But I can’t find anything in the article that shows a link, much less justification for the word cause. The article does note that numerous prior studies have failed to find a link between cell phones and brain cancer. It also points out that studies are limited by the sheer number of people who use cell phones. It mentions one study that “hinted” at a link between cell phones and one particularly rare form of brain cancer, but noted that the study required researchers to ask participants about cell phone use from years ago. The article also explains that cell phones haven’t been around long enough to draw any conclusions about long-term effects.
But I don’t see anything in the article that supports scaring people about cell phone use.
Fun fact: Incidence of the most common type of brain cancer in the U.S. has dropped 0.4 percent per year between 1987 and 2007. This would be about the very same period that we all started using cell phones. That doesn’t necessarily mean the drop wouldn’t have been steeper had we not used cell phones. And it doesn’t necessarily mean cell phones don’t have a long-term effect that we may see in years to come.
It does mean that brain cancer incidence has plummeted just as cell phone use has taken off. Which would seem to contradict the alarmism in the headline. Or at least merit inclusion and an explanation.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has vetoed the absurd civil asset forfeiture “reform” bill I wrote about here. It would have allowed police and prosecutors to keep up to 90 percent of property and cash seizures, despite the Indiana State Constitution requirement that all forfeiture proceeds go to the state’s schools fund.
In his veto message, Daniels said paying out 90 cents of every forfeiture dollar for the “expense of collection” is improper.
“That is unwarranted as policy and constitutionally unacceptable in light of the Supreme Court’s recent guidance and the plain language of Article 8, Section 2 of the Indiana Constitution,” Daniels said.
Kudos to Daniels for doing the right thing.
It’s not exactly clear where this leaves things. The Indiana Supreme Court strongly criticized how forfeiture cases were being handled in a decision last month, but the ruling itself only applied to the specific case the court was considering. Local attorney Paul Ogden also still has a lawsuit pending. But Indiana Attorney General Paul Zoeller has vigorously defended the way the system has been operating, and has promised to defend any state prosecutor named in a future lawsuit.
Every forfeiture expert I’ve spoken to has said the practice of having private attorneys handling cases that directly benefit them financially is almost certainly a violation of the U.S. Constitution, so I imagine we could some federal challenges to at least that practice—though it may be difficult to figure out who has standing to bring such a suit.
Two kids commit an armed robbery. Cop shoots one of them in the back. The other kid is now charged with homicide under the felony murder rule. Might be difficult to muster much sympathy for a kid who just committed armed robbery, but this doesn’t feel like a just charge. Felony murder cases often feel that way.
So in the midst of a rash of police scandals and allegations of misconduct in Seattle, an arbitrator has ruled in favor of the police union: Seattle is not allowed to release the names of police officers who have been the subject of formal complaints. This makes it pretty much impossible for anyone outside of law enforcement to see if the same cops are generating multiple complaints.
Adele’s ex-boyfriend does all the world’s shitty boyfriends a huge favor: He makes them look good by comparison.
So isn’t this basically a form of fraud? This is the same guy who make the prank call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pretending to be David Koch. Which I take to mean he thinks spending money to advance your political opinions is somehow a threat to the democratic process, but lying to gain access to your political opponent’s calling lists, then calling up, insulting, and lying to your opponent’s supporters while pretending to be a campaign worker is just a robust form of activism. Or at least good material for a newspaper column.
ACLU lawsuit alleges NYPD using an arrangement with taxi companies to stop and frisk passengers.
A U.S. citizen has been arrested in Thailand for insulting the Thai king on the Internet. Each alleged defamations carrries a sentence of 3-15 years in prison.
This is obviously terrible, and I hope the guy is released. But the premise here is no different than when the U.S. government arrests the executives of online gambling sites at U.S. airports and charges them under U.S. law, despite the fact that online gambling is perfectly legal in the countries where they’re citizens and where their companies are incorporated.
We set a pretty nasty precedent here. I don’t see how the U.S. government has much moral standing to demand this guy’s release.
Johnson is really impressive. In just the last year or so that I’ve been watching him on these shows, he has become much more articulate, charismatic, and convincing.
Really? Set aside a moment the debate on the legalization of drugs and ask yourself, honestly, do you think these kind of pre-dawn, over-the-top, pseudo-military raids would stop if drugs were fully legalized? You don’t think they’re used for other things like, say child pr0n?<—Radley’s own post, fer cryin’ out loud!
The issue is not the object of the warrant, but the tactics by used in ostensibly serving the warrant.
What follows won’t be anything new to readers of this site, but it’s worth correcting people on this stuff. (I’d also encourage Click to read my paper on the rise of SWAT teams in America, which goes into all of this in much more detail.)
The mass increase in the use of SWAT teams over the last 30 years is unquestionably a product of the war on drugs. The Pentagon giveaway programs, which have turned millions of pieces of military equipment over to domestic police departments; the Byrne and other federal law enforcement grants tied exclusively to drug policing; the federally-funded multi-jurisdictional drug task forces that are almost always paramilitary in nature, civil asset forfeiture laws; the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s the federal government sent members of elite military units like the Navy SEALS and Army Rangers out to train police departments in drug interdiction—all of these policies contributed to the militarization of America’s police departments, and nearly all were enacted because politicians decided the war on drugs ought to be fought more like an actual war.
It isn’t all that surprising that SWAT teams are now used to break up neighborhood poker games, arrest people suspected of downloading child porn, and for sorts of other nonviolent crimes unrelated to illicit drugs. They are government entities, after all. Mission creep is encoded into their DNA.
But the drug war is the driving force behind the proliferation of SWAT teams over the last 30 years (though since September 11, DHS anti-terror policy has contributed quite a bit as well). And the overwhelming majority of SWAT callouts today are still for the service of drug warrants.
The activist, poet, and musician died yesterday. There’s an almost a poetic timing to his death, given the last few days. He was warning us about this stuff back in the 1970s.
For my protection?
Who’s gonna protect me from you?
The likes of you?
The nerve of you?
Your tomato face deadpan
Your dead hands ending another freedom fan
We have another video of a raid by the Columbia Police Department. The action starts at 5:30. There’s more violence. More perfunctory dog killing. (I didn’t hear a single menacing growl, and the dogs were shot while retreating.) There’s more careless tossing of flash grenades. (They threw five three, then, bizarrely, two more to prove that the previous three grenades had done no damage.) This raid, once again, was for marijuana.
I’ve become somewhat inoculated to the outrage in many these stories. I think you probably need to in order to write about this stuff every day. But I was shaking while watching this one. Then I let out a string of profanities. Then I gave my dog a hug.
All of which is why you need to watch it. And help distribute it as far and wide as the Columbia raid video from last year. This isn’t like watching video of a car accident or a natural disaster. This doesn’t have to happen. You’re watching something your government does to your fellow citizens about 150 times per day in this country. If this very literal “drug war” insanity is going to continue to be waged in our name, we ought to make goddamned sure everyone knows exactly what it entails. And this is what it entails. Cops dressed like soldiers breaking into private homes, tossing concussion grenades, training their guns on nonviolent citizens, and slaughtering dogs as a matter of procedure.
Thousands of rounds of live ammunition, sealed evidence kits and case files — some containing Social Security numbers of rape and assault victims — lay amid rubble in a crime lab abandoned by Detroit police two years ago.
The Free Press discovered the ruins this week. Judicial experts expressed shock that evidence would be handled so recklessly.
“It’s incomprehensible that any law enforcement agency would not be mindful to preserve evidence,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny said.
Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr., told about the crime lab Thursday, launched an immediate investigation. “I will make sure that this never happens again,” he said.
The lab, housed in a former elementary school in Brush Park, was ordered closed in 2008 because of sloppy investigations. It’s now littered with tools, computers, TVs, cameras and microscopes, in addition to the other items.
The lab was open to trespassers for at least the past week. Parts of a fence around the perimeter have collapsed, and a window was broken. As recently as Monday, the front door was ajar . . .
The Free Press asked a downtown real estate professional with more than 25 years of experience in corporate real estate and building management to look at the former crime lab for an opinion on whether it was secure.
The professional, who asked not to be named because his company does not permit him to be quoted in the news media, visited the building Thursday afternoon and easily walked through the broken fence.
“You could back up a truck and empty the building,” he said.
So they had to close the place for sloppy work. Then they just left it open, to weather, trespassers, and raccoons, evidence and all. But rest assured. Chief says, “I will make sure that this never happens again.” So there’s that.
Sad thing is, any innocent people rotting away in a Detroit prison are the ones who will pay for this colossal fuck-up. If there’s evidence that could prove your innocence that was once testable but due to state screw-ups goes missing or contaminated, you’re generally out of luck.
Family with an unsecured wireless connection gets an early-morning FBI raid, lives under a cloud of suspicion for two years.
Note that though the FBI arrested the guy they were after in November, it took them until May to get around to notifying the family they were no longer under investigation—and even then only after the media got wind of the story.
It looks like the Sheriff’s Department has dumped a large stash of documents in addition to the video they released last night, though the search warrants and affidavits are still apparently sealed. The Arizona Daily Star has a write-up.
From the Daily Star report, it looks to me like there’s strong evidence some members of Jose Guerena’s family were involved in drug activity, and possibly some home invasions, but I don’t see anything in the article that implicates him personally. The list of items seized from his home still doesn’t show anything illegal, and seems to confirm that the alleged “piece of law enforcement clothing” was a Border Control baseball cap.
In an email to me this morning, Mike Storie, the union lawyer, alleges that Jose Guerena had been previously arrested in Pima County, along with several others, and that “drugs and weapons were found.” He writes that Guerena was never charged because he “flipped on a higher-up.” An online records search doesn’t turn up any criminal history for Guerena, but I’m not sure that sort of search would turn up an arrest that never resulted in a charge. I’m looking into this.
According to the Daily Star, there’s also some additional audio from the raid that further contradicts earlier statements from Storie.
Michael Storie, an attorney representing the five SWAT officers who shot at Guerena, said last week that all those officers were separated immediately after the shooting so they could be interviewed and provide objective statements of what happened. The audiotapes reveal that after about 45 minutes, all the SWAT officers are together. They can be heard talking about what happened, according to tape recordings made at the scene.
“That was um, like a movie, the way he jumped out,” said the SWAT team leader.
“Well, he waited, he waited and once Hector came up …” said another SWAT member just before being interrupted by the SWAT leader who said, “What did he say?” Hector is the name of one of the SWAT officers.
Two other voices say they “couldn’t hear anything” and that they didn’t know if Jose Guerena said anything before the shooting began.
“He yelled something, ‘I got something for you’ or something,” the SWAT leader told them, according to the audiotapes.
The Sheriff’s Department said previously that Guerena said something as he pointed his gun at officers.
“I just started boom, boom, boom, boom,” said another voice on the tape.
“Yeah, we were all out of ammo when we got back,” the SWAT leader said.
Storie said police statements about Guerena’s “I’ve got something for you” utterance just before his death was credible because the cops were separated immediately after the shooting, and that they couldn’t possibly have collaborated on a story. This doesn’t mean Guerena didn’t say it. It does mean that Storie was wrong about there being no opportunity for collaboration.
Next, in my column I noted that a couple sources told me that another home near the Guerenas’ had been mistakenly raided the morning of the shooting. I didn’t see the local news report below at the time, which is an account of that incident. If this is true, it wasn’t a mistaken raid, but I’m not sure it makes them look much better.
It appears that after they fired all of their ammunition into the Guerena home, the SWAT team found that at least one of their bullets had also penetrated a nearby house. So as a precaution, they also broke down the door to that house to see if anyone inside had been injured. Note too the end of the report, which states that other neighbors also say they never heard an announcement.
Finally, a bleg of sorts. I see that in the comments, some military folks have weighed in on the tactical skills (or lack thereof) depicted by the SWAT team in the video of the raid . I’m looking for someone who has ample military experience in these kinds of raids who would be willing to evaluate the video on the record. Drop me an email if that’s you.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has now released the helmet cam video of the raid you see above.
I count about eight seconds of one siren. Which is probably why some of the neighbors don’t recall hearing one. I think I hear about 8-10 seconds of a man shouting something that sounds like “police” and “search warrant”, but it’s difficult to hear, and that’s from a camera that looks to be about 15 feet away (though possibly in a closed vehicle). It certainly isn’t the blaring sirens and 45 seconds of knocking and screaming of “police” that Mike Storie indicated.
Now imagine you’re asleep—behind a couple walls, after working a graveyard shift—for what you see in the video. Would you have woken up and known that these were cops breaking into your home? Might it have been in the back of your mind that you had relatives murdered by armed intruders just a year ago?
As I wrote in my column, if we see convincing evidence that Guerena was part of a violent home-invasion ring, and that this is what the search was for (as opposed to a marijuana investigation, as press reports initially indicated), I’ll reassess my opinion of the police action. That there were perfectly legal guns, armor, and, as far as we know right now, a Border Patrol baseball cap in his home is far from convincing evidence.
So if I’m correctly understanding the latest dumb political controversy correctly, not only is it anti-Semitic to disagree with Israel on policy, it’s now anti-Semitic to be insufficiently laudatory and deferential to Israeli politicians.
The Washington Post’s strange way of describing how police slammed a man in a wheelchair into the sidewalk.
So remember that nonsense in which whiny hipsters were protesting Whole Foods opening a store in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood? The state senator who represents the neighborhood weighed in last month. She’s demanding the store hire a quota of local residents and, more absurdly, that it endow “a fund that could buy available property in the Hyde/Jackson area with a commitment to keeping it affordable”.
My first reaction to this story was, “Unbelievable.”
My second reaction was that, sadly, it is entirely believable.
With a shocking altercation between Philadelphia police and a 25-year-old IT worker putting the spotlight back on open-carry gun laws, local authorities are warning gun owners that they will be “inconvenienced” if they carry unconcealed handguns in the city.
Lt. Raymond Evers, a spokesman for the city police, told FoxNews.com that gun owners who open carry, which is legal in the city, may be asked to lay on the ground until officers feel safe while they check permits.
Let’s be clear here. Regardless of how you feel about guns, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that gun ownership is a right protected by the Constitution. Under Pennsylvania law, it is perfectly legal to open carry. So Lt. Evers is openly, publicly, and without any apparent shame promising that if gun owners exercise their constitutional rights in Philadelphia in a manner that is well within the confines of the law, they can expect a violent confrontation with police.
As I explained in my post on Philadelphia DA R. Seth Williams, this is a knowing, premeditated, intentional violation of the constitutional rights of people who live in or visit Philadelphia.
I think I’ve mentioned here that my last big project before leaving Reason was to co-edit with Jacob Sullum a special issue on America’s broken criminal justice system. If you’re a subscriber, the issue should hit your mailbox sometime in the next couple weeks. If you aren’t, head on down to your favorite newsstand and look for the cover to your right.
It’s the most comprehensive analysis of the criminal justice system I’ve seen in a single issue of any magazine. The issue looks at wrongful convictions, the overreach of sex crimes laws, immigration detention centers, twisted incentives, prosecutorial misconduct, prison rape, police informants, and a host of other issues.
I’m pretty proud of what we did here. So go pick up a copy. Better yet, pick up three, and pass them around.
TheAgitator.com
