The Property of the People transparency group (previously) has published another damning US intelligence file, this one a report circulated by the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (RICOC, a joint state/federal intelligence body), revealing how the US intelligence bodies advised local law enforcement after the Charlottesville white supremacist march.
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You could be the proud owner of this customized 1978 Tradesman 200 undercover police surveillance van! Currently for sale on the San Francisco Bay Area's Craigslist, the white, 8-cylinder automatic has just 78,000 original miles. Asking price is $4,000. And now for the good stuff:
It has been carpeted with a bench and workbench inside. It is chock full of surprises and cool modifications including; a CB radio setup (don't think it currently works), police band radio/scanner, black out windows/shades, custom AC unit designed to run off a few deep cycle-cell marine batteries (daisy-chained together), a door to separate the cab from the rear of the vehicle, and best of all.....a periscope that comes out of the vent. It does have some minor dents and dings as a 40 year-old truck will likely have, but no major defects/issues. Everything seems to work on it, but I haven't done much driving in it since it is not currently registered or insured. Seats are going to need to be recovered or replaced. This van would make an awesome undercover PI van, party van, camper van, hippy van, surfer van, boogie van, classic 70's van. I have another one already, and with two jobs, and school, I don't have a lot of free time to convert a second van. I may consider a trade for a 4x4 van, or similar, Suburban, Bronco, Scout, Jeep etc.
"1978 Dodge Tradesman 200 undercover police van - $4000 (san mateo)" (Craigslist)
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After this weekend's snow in Chadron, Nebraska, Jason Blundell and his kids spent the afternoon sculpting a snow replica of their 1967 Ford Mustang GTA. Nebraska State Patrol Sgt. Mick Downing spotted the snow car and decided to have his own fun. From the Omaha World-Herald:
(Downing) drove by and recorded himself giving the sculpted car a pretend tow notice, then posted the video on the patrol’s social media channels...
Downing said he never did the paperwork for the tow notice. It wouldn’t have held up in court.
“If it would’ve been a real car,” he said, “it was parked just fine.”
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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra told two Berkeley-based reporters that it is against the law to even possess a copy of this never-before-publicly-released list of convicted cops.
In Fort Pierce, Florida, police officer Doug McNeal arrested Zachery Moellendick, 23, and Krista Leigh, 24, for shoplifting and put them in the back of his squad car. The couple started making out so McNeal played Barry White's "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love." Later, he allowed Leigh to smoke a cigarette in the car. In the police report, McNeal admitted to seeing them kiss and "was fine with it."
According to Florida Today, "The Fort Pierce Police Department said it suspended Officer Doug McNeal for 20 days without pay for the ride, which captured the couple's backseat actions on video..."
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“Overkill is an understatement,” the family’s lawyer said.
"Predictive policing" is the idea that you can feed crime stats to a machine-learning system and it will produce a model that can predict crime. It is garbage.
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Detroit cop Gary Steele pulled over a young black woman for expired plates, forced her to leave her car in -18f weather, took video of her walking off in the freezing cold, and taunted her with racist insults. He posted the video online for the amusement of other racists, went viral, was "reassigned" by his chief, and turns out to have a history of domestic violence during his time on the force.
WXYZ Detroit:
Moore was ordered to walk to her destination because of the expired tags. As she walked away, the officers recorded Moore with a cell phone camera. The officers referred to Moore as making a "walk of shame in the cold." One of the officers used the phrase "bye Felicia."
The video also included a "Celebrate Black History Month" filter that included the caption "what black girl magic looks like."
He was a cop when he shot at his ex-girlfriend a decade ago, and he's still a cop today.
UPDATE: Here's his mugshot and charge sheet from the 2008 attack on his ex-girlfriend. He was originally charged with torture and assault with intent to commit murder, among other crimes, but got to plead to a misdemeanor charge of reckless discharge.
Original charges: Torture; assault w/intent to commit murder; assault w/intent to do great bodily harm less than murder; 2 counts felonious assault w/a dangerous weapon; weapons / firearm discharge in or at a building; felony firearm. ... Plea bargain: Pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of reckless discharge of a firearm, and was placed on probation for one year.
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Jake the police dog was screening passengers boarding the Norwegian Epic cruise ship for the Holy Ship! EDM festival on the ocean. Jake alerted his police officer companion that he smelled something suspicious and then became visibly sick.
"(The dog) started having some problems with balance and had some type of seizure incident of some sort, was showing effects of having inhaled some substance," Tod Goodyear, a Sheriff's Office spokesman, told WFTV. "They administered the Narcan and got (the dog) to the vet as quick as they could."
They gave him Narcan as a precaution as they didn't know what caused the illness.
Meanwhile, police searched the passenger and found "a sedative and other prescription drugs, as well as an amphetamine and Ecstasy," according to WFLA.
It isn't clear what Jake ingested, when, or how. Most importantly though, Jake is expected to make a full recovery. Read the rest
At Jefferson K-8 School in Warren, Ohio, school police officer Adam Chinchik noticed that a car kept parking in the no-parking zone between two disabled spaces in front of the school. Turns out that it was the school principal's car. Chinchik apparently warned the principal and then finally issued a citation.
"Within one hour (of the citation), the superintendent had ordered two administrators to go to Jefferson and escort the SRO off the property," Warren police union spokesperson Michael Stabile told WCMH-TV.
(In defense of the principal), a school spokesperson said the district employee moved the vehicle when asked.
Chinchik may be assigned as a resource officer at a different school.
"At this point, he doesn't want to go back to that school because of how the situation unfolded," Stabile said. Read the rest
A passerby in Perth, Western Australia heard a man inside a home yelling "Why don't you die?" amidst a toddler's screams. The concerned neighbor called the police who responded with haste. Turned out, the man was just trying to kill a spider that was terrorizing his family.
According to police, there were no injuries "except to spider."
(BBC)
image: Toby Hudson: "A redback spider (Latrodectus hasseltii) female"
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In 2013, San Bernardino Sheriff’s Deputy Luis Ortiz took the decision to arrest a group of seventh grade girls -- 12 and 13 year olds -- because they wouldn't speak when he demanded to know who among them had been the aggressors and who had been the victims in a series of bullying incidents; Ortiz's rationale for these arrests was that the girls were "unresponsive and disrespectful" and that by arresting them, he could "prove a point," that he wasn't "playing around" and this would "make [them] mature a lot faster," by teaching them that the law was indifferent to "who [was] at fault, who did what" because "it [was] the same, same ticket, same pair of handcuffs."
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A Cincinnati gentleman, running from a police officer who spotted him shoplifting from Walmart, accidentally ran right to the rear entrance of the nearby police station.
According to police, "(Jeremy) Roberts made what can only be described as a tactical error and ran directly to the rear of the Cincinnati Police Department ... District 3 station, which is located just south of Walmart... and where he was 'greeted by numerous officers.'"
(WCPO, thanks Charles Pescovitz!) Read the rest
In October 2017, Syracuse cops arrested Torrence Jackson with a small amount of marijuana and accused him of hiding drugs in his rectum (the officers say they saw him shift in his seat and concluded that he'd put drugs up his butt). They took him to St Joseph's Hospital where he was nonconsensually X-rayed; when that revealed no drugs, officers told doctors to force sedation on Jackson and then put a tube and camera up his rectum.
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Police in Opp, Alabama, blame Satan for a recent spate of killings in the rural area. The Associated Press quotes a statement posted to the department's facebook page:
THIS PAST SUNDAY, A YOUNG MAN WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN KINSTON. MONDAY NIGHT, A MOTHER WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN NORTHERN COVINGTON COUNTY. THERE HAVE BEEN FIVE MURDERS IN COVINGTON COUNTY IN 2018. THESE MURDERS HAVE BEEN DONE BY OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. THIS IS HAPPENING BECAUSE WE HAVE TURNED AWAY FROM GOD AND EMBRACED SATAN. WE MAY HAVE NOT MEANT TO DO SO BUT, WE HAVE. IT IS TIME TO ASK FOR GOD’S HELP TO STOP THIS. IT IS TIME TO BE PARENTS AND RAISE OUR CHILDREN, NOT HAVE THEM RAISE US. IT IS TIME TO FULLY SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT AND STAND BY THE OFFICERS AND DEPUTIES THAT ARE FAR TOO OFTEN HAVING TO WALK INTO THESE DANGEROUS SITUATIONS AND CLEAN UP THE MESS. FRIENDS, IT IS TIME TO STAND UP AND BE RESPONSIBLE, GROWN UP LEADERS IN OUR COMMUNITY. BOTTOM LINE, THERE ARE SHEEP; THERE ARE WOLVES AND THERE ARE SHEEP DOGS. WHICH GROUP DO YOU BELONG TO ?
Wolves, sheepdogs and the separation of church and state. Read the rest
There's a lot of controversy surrounding the use of police body cameras. Some privacy advocates argue that the video captured by the always-on cameras has little effect on the behavior of police officers : the statistics surrounding use of force and citizen complaints barely budged before and after the tech was introduced. The police don't much care for them either. The NYPD's police union, for example, says that the footage captured by a body cam shouldn't be able to be used in open court as it could be considered to be part of a police officer's personnel record, which is protected from public disclosure. Then there's the middle ground: by having cops wear body cams while on duty, provided they're not covering them or turning them off during an incident, they're being held accountable for every action they take.
No matter where you sit on this spectrum, it's likely safe to say that using the tech to capture video of someone's ass and balls is likely not a great idea.
From The New York Daily News:
An NYPD detective has been suspended for using another cop’s body camera to shoot an X-rated video of his privates, the Daily News has learned.
Detective Specialist Raymond Williams, a neighborhood coordination officer at the 79th Precinct, was suspended Thursday, law enforcement sources said.
Williams waited until unsuspecting cop Michael Devonish — another neighborhood coordination officer — went to the men’s room in their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, stationhouse before he snatched Devonish’s body camera and put it to anatomical abuse.
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After St Louis police officer Jason Stockley, killed an unarmed black man named Anthony Lamar Smith with an unauthorized AK-47, planted a pistol on his body, and was then acquitted on murder charges in 2017, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Dustin Boone sent several texts in which he relished the prospect of beating up the protesters he anticipated following the verdict: phrases like "It’s still a blast beating people" and It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight!!” and “It’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these s---heads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!”
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