

Does USDA Need Submachine Guns? Republicans Look to Demilitarize the Government

Image | Posted on June 25, 2014 by tomfernandez28

Jun. 24, 2014 11:02am Pete Kasperowicz
Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and other House Republicans are proposing steps to take heavy weaponry out of the hands of federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose Office of Inspector General has put out a bid to buy submachine guns.


Stewart’s Regulatory Agency De-militarization Act looks to scale back a 2002 law that gave most Offices of Inspector General the authority to carry weapons and arrest people. But Stewart said that is prompting agencies to develop “SWAT-like” teams to handle situations that should be reserved for law enforcement agencies.


federal govenrment weapons submachine gun

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General has put in an order for submachine guns. That has Republicans looking to demilitarize the government. (AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christian Gooden)


Stewart noted that last May, USDA’s OIG put out a bid to buy submachine guns. The solicitation said the OIG is looking for a very specific type of weapon:


“Submachine guns, .40 Cal. S&W, ambidextrous safety, semi-automatic or 2 shot burts trigger group, Tritium night sights for front and rear, rails for attachment of flashlight (front under fore grip) and scope (top rear), stock-collapsilbe or folding, magazine – 30 rd. capacity, sling, light weight, and oversized trigger guard for gloved operation.”


“I understand that federal agents must be capable of protecting themselves,” Stewart said Monday. “But what we have observed goes far beyond providing necessary protection.”


Stewart noted that the Food and Drug Agency and the Department of Education also have law enforcement teams to conduct raids, and said this shows the government has gone too far.


As examples, Stewart noted that in 2010, armed FDA officers raided a grocery store suspected of using raw milk. In 2011, the Department of Education’s OIG forcibly entered the home of a man suspected of student aid fraud.
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In addition, Environmental Protection Agency officers in 2013 raised an Alaska mining operation suspected of violating the Clean Water Act.


“When there are genuinely dangerous situations involving federal law, that’s the job of the Department of Justice, not regulatory agencies like the FDA or the Department of Education,” he added. “Not only is it overkill, but having these highly-armed units within dozens of agencies is duplicative, costly, heavy handed, dangerous and destroys any sense of trust between citizens and the federal government.”


Stewart’s bill would repeal the 2002 grant of authority to Offices of Inspectors General, which was done under the Homeland Security Act.


It would also prohibit federal agencies from buying machine guns, grenades and other weapons, except for agencies like the FBI and U.S. Marshals that have used these weapons.


The bill would also require the Government Accountability Office to report to Congress on all federal agencies that are undertaking military training and using weapons.


“The militarization of agencies is only a symptom of a much deeper and more troubling problem within Washington – that the federal government no longer trusts the American people,” Stewart said. “When all of us feel that we are no longer seen as citizens but as potential dangerous suspects – a relationship of trust is impossible.


“I’m working to restore and rebuild trust – beginning with this effort to defund paramilitary capabilities within federal regulatory agencies.”

[American Patriot]

Finally, someone gets it.

RT: Federal judge says no-fly list rules are unconstitutional

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Jean
Published time: June 24, 2014 20:16

Reuters / Kevin Lamarque


​A federal judge in Oregon said Tuesday that the rules surrounding the use of a no-fly list managed by the United States government violates the constitutional rights of the US citizens included therein.



District Judge Anna Brown’s ruling this week will now force the government to fine-tune its procedures for handling requests from flyers who want to know if they’re included on that list and find ways for them to be removed if such is the case.


Judge Brown’s decision was made in response to a complaint filed by 13 Muslim-Americans who have been anything but successful with regards to having their name removed from the no-fly list and thus being unable to enjoy air travel above and around the US. In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on their behalf.


Because the procedure for getting removed from that list is so marred and, according to Judge Brown, “wholly ineffective,” she wrote in her decision this week that its existence in its current form violates the constitutional rights of those affected.


“The court concludes international travel is not a mere convenience or luxury in this modern world. Indeed, for many international travel is a necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society,” Brown wrote.


“Accordingly, on this record the court concludes plaintiffs inclusion on the no-fly list constitutes a significant deprivation of their liberty interests in international travel,” Brown said.


The plaintiffs in the case, which includes four veterans of the US military, insisted before the court that they only learned of their placement on the no-fly list once they arrived at airports and were promptly rejected. According to facts presented before the court, “Federal and/or local government officials told some Plaintiffs that they are on the No-Fly List,” yet efforts to earn their removal from the roster proved futile in every instance.


“Despite Plaintiffs’ requests to officials and agencies for explanations as to why they were not permitted to board flights, explanations have not been provided and Plaintiffs do not know whether they will be permitted to fly in the future,” Judge Brown acknowledged with Tuesday’s ruling.


“Due to the major burden imposed by inclusion on the no-fly list,” Brown continued, “Plaintiffs have suffered significantly including long-term separation from spouses and children; the inability to access desired medical and prenatal care; the inability to pursue an education of their choosing; the inability to participate in important religious rites; loss of employment opportunities; loss of government entitlements; the inability to visit family; and the inability to attend important personal and family events such as graduations, weddings and funerals.”


Now as a result of this week’s ruling, Brown wrote that the plaintiffs must be allowed to submit evidence to counter whatever claims from the government that earned them a spot on the infamous list already. She’s asking that both parties come up with a plan ahead of a follow-up hearing now scheduled for July 14.


“For years, in the name of national security the government has argued for blanket secrecy and judicial deference to its profoundly unfair No Fly List procedures, and those arguments have now been resoundingly rejected by the court,”ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi, one of the attorneys who argued the case, said in a statement on Tuesday.


“Our clients will finally get the due process to which they are entitled under the Constitution. This excellent decision also benefits other people wrongly stuck on the No Fly List, with the promise of a way out from a Kafkaesque bureaucracy causing them no end of grief and hardship. We hope this serves as a wake-up call for the government to fix its broken watchlist system, which has swept up so many innocent people.”

[American Patriot]

Predicting crime, LAPD-style

Cutting edge data-driven analysis directs Los Angeles patrol officers to likely future crime scenes – but critics worry that decision-making by machine will bring 'tyranny of the algorithm'

• Nate Berg in Los Angeles
  
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 25 June 2014 05.19 EDT

PredPol co-developer P Jeffrey Brantingham at the Unified Command Post in Los Angeles. 'This is not Minority Report,' he said. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP

The Los Angeles Police Department, like many urban police forces today, is both heavily armed and thoroughly computerised. The Real-Time Analysis and Critical Response Division in downtown LA is its central processor. Rows of crime analysts and technologists sit before a wall covered in video screens stretching more than 10 metres wide. Multiple news broadcasts are playing simultaneously, and a real-time earthquake map is tracking the region’s seismic activity. Half-a-dozen security cameras are focused on the Hollywood sign, the city’s icon. In the centre of this video menagerie is an oversized satellite map showing some of the most recent arrests made across the city – a couple of burglaries, a few assaults, a shooting.


On a slightly smaller screen the division’s top official, Captain John Romero, mans the keyboard and zooms in on a comparably micro-scale section of LA. It represents just 500 feet by 500 feet. Over the past six months, this sub-block section of the city has seen three vehicle burglaries and two property burglaries – an atypical concentration. And, according to a new algorithm crunching crime numbers in LA and dozens of other cities worldwide, it’s a sign that yet more crime is likely to occur right here in this tiny pocket of the city.


The algorithm at play is performing what’s commonly referred to as predictive policing. Using years – and sometimes decades – worth of crime reports, the algorithm analyses the data to identify areas with high probabilities for certain types of crime, placing little red boxes on maps of the city that are streamed into patrol cars. “Burglars tend to be territorial, so once they find a neighbourhood where they get good stuff, they come back again and again,” Romero says. “And that assists the algorithm in placing the boxes.”


Romero likens the process to an amateur fisherman using a fish finder device to help identify where fish are in a lake. An experienced fisherman would probably know where to look simply by the fish species, time of day, and so on. “Similarly, a really good officer would be able to go out and find these boxes. This kind of makes the average guys' ability to find the crime a little bit better.”


Predictive policing is just one tool in this new, tech-enhanced and data-fortified era of fighting and preventing crime. As the ability to collect, store and analyse data becomes cheaper and easier, law enforcement agencies all over the world are adopting techniques that harness the potential of technology to provide more and better information. But while these new tools have been welcomed by law enforcement agencies, they’re raising concerns about privacy, surveillance and how much power should be given over to computer algorithms.


P Jeffrey Brantingham is a professor of anthropology at UCLA who helped develop the predictive policing system that is now licensed to dozens of police departments under the brand name PredPol. “This is not Minority Report,” he’s quick to say, referring to the science-fiction story often associated with PredPol’s technique and proprietary algorithm. “Minority Report is about predicting who will commit a crime before they commit it. This is about predicting where and when crime is most likely to occur, not who will commit it.”

The dashboard for New York Police Department's 'Domain Awareness System'. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

PredPol is now being used in a third of the LA Police Department’s 21 geographic policing divisions, and officers on patrol are equipped with maps sprinkled with a dozen or more red boxes indicating high probabilities of criminal activity. For now, the LAPD is focusing on burglary, vehicle break-ins and car theft – three types of crime that last year made up more than half of the roughly 104,000 crimes recorded in LA.


Dozens of other cities across the US and beyond are using the PredPol software to predict a handful of other crimes, including gang activity, drug crimes and shootings. Police in Atlanta use PredPol to predict robberies. Seattle police are using it to target gun violence. In England, Kent police have used PredPol to predict drug crimes and robberies. Brantingham notes that Kent police are taking a more proactive approach by not only concentrating officers in prediction areas, but also civilian public safety volunteers and drug intervention workers.


The prediction algorithm is constantly reacting to crime reports in these cities, and a red box predicting crime can move at any moment. But although officers in the divisions using PredPol are required to spend a certain amount of time in those red boxes every patrol, they’re not just blindly following the orders of the crime map. “The officer still has a lot of discretion. It’s not just the algorithm,” Romero says. “The officer still has to know the area well enough to know when to adjust and go back into manual.”
Clicking on a few of the boxes for more detail, Romero brings up Google Street View images of the predicted crime areas. Two are centred on the car parks of big box stores, not particularly surprising places for car break-ins and thefts, says Romero. But Brantingham contends that the algorithm is doing much more than just telling cops what they already know.


“Crime hotspots are incredibly dynamic,” he says. “Yes, there are bad sides of town and good sides of town, but within those broad distinctions crime hotspots pop up and spread and disappear and pop up again in really complicated ways that are just very, very difficult, if not impossible, for the individual to intuit.”


Not that they don’t try. Beginning in the mid-1990s, police in the New York City Police Department began to run statistical analyses of the city’s crime reports, arrests and other police activity known as Compstat. Law-enforcement agencies around the world have since implemented their own data-driven approaches to tracking and adapting to crime trends. Though police have long mapped out crime hotspots, Brantingham says the increased attention to data and analytics has been a major step up. He calls predictive policing the next iteration of that advancement.

An Arizona Department of Public Safety officer keeps an eye on his dashboard computer as it reads passing car licence plates. Photograph: Ross D Franklin/AP

“It’s using much larger collections of data, and processing it in a much more sophisticated mathematical way that allows you to produce significant boosts over just hotspot mapping alone,” Brantingham says. A 21-month single-blind randomised control trial in three LAPD divisions found PredPol to accurately predict twice as much crime as existing best practices, according to Brantingham. However critics have argued that a larger study of multiple cities would be needed to more accurately test its effectiveness.


“Predictive policing is at the cutting edge of policing today. The problem is that, historically, the cutting edge of policing is dull,” says John Eck, a professor of criminology at the University of Cincinnati. He is skeptical about what predictive policing can do to actually prevent crime in the long term. “If crime at locations is highly predictable over long periods, there is often something fundamentally wrong with how the place is managed by its owner that makes it a crime hotspot. And it is the owner who has the responsibility to correct things. We do not have to stop a lot of innocent people and intrude in their lives.


“[Predictive policing] fosters a whack-a-mole policing mentality,” Eck says. “Not that whacking moles doesn’t work – but it is unnecessarily intrusive in people’s lives, which erodes their limited confidence in the police, and undermines something fundamental to our ideals of democracy.”
Widespread data collection efforts have faced scrutiny in recent years, especially since information about the surveillance tactics of the US National Security Agency was leaked by Edward Snowden last June. And though much of that data collection focuses on digital communications, a growing amount of information is being gathered in the physical world.


Police departments across the US are considering using drones to assist in policing and surveillance. The LAPD has access to more than 1,000 closed-circuit security cameras. Number-plate readers have been installed on police cars in a number of cities, including Los Angeles. The LA County Sheriff’s Department recently tested out an airplane-mounted system that recorded real-time activity in the entire city of Compton. And by this summer, the FBI plans to have a fully operational face recognition system that will eventually contain upwards of 52 million records.


According to documents released by the FBI as a result of a lawsuit filed by civil liberties organisation the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the database will include not only criminal mugshots but also millions of photos taken for non-criminal reasons such as employment background checks. That lawsuit was filed by Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney at the EFF, who says that the FBI’s facial recognition database is hardly the only one. Law enforcement agencies in San Diego County and in Maricopa County, Arizona, have contracts with private firms to build their own local facial recognition databases, while the New York Police Department has partnered with Microsoft to create a “Domain Awareness System” capable of accessing more than 3,000 surveillance cameras as well as a trove of crime data, 911 calls, number-plate readers and even radiation detectors.

NYPD's Domain Awareness System uses hi-tech tools previously used in counterterrorism operations. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Law enforcement agencies now have access to hundreds of millions of records, many of non-criminal members of the general public. While these tools have been useful for police, they are not failsafe. A California woman recently won a civil rights lawsuit against the San Francisco Police Department after a number-plate reader misidentified hers as a stolen car and she was held at gunpoint by officers, forced to her knees and detained for 20 minutes.


In Los Angeles, Lynch and the EFF have partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California on a lawsuit seeking information from the LAPD and the LA County Sheriff about how exactly they collect number plate data. “The law enforcement agencies have not even been willing to talk to us about that,” Lynch says. “And I think that’s really problematic. If we can’t get information on how they’re using this data and what kind of surveillance they’re doing, I don’t see why we should accept the fact that they’re doing it."


Lynch worries that there’s too much submissive acceptance of these technologies by the public, without consideration of exactly how this data is collected and used. She says that predictive policing, with its claims of reducing crime, will be given something of a free pass.


“What starts to happen is people think the results that come out of that must be accurate because there’s technology involved,” Lynch says. “But what we forget is that the information that went in may have been the subject of bias, may have been based on inaccurate assumptions about people, may have been collected in certain communities more than other communities. The problem is technology legitimises somehow the problematic policing that was the origination of the data to begin with.”


Brantingham says that because PredPol only concerns itself with the spatial and temporal aspects of crime, it wouldn’t be skewed by social factors. And Romero says the LAPD has been conscientious about how it collects and uses the increasing amount of data in its storage drives.


“We’re pretty careful about what people do here,” Romero says. “I care about civil liberties and freedom. And I know that our constitution was not written to protect us from gang members and thieves and thugs; it was written to protect us from the government and overreach of the government.”


But concerns persist. Gary T Marx, professor emeritus of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says technology such as predictive policing creates “categorical suspicion" of people in predicted crime areas, which can lead to unnecessary questioning or excessive stopping-and-searching. And as data-driven policing expands, Marx worries that analysis and decision-making by machine will lead to what he calls “the tyranny of the algorithm”.


“The Soviet Union had remarkably little street crime when they were at their worst of their totalitarian, authoritarian controls,” Marx says. “But, my god, at what price?”

[American Patriot]

Well, now isn't THAT the attitude?

Law Enforcement Firm: Nobody Will Complain About Militarized Police When ISIS Attacks

Image | Posted on June 26, 2014 by tomfernandez28

Company suggests outrage over toddler critically injured by police flashbang grenade will subside when terror group “comes a calling”


A company that provides video training programs for law enforcement has caused controversy by suggesting that nobody will complain about militarized police in America or examples of police brutality when the ISIS insurgent group “comes a calling.”


A Facebook post by In the Line of Duty even goes so far as to imply that outrage over a recent incident where a 2-year-old had a hole blown open in his chest as a result of a flashbang grenade thrown by SWAT police will disappear once ISIS terrorists enter the United States.


“When this ‘militarization’ of lea’s (Law Enforcement Agencies) affects infants like Bou Bou, the public’s going to be righteously outraged. But, someday, when ISIS comes a calling, who will be complaining then?,” states the Facebook post, which links to a Guardian article about how police departments in the U.S. are becoming increasingly militarized.


ISIS is the insurgent group (aided in part by the Obama administration’s support for radical jihadists in Syria), that recently took control of key cities in Iraq and has been blamed for a number of atrocities.


“Bou Bou” is a reference to the victim of a harrowing recent incident during which a SWAT team member threw a flashbang grenade into the toddler’s crib while conducting an armed raid on a house just outside of Atlanta.


2-year-old Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh was severely injured by the blast and remains in critical condition with possible brain damage. “There’s still a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs,” the toddler’s mother wrote in an article for Salon.com. “At least that’s what I’ve been told; I’m afraid to look.”


According to its website, In the Line of Duty “is the only producer of reality-based video training programs for law enforcement.”


Writer William Norman Grigg labels the company, “defenders of the militarized Homeland Security State,” accusing them of making, “the assumption that the public would regard 3:00 a.m. Stormtrooper raids that leave infants with disfiguring injuries (as) simply the price we must pay to be protected from whatever “threats” our rulers can conjure.”

[American Patriot]

H.R. 4934: A bill to disarm federal agencies

By Conor Higgins, Communities Digital News
22 hours ago

wikimedia

WASHINGTON, June 25, 2014 — In April, the country watched as tactical response teams from the Bureau of Land Management laid siege to the ranch of a Nevada man and his family. In the outrage that followed what many believed to be an irresponsible, and tyrannical use of force by a federal agency far exceeding its mission and scope, many Americans began to question the existence of the numerous, well-funded federal tactical response teams being maintained with taxpayer funds.


The Department of Education, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. National Park Service, and the Department of Energy are just some of the federal agencies which arm and maintain tactical response or SWAT teams.


One politician is out to change all of that.

In May, following the standoff between militia and heavily armed federal agents, Utah Representative Chris Stewart, R-Utah, voiced concern over the rising militarization of federal police forces.


“There are lots of people who are really concerned when the BLM shows up with its own SWAT team…They’re regulatory agencies; they’re not paramilitary units, and I think that concerns a lot of us.”


On Monday, June 23, Stewart took the next step in putting his money where his mouth is.


He introduced H.R. 4934: The RAD Act.


The RAD Act, or “Regulatory Agency Demilitarization Act,” intends to “prohibit certain Federal agencies from using or purchasing certain firearms, and for other purposes.”


The RAD Act would stop any federal regulatory agency from purchasing or even using a firearm within thirty days of its enactment. In addition, the act would require every federal agency to submit to Congress a report which includes “Each federal agency, including the office of the Inspector General for the federal agency, that has specialized units that receive special tactical or military-style training or use hard-plated body armor, shields, or helmets and that respond to high-risk situations that fall outside the capabilities of regular law enforcement officers, including any special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team, tactical response teams, special events teams, special response teams, or active shooter teams.”


In addition, the agency is required to report a description of each unit, details of their training and the hardware and weapons they use in the line of duty.


Perhaps the most important requirement of this law as it pertains to each agency report is that the reporting federal agency provide important details about their special response teams:

• “The criteria for activating each such unit and how often each such unit was activated for each year of the previous ten years.”
• “The annual cost of equipping and operating each unit.”
• “Any other information that is relevant to understanding the usefulness and justification for the units.”

These reporting requirement are political and practical landmines, and would provide extremely valuable information for any politician going after government spending and overreaching power. The reports generated by this act would have the potential to spark a hurricane of media outrage.


The ten-year mark is the key for the reporting requirement; the reports would show how much spending and agency task-creep went on under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. With Obama’s popularity on the wane, and even the most liberal news stations beginning to criticize his presidency, news outlets would most likely be unable to keep from plastering this all over the airwaves.

If the act does pass, if the reporting requirement is implemented, and if spending and agency task-creep did increase under Obama, then Obama’s supporters might simply observe that there is a surge in gun violence and an ever-present threat of terrorism.


Except there isn’t.


Violent crime is down, and you are more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, a statistic which the Cato Institute concluded in 2012 was a result of the militarization of U.S. police forces. It will be very difficult for politicians and liberal media outlets to downplay the results of this report if indeed it does show increased spending and proliferation.


Rep. Stewart was smart enough to exempt armed federal agencies such as the CIA, DHS, DOJ, DOD, and Capitol Police. This makes the bill more passable and takes away an objection by potential opponents that the esteemed representative from Utah wants to disarm the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team.


This bill will represent a very politically lucrative opportunity for Republicans, as well as a chance for red and purple state Democrats up for reelection to seem as though they care about the continually growing federal government. Supporting this bill would be a signal to constituents that their representatives want to do something about the increasingly militarized American police forces. It would allow proponents to whip up conservative and libertarian-minded voters and garner support for reelection.


Opponents of this bill would have to tread lightly; the Bundy Ranch standoff is still fresh in the minds of many Americans, and stories run weekly about the militarization of small town police forces. This is a topic close to the hearts of many Americans, and opposing a law which asks for a report on why a federal agency has a tactical response team would make it seem as though one supports the growth of federal paramilitary forces.


This bill is part of a slowly growing trend to reduce federal power. Not many bills on record at the moment seek to rein in the power of Washington. Rep. Steve Stockman introduced a bill a few months ago to ban the federal government from funding firearms registries; Thad Cochrane upped the ante by introducing a bill that would forbid the federal government from even maintaining a gun registry. There is a push by many Republicans, fueled by a nationwide resentment of growing federal power that is now being reflected in the legislature in Washington.


You can read the RAD act here, and decide for yourself.


Read more at http://www.commdiginews.com/politics...Xdd1wjjR0HK.99

[American Patriot]

Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws

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By Radley Balko June 26 at 10:27 AM Follow @radleybalko

As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response.


As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. In 2012, for example, the Tewksbury Police Department paid about $4,600 in annual membership dues to the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC. (See page 36 of linked PDF.) That LEC has about 50 member agencies. In addition to operating a regional SWAT team, the LECs also facilitate technology and information sharing and oversee other specialized units, such as crime scene investigators and computer crime specialists.


Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear.

These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.


From the ACLU of Massachusetts’s report on police militarization in that state:

Approximately 240 of the 351 police departments in Massachusetts belong to an LEC. While set up as “corporations,” LECs are funded by local and federal taxpayer money, are composed exclusively of public police officers and sheriffs, and carry out traditional law enforcement functions through specialized units such as SWAT teams . . .


Due to the weakness of Massachusetts public records law and the culture of secrecy that has infected local police departments and Law Enforcement Councils, procuring empirical records from police departments and regional SWAT teams in Massachusetts about police militarization was universally difficult and, in most instances, impossible . . .


Police departments and regional SWAT teams are public institutions, working with public money, meant to protect and serve the public’s interest. If these institutions do not maintain and make public comprehensive and comprehensible documents pertaining to their operations and tactics, the people cannot judge whether officials are acting appropriately or make needed policy changes when problems arise . . .


Hiding behind the argument that they are private corporations not subject to the public records laws, the LECs have refused to provide documents regarding their SWAT team policies and procedures. They have also failed to disclose anything about their operations, including how many raids they have executed or for what purpose . . .



METROLEC, one of the largest of the law enforcement councils covering the metropolitan Boston area, operates a range of specialized resources, including a Canine Unit, Computer Crimes Unit, Crisis Negotiation Team, Mobile Operations Motorcycle Unit, and Regional Response Team, in addition to its SWAT force. The organization maintains its own BearCat armored vehicle, as well as a $700,000 state of the art command and control post. In 2012, METROLEC reportedly used its BearCat 26 times, mostly for drug busts, and applied to the Federal Aviation Administration to obtain a drone license.


The North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC) similarly operates a SWAT team, as well as a Computer Crime Unit, Motorcycle Unit, School Threat Assessment & Response System, and Regional Communications and Incident Management Assistance Team. Its SWAT team members are trained and equipped to “deal with active shooters, armed barricaded subjects, hostage takers and terrorists,” and they dress in military-style gear with the words “NEMLEC SWAT” emblazoned on their uniforms. Given this training, it is not surprising that the NEMLEC SWAT team has over the past decade led numerous operations that involved armored vehicles, flash-bang devices, and automatic weapons.

(Note: In addition to the LEC SWAT teams, the ACLU notes that at least 25 other Massachusetts cities and towns have their own SWAT-like units, along with the state police and the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.)


Massachusetts also has a long history of accountability and excessive force problems with SWAT teams. A few examples:

• In 1988, Boston Det. Sherman Griffiths was killed in a botched drug raid later revealed to have been conducted based on information from an informant a subsequent investigation revealed that the police had simply made up.
• Six years later, the Rev. Accelyne Williams died of a heart attack during a mistaken drug raid on his home. The Boston Globe found that three of the officers involved in that raid had been accused in a 1989 civil rights suit of using fictional informants to obtain warrants for drug raids. In testimony for that suit, one witness testified that after realizing they’d just raided the wrong home, a Boston police officer shrugged, apologized and said, “This happens all the time.” The city settled with the plaintiffs.
• In 1996, the Fitchburg SWAT team was already facing a lawsuit for harassing a group of loiterers when it burned down an apartment complex during a botched drug raid. The SWAT team subsequently faced a number of other allegations of recklessness and misconduct.
• In January 2011, a SWAT team raided the Framingham, Mass., home of 68-year-old Eurie Stamps at around midnight on a drug warrant. Oddly, it had already arrested the subject of the warrant — Stamps’s 20-year-old stepson — outside the house. But because he lived in Stamps’s home, the team went ahead with the raid anyway. When the team encountered Stamps, it instructed him to lie on the floor. He complied. According to the police account, as one officer then moved toward Stamps to check for weapons, he lost his balance and fell. As he fell, his weapon discharged, sending a bullet directly into Stamps’s chest, killing him.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Jessie Rossman, a staff attorney for the Massachusetts ACLU, told me in a phone interview. “The same government authority that allows them to carry weapons, make arrests, and break down the doors of Massachusetts residents during dangerous raids also makes them a government agency that is subject to the open records law.”


In some states, police agencies can claim exemptions from open records legislation for certain types of requests, such as for internal personnel files, or investigation documents that could reveal the identities of witnesses or informants. In some parts of the country, like the Virginia suburbs of Washington, police agencies have broadly interpreted open records laws to allow them to turn down just about every request. But this claim in Massachusetts is on a whole different scale.


“They didn’t even attempt to claim an exception,” Rossman says. “They’re simply asserting that they’re private corporations.”


The ACLU is now suing NEMLEC. It’s worth noting that in addition to receiving taxpayer funding from its 51 member police agencies, NEMLEC has also received significant federal funding over the years, particularly from the Byrne Grant program. In fact, just last April, NEMLEC made a series of drug busts across the state in an investigation funded at least in part with Byrne Grants. (NEMLEC seems to be involved in a lot of drug raids.) In 2010, NEMLEC received an $800,000 Byrne Grant earmarked by then-Sen. John F. Kerry.


Interestingly, in 2009, NEMLEC had to pay out $200,000 “to settle allegations that it made false claims related to the use of Justice Department grant funds” — specifically, funds obtained through the Byrne Grant program. That sounds like an agency that could use a little oversight.


The argument that the LECs in Massachusetts are private corporations and therefore immune to the state open records law was made by Jack Collins, the general counsel for the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association. I have contacted his office to request an interview but haven’t yet heard back.

[American Patriot]

The Feds Have Turned America Into a War Zone: 4 Disturbing Facts About Police Militarization

Posted on 26 de June de 2014 by fernandocascais

By Aaron Cantú
Why do even small towns now deploy paramilitary forces?
For nearly half a century, America’s police forces have undergone a process of “militarization.” They’ve upped their cache of assault weapons and military defense gear, increasingly deployed SWAT teams to conduct ops-style missions on civilians, and inculcated a warrior attitude within their rank. While major metropolitan areas have maintained SWAT teams for decades, by the mid 2000s, 80 percent of small towns also had their own paramilitary forces.
But beyond deep reporting of individual journalists and scholars, little is known about the extent of militarization across the country. The ACLU has attempted to bridge that knowledge gap with a new report called War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.
“Our investigation is the first to conduct an analysis using raw data received directly from police departments, by looking directly at incident reports themselves,” says Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel at the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the primary author of the report. The ACLU sent public records requests to 260 law enforcement agencies in 25 states plus Washington D.C., asking for records of all SWAT deployments between 2011 and 2012. Below are some of its most significant findings.
1. The federal government’s war on drugs is the single greatest catalyst for local police militarization.
Far from being used for emergencies such as hostage situations, the ACLU found that 62% of all SWAT deployments were for the purpose of drug searches, and 79% were to search a person’s home with a search warrant—usually for drugs.
These deployments are usually violent and feature bands of heavily armed officers ramming down doors or chucking flash bang grenades into homes. Innocent people are often caught up, and sometimes killed, in the ensuing chaos, including Eurie Stamp, a Massachusetts grandfather who was shot dead by an officer as police attempted to locate Stamp’s girlfriend’s son for a drug offense. Other SWAT-induced tragedies abound: The ACLU found that 46 people were injured as a result of paramilitary deployment.
For decades, the federal government—in its quixotic quest to eliminate drug use— has abetted these aggressive tactics with programs that create incentives for militarization. One is called the 1033 program, which was launched in the 1980’s to create a pipeline for military equipment between the Department of Defense and local law enforcement.
From the ACLU report:
“There are few limitations or requirements imposed on agencies that participate in the 1033 Program…. In addition, equipment transferred under the 1033 Program is free to receiving agencies, though they are required to pay for transport and maintenance. The federal government requires agencies that receive 1033 equipment to use it within one year of receipt.”
Equally to blame is the federal Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program, another 80’s artifact that gives local police forces incentives to seek out low-level drug offenders in exchange for grant money.
From the ACLU report:
“Between April 2012 and March 2013, JAG grantees spent 64 percent of their JAG funding on law enforcement…state and local agencies used JAG funds to purchase hundreds of lethal and less-lethal weapons, tactical vests, and body armor.”
Kara Dansky says this complex for funneling federal money to paramilitary drug policing undermines potential reforms to the criminal justice system that US Attorney General Eric Holder has called for.
“Holder has been outspoken about the need to ensure that the police have the trust of the community, [and] it has the potential to do some really good work,” she said. “But we are concerned that if justice department continues to grant money to local police departments, money they use to engage in paramilitary weapons and tactics, the Attorney Generals’ great work will be undermined.”…
http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...militarization

[American Patriot]

Report: Militarized Police Treating Citizens as “Wartime Enemies”

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Various Writers
[The New American]

Friday, 27 June 2014 09:49
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.


As the number of troop-heavy foreign interventions decreases, the warcraft and weaponry used in battle are now being deployed in neighborhoods as members and machines of law enforcement become increasingly indistinguishable from those of the military.
This is the situation as revealed in a new report published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) entitled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.”
“A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2 year-old son” is perhaps the best example of a headline announcing the horrific impact this conversion can have when left unchecked.
As reported by The New American, a toddler is in a medically induced coma after a Cornelia, Georgia, SWAT team tossed a flash-bang grenade into his crib during the execution of a “no-knock” warrant.
Bounkham Phonesavanh is 19 months old and was asleep in his crib when police broke down the front door in the early morning hours on May 28 and threw the grenade into the front room. His mother, father, and three sisters were in the room as well.
Earlier this week, the baby’s mother, Alecia Phonesavanh, described the ordeal in detail, including the relevant account of the near fatal blurring of the line between soldier and cop:
Flashbang grenades were created for soldiers to use during battle. When they explode, the noise is so loud and the flash is so bright that anyone close by is temporarily blinded and deafened. It’s been three weeks since the flashbang exploded next to my sleeping baby, and he’s still covered in burns.

The ACLU provides a brief history of the creation and transformation of SWAT:
SWAT [Special Weapons And Tactics] teams were created in the late 1960s as “quasi-militaristic” squads capable of addressing serious and violent situations that presented imminent threats such as riots, barricade and hostage scenarios, and active shooter or sniper situations. The first SWAT team, at the Los Angeles Police Department, was developed in the wake of a series of emergency situations in which local police felt unable to respond as swiftly or as effectively as was necessary. SWAT teams have since expanded in number, and are used with greater frequency and, increasingly, for purposes for which they were not originally intended — overwhelmingly to serve search warrants in drug investigations.
In the case of Bounkham Phonesavanh, SWAT team members executed the no-knock warrant after receiving a tip from an informant that he had bought methamphetamine from a man named Wanis Thometheva earlier that day. Precisely the perversion of the power documented in the ACLU report.
“War Comes Home” observes 818 SWAT operations from July 2010 to October 2013. These operations were carried out by more than 20 law enforcement agencies in 11 states.
The 96-page report reveals that the increasingly militaristic police — forces equipped, trained, and often outfitted by the Pentagon — are behaving with a belligerence more at home on the battlefield in the face of an armed enemy than in neighborhoods while performing routine duties once accomplished with little more than a squad car and a badge.
The sources of the funds that equip formerly cash-strapped towns and cities are also covered in the ACLU report. As the organization writes:
Law enforcement agencies have become equipped to carry out these SWAT missions in part by federal programs such as the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, the Department of Homeland Security’s grants to local law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Justice’s Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program.
“Neighborhoods are not war zones, and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies,” the ACLU says.
The authors of the study recognize that their findings are not new, but only another brick of evidence in the wall of proof incriminating the police for treating Americans as suspects, rather than as fellow citizens.
“This report provides a snapshot of the realities of paramilitary policing, building on a body of existing work demonstrating that police militarization is a pervasive problem,” the paper explains.
In order to combat the militarization of police, the report recommends more local oversight.
“Local police departments should develop their own internal policies calling for appropriate restraints on the use of SWAT and should avoid all training programs that encourage a ‘warrior’ mindset,” the report suggests.
Finally, the ACLU report notes that “if the federal government gives the police a huge cache of military-style weaponry, they are highly likely to use it, even if they do not really need to.”
This analysis of human nature is not unique to the ACLU. Another expert agrees: Jim Fitzgerald worked for eight years as a vice and narcotics squad detective in Newark, New Jersey, before joining the staff of The John Birch Society. He is point man for the conservative organization’s “Support Your Local Police” initiative.
In an interview with The New American, Fitzgerald said there is “virtually no use” for the military-grade equipment being bought by local law enforcement with DHS grant money.
“The only reason to have this equipment is to use it,” Fitzgerald said, and it is likely it would be used against local citizens who have risen up and created some sort of civil disorder.
Paradoxically, the police’s push to be prepared and trained to quell civil unrest is fomenting the feelings that could create such an uprising. Americans are tired of reading reports of law enforcement behaving less like the police and more like the gestapo, less like servants of the law and more like servants of the state, deployed with the training, technology, tactics, and weapons capable of enforcing the increasingly unconstitutional edicts of the ruling regime.

Photo of SWAT team in Seattle: AP Images

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels nationwide speaking on nullification, the Second Amendment, the surveillance state, and other constitutional issues. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at jwolverton@thenewamerican.com.

[American Patriot]

Government ParaMilitary Units Invading 124 American Homes Per Night

Posted on June 29, 2014 by stevengoddard
With the borders open for terrorists to walk across, government paramilitary units are invading 124 American homes per night

Nestled awkwardly among the usual guff, the outrage website Salon this week took a welcome flyer and accorded space to something genuinely alarming. “A SWAT team,” the headline screamed, “blew a hole in my 2-year-old son.” For once, this wasn’t hyperbole.
Paramilitary operations, the ACLU concluded, are “happening in about 124 homes every day — or more likely every night” — and four in five of those are performed in order that authorities might “search homes, usually for drugs.” Such raids routinely involve “armored personnel carriers,” “military equipment like battering rams,” and “flashbang grenades.”
Barney Fife Meets Delta Force | National Review Online

[American Patriot]

June 27, 2014 6:00 PM
Barney Fife Meets Delta Force
Hypermilitarized police departments are more dangerous than whatever they fight. By Charles C. W. Cooke






The Pentagon has donated hundreds of MRAP vehicles to police departments nationwide.








Nestled awkwardly among the usual guff, the outrage website Salon this week took a welcome flyer and accorded space to something genuinely alarming. “A SWAT team,” the headline screamed, “blew a hole in my 2-year-old son.” For once, this wasn’t hyperbole.


The piece’s author, Alecia Phonesavanh, described what it felt like to be on the business end of an attack that was launched in error by police who believed a drug dealer to be living and operating in her house. They “threw a flashbang grenade inside,” she reported. It “landed in my son’s crib.” Now, her son is “covered in burns” and has “a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs.” So badly injured was he by the raid that he was “placed into a medically induced coma.” “They searched for drugs,” Phonesavanh confirmed, but they “never found any.” Nor, for that matter, did they find the person they were looking for. He doesn’t live there. “All of this,” she asks, “to find a small amount of drugs?”


Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with which those teams were assembled to contend. Paramilitary operations, the ACLU concluded, are “happening in about 124 homes every day — or more likely every night” — and four in five of those are performed in order that authorities might “search homes, usually for drugs.” Such raids routinely involve “armored personnel carriers,” “military equipment like battering rams,” and “flashbang grenades.”

Were the military being used in such a manner, we would be rightly outraged. Why not here? Certainly this is not a legal matter. The principle of posse comitatus draws a valuable distinction between the national armed forces and parochial law enforcement, and one that all free people should greatly cherish. Still, it seems plain that the potential threat posed by a domestic standing army is not entirely blunted just because its units are controlled locally. To add the prefix “para” to a problem is not to make it go away, nor do legal distinctions change the nature of power. Over the past two decades, the federal government has happily sent weapons of war to local law enforcement, with nary a squeak from anyone involved with either political party. Are we comfortable with this?


The Right’s silence on the issue is vexing indeed, the admirable attempts of a few libertarians notwithstanding. Here, conservatives seem to be conflicted between their rightful predilection for law and order — an instinct that is based upon an accurate comprehension of human nature and an acknowledgment of the existence of evil — and a well-developed and wholly sensible fear of state power, predicated upon precisely the same thing. As of now, the former is rather dramatically winning out, leading conservatives to indulge — or at least tacitly to permit — excuses that they typically reject elsewhere. Much as the teachers’ unions invariably attempt to justify their “anything goes” contracts by pointing to the ends that they ostensibly serve (“Well you do want schools for the children or don’t you? Sign here”), the increasingly muscular behavior of local police departments is often shrugged off as a by-product of the need to fight crime. This, if left unchecked, is a recipe for precisely the sort of carte blanche that conservatives claim to fear.


Leaving aside the central moral question of the War on Drugs — which is whether the state should be responding to peaceful transactions and consensual behavior with violence — there is, it seems, considerable room between law enforcement’s turning a blind eye to the law and its aping the military in its attempt to uphold it. The cartels of Mexico and drug lords of America’s larger cities are one thing; but two-bit dealers and consumers of illicit substances are quite another. In the instance that Salon recorded, the person that authorities “were looking for, wasn’t there.” “He doesn’t even live in that house,” Phonesavanh confirmed. But suppose that he had, and that he’d been dealing drugs as charged? Does this alone make the case for the tactics? I suspect not. Instead, attempting to catch a violator in the act by releasing military vehicles full of machine-gun-wielding men, storming a home in the dead of night, and performing a no-knock raid that results in a two-year-old’s being pushed into a coma might, one suspects, be overkill — in many similar cases, literally so. The question for conservatives should be this: If cowboy poetry is no justification for federal intrusion, can drug dealing be said to serve as an open invitation for the deployment of the ersatz 101st?


In the more febrile of the Right’s quarters, the sight of MRAPs being delivered to the chief of police in Westington, Mont., has given rise to all forms of regrettable silliness — to visions of black helicopters and reeducation camps and an America on the verge of being taken by force by the gun-toting rangers of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Nevertheless, a small amount of latent paranoia has served America well, and Chekhov’s advice that “one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it” should be applied to governments as rigorously as to aspiring playwrights. Once the holders of the monopoly on violence are accorded the latest weaponry, there will always be the temptation to use it. Likewise, once one has taken the mental and linguistic leap of ascribing to domestic law enforcement the imprimatur of “war,” one may be inclined to reach for the trigger that little bit more quickly. The disaster at Waco, Texas, was, it seems, more cock-up than conspiracy. But the recognition in the aftermath that the whole bloody mess could have been avoided if local officers had taken the time to chat with the victims should haunt us to this day. Rushing in at 100 miles per hour rarely works out, whatever the ill that one is attempting to resolve.


The Left’s current inclination is to spin offenses out of straw — having no major battles left to fight, it seeks to detect microaggressions; with overt bigotry so thin on the ground, the dog whistles have come out; and with the barriers to the Declaration’s maxim having been largely removed, the focus has shifted to the structural and the invisible. But first-degree burns and holes in the chest are different things altogether — not to be dismissed or downplayed — and that the issue is being raised by an outlet known for its absurdity should not dull its impact. Will the Right acknowledge the scale of the threat, applying its usual mistrust of power to a favored group, or will its usually alert advocates leave themselves willfully in the dark until, one day, a flashbang with their name on it is tossed through the window to wake them up with a start?
– Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.




RELATED SLIDESHOW
MRAPs on Main Street

[American Patriot]

Dept. of Homeland Security: feel safer, sucker?

Jul2 by theodorewesson

Dept. of Homeland Security: feel safer, sucker?
by Jon Rappoport
July 2, 2014
www.nomorefakenews.com
Your big-government-at-work scores again.


In 2003, Congress began pouring money into a program of fusion centers. These 70 outposts, scattered across America, were supposed to coordinate federal, state, and local efforts to gather counter-terrorism intelligence.


You know, to protect America against al-Qaeda.


The lead agency in this program is the US Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS).


In 2012, the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations issued a chilling report on how this has worked out.


First and foremost, the report indicates that DHS has claimed certain fusion centers exist that don’t exist at all. This should give you a clue about what we are dealing with.
“So how is fusion center #32 doing?”


“Pretty good.”


“Really? Fusion center #32 doesn’t exist.”


“Oh.”


Here is the exact statement from the Committee: “…DHS officials asserted that some fusion centers existed when they did not.”


This is quite a lie, even for an intelligence agency whose business is lying.


The Committee also found that DHS hid their own “evaluations highlighting a host of problems at fusion centers and in DHS’ own operations.”


Or in plain language: a) we screw up big-time; b) we cover it up.


But even with all this lying, surely the fusion centers produced useful intelligence, right?


“…the Subcommittee investigation could identify no DHS reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot.”


What?!


It gets even worse. For the period between April 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, a third of all fusion center reports weren’t even published for use by DHS or other US intelligence agencies. Why? Because the reports often “lacked any useful information or potentially violated department guidelines intended to protect Americans’ civil liberties or Privacy Act protections…”


In fact, the Committee found, DHS launched an internal review of its own illegal actions infringing on citizens’ privacy and civil liberties, but the review was extended in time, in order to conceal “most of the troubling reports” and keep them “from being released outside of DHS…”


Translation: a) we violate citizens’ Constitutional rights; b) we cover it up; c) we investigate our own cover-up; d) we conceal our own investigation.


As the capper on the Committee report, Congressional investigators discovered that “DHS required only a week of training for intelligence officials before sending them to state and local fusion centers to report sensitive domestic intelligence, largely concerning US persons…”


Meaning: incompetent raw DHS employees are deployed to accuse US citizens of being terrorists or aiding terrorists.
Feel safer now?

The bumbling stumbling fusion centers are actually evidence of something far more sinister: the hidden mission of DHS is not intelligence. Instead, DHS was secretly tasked with creating its own army, to be equipped with hundreds of millions of rounds of ammo, guns, tanks, and the like. The “gathering of intell” is a secondary mission, and a cover story to conceal DHS’ ongoing war on the American people—because, in its eyes, anything or anyone that moves is a potential threat.


The impulse to control has that result: eventually “public safety” devolves into an anti-human system. “People, all people, are trouble. Watch them. Regulate them. Police them. Exercise zero tolerance.”


You can read the Committee report at:
http://publicintelligence.net/hsgac-fusion-centers/
Jon Rappoport

[Ryan Ruck]

Well, sounds like Sommerville, MA has effectively eliminated all crime in their town. Guess it is time to disband the police department and save the taxpayers money if all they have left to do is dedicate valuable departmental time and resources to things like this.

Gone Fishing: These Cops Have Setup a Revenue Collection Trap Like No Other

July 3, 2014

A video uploaded to facebook Monday shows what low levels police will sink to in order to generate revenue.

The Somerville Police Department has devised an ingenious method for catching dangerous criminals.

It is against the law to enter a crosswalk while there is someone crossing the road.

Obviously a driver can drive through a crosswalk while simultaneously remaining cautious and being aware of pedestrians. But where would all this extra revenue come from?

Somerville police are using undercover crosswalkers to set up questionable traps at crosswalks throughout the town.

The undercover just walks back and forth in the crosswalk all day long, while the unit pulls over the unsuspecting “criminals” to issue a citation.

What do you think? Is this really protecting and serving?

[American Patriot]

Huh?

Jacksonville Implements Orwellian Police State, Going to 18,000 Homes Looking for Drugs and Guns

09 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted by ocdjm in Police State
≈ Leave a comment

Tags
4th amendment, asset forfeiture, gun confiscation, jacksonville sheriff, police state, spy cameras




Jacksonville Florida Sheriff John Rutherford is trying to put a good spin on door to door “knock and talks” aka illegal searches. The Jacksonville sheriff is looking for drugs and guns so they can do asset forfeitures for revenue generation. The sheriff is putting up cameras all over Jacksonville to spy on the citizens. This is a giant 4th Amendment violation on the guise of making you safe.


Go to 4:12 in the video and the sheriff will talk about what was seized and the crimes that were discovered.


Here is another take on operation ceasefire from The Free Thought Project.


http://thefreethoughtproject.com/jac...rz3vUkC6Qlq.99

[American Patriot]

Justice in the world?

Wonder how long before Eric Holder breaks him out?


Ray Nagin, Former New Orleans Mayor, Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison

By ALLEN M. JOHNSON Jr. and CAMPBELL ROBERTSONJULY 9, 2014

Photo

C. Ray Nagin, the former mayor of New Orleans, left court after being sentenced on Wednesday. Credit Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

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NEW ORLEANS — C. Ray Nagin, the former mayor of New Orleans, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Wednesday on federal corruption charges.
The sentence was less than the recommended 15 years, but Judge Ginger Berrigan of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana told the court that the evidence failed to show that Mr. Nagin had organized or had been a leader of a corruption scheme.
“Mr. Nagin claimed a much, much smaller share of the profits of the crime than any other member of the group,” Judge Berrigan said, referring to the businessmen who profited from the scheme. The judge said that Mr. Nagin’s leadership was much needed after Hurricane Katrina but that it had also been lagging.
Prosecutors objected to the sentence, a move that could set up an appeal.
Mr. Nagin, who will remain out on bond, hugged family and friends after the sentencing, and was quickly driven away from the courtroom. “I’m trusting God is going to work all this out,” he said during sentencing.
“I think that he got off lightly considering the violations of the public trust,” said Edward E. Chervenak, a political science professor at the University of New Orleans and a critic of Mr. Nagin during his eight years as mayor.
A longtime civil rights advocate in New Orleans, Jerome Smith, said he offered Mr. Nagin words of encouragement after the sentencing. “I just let him know that he has spiritual support,” Mr. Smith said.
Mr. Nagin, a Democrat, was found guilty in February on 20 counts, most relating to kickbacks from contractors looking for city work. He was arrested in January 2013, nearly three years after he left office. He was charged with taking kickbacks in the form of cash, cross-country trips or help with the family-run granite countertop company; the bribes were handed out by men looking for city business ranging from software supplies to sidewalk repair. Many of the schemes, though not all, took place after Hurricane Katrina, when contractors crowded into the city for rebuilding work.
Many of those involved eventually pleaded guilty and testified at length against Mr. Nagin at his trial.
The corruption had been so thoroughly covered in the local news media that few people were surprised by the verdicts in February. Mr. Nagin had come into office in 2002 as a reformer from the business world and a foe of cronyism. But the city grew frustrated with his stewardship, particularly in his second term when the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina stalled and Mr. Nagin seemed unengaged. By the time he left office in 2010, many in New Orleans had moved past frustration and were simply ready to see him go.
Throughout the trial the courtroom was half-empty, except for a riveting two days when Mr. Nagin took the stand and denied everything, at times with a glib dismissal. At one point he even refused to recognize his own signature on receipts that federal prosecutors displayed on a large screen.
In a court filing urging a stiff sentence, federal prosecutors had described Mr. Nagin’s testimony as “a performance that can only be summed up by his astounding unwillingness to accept any responsibility,” and listed in detail 22 instances in which they said he had lied on the witness stand. As they had at trial, prosecutors also contrasted Mr. Nagin’s attention to detail in some of the kickback schemes with what many came to see as his lackadaisical stewardship in office.
“These repeated violations, at the expense of the citizens of New Orleans in a time when honest leadership was needed most, do not deserve leniency,” wrote Matthew M. Coman, an assistant United States attorney.
Robert Jenkins, the lawyer representing Mr. Nagin, had urged leniency, arguing that Mr. Nagin has a “completely sterling record” outside of the convictions and that the behavior described at trial is a “complete aberration to his otherwise outstanding life.”

[Ryan Ruck]

I know a lot of us wish it otherwise but, that doesn't change reality.

Reporter Stopped By TSA Agent Who Didn't Know District Of Columbia Is In US

July 15, 2014



It's something most students learn in elementary school -- the United States is made up of 50 states and the District of Columbia. But Channel 9's Justin Gray found out it's a lesson that an Orlando agent with the Transportation Safety Administration seems to have missed.

Gray, who lives in Washington, D.C., was flying out of Orlando International Airport when a TSA agent said Gray's District of Columbia driver's license wasn't a valid form of identification. Gray said his license is legal and up-to-date, but the TSA agent didn't seem to know what the District of Columbia was when Gray arrived at the security checkpoint over the weekend.

When Gray handed the man his driver's license the agent demanded to see Gray's passport.

Gray told the agent he wasn't carrying his passport and asked why he needed it.

The agent said he didn't recognize the license.

Gray said he asked the agent if he knew what the District of Columbia is, and after a brief conversation Gray realized the man did not know.

Gray was able to get through security and then stopped to complain to a TSA supervisor.

Critics of the TSA said that what happened to Gray is a sign that the problems at TSA are bigger than just not knowing geography.

"They simply have not been either applying or maintaining standards for good personnel," said Douglas Kidd, with the National Association of Airline Passengers.

A TSA spokesman contacted Gray just minutes after he tweeted about the problem. He confirmed that a District of Columbia license is an acceptable form ID.

The spokesman said, "Officers are trained to identify fraudulent documents, which can potentially deter and detect individuals attempting to circumvent this layer of security."

"It makes you wonder what's going on with their training and their policies," said Kidd.

A TSA spokesman told Gray that all of the TSA agents in Orlando are being shown copies of District of Columbia driver's license.

[American Patriot]

I was sitting at lunch yesterday with some other rather "Patriotic" individuals. Something about the ACA came up. One said, "Death by a thousand cuts"

(Talking about the ACA, Obamacare)

Someone else said "37 states opted out of it"

I said "What's that? Like 1/2 of the 57 states right?"


Another said "Yeah, like Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, and ..."

I added "District of Columbia".


(Guess you had to be there). LMAO

[American Patriot]

Another article about the dumbass from TSA that never heard of "Washington, D.C.".....



Posted: 10:51 a.m. Tuesday, July 15, 2014


Reporter stopped by TSA agent who didn't know District of Columbia is in US


TSA





ORLANDO, Fla. —


It's something most students learn in elementary school -- the United States is made up of 50 states and the District of Columbia. But Channel 9's Justin Gray found out it's a lesson that an Orlando agent with the Transportation Safety Administration seems to have missed.

Gray, who lives in Washington, D.C., was flying out of Orlando International Airport when a TSA agent said Gray's District of Columbia driver's license wasn't a valid form of identification. Gray said his license is legal and up-to-date, but the TSA agent didn't seem to know what the District of Columbia was when Gray arrived at the security checkpoint over the weekend.

When Gray handed the man his driver's license the agent demanded to see Gray's passport.


Gray told the agent he wasn't carrying his passport and asked why he needed it.

The agent said he didn't recognize the license.

Gray said he asked the agent if he knew what the District of Columbia is, and after a brief conversation Gray realized the man did not know.

Gray was able to get through security and then stopped to complain to a TSA supervisor.

Critics of the TSA said that what happened to Gray is a sign that the problems at TSA are bigger than just not knowing geography.

"They simply have not been either applying or maintaining standards for good personnel," said Douglas Kidd, with the National Association of Airline Passengers.

A TSA spokesman contacted Gray just minutes after he tweeted about the problem. He confirmed that a District of Columbia license is an acceptable form ID.

The spokesman said, "Officers are trained to identify fraudulent documents, which can potentially deter and detect individuals attempting to circumvent this layer of security."

"It makes you wonder what's going on with their training and their policies," said Kidd.

A TSA spokesman told Gray that all of the TSA agents in Orlando are being shown copies of District of Columbia driver's license.

[American Patriot]

Anyone think there might be more to this story?





DHS Raid Home To Seize Land Rover For Violation Of EPA Regulations

Posted on July 29, 2014


Our government is out of control.

Check it out:


As part of its mission to “protect the Homeland,” the DHS has been busy seizing imported vehicles that don’t comply with safety and CO2 regulations.


Jennifer and Bill Brinkley were satisfied that their $60,000 dollar purchase of a Land Rover Defender on eBay complied with regulations because it fell into the exemption category of a vehicle 25 years or older.


However, when DHS agents turned up at the property, they compared the car’s Vehicle Identification Number to a list and immediately seized the Land Rover. The couple were not given “a chance to debate the issue.”


WBTV’s Steve Ohnesorge said DHS agents conducted “almost like a raid to get the car.”


“it’s just unnerving the way they did it,” said Bill Brinkley.


The feds have given the Brinkley’s 35 days to appeal the seizure but refuse to tell them where the vehicle is located. The DHS has also failed to respond to media requests about the incident.


The Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, was tasked with the role of protecting America from terrorists, man-made accidents and natural disasters. However, the DHS has been turned into a national police force with a remit that extends from seizing websites for copyright infringement to confiscating fake NFL merchandise.







Read more at http://conservativebyte.com/2014/07/...LmLTX7PxiKY.99

[Ryan Ruck]

They weren't the only ones. There were, I believe, 40 people who had their Land Rovers seized because some importer either imported them improperly or fraudulently. I think the issue was that they were supposedly newer than 25 years old but sold as older. The reason this is an issue is that there were some safety regs like airbag and anti-lock brake requirements that were instituted around that time frame. Land Rover chose not to institute these safety features and so were no longer allowed to export these trucks to the US.

These were Land Rover Defender 90s and 110s:





I saw this about a week ago and never had a chance to post about it.

[American Patriot]

The only airbags that count are the fucking congress, President and all the Gestapo.