Archive for the 'Law Enforcement' Category

The situation in Madison Wisconsin has been so well covered by Ann Althouse on her blog, that I have not felt it necessary to mention it. Yesterday, the situation began to change. This is what union rule would look like:

The state Senators had passed the limited budget bill that included only the collective bargaining provisions. The Democrats had blocked the fiscal portions of the bill by fleeing the state two weeks ago. Walker has had this option since they left but he and Majority Leader FitzGerald, were negotiating with the Democrats in hopes the standoff could be ended. The negotiations (not reported by the MSM, of course) broke down when it became apparent that the Democrats are nationalizing this controversy. Walker then encouraged the Senate Republicans to go ahead with Plan B. They did and the law was signed by Walker yesterday.

Why has this issue been so inflammatory? There are even leftist academics who are advocating serious violence.

My prediction: 10 years from now public higher education, at least in many states, will have ceased to exist. 20 years from now state governments will realize that they still own the buildings and property on their former state university campuses and start charging us rent to use them. 25 years from now citizens will complain that they can’t afford to send their children to college–any college. But by then the peasant class will be so firmly established that it won’t really matter.

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I have had a house in Tucson for the past five or six years. It is in Gabriel Gifford’s Congressional district. I know the corner of Ina Road and Oracle Road where the shooting occurred. I know and like Tucson and Arizona. I would rather be living there than here because I have serious fears about California’s future while I think Arizona is now in pretty good hands. They had a housing bubble but they have more sensible people in that state government.

Gabriel Gifford’s district includes some of the most affluent areas of Tucson. To be re-elected, she had to be a “blue dog” Democrat. She has an appealing personal story. Her father is a sheriff of a neighboring county and her husband is an astronaut. I would not have voted for her because she had a very attractive opponent but there was very little of the animosity in that election that there was in other district races. Some of her constituents were unhappy about her healthcare vote. She had gotten the message and voted against Nancy Pelosi for minority leader of the Democrats, one of 17 Democrats to do so.

The press conference by the Pima County sheriff yesterday was disgraceful. I watched the whole thing. He went over and over his theories that harsh political discourse was somehow a cause of the shooting. He repeated the whole mantra three times by my count. Other than that, he provided very little information, for example, declining to give the suspect’s name when everyone with an internet connection knew what it was. I think he may have been reacting to personal distress as he probably knows Ms Gifford’s father and has known her for a long time. I also suspect he is a Democrat as Tucson is a rather left wing city being the site of the University of Arizona. The City Council has been very left wing and several members were defeated in the previous election as they had spent far too much money on frivolous projects, some of which had never been completed.

There is a lot of wild talk on left wing web sites, some of which is being rolled back as Daily Kos and the DNC scrub web sites of similar images and rhetoric as conservative sites and people they are attacking. A lot of it has been scrubbed but some people have found Google caches.

Like this DLC “targeting map.”

There has been a lot of talk about how “angry” Arizona people are. Well, maybe they have reason to be angry. The Obama administration has sued the state to try to stop an Arizona law that merely enforces a federal law that Obama seems disinterested in enforcing. Arizona is overrun with illegals immigrants, drug violence is 60 miles away in Mexico and auto insurance rates are sky high because of car theft. Someone I know had a LoJack system installed in his car. When he realized the car was stolen, the police activated the locator and the car was already 60 miles into Mexico.

Some of the angry rhetoric comes from a sense that the people have lost control of the government since Obama was elected. The health care bill was opposed in every poll of public opinion. The Republican minority was completely opposed. Yet, the bill was passed by procedural maneuvers never before used to pass legislation of this magnitude. As the people have learned more about the bill, they like it less. Nancy Pelosi told us they have to pass it so we can find out what is in it. Yes, the people of Arizona are angry. But it had nothing to do with yesterday’s shooting.

The young man is obviously a paranoid schizophrenic. His ramblings on a You Tube video contain the typical delusions of schizophrenics. He goes on about the government controlling minds through grammar. He appears to be obsessed with grammar and goes on about introducing a new currency for which he will be the Treasurer. These are the delusional ravings of a psychotic. There appears to be some level of disappointment that he is not associated with a political ideology, especially the tea party. There are already think pieces about “violence”, by which they mean talk radio and Fox News, just as Clinton did after the McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma.

By day’s end, the argument that the political right—fueled by anti-government, and anti-immigrant passions that run especially strong in Arizona—is culpable for the Tucson massacre, even if by indirect association, seemed to be validated by the top local law enforcement official investigating the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D).

This refers to that disgusting press conference by the Pima County sheriff. They even have a video of his rant.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, an elected Democrat, at a news conference Saturday evening.

Yup, I guessed right.

One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did.

Another Democratic strategist said the similarity is that Tucson and Oklahoma City both “take place in a climate of bitter and virulent rhetoric against the government and Democrats.”

Isn’t it odd that movies about the assassination of George Bush are not considered too extreme ?

I think Representative Gifford will recover as the gunshot wound track passed from her temple out her forehead, probably missing her brain. A family friend said she is now in induced coma, no doubt to minimize cerebral edema from the contusion to the brain from the shock wave. I don’t know if the Democratic party will recover from its disinterest in debate and its tendency to try to demonize its opponents instead of argue with them.

Wikileaks randy revolutionary, Julian Assange, cannot be a traitor to the US, we are told, because he is an Australian citizen. This leaves him with a vulnerability in releasing documents that involve the Australian government.

Since it is highly unlikely that in the 250,000 cables there are none that involve the government of Australia there is no doubt a legal team examining Australian law for the proper way to proceed when Mr. Assange’s traveling roadshow comes to Canberra. So how many Australian related State Department cables have been released? So far as I can tell, exactly zero. That’s very nice for Mr. Assange but doesn’t do so much for Wikileaks’ reputation as an honest broker or any of Wikileaks’ non-Australian collaborators who do not get that little legal benefit.

Update: The Guardian newspaper, who has all the cables, has a CSV file which includes cable metadata from Canberra, the US’ embassy in Australia. It also has a nice cable source graphic. Australia is one of the few countries not listed as having any cables from there. This is passing strange.

[Officer] Chalifoux said, “When I asked him to recite the alphabet from A to Z, he said, ‘I can’t do that.’ When I asked him why, he stated, ‘No one could do that. From A to Z? Come on. That’s crazy.’ ” From the Boston Herald

It is a bit peculiar how the left seems to be fond of terrorists. Bill Ayres and his wife, of course, are prime examples but not the only ones. Some of them have adoring books written about them. Naturally, Sarah Jane Olsen had become a “community activist” in her new identity.

Now we have a new example disclosed today by Andrew Breitbart. Bradblog is a left wing blog that has become very successful while attacking such people as James O’Keefe of the ACORN tapes, and it has spun numerous conspiracy theories about the right and election fraud, etc. It turns out that one half of the blog, which has received over $1.3 million in donations from such sources as Teresa Heinz’s Tides Foundation, is a convicted murderer and terrorist. His name is Brett Kimberlin although he was once known as the “Speedway bomber” as he terrorized a town in Indiana. He was also a drug smuggler and dealer and he eventually ended up with a 50 year prison sentence. He was paroled after only 13 years but, when he refused to make any payments to the widow of one of his victims who had won a civil suit against him, he went back to prison for four more years.

Today he is a prominent figure on the left and his story of how he went to prison, a total fabrication, has made him even more of a hero. It’s pretty interesting reading.

In a recent post, I discussed how art lovers were upset that billboards were blocking the view of famous landmarks in Venice, Italy. Complain all they might, the mayor of that canal-infested city points out that selling ad space is the only way to generate the funds needed to preserve the very treasures the critics want to see.

To point up the unreasonable nature of the complaints, I juxtaposed how people not involved in law enforcement were constantly insisting that the police expand their responsibilities. This is in spite of the fact that there simply isn’t enough in the budget to pay for equipment, training, or the manpower to do the new jobs.

This prompted Ric Locke to pen a comment ….

“Perhaps police should sell advertising space on their patrol cars, rather the way race drivers do.”

That has already been tried. If memory serves, the public didn’t like it because some local strip clubs (to my knowledge the only healthy and growing businesses in Toledo, Ohio) bought adverts on the cruisers.

There is no pleasing some people.

When people hear that I used to work for my local police department, they usually want to complain. “The cops don’t do enough!” is the usual refrain.

My position is that they do as well as they can. Budget constraints also constrain the ability of the police, and the department has to compete with other government agencies for a slice of the taxpayer provided pie. Although everyone interested in the subject should remain wary of excesses and corruption, the vast majority of police forces here in the United States do a pretty good job with what they have. But that isn’t what most people say.

There is never enough cash to provide the equipment the public demands, provide the training the public demands, provide the size of the force the public demands, or provide the services the public demands. People looking at police work from the outside can see that there is a lot more cop work that can be done if there was unlimited money, so how come they can’t get it now without their taxes going up?

I was reminded of the neverending litany of woe while reading this news article. It appears that giant billboards have been erected over the facade of many famous landmarks in Venice, Italy. This has elicited outrage from prominent figures in the art world, who have complained that blocking the view of such historical treasures in order to sell soft drinks and sports watches is an act of “stupidity and incompetence”.

The mayor of Venice, Giorgio Orsoni, says that selling the advertising space is the only way to pay for desperately needed renovations since tax revenues have been falling. He also says that his critics should get bent.
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Cheryl Rofer was kind enough to post an essay where she discusses her attempts to understand the mindset behind the supporters of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party movement.

That essay has invited a fair number of comments, some of them less than kind. When I noted that Ms. Rofer was trying to reach Tea Party satori by mulling over the life of Tchaikovsky, and the writings of authors who hail from Spain and Great Britain, I am afraid that I became guilty of writing something negative myself….

“You conflate a Russian composer and a British novelist with an American grass roots movement that is devoted to shrinking the size of government? I think it is pretty obvious why you are confused!”

That was both unkind and uncalled for, and I apologize to Ms. Rofer unreservedly.

As a gesture to show that I take her seriously, I would like to try and smooth the way for her a little bit. But to do that, I will have to bore you all to tears by explaining my own background. My only defense for this terrible waste of your time is that I believe it will lead to a better meeting of minds.
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I posted an overly long comment to the comments of this blog post on prison rape [h/t Instapundit], so I thought I would turn it into a post here.

I don’t think the vast majority of people who joke or threaten about prison rape are seriously indifferent to it when it comes to making real decisions about the penal system. Instead, I think they are simply pointing out one of the ugly realities of the real-world penal system.

I think that politically most people would like to reduce prison rape but they have a lot other evils they would like to reduce first. It is not that they don’t care, it is just that they have so many other things to care about as well.

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When the second world war ended, and the boys began to come home in 1946, my parents held parties for all of those who came back to Chicago. Many were friends of my cousin, Bud Kerrison, a B 17 bombardier who served in North Africa. Bud flew 50 missions; the 8th Air Force flying out of England only had to complete 35 missions because their loss rate was higher. His friends, some of whom were from Chicago, had similar military records and had served with him in the same theater. In addition to his Chicago buddies, a bunch of friends from other cities came to the parties and quite a few of them stayed. Why ? Bud had two beautiful sisters and they had a large number of beautiful girlfriends.

Here are Bud and Marion with me in the middle.

There were quite a few marriages that began with my parents’ parties and my mother kept in touch with many of these couples until she died 55 years later. There were a lot of beautiful girls and they all stayed married to the guys they met at the parties.

One of the friends of Bud who stayed on was great big guy named Frank Flanagan. His father was Chief of Detectives in the Philadelphia PD and, as some might say, if cut, Frank would bleed blue. At that time, and for years afterward, the Chicago PD was corrupt but, as in any big city department, there were pockets of career officers who maintained the honor of the profession and were respected even by the corrupt among them. One such was the father of Pat Neary. She was a beautiful girl with a Irish smile. Her father was an Inspector of the Chicago PD and a great guy. I was about 8 years old then and was fascinated with a tie clasp he wore that had suspended from it a tiny revolver. The tiny pistol worked mechanically and the trigger could be pulled and the cylinder would revolve and the hammer would fall, just as with a real pistol. He told me it even shot tiny bullets but I fear that may have been an embellishment. There are such tiny working guns, so maybe he wasn’t exaggerating after all.

Many of those girls from 1946 stayed beautiful into old age. I haven’t seen Pat in 20 years but she was trim and beautiful with a slight Irish accent the last time I saw her. She had three beautiful daughters.

Marion still looks pretty good at the age of 92. That’s her son Kerry who is 65. She lives alone in a nice condo and goes to the movies with my sister every week.

Anyway, Pat and Frank got married and lived happily ever after, except for one small problem. The Chicago PD pay scale was lousy. They could not afford a house for years and Pat drove an old clunker of a car. My father used to show up with piles of toys for the kids but no one doubted that the purpose of the low salary was to keep the policemen susceptible to bribery. Frank put up with it and there was never a whiff of anything improper about him. The crooks in the department knew this better than anyone else and so a little conspiracy was launched to protect Frank, and probably others like him, from the hustlers. The Mafia had a stranglehold on Chicago and the one place where someone like Frank was least likely to run a foul of organized crime was hit and run accident investigations.

Frank became chief of Hit and Run. A few years later, Life magazine ran a special feature on him as the first crime lab in Chicago law enforcement history began to get results. They developed means of identifying paint chips recovered from accident scenes and then identifying the make, model and year of the car the chip came from. That is no big deal now but it was revolutionary then. The rate at which hit and run crimes were solved became phenomenal. The Life Magazine feature began with a photo of Frank answering the telephone with his signature greeting, “Hit and Run, Flanagan.” He went on to Homicide and thrived as a good Homicide detective.

In 1960, everything changed. The city was hit with a monumental scandal when it was discovered that a burglary ring was run from a police district on the North Side. Corruption had taken over the department and Mayor Daley was faced with a desperate need for a respectable figure to take over the department and clean it up. He found him in a Harvard Professor named Orlando Wilson. Daley was desperate and this gave Wilson enormous power. He could have just about anything he wanted.

In 1960, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, in the wake of a major police scandal,[6] established a commission headed by O.W. Wilson to find a new police commissioner.[7] In the end, Daley decided to appoint Wilson himself, as Commissioner.[8] Beginning on March 2, 1960,[4] Wilson served the Superintendent of Police of the Chicago Police Department until 1967 when he retired.
Reforms demanded at the outset by Wilson included establishment of a non-partisan police board to help govern the police force, a strict merit system for promotions within the department, an aggressive, nationwide recruiting drive for hiring new officers, and higher police salaries to attract professionally qualified officers.[8]

Wilson began searching the department for honest and competent men. He found Frank Flanagan in Homicide and made him Chief of Homicide. Among the big homicide cases investigated by Frank was the Richard Speck case, in which Speck raped and murdered 8 student nurses in one night. It was a huge sensation in Chicago for years.

Here is a copy of a Chicago police newspaper (pdf) with a story about Frank and a photo of Pat and his three daughters. Pat is still beautiful there, 18 years after they met at my parents’ party. The two stories about Frank are on pages 4 to 7. I am still trying to figure out how to copy those images.

I got stimulated about this after reading a post at Patterico by Jack Dunphy. Dunphy (a pseudonym) wonders what is wrong with Chicago? Crime is out of control and nothing is being done, or at least it seems that way. The details of the sickening situation are here. My brother-in-law is a retired CPD officer. He was retired by the time the situation as described arrived but he was constantly frustrated in the promotion process as affirmative action was in full flower then and only blacks were considered for promotion. If there were not enough blacks applying, some white officers would be considered. The linked article does not mention race but you can be sure it is a huge factor. My brother-in-law finally gave up and stopped taking the sergeants’ exam, a disservice to my sister, but he was sick of watching the list posted every six months.

Frank died a few years ago and, unfortunately, had no sons. He and Pat (still with us but ailing) were the products of a tradition of police families. Maybe, if there was a Flanagan on the force, things might be better. In addition to his police service, Frank was the commanding officer of an Army Reserve unit in the city. He retired a full colonel. There aren’t many like him. Among other things, he was a big, hearty, friendly guy and he never lost his Philadelphia accent.

and, unfortunately, broadly applicable:

The most serious allegation in the whole affair is that the certain officials countenanced a crime because they wanted to. The most concentrated expression of tyranny is malice in the service of caprice.

Belmont Club

A lot of the big urban areas of the Northeast have turned into war zones. Virtually, without exception, they place the blame on lax “gun control” (really, people control) laws for their sky-high murder rates. I wonder if their voters have ever asked themselves why their mayors are so obsessed?

I think the answer is simple: It give the mayors external actors to blame so they don’t have to answer for their own incompetence.

Think about it. What is every one of those mayors really saying when they talk about disarming the citizenry? They’re really saying, “Hey, it’s not my fault our city has become a shooting gallery, it’s the fault of those rednecks three states over! You can’t blame me because I can’t control what those rednecks do! Oh, if only we could overturn two centuries of Constitutional law we would have safe streets! Until that happens, don’t even think of voting me out! It wouldn’t be fair!”

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Big Brother on the Make….or perhaps, the take….

Outside of specific and targeted investigational contexts for law enforcement and intelligence, the Federal government really does not need to know what products we buy at the grocery store, what books we buy or check out at the library, the magazines to which we subscribe, our car payments, what kind of food we eat, the websites we visit, how we use our credit cards and where. It’s not actually the government’s business, and presumably, the 4th Amendment indicates they need a compelling interest before they are allowed to snoop.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) is working hard….to make sure the Feds are watching your every move. Unless you are an illegal alien of course.

What passes for Liberalism these days is a strange ideology – American citizens are to be treated as criminals to be kept under continuous government surveillance but if you are a foreigner who enters the country illegally, you should get special dispensations from police questioning. Or unless you are a foreign terrorist overseas or in communication with one. WTF?

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

Sometime back I wrote about “Delocalization”, i.e., how the internet makes distant events feel local and makes local events feel distant.

At the time I overlooked another attribute of delocalization: It allows distant evils like slavery and the general violation of human and civil rights to move into America and set up shop right on Mainstreet USA.

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tehag comments on Alas! Poor Mexico. So Far From God, So Close to Chaos:

Containment worked for the Soviet Union. Do you think it will work for Mexico?

I figure that’s worth a post.

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Zenpundit has a post up about how gunmen employed by one of the drug cartels in northern Mexico have demanded that an entire town empty out. They want the people gone, or else they will start killing.

Zen thinks this is the start of the end for Mexico, and sees a potential flood of refugees from our neighbor to the south.

To anyone interested in the subject, thought you might appreciate the news that the cartels are now attacking Mexican army bases.

A last and hopeless act of desperation by criminals who are on the ropes, or a canny move to test the security of their greatest foes?

We shall see.

(Hat tip to Scott, who snarks like mad when he says “Man, this never would have happened without American gun shows.”)

Last year, I read about an incident in a water park in the United Kingdom.

A father took his kids to the park so they could frolic in the cool and refreshing waves. When the children said they wanted to hurl themselves down the water slide, the proud father decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for some action photos of the apples of his eye.

He positioned himself at the end of the slide, camera at the ready, only to face a muttering and hostile crowd that apparently wanted to lynch him then and there!

The justification for the violence was that he must be a pedophile. After all, what other reason would a grown man have of snapping shots of young children in swimwear? The explanation that he was only photographing his own progeny were rejected out of hand. What else would child molesters say to escape just punishment when the righteous crowd gets their blood up?

Lucky for all concerned, the police were notified by someone in the mob. A police officer arriving at the scene averted any ugly actions.

Unfortunately, I cannot now find the online article to prove to my readers in the United States that such a ridiculous incident actually occurred. It seems unbelievable, that such a climate of suspicion and paranoia can actually exist in Old Blighty. I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you thought that I was simply writing as fact a bad comedy I once viewed on cable TV, or some uncomfortable dream I once had where everyone around me turned into bizarre and violent zombies.

But such an environment of hatred and prejudice is all too prevalent in Great Britain, and simply scanning the online news article from that country proves it to be so with appalling regularity.
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Why do these murdering nut jobs so often target the IRS?[h/t Instapundit]

At first, one might presume they do so out of ideological resentment, but as I noted in my previous post, these nuts tend to pick and choose from various ideologies depending on what is best for them at the moment. If so, why do so many of them perform their final detonation at the IRS?

I think it is because the IRS is the one institution that no one can ever escape.

You can’t escape death and taxes, and the IRS is always the latter and sometimes the former.

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More revelations concerning the university professor who allegedly slaughtered some of her colleagues. (Hat tip to Ace.)

Seems she killed her brother with a shotgun 24 years ago, fled the scene of the crime after the death, and tried to carjack a passing motorist. It is tough to say if this is a true account, since police reports of the incident have been missing since 1988.

I worked for some years as a fingerprint technician for the local police force. Standard procedure was to keep all arrest records on hand until the person taken into custody died, and the death was verified via fingerprints taken from the corpse. Some of the cards were from before the First World War, and were the very first set of prints taken by the police.

Of course, I live in Columbus, Ohio. I have no idea what guidelines the cops in Alabama use. Something tells me that it is not all that different, though.

I found the following passage from the news article I linked to above to be interesting…

“After she left the room, the police said, she dumped the gun — for which she did not have a permit — in a second-floor bathroom.”

I’ve seen that mentioned in several news stories now. She did not have a permit! (“No permit! No permit!“) It seems the reporters writing these articles want to make sure that their readers know this.

In Alabama you don’t need a permit to purchase a firearm, only to carry a concealed handgun.

One of two things are happening here.

It could be that the journalists working on this story want to include the fact that the crime was premeditated, as the suspect cannot claim that she just forgot to leave her gun in the car when she came onto the university campus that morning. Not only is it illegal for someone in Alabama to carry a firearm on to school grounds, CCW permit or not, but it was illegal for the suspect to even carry a concealed handgun at all. This strongly indicates that she was planning this attack in advance.

The second possibility is that the reporters writing these news items hail from places with such draconian gun laws, that they simply cannot conceive of anywhere you can purchase and own a firearm without government permission. The fact that the suspect owned a gun at all when she didn’t have a license is a crime in their eyes.

Considering how much anti-gun bias I’ve encountered in the news over the past two decades, I’d have to say that the latter explanation is more credible than the former.

But, whatever their motivations, it turns out that they are actually doing a favor for those who advocate armed self defense. The suspect wasn’t one of us!

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Via Glenn we find out that the TSA is using legal muscle to go after a couple of bloggers.

It seems that new security procedures were rushed into place right after the Panty Bomber incident, but the Feds say that the directive wasn’t supposed to be revealed to the public. They want to know who leaked the info.

The fact that bloggers are in the litigation cross hairs will be of primary interest to other people who write online. But I want to know how the TSA thinks it can keep out terrorists who are aching to blow up commercial airliners if they can’t keep their internal, secret security directives from being emailed to those who are supposed to be kept in the dark. Since they allowed some known al Qaeda stooge without a passport or luggage who was carrying a syringe full of acid just waltz on a flight to Detroit, I suppose that is a silly question.

On a side note, fellow gunblogger Breda has the final word on the failures of TSA security…

“…tell me again why I have to bear the humiliation of being groped and swabbed every time I fly? Someone please explain it to me because, clearly, I don’t understand. Can’t they just put me on a terrorist watchlist so that TSA will leave me alone?”