Category: Police Militarization

Lunch Links

Monday, June 29th, 2009
  • I wholly endorse this idea. I’ve been taking the 20-minute post-lunch power nap for years, and it does wonders for productivity. Here’s a tip: Drink a cup of coffee (or, if you’re a caffeine fiend, a Five Hour Energy or Monster), then nap for 20-30 minutes. You’ll wake up alert, focused, and rested.
  • I’d like to hear the torture apologists explain what possible benefit we might have gained from, pardon my language, fucking crucifying an Abu Ghraib detainee (see page six). Why in the world would we not pursue charges against the people who did it? Did he provide valuable intelligence after he was dead? Are we worried that prosecuting the people who killed this detainee might make CIA interrogators reluctant to use crucifixion as an interrogation tool in the future? And wouldn’t that sort of be the point?
  • Fun with banner ads.
  • So remember how Obama and all the Very Serious People in Washington kept telling us how the stimulus bill needed to be passed post-haste, and anyone foolish enough to call for restraint, or who suggested that perhaps Congress and the public should be given more than 11 hours to review the bill in its final version before it was voted on were cast off as petty obstructionists? Here’s your pork- and corporate-welfare laden reality. When politicians tell you we don’t have time to be careful, it means they don’t want to give you the time to figure out what they’re actually doing. (Note: Link fixed. Note: No, really this time.)
  • This year’s winner of the World’s Ugliest Dog competition.
  • DHS, DoD clashing over posting National Guard troops at the border for drug interdiction. The DoD’s got this one right. But here’s a pretty typical Obama line from the article: “President Obama has signaled that he is open to the idea, asking Congress for $250 million to deploy the National Guard while also saying he was “not interested in militarizing the border.” Obama has perfected the art of making a firm declaration of principle, just before taking action that directly violates that principle.
  • Sunday Links

    Sunday, June 28th, 2009
  • Straight Outta’ Moscow.
  • Others have done the celebrity Facebook page gag before, but this one is pretty well-executed.
  • New report casts fresh doubt on “shaken baby syndrome.”
  • Another bizarre autopsy case in Mississippi: “His body organs were missing and he was stuffed with bed sheets.” Yes, Dr. Hayne is involved, though it isn’t yet clear just where in the chain of custody his initial autopsy came.
  • Police officer once again treads onto private land, shoots and kills the owner’s dog. And once again, witness accounts of the incident differ sharply from officer accounts.

  • (Yet) Another Isolated Incident

    Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

    Here’s one from Montgomery County, Maryland:

    Kenyan immigrant Nancy Njoroge had been living in the United States for a year when a Montgomery County SWAT team burst into her Gaithersburg apartment at 4 a.m., handcuffed her and her two teenage daughters, and searched her apartment, court records show.

    Police found nothing.

    The reason: Njoroge lived in No. 202 of her apartment complex. The police had a search warrant for apartment 201.

    After rejecting an offer from the county’s claims adjuster of a “couple of movie passes,” the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the county on the family’s behalf for unspecified damages, according to ACLU records filed in court.

    The ACLU said the purpose of the lawsuit was to hold the police department accountable for its mistake.

    “Officers had but one apartment to locate, in a quiet and well-lit hallway in the dead of night, without distraction and with clearly marked doors and numbers,” ACLU lawyer Fritz Mulhauser said in a letter to the county…

    Court records don’t give a clear reason why the police raided the wrong apartment, and the county attorney assigned to the case did not respond to inquiries for the story. But in court records, a SWAT team leader indicated that it was an isolated incident.

    The movie passes were a nice touch. The raid actually happened in 2005, but after negotiations with the county failed, the family filed its federal civil rights suit this month.

    Another Isolated Incident

    Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

    In Indianapolis:

    Marye Minton, 70, and her 72-year-old husband were awoken early Thursday to officers banging on the door of their home…

    Marye Minton said she is upset that the officers came inside and ordered her husband, who is in poor health, onto the ground.

    “They said to him, ‘Get on the floor,’ like that, and see my husband’s had four strokes, and he can’t whoop anybody, he can’t do anything,” she said. “I’m very mad and I don’t want it to happen to another citizen.”

    Officers were trying to serve a warrant for a man wanted on drug charges. The address listed on the paperwork was 4042. The Minton’s home is 4048, with both house numbers clearly marked.

    But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies.

    Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department Clears Its Own Officers of Wrongdoing in Cheye Calvo Raid

    Saturday, June 20th, 2009

    Yesterday, the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department announced that its internal review found that its officers did nothing wrong in the SWAT raid on Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home.

    Last summer, officers intercepted a package of marijuana at a delivery service warehouse. Despite the fact that they already knew of a drug distribution network in which dealers were sending packages of marijuana to random addresses with the intent of having them picked up by accomplices working for the delivery companies, the Sheriff’s Department raided Calvo’s just seconds after his mother-in-law brought the package into the house with no investigation into who actually lived there.

    Police and county officials have since admitted that Calvo and his family are innocent. But they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing, such as not doing the least bit of investigation before sending the SWAT team to take down Calvo’s door, not knocking and announcing before entering, or slaughtering Calvo’s two Labrador retrievers.

    In fact, Prince George’s County officials have been stunningly callous about it all, at various points praising the officers for their “restraint,” and commenting that everyone involved in the investigation and raid “deserves a pat on the back.”

    So the announcement yesterday that the internal review cleared the department isn’t surprising. But Sheriff Michael Jackson’s comments at the accompanying press conference are really something to behold. From the Washington Post:

    The findings of the internal review “are consistent with what I’ve felt all along: My deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities”…

    In an interview, Jackson reiterated his explanation that a scream by Calvo’s mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, who saw officers in SWAT gear running toward the house, justified the shooting.

    Porter “corroborated that she did scream out ‘SWAT.’ She admitted to that, and [Calvo] admitted to hearing that upstairs in the house,” Jackson said. “That threw out the procedure of knocking and announcing, because now [officers were] compromised.”

    One dog was shot four times by the front door. Calvo has said his younger dog was running away from officers when it was shot twice, including once in a hind leg. Jackson said deputies thought the dog was running toward another deputy in the home…

    “I’m sorry for the loss of their family pets,” Jackson said. “But this is the unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community. Lost in this whole incident was the criminal element. . . . In the sense that we kept these drugs from reaching our streets, this operation was a success.”

    First of all, the police intercepted the package at the warehouse. At that point, they had already kept the marijuana inside from “reaching the streets.” Everything that happened next was at the discretion of the officers who carried out the investigation and raid well after the marijuana had already been confiscated, which means they and they alone own the results of the raid.

    Second, what happened to Calvo isn’t the “unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community,” it’s the result of a bumbling, overly aggressive, wholly incompetent police department. And it’s the result of a drug warrior mentality that believes invading someone’s home with guns and filling their pets with bullets is an appopriate response to a possible violation of state marijuana laws. The raiding cops didn’t bother to notify the Berwyn Heights police chief before sending in the SWAT team, which would almost certainly have tipped them off to their mistake. They didn’t bother to do any investigation at all of who lived at Calvo’s residence. Their first resort was to use the most overwhelming force possible.

    Third, the purpose of a knock-and-announce requirement is to notify a home’s occupants that the police are outside to serve a warrant, and to give them the opportunity to come to the door and prevent the use of force and violence. Jackson’s excuse that officers feared Calvo’s mother-in-law’s scream when she saw men in black running up the lawn tipped off the drug dealers inside doesn’t fly. Because, again, the entire point of the knock-and-announce requirement is to “tip off” occupants that the police are outside.

    Finally, Jackson’s comment that “[m]y deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities” may actually be the only accurate thing he said yesterday. Just not in the way he intended.

    Massachusetts Suspends Pentagon Giveaways to Local Police Departments

    Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

    The Boston Globe has been doing some terrific reporting about how small town police departments in Massachusetts have been using the Pentagon’s surplus weapons program to acquire some ridiculously high-powered weaponry. The paper found that 82 police departments across the state have obtained more than 1,000 military-grade weapons over the last 15 years, including…

    Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles. At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers.

    In response, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has temporarily suspended the program to investigate.

    The thing is, just about any decent-sized newspaper in the country could do a similar investigation. This has been going on since the early 1990s. The program was streamlined in 1997 when Congress created an agency called the Law Enforcement Support Program to facilitate the giveaways.  National Journal reported in 2000 that between 1997 and 1999 alone, the office handled 3.4 million orders for military equipment from 11,000 domestic police agencies, and gave away $727 million worth of stuff designed for use in war to be used in American streets and neighborhoods, against American citizens. That included…

    "…253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger airplanes, and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles."

    The transfers have only picked up since then. The program is also how Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott acquired his M113A1 armored personnel carrier, which moves on tank-like tracks, and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds. And he isn’t the only one.

    If I may, here’s a passage about the program from Overkill, the 2006 paper on police militarization that I wrote for the Cato Institute:

    The city of St. Petersburg, Florida, bought an armored personnel carrier from the Pentagon for just $1,000. The seven police officers of Jasper, Florida—which has all of 2,000 people and hasn’t had a murder in 14 years—were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.” The sheriff’s office in landlocked Boone County, Indiana, was given an amphibious  armored personnel carrier...

    The New York Times reported in 1999 that the Fresno, California, SWAT team had two helicopters with night-vision goggles and heat sensors, a turret-armed armored personnel carrier, and an armored van…

    A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted."

    In a 1997 60 Minutes segment on the trend toward militarization, the CBS news magazine profiled the Sheriff’s Department of Marion County, Florida, a rural, agricultural area known for its horse farms. Courtesy of the various Pentagon giveaway programs, the county sheriff proudly showed reporter Lesley Stahl the department’s 23 military helicopters, two C-12 luxury executive aircraft …a motor home, several trucks and trailers, a tank, and a “bomb robot.” This, in addition to an arsenal of military-grade assault weapons.

    As you can see, there was some media interest in this story about 10 years ago, but it largely died down, particularly after September 11. But the transfers didn’t stop, and neither did the unfortunate trend toward a militaristic mindset that comes with domestic police officers using military equipment and tactics, and being told they’re fighting a "war."

    It’s good to see the Globe to revisit this issue, and it’s great that the paper’s investigation seems to have won the attention of Massacusetts’ elected officials. It would be even better if it could attract the attention of some members of Congress, who might stop this ill-considered program once and for all.

    Morning Links

    Friday, June 12th, 2009
  • Charlie Lynch gets a year in prison for legally dispensing medical marijuana.
  • Police dog bites four-year-old during raid; suspect wasn’t found. Wonder what would have happened if someone in the house had shot the dog?
  • Japan. Just japan.
  • Speaking of botched raids, here’s another that appears to be a mistaken address.
  • The sorts of things that happen in the D.C. area: “Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, ‘You just hit our line.’”

  • Sunday Links

    Sunday, June 7th, 2009
  • “‘Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?’ asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald’s media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago. Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.” (NOTE: Yes, I know this article was written in 1994 — that’s what makes it fun. That not so long ago, major corporations were still figuring out whether this “Internet” thing was worth getting involved with.)
  • I blogged about this case shortly after it happened, but the wife of a public defender who was pulled over for DWI because, the officer said, of “the smell of alcohol coming from inside the vehicle” and that the woman “had bloodshot, watery eyes and a flushed face,” is now suing in federal court. The boilerplate language was exposed when the woman’s blood test came back negative for any trace of alcohol.
  • More allegations against Philly narcotics cop Jeffrey Cujdik and his crew, this time of planting drugs during a raid.
  • Man’s body decomposes in minivan while NYPD cops . . . continue to paper the van with parking tickets.
  • Beautiful time-lapse videos from Tokyo.
  • Dahlia Lithwick on the prison boom.

  • Morning Links

    Friday, June 5th, 2009
  • How FDA regulation of tobacco will become a public health disaster. The public health community’s aversion to less unhealthy tobacco products really is killing people.
  • I’ve been waiting for this Nancy Rommelmann piece from our July issue on the “sexting” panic to go online. It’s really well-written and well-reported.
  • Anti-boobs terrorist burns down topless coffee shop.
  • More on Boomtown D.C.
  • Boston Mayor Thomas Menino rarely gets much of anything right. So it’s worth praising him when he does.
  • Medical marijuana grower in Seattle gets robbed, calls cops, then gets robbed a second time by the city government.
  • Police in Michigan tase giant stuffed toy cougar. Stay.

  • More Problems in Philly

    Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

    More allegations of sexual assault during drug raids conducted by members of Philadelphia Officer Jeffrey Cujdik’s rogue narcotics team.

    If these were normal citizens, and not cops, they’d have been indicted by now.

    Morning Links

    Monday, June 1st, 2009
  • Scalia’s “things that rarely happen.”
  • LAPD officer wrongly raided by LAPD.
  • Well-done billboard ad.
  • I’ve posted a number of times about Lee Lucas, the Cleveland DEA agent accused of lying and encouraging informants to lie in order to secure a number of convictions. The good news is that he’s now facing an 18-count federal indictment.
  • No idea if this is real. It’s so funny, I don’t think it matters.
  • Man fights city hall eminent domain plan to seize private marina homes and hand them over to wealthy developers. Man actually wins. City fights back with ridiculous attempt to evict man, including claim that his dachshund is a “menace” to the community. Man fights back, actually wins again. City goes after man a third time, with new law that would require expensive renovation of his houseboat. City learns its lesson. This time, they get the feds to take the man’s home away before he has the chance to fight back.

  • Saturday Links/Open Thread

    Saturday, May 30th, 2009
  • More details emerge in the Oklahoma story where a police officer was caught on a camera phone assaulting an EMT.
  • State police raid a charity poker game in Maine, seize $500 intended for a food co-op.
  • Some beautiful photos from Africa.
  • More surprises in Judge Sotomayor’s record: She rarely allows claims of private race discrimination to go forward. I imagine you, readers, will have mixed reactions to this one.
  • Craig T. Nelson, tax protester.
  • The “non-lethal” Taser strikes again.

  • Small Victories

    Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

    The Maryland SWAT transparency bill was signed into law today.

    It’s a start.

    Sunday Afternoon Links

    Sunday, May 17th, 2009
  • Vigilante cops vs. Massachusetts politicians. Not sure who I’m rooting for, here. Or against.
  • My latest on Michael West got the green-light on Fark. Check out the comments from user RedThree in the discussion thread. Interesting.
  • Virginian-Pilot columnist Roger Chesley looks at the Cory Maye case, and says Ryan Frederick is lucky he doesn’t live in Mississippi. Neither man should be in prison, of course. But if Maye had gotten Frederick’s sentence, he’d be free by now.
  • Dear Keith Olbermann: Stop taking yourself so damned seriously. Really.
  • Op-ed in the Washington Post says it’s time to sacrifice the Internet at the altar of journalism. I’d like to think this site shows the two can coexist rather nicely.

  • Obama’s Drug Czar Says No More War Rhetoric

    Thursday, May 14th, 2009

    I say this is encouraging, and shouldn’t be dismissed as mere symbolism.

    My Reason colleague Jacob Sullum is more skeptical.

    Training the Police State’s Next Generation

    Thursday, May 14th, 2009

    Remember when the Boy Scouts were merely about helping old ladies across the street, learning how to tie a decent knot, and excluding gay people?

    Meet the post-9/11 Scouts.

    The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

    “This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

    The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

    “Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”

    This is really despicable stuff.

    Fifth Circuit Says No SWAT Teams for Regulatory Inspections

    Monday, May 11th, 2009

    It’s a "Well gee, you’d hope so" sort of victory, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that using a SWAT team to conduct an administrative or regulatory search is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

    The case stems from what was clearly a drug raid conducted on a bar in Louisiana by the Rapides Parrish Sheriff’s Department. But the raid was conducted under the auspices of an alcohol inspection, which allowed the department to get around the need for a criminal search warrant.

    The Fifth Circuit ruled such a raid violates the Fourth Amendment, and is allowing a civil rights suit against the officers involved to go forward. From the opinion:

    Taking plaintiffs’ factual allegations as true, defendants did not enter Club Retro as would a typical patron; instead, they chose to project official authority by entering with weapons drawn in a S.W.A.T. team raid. They lacked any particularized suspicion or probable cause when they subsequently searched Club Retro, its attic, and the separate apartment and seized and searched all of its patrons and employees. Thus, defendants’ entry and search was not a reasonable acceptance of Club Retro’s invitation to the public. Any other conclusion would be an invitation for S.W.A.T. team raids by law enforcement officers of any business that is open to the public and would severely undermine the Fourth Amendment protections afforded to owners of commercial premises.

    We are likewise not convinced by defendants’ second argument that they conducted a permissible administrative inspection. Although Louisiana statutes and Rapides Parish ordinances authorizing administrative inspections may have provided justification for an entry and inspection of Club Retro, no such law permits the scope and manner of the raid that plaintiffs allege occurred here…

    Administrative inspections, by their very nature, require more limited, less intrusive conduct than is alleged to have occurred here. We thus conclude that defendants’ S.W.A.T. team entries and extensive searches, as described in the amended complaint, unreasonably exceeded the scope of Louisiana and Rapides Parish administrative inspection laws. Any other conclusion would allow the administrative inspection exception to swallow the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement for searches of private property.

    The court also cited a similar opinion from the 11th Circuit:

    In Swint v. City of Wadley, 51 F.3d 988 (11th Cir. 1995), the Eleventh Circuit relied on existing Supreme Court precedent to reject qualified immunity as a defense for officers who conducted two raids of a nightclub that were comparable in relevant respects to the raid here. There, a S.W.A.T. team of thirty to forty officers, wearing ski masks, swarmed a club after receiving a signal from an undercover officer who had probable cause to arrest one patron for an illegal drug transaction. Id. at 993. The officers pointed their weapons at many of the club’s patrons and employees; prohibited the owners, employees, and patrons from moving or leaving; searched all individuals; refused patrons’ and employees’ requests to use the restrooms; searched the club, its cash registers, and door receipts; and maintained control of the premises and persons for between one and one and one-half hours. Id. The court concluded that the officers could point to "no authority that even suggests that the search and seizure of one suspect in a public place can be bootstrapped into probable cause for a broad-based search of the business establishment and its patrons."

    For a few years now, I’ve been covering the ongoing saga of David Ruttenberg, a former pool hall owner in Virginia whose business was raided by a massive police force in 2004. The mix of SWAT, undercover, and uniformed officers stormed Ruttenberg’s bar on ladies’ night. Like the cases above, the search on Ruttenberg’s bar was also clearly a criminal search disguised as an alcohol inspection, though in Ruttenberg’s case, it was really only one of numerous violations of his civil rights by the police and political establishment in Manassas Park, Virginia. The police had tried to obtain a search warrant against Ruttenberg for the 2004 raid, but couldn’t convince a judge they had probable cause he’d committed a crime. So the merely brought along some representatives from the Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control, and called it an inspection.

    So far, Ruttenberg hasn’t had much luck in his own federal civil rights suit. His case was rejected outright the first time he appeared in federal court. Last July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit gave Ruttenberg a small glimmer of hope, affirming the lower court’s dismissal of every claim, save for one—that the use of SWAT tactics to enforce a regulatory inspection was a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Last month, the same circuit court judge once again threw out that claim, too.

    But Ruttenberg is appealing, and given how the similar the facts are to his own case, one would think this latest ruling from the Fifth Circuit could only help his cause. If it doesn’t, the split between the Fifth Circuit and the Fourth and 11th Circuits would seem to make the case ripe for the Supreme Court.

    It’s pretty remarkable that we’re even discussing this. We’re talking about using SWAT teams to conduct regulatory inspections on businesses. That there would even be a debate shows just how tolerant we’ve become of the government using this sort of force.

    Here’s surveillance video of the raid on Ruttenberg’s bar. Keep in mind, this was done other the auspices of an alcohol inspection. And a federal judge has now twice ruled that he sees nothing excessive about it.

     

    Morning Links

    Monday, May 11th, 2009
  • The “kid gets wrongly arrested due to PATRIOT Act” story is getting more and more dubious.
  • Why I like the ACLU, even though I disagree with them a good percentage of the time. Reminds me of this classic piece from The Onion.
  • This seems like a bad idea. Pretty sure there’s no way in hell my dogs would go for it.
  • http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/
  • I am shocked, shocked to hear that former Drug Czar John Walters is full of crap.
  • Great movie mustaches.
  • Ryan Frederick was formally sentenced last week to 10 years in prison.
  • Bush officials trying to alter legal ethics report on torture from behind the scenes.
  • CNN covers the asset forfeiture shakedowns in Tenaha, Texas.

  • Another Isolated Incident

    Thursday, May 7th, 2009

    Police raid the wrong house in Baltimore. Weeks later, the guy still can’t get the city to repair his door. Their explanation is that because the address written on the warrant is the address the police raided, there was no mistake. Even though the guy they were actually after lived and was eventually arrested two doors down.

    Ah, but it gets worse. If it’s not the cops, it’s the bureaucrats. The guy stored his old door in his backyard, hoping the city would eventually repair it. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he called the city’s special trash pick-up to come and get it. They never did. But a city code inspector did come, and fined the guy $50 for having a broken door in his backyard.

    Morning Links

    Monday, May 4th, 2009
  • I think there’s something to this criticism: All but one of the current Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale. All were federal appellate judges when they were nominated. And this one seems particularly troubling: Only one–Souter–ever actually presided over a trial. More than skin color or penis-vagina diversity, it would be nice to see Obama look for someone from a different orbit than the usual echelon of elite legal circles. I like the idea of Russ Feingold. Yes, he’s awful on political speech, but he at least possesses some admirable skepticism for government power.
  • Thousands of Minnesota DWI cases in jeopardy after state supreme court orders breath machine manufacturer to turn over source code. They’re refusing. It’s somewhat amazing that these companies have gotten away with keeping source code secret this long, though I believe something similar happened in Florida a few years ago.
  • Injustice in Seattle is doing some interesting stuff with the media reports of police misconduct he’s been tracking.
  • Former NYPD cop runs red light, plows into car of teens in New Jersey. Local cops say he was belligerent, had watery eyes and slurred speech, and smelled of booze. The teens in the car had passed his car earlier, and said he was parked and slumped over the wheel. There was an empty beer can in his car. He refused both blood and breath tests for alcohol. He also had an unlicensed handgun and illegal ammunition in the car at the time of the accident. But his former colleagues from NYPD vouched for his character in his defense. He got probation, because the judge says he wasn’t convinced the guy was drunk. Maybe that’s true, but I’m wondering if any of us normal people would get off that lightly.
  • Home invaders in Orlando yell, “Police! Open the door!” before breaking in and killing one of the home’s occupants. They’re learning.
  • Lovely. The feds want to create a “West Point for public service.” Imagine, a whole campus filled with douche-y college resume builders who all want to be politicians when they grow up! Sounds like a kind of customized hell for me.
  • Speaking of crappy ideas for colleges….
  • Uh-oh. I think if my dogs get wind of this, they may start their own political action committee.
  • Two polls now show legalizing marijuana more popular with America than either party in Congress.
  • Florida passes primary seat belt law, more commonly known as the “pretext for racial profiling and asset forfeiture law.” This one lets cops pull cars over even if the front seat passenger isn’t buckled up. The reader who sent me this says he thinks this most disgusting line in the article: “The bill makes cash-strapped Florida eligible for a one-time, $35.5 million traffic-safety grant from the federal government.”