A Virginia middle school student has been suspended for . . . opening the door for a woman whose hands were full.

“Students are not allowed to open the doors, and if anyone does, they will be suspended,” said Dr. Wayne K. Smith, executive director of administration and personnel.

A districtwide policy prohibiting students and staff from opening doors to the outside was recently adopted after a $10,800 security system was installed at the middle school, Southampton High School, Southampton Technical Career Center and Nottoway, Meherrin and Capron elementary schools. Riverdale Elementary had a similar system installed when it was built three years ago.

All of the schools’ doors are locked during the day. Visitors must ring a buzzer and look into a camera before office personnel can let them in.

Smith said everyone knew about the policy and its consequences. The middle school student was the first to be suspended for opening a door. Smith did not say how many days of suspension the unidentified student received.

You can’t be too careful. Your average middle school, high school, or college can expect to see an on-campus shooting about once every 12,000 years. If Southhampton Middle School hasn’t had at least one shooting since 10,000 B.C., they’re really just on borrowed time.

Via Lenore Skenazy.

“A Girl in Port,” by Okkervill River.

The New Haven Police Department’s internal affairs division has released two reports on recent incidents involving police and citizens with cameras.

The first report concerns the department’s SWAT raid on a nightclub where police suspected there was some underrage drinking. (My post on that raid here.) That report found no fault on the part of any individual officers, but did say the SWAT team was inappropriate and that police officers were wrong to forbid the nightclub’s occupants from recording the raid with cell phone cameras. Instead, the report blamed the incident on a lack of proper training.

The second report addresses an incident between then-New Haven Assistant Police Chief Ariel Melendez and Luis Luna, a student who attempted to record two police officers in the process of making an arrest. (My post on that incident here.) Melendez ordered subordinate officers to arrest Luna, to confiscate his camera and to delete the video. The second report is actually quite critical of Melendez, concluding that he behaved in an “intimidating” matter, and that the arrest, confiscation, and destruction of the video were all unlawful.

Melendez has been the subject of at least two other misconduct investigations, including the nightclub raid. He has since resigned from the New Haven Police Department. According to the New Have Independent, he’ll get to keep his $124,500 annual pension.

Last month, the New Haven police union President Sgt. Louis Cavaliere called Mayor John DeStefano’s decision to lay off 16 of the city’s 448 police officers due to budget constraints a “disgusting embarrassment”. New Haven cops also called in sick and took to the streets and blocked traffic to protest the layoffs. When asked how those tactics protect New Have from crime, Cavaliere suggested residents take up arms.

• William Anderson is reporting on another recovered memory sex abuse prosecution, this time in Maryland. According to Anderson, the prosecutor in the case had the defendant locked up in solitary confinement for a week, forbidden from showering, shaving, or changing his clothes. She then intended to bring him out in that condition to face the jury for the first time. She may as well have forced him to grow a pedistache. If true, this is pretty outrageous.
• Gawker reports that the FBI is borrowing technique from Neal Strauss, aka the world’s greatest pick-up artist.
• Tom Waits reads you Bukowski.
• These are amazing. And incredibly beautiful.
• I used to write a lot of stories as a kid. I’m relatively certain that if I had been born 25 years later, I’d probably be facing felony charges, or perhaps have spent time in a psychiatric ward somewhere, if school officials ever got hold of them.
• Lawyer for police union issues a vague threat on the Facebook page of state rep who voted for a union-busting bill. Note the first entry in the comments section.
• Looking at the state of citizen-shot video on the 20-year anniversary of the Rodney King video.

A brief glimpse into the sometimes-surreal world that is my email in-box:

Well Radley Balko, I see you only tell some of the news some of the time. I guess you didn’t have it in you to tell about the rape of the 14 year old by the chief investigator of the District Attorney’s Office here in Colorado. People have acted pretty strange towards me instead. I haven’t any thing to hide. Are you participating in the police cover up ? Or just what are you doing. I have come to realise you are shunning this story. I don’t care what the hell has been fabricated about me, I am no angel but I’m not a rapist, I am still working on my book too, I am going to dedicate a chapter or two, to people like you sir! That are afraid of controversy. This story is a mess, what I am looking for in all of this is a news person that wants to get his hands dirty and find out the truth. I have come to realise you sir are not that man!

I haven’t the slightest idea what this is about. I would point out that if you’re trying to get a journalist interested in your story, this is not a strategy I’d recommend.

It reminds me of a letter I received a few years back from an inmate at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi. He accused me of plagiarizing his own reporting on medical examiner Steven Hayne. For proof, he included an article written in his own handwriting which he claimed he had self-published from prison many years ago. It did read suspiciously like one of my articles. Almost word for word, in fact. He then graciously agreed to refrain from suing me if I would investigate and write about his case. I thought that one was actually pretty creative.

I suppose it’s probably a little cruel to find amusement in this sort of desperation. For all I know, both these people could have suffered some real injustice. But hell, when you write (or in your case, read) about this stuff every day, you gotta’ allow for a little levity.

So I just noticed the Media Matters “Transparency” project today after clicking over from another site. It lists the major donors to all sorts of conservative and libertarian organizations, including my current and previous employers, Reason and Cato.

As I’ve noted before, both Reason and Cato already lists their major donors in their annual reports. At Reason, we also publish the names of everyone who has given the Reason Foundation at least $1,000 each year in the magazine.

But here’s what you won’t find on the Media Matters “Transparency” website, or on the main Media Matters site: a list of the names of the major donors to Media Matters. They keep that secret. As do the various “Progress” groups, who also regularly criticize conservative and free market organizations as being secret front groups for major donors and corporations. (That criticism is crap when it comes to Reason and Cato, for reasons I’ve explained numerous times on this site, but won’t get into again here.)

As I’ve also written in the past, I don’t think political or ideological organizations should be required to disclose their donors. The right to anonymity is a critical part of the right to dissent without fear of retaliation from the government.

But that Media Matters’ won’t list its own donors anywhere on its website dedicated to making think tanks and political advocacy groups more transparent is so astonishingly, jaw-droppingly hypocritical, it’s actually kind of comical.

• Ladies and gentlemen, a pro-Gadaffi op-ed. I’m sure the Koch brothers are behind this.
• This made me happy.
• The federal government has 82—yes, eighty-two—separate programs to improve teacher quality.
• New York state assemblyman wants to require licensing for bicycles, looks forward to the day when bike lanes are monitored by cameras to catch “scofflaws.” Excellent idea. We should probably issue tags to pedestrians, too.
• Another moronic attempt to ban sharia law in . . . hey, Tennessee! Nice to see leaders from other faiths speak out in opposition, though.

Interesting story from Cleveland:

Jurors are so convinced that a Cleveland teen should not have been charged with assaulting another teen that they’ve gone beyond acquitting him. A few are writing angry letters to police and intend to donate their jury pay to him. At least three jurors plan to give the $100 they received to sit on the jury to defendant Demrick McCloud, 19, if McCloud earns a high school equivalency degree. They took only 30 minutes to find him not guilty in their deliberations Friday.

Most of the jury could not be reached for comment, but three members complained of a “sheer lack of evidence.”

They said the prosecution’s case hinged on the victim identifying McCloud as an attacker. But the victim also had told police he was certain another boy — later found to be in school at the time — was one of the assailants.

As they were leaving the courthouse, jurors Ana de Freitas Boe, an English professor at Baldwin-Wallace College; Jeanne Knotek, an obstetrician and gynecologist; and alternate juror Richard Nagin discussed ways to help McCloud.

The three have committed to donating their jury stipend to a fund for McCloud. Boe said the amount is too small to compensate McCloud for his jail time, but the jurors intend it as a “show of support.”

“He seemed like a decent kid who was falsely accused,” Nagin said.

I don’t think I’ve ever read about this kind of indignation from a jury before, but it’s nice to see.

The case against McCloud was brought by the office of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer published a long investigation of Mason last year, finding hundreds of cases brought with what legal observers interviewed for the story said was little or no evidence. The investigation also found that Mason’s office brought an unusually high number of cases that were dismissed by judges for insufficient evidence before ever reaching a jury.

Wow.

A memo discovered in Bell police files appears to outline a game in which police officers compete to issue tickets, impound cars and arrest motorists.

Titled the “Bell Police Department Baseball Game,” the memo assigns “singles,” “doubles,” “triples” and “home runs” to progressively more serious infractions, starting with parking tickets and moving on to vehicle impounds and felony arrests of drivers. “Non-performers,” the memo says, are “sent for minor league rehab stint.”

The discovery of the memo comes as the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether Bell police violated the civil rights of residents through aggressive towing of cars and code enforcement. Part of the investigation focuses on claims by some officers that the department had quotas for issuing tickets and impounding cars, which they said was done to raise revenue for the city. Some officers said they were reprimanded when they did not meet goals.

It’s the first document suggesting a concerted effort to have officers pull over more cars, though it’s unclear who wrote the memo and whether department brass condoned it.

At least two Bell police officials said they were familiar with the memo, which they said circulated a few years ago. Bell Police Capt. Anthony Miranda said he thought a few patrolmen wrote it “to challenge themselves” and when department leaders found out about it, they “squashed it.”

“I think guys created it on their own and when the administration heard about it, they put a stop to it,” added Lt. Ty Henshaw. Department leaders said “It’s cool and fun and we appreciate the motivation, but it’s not going to look good.”

I suppose it’s possible that this memo and the contemporaneous complaints of illegal towing, ticketing, and other harassment of motorists, coupled with the resulting revelation that Bell city officials were drawing massive salaries while the city went deep into the red . . . are entirely coincidental. Seems unlikely, though, doesn’t it?

Also, assuming Capt. Miranda (great name!) is telling the truth, isn’t it at least a little problematic that upon learning that some of their officers were making a game of due process, Bell police officials merely “squashed” the memo, instead of investigating and disciplining the officers responsible?

Here’s my favorite part of the memo:

Honor system in place and violation will result in one day suspension.

Well of course. In our game to deprive motorists of their rights in order to enrich grossly overpaid city officials, there’s no place for cheaters! Honor among thieves, and all that.

North Miami Beach Mayor Myron Rosner makes a strong case for asshole of the week.

Last month, North Miami Beach blogger Stephanie Kienzle ripped her town’s mayor, Myron Rosner, after finding that he’d spent more than $500 on hotels in nearby Hollywood and Miami. Days later, a code compliance inspector came knocking at her front door. “I had no doubt the mayor was trying to get revenge,” she says…

Two days later, Rosner wrote an email to Philip Azan, head of the city’s Building Department, to complain about Kienzle’s house. “There appear to be several violations at the above property,” he wrote in the email.

Rosner admits he sent the email but says there’s no conflict. “I complained as a resident, not as mayor,” he says.

An inspector later found nothing worth a citation, Kienzle says.

Rosner’s opponent in the last election claims the mayor pulled something similar with him.

• Happy National Pancake Day! This is my second favorite holiday—after March 14th, of course.
• No Depression readers interview Agitator favorite Hayes Carll.
• Wired jumps on board with the “the people who are making your iPhone are killing themselves” hysteria.
• Amazing photo of Christchurch, New Zealand moments after last week’s earthquake.
• Iran sees a Jewish conspiracy in . . . London’s 2012 Olympics logo.
• Lawyer wants to sue town for racketeering for falsely threatening license suspensions if citizens don’t pay automated speeding tickets.