The NY Times Nicholas Kristof says the drug war has failed. Meanwhile, New York Gov. David Paterson says it’s time for a conversation about legalizing marijuana. Which isn’t exactly courageous, but it’s a start.
So you wanna’ be pals? Will be sad the day the pig catches the pup eating a Beggin’ Strip.
Oklahoma officials finally release dash cam video from the car of the cop who choked the paramedic. The cop also had his wife in the passenger seat when all this went down.
A day at the wiener dog races.
Another DNA exoneration in Dallas County, Texas.
NYPD cops go on trial for fabricating a drug bust. Were it not for the club’s security cameras, two innocent men would almost certainly be in prison.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 1:30 pm by Radley Balko
and is filed under General Criminal Justice, General Drug War, Innocence, Police Professionalism.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
TheAgitator.com
There ain’t no bacon in beggin’ strips. They are also not fit for human consumption. As has been demonstrated:
http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/cat_steve_dont_eat_it.php
It’s ‘volume 3′… scroll down a bit. Don’t read them all at once… you might die. I recommend you wait at least an hour between episodes.
Fron the Nicholas Kristof op-ed -
Obviously from “experts” who have not thought the problem through. If sales and production are illegal all of these associated problems with the trade will still exist.
- Dealers can’t go to authorities if they are robbed. They have to take matters into their own hands.
- Dealers can’t go to court if they are cheated. They have to take matters into their own hands.
- No taxes, not even a sales tax can be collected.
- The money laundering continues.
- The overwhelmingly minority small time dope dealers will still bear the brunt of law enforcement.
- SWAT raids on people who sell 4.5 grams of weed to shady “confidential informants” with the associated dangers for LEOs, the targets and innocent bystanders will continue.
- In producer nations, violent criminal cartels will continue to profit from the trade and undermine attempts to ceate stable governments based on the rule of law.
- Corruption in our own law enforcement community will continue as dealers bribe cops for protection.
I’m certain I didn’t list all of the problems with decriminalization of possession while leaving production and distribution illegal.
Raids an
Drug use is the human norm. Only isolated wierdos actually use no drugs at all. I’ve been taking drugs all day in the form of coffee, later tonight? I’ll probably have a beer or two. It’s rare that a day goes by where I don’t dose up with something. And everyone I know is the same way.
“America’s drug problem” has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with rampant expansion of the criminal system in the creation of a class of second class citizens to mercilessly prosecute for it’s own profit.
As J Sub D quotes from the article:
Those experts are retards. There is already in place, and in use right now, mechanisms to charge users as dealers.
From the NYPD story:
Despite the fallout, authorities describe the corruption allegations as aberrations in a city where officers daily make hundreds of drugs arrests that routinely hold up in court.
Hahahaha! Of course, silly! What makes this case an aberration is that they actually got caught, not that other drug crime prosecutions are so squeaky clean.
Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, agrees the majority of narcotics officers probably are clean.
Probably? You mean, you’re not certain?
From the defense attorney speaking of her relationship with the cops back when she was a prosecutor:
“Because I must’ve prosecuted 1,500, 2,000 drug cases … and all felonies. And I think back, Oh my God, I believed everything everyone told me.”
Yeah, cops are always such nice upstanding guys it’s unimaginable that anyone who sees them in action, day in and day out, would ever suspect that maybe they weren’t all that honest.
And then this little morsel:
Berliner handed the tape over to the District Attorney’s integrity unit. It reviewed the images more than 100 times to make sure it wasn’t doctored by the defense before deciding to drop all charges against the brothers in June.
ROFLMAO! I’ll just bet you did. You gotta love the irony, though. The District Attorney has an “integrity unit”. LOL!
Six months later, Officer Tavarez and Detective Stephen Anderson pleaded not guilty to drug dealing and multiple other charges that their lawyers say were overblown.
Wow. They were right on top of that, huh? After seeing the evidence clearly incriminating the cops and exonerating the brothers, it only took six months to drop the charges against the brothers and bring charges against the cops. I’m astounded by the lightning fast reaction of the DA’s so-called integrity unit. I guess if you scrapped up all the integrity in that unit and put it on the head of a pin, you’d still have plenty of room for angels to dance.
That should have been “scraped” in the last sentence.
Regarding the cop and the EMT, it all makes even more sense now. The officer couldn’t let that black man look like he was getting the best of him, not in front of his own wife.
From the NYC drug article:
Ridiculous. He has every reason to do that. The reason he SHOULDN’T is things like ethics… honesty… but once you’re past that, you have:
1) There is no victim. This transfers all burden of proof to the defendant to prove they are innocent if an officer is lying.
2) It’s a lot safer to target random people than it is to target armed criminals. And innocent people are a lot easier to find.
3) Arrests look good on his record. If you work your sting right, you can walk into any bar and arrest half a dozen people on drug charges. The fact that they’re innocent patrons is irrelevant. Who are you going to believe? A second class citizen or the shining example of honesty that is the police?
Obviously… the ex-prosecutor believed the police.
Clarify… “Obviously… the ex-prosecutor believed the police.” when she was a prosecutor…
Be careful what you wish for. If the consensus among lawmakers and police becomes that the drug war has failed, their response may not be to end the silly war but instead to redouble their efforts. Basically the “sunk cost fallacy” on a massive scale. (Arguably that’s already the situation we’re in). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy
“I believed everything everyone told me” That’s the problem with the courts thier in denial of corruption. They want to feel good about locking away thousands of non violent citizens. Always question authority including your own.
For the cop vs EMT story, photography is not a crime has a petition needs to be signed to have the cop pay (terminated) for his assault on the EMT during transport of a patient.
http://carlosmiller.com/
I was number 96 this morning and there are near 440 signatures now.
For better or for worse, my two year-old just crawled into my lap and watched the video with me. He put his fingers in his ears and said, “no bad!”
I told him that if he’s ever in trouble, to call me or his daddy. Not the police.
How can they justify not having this cop in jail? Better question, how can the citizens of Oklahoma stand for it?
re: OKLA cop
Why exactly was his wife riding with him? Was he taking her shopping on the county dime?
About legalizing pot, AC360 (on CNN) will be discussing that topic all next week.
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/06/14/another-prosecutor-loses-her-virginity.aspx?ref=rss
“So congratulations on losing your virginity. I hope it didn’t hurt too much. I’m sure it didn’t feel very good for Jose and Maximo Colon, and I hope Police Officer Henry Tavarez loses his soon.”
more importantly about paterson, he has actually mentioned privatizing roads and bridges among other things. Of course his motives for doing so are to pay for his massive MASSIVE welfare state. Sooner or later one state will do it, it will work, and then we’ll have to get Obama out of office for a president with the balls to cut government in half, which is the only way out of this mess…
SJE # 16
I was wondering the exact same thing.
Does she get the use of the Police Car in the evening?
The story on the Dallas DNA exoneration mentions that it is the 20th such since 2001.
It also mentions that there is a hearing the next day for someone whose guilt was confirmed by DNA.
20 wrong, one right.
Would you knowingly go to a doctor with that kind of track record?
So, I’m reading a book, “Drug Warriors and their Prey: From Police Power to Police State”
It covers exactly what happened to these guys… and what the ramifications are. These guys, even though not convicted of shit, were slapped with civil sanctions which profoundly damaged thier ability to make a living.
“Were it not for the club’s security cameras, two innocent men would almost certainly be in prison”
Another victory for Little Brother. How ’bout that.
Wait a minute…doesn’t an ambulance with a patient in it rate higher on the emergency vehicle scale than the third cop to show up at a situation that’s already been resolved? What a jackass.
“The NY Times Nicholas Kristof says the drug war has failed.”
My head spins.
This guy works for the establishment. And he says the drug war has FAILED? The drug war has to be the most successful government operation of all time.
Exactly how stupid does Nicholas Kristof expect us to be?
BTW,
Just read an article today about that Oklahoma incident and it appears as though not only did the cop not get charged or anything… but that the EMT did get charged with obstruction after the fact and is now under investigation by the county he works in because of the incident.
It’s a convoluted article, but here it is: http://tinyurl.com/lccm2d
@18, there have actually been a large number of cases where DNA was not exculpatory. That doesn’t justify the mistakes.
Only if the patient is a cop- otherwise, no, a littlepeople in the back of an ambulance counts the same as any other littlepeople, i.e. they don’t rate for shit.