Archive for the ‘Police state USSA’ Category

New Study: For Every 1000 People Killed by Police, Only 1 Cop is Convicted of a Crime

Posted: April 15, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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A new study released by the Washington Post reveals that for every 1000 people killed at the hands of police, only one officer is convicted of a crime. Since 2005, although there have been thousands of fatal shootings by police officers, only 54 have been charged. Of those charged, most were cleared or acquitted.

This analysis is, to date, the most comprehensive of its kind. According to the Post:

“The 54 criminal prosecutions were identified by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson and The Washington Post. Cases were culled from news reports, grand jury announcements and news releases from prosecutors. For individual cases, reporters obtained and reviewed thousands of pages of court records, police reports, grand jury indictments, witness testimony and video recordings. Dozens of prosecutors and defense attorneys in the cases were interviewed, along with legal experts, officers who were prosecuted and surviving relatives of the shooting victims.”

It stands to reason that if there are thousands of fatalities due to police shootings, the number of police charged would be much higher than it is. According to the analysis, in order for prosecutors to press charges, there had to be exceptional factors at play. These include “a video recording of the incident, a victim shot in the back, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.”

According to Bowling Green criminologist Philip M. Stinson, “To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way. It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”

On the rare occasion an officer is charged with a crime, the punishment on average is much lower than would be expected, some spending only weeks behind bars. The prosecutors and defense lawyers interviewed in the study attribute this to the fact that “Jurors are very reluctant to punish police officers, tending to view them as guardians of order.” 

The most alarming part about this study is that the number of people fatally shot by police could potentially be much higher because police departments are not required to keep the database of police shootings updated. This is terrifying, as it’s arguably one of the most important records a police department could keep.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/study-reveals-police-officers-murder-alarming-rate/#kpTMbbf9GEKIOo0b.99

Video Shows Cops Arrest Healthy Man, Hours Later He’s in ICU in a Coma with Severe Injuries

Posted: April 14, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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freddie-Gray-in-a-coma-after-arrest1

Baltimore, MD — 27-year old Freddie Gray is now hospitalized in critical condition and in induced coma, after an incident with Baltimore police Sunday morning.

An eyewitness captured video footage of Gray being restrained and hauled into the back of a police van after being chased and arrested by bike cops. What happened after that is a mystery, as Freddie Gray is now unconscious in Shock Trauma with multiple injuries.

Gray’s godbrother did not want to be identified, but he did give a statement after he left the ICU, saying “I seen police, him handcuffed, him tased while he was handcuffed. I seen the police officer bending his leg to the point where it looked like he broke it. He was completely healthy, fine being carted off aside from his leg. It’s nowhere near how he’s sitting in the ICU right now.”

According to the family, Gray has spinal injuries and is barely alive. Richard Shipley, Gray’s stepfather, told local news affiliate WJZ, “His face is swollen. He just looks really horrible. Like I said, he’s in an induced coma. We’re all praying.”

Police will not say why the bike cops arrested the fleeing Gray, or how he ended up in the hospital in an induced coma. The arrest was described by witnesses as brutal, but Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said he did not see any use of force by police in the video, adding that the investigation was at an early stage.

“A number of officers made an arrest of a man who fled from them,” Rodriguez stated. “This is a very serious incident, that we are looking at thoroughly. I have been on the phone with the State’s Attorney’s Office and we are going to work jointly on this investigation.”

The officers involved in the mystery incident have been assigned to administrative duties.

While Deputy Commissioner Rodriguez denies any use of force in the video, there is a considerable amount of time not documented. So what happened after Freddie Gray was loaded into the police van to put him in critical condition? Did Gray receive a “nickel ride” from the fine folks at the Baltimore Police Department?

For those who don’t know, “nickel rides,” as reported by the Inquirer in 2001, were a witness-free way for police to punish unruly, uncooperative, or arrogant suspects – without ever laying a hand on them. For rogue police, it was a literal way to deliver “street justice.”

Anyone else with evidence of the arrest is being encouraged to contact police. Unfortunately, police have a history of tampering with and erasing video evidence incriminating them. We at The Free Thought Project encourage anyone with evidence regarding this situation to send it to contact@thefreethoughtproject.com or any other media source you trust.

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/video?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=11386489

Police Kidnap Children for Playing Outside without their Parents, Bring them to CPS

Posted: April 13, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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Silver Spring, MD — Two children were kidnapped by state agents Sunday as they walked home from playing.

The state claims to have kidnapped these children in order to protect them. Who, exactly, the police were protecting them from remains unclear.

In March, Danielle and Sasha Meitiv were found guilty of child neglect after letting their children walk home from a nearby park.

Refusing to let the state dictate how they can raise their own children, the Meitiv’s continued to allow their kids, ages 6 and 10, to be “free range.”

As their kids walked home Sunday around 5:00 pm, a nosey neighbor called 9-1-1 to report the horrible “crime” of two responsible children walking down the sidewalk.

Police were then dispatched to “protect” these children, so they kidnapped them.

According to Fox 5 DC, the Meitivs’ 10-year-old son told reporters they sat in the police car for about two hours before they were told they would be dropped off at home, but instead, they went to CPS in Rockville.

Frantic after their children failed to come home at 6:30, like they said they would, the Meitiv’s went out to search for them. The police never reported that they picked up their children, and CPS didn’t call them until 8:00.

Danielle Meitiv told Fox 5 DC that she always feared something like this would happen.

When the Meitiv’s arrived at CPS to get their children back from their captors, they weren’t given any information about them. They were instead told to “take a seat” and were forced to wait for hours before finally being reunited with their children at 10:30 pm.

Police claim that they are now conducting an investigation to determine what charges will be brought against these parents.

Growing up in the 80’s, I remember roaming the neighborhood as a 6-year-old child. We were told that we didn’t have to come home until the street lights came on. My parents, nor the parents of my friends, who were allowed to roam free, were never harassed or worried about facing charges for their parenting.

The term “free range kids” in the 80’s and 90’s did not exist, they were just called “kids.” What used to be a completely normal behavior is now considered a criminal act in modern day Police State USA.

What the police and CPS are proving here, is that it is, in fact, dangerous to let your children roam free. However, the people posing the greatest risk to your children as they roam free, happen to be the police and CPS.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-kidnap-children-playing-parents-bring-cps/#GQO72YuHsajlXy7S.99

Coroner: Teen killed by police in Illinois shot in back

Posted: April 7, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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ZION, Ill. (AP) — An autopsy has revealed that a teenager killed by a police officer in Illinois over the weekend was shot twice in the back, authorities said Monday.

Justus Howell was shot by Zion police on Saturday afternoon. Police say officers responding to a call about an altercation began chasing a male when he ran from the scene. They say that after the teen was shot, officers recovered a handgun.

The Lake County Coroner’s Office said in a statement Monday that one bullet struck the 17-year-old in the left back and penetrated his heart, spleen and liver. Another bullet struck him on the right side of his back. Tests to determine whether drugs were in the victim’s system are pending.

The Zion police chief didn’t return calls Monday seeking comment about the autopsy results. Zion is a community of about 24,000 people along Lake Michigan about 45 miles north of Chicago, near Illinois’ border with Wisconsin.

Howell was black and his relatives contacted the NAACP asking its officials to speak on their behalf, according to Lake County NAACP president Jennifer Witherspoon. She says Howell’s relatives are hoping to find out exactly what happened as quickly as possible.

“Whether it was a mistake on his part or a mistake on the police’s part, they want answers to make sure something like this never happens again,” she said.

View gallery

A Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Investigator …

A Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Investigator holds an evidence bag on Saturday, April 2, 2015  …

The teen’s death comes months after an unarmed black 18-year-old was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, an incident that sparked protests and heightened concerns about how minorities are treated by police around country. Police in Zion haven’t provided any details on the officer involved in Howell’s shooting, including the officer’s race.

“Here in America we are seeing this with too many brown and black boys,” said Witherspoon, who added she was encouraged that Zion police quickly handed the investigation over to the Lake County Major Crime Task Force.

Family members gathered Sunday near the site of the shooting to pay tribute to Howell.

Howell, was a high school junior who transferred from a school in Wisconsin to Waukegan Public School District 60, spokesman Nick Alajakis told the Chicago Tribune.

Alajakis said the teenager attended the Lakeshore Academy, a privately-operated school that takes students from the district and, according to the district’s website, serves academically struggling students.

Runaround: DHS to Purchase Access to License Plate Databases

Posted: April 2, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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According to a Federal Business Opportunities report posted today, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning to solicit proposals for a “license place commercial data reader service” later this month.

An official DHS statement says that the Department is not attempting to set up its own database, but to instead query existing data held in commercially available license plate reader databases.

That statement continues, saying:  https://readfomag.com/2015/04/runaround-dhs-to-purchases-access-to-license-plate-databases/

U.S. Supreme Court: If You’re Being GPS-Tracked, You’re Being Searched

Posted: March 30, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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If the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court clarified and affirmed that law on Monday, when it ruled on Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, before sending the case back to that state’s high court. The Court’s short but unanimous opinions helps make sense of how the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, interacts with the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government.

“It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a car or a person. Putting that tracking device on a car or a person is a search,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF).

In this case, that context was punishment. Grady was twice convicted as a sex offender. In 2013, North Carolina ordered that, as a recidivist, he had to wear a GPS monitor at all times so that his location could be monitored. He challenged the court, saying that the tracking device qualified as an unreasonable search.

North Carolina’s highest court at first ruled that the tracker was no search at all. It’s that decision that the Supreme Court took aim at today, quoting the state’s rationale and snarking:

The only theory we discern […] is that the State’s system of nonconsensual satellite-based monitoring does not entail a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That theory is inconsistent with this Court’s precedents.

Then it lists a series of Supreme Court precedents.

And there are a few, as the Court has considered the Fourth Amendment quite a bit recently. In 2012, it ruled that placing a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car, without a warrant, counted as an unreasonable search. The following year, it said that using drug-sniffing dogs around a suspect’s front porch—without a warrant and without their consent—was also unreasonable, as it trespassed onto a person’s property to gain information about them.

Both of those cases involved suspects, but the ruling Monday made clear that it extends to those convicted of crimes, too.

But much remains unclear about how the Fourth Amendment interacts with digital technology. The Court so far has only ruled on cases where location information was collected by a GPS tracker. But countless devices today collect geographic information. Smartphones often contain their own GPS monitors and can triangulate their location from nearby cell towers; electronic toll-collection systems like E-ZPass register, by default, a car’s location and when it passed through a toll road.

Lynch, the EFF attorney, said that the justices seem to know that they’ll soon to rule on whether this kind of geo-locational information is protected.

She also said that those questions are more fraught for the Court than ones just involving GPS tracker data. Some members of the Court, including Justice Antonin Scalia, argue the Fourth Amendment turns on whether the government has trespassed on someone’s private property. Other members—represented in arguments by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito—say that people have a reasonable expectation to the privacy of their location data.

For now, Monday’s ruling will force lower courts to consider whether attaching a GPS tracker to someone or something is a reasonable search, Lynch said. “It makes very clear to state courts and lower courts considering this issue that at least they have to get to that point,” she told me.

North Carolina isn’t alone in requiring past sex offenders to wear a GPS tracking device. Wisconsin also forces convicted sex offenders to wear location monitors for the rest of their lives, and Lynch said the EFF is looking at similar cases in other states. In her opinion, lifelong GPS tracking does constitute an unreasonable search. Her thinking: By the time they’re monitored, convicts have served their time and have theoretically repaid society for their crimes.

“They should have the opportunity to rebuild their lives and not be under a state of government surveillance for the rest of their lives, and that’s what a GPS tracker constitutes,” Lynch said. “Sex offenders—it’s the easiest class of people to place these kinds of punishments on, but I worry that we start with sex offenders and then we go down the line to people who’ve committed misdemeanors.”

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-supreme-court-youre-being-220522445.html

Officer kills man upon return from leave for other shooting

Posted: March 17, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — On his first day back from a mandatory leave for shooting and wounding a knife-wielding man earlier this month, a Wisconsin police officer shot and killed an armed suspect after confronting him following a chase, authorities said.

Kenosha police officer Pablo Torres returned from leave Saturday, 10 days after shooting a man who advanced on police armed with knives, the department said. While that March 4 shooting was investigated, Torres was placed on administrative leave by department policy in police-involved shootings. He also attended annual in-service training before returning to work last weekend, police said.

On Saturday morning, police chased a car driven by 26-year-old Aaron Siler, who was wanted on a felony probation and parole warrant, Lt. Brad Hetlet said in a statement. Siler crashed at around 9:30 a.m. and took off running.

When Torres confronted Siler, Siler “armed himself with a weapon” and Torres fatally shot him, Hetlet said.

Wisconsin online court records show a man with the same name and birthdate as Siler was charged in 2011 in Kenosha County with strangulation, false imprisonment, battery and disorderly conduct. He pleaded no contest to strangulation with the other charges dismissed and was sentenced in 2013 to four years of probation on condition he serve one year in jail.

In 2011, the same man pleaded guilty to bail jumping and was sentenced in May 2013 to credit served for 563 days he spent in jail. A theft charge was dismissed.

In the earlier officer-involved shooting, Torres was among three officers and a recruit who went to a home after a woman called to say her husband had gone into the garage to kill himself. Police say the man was armed with two knives and was seated in a running vehicle. When the man refused to drop the knives, two officers shot him with Tasers. When the man began advancing on police, Torres shot him once in the stomach. The man is expected to survive.

Hetlet said police had no additional information to release about the shooting of Siler.

Kenosha is in southeastern Wisconsin between Milwaukee and Chicago.

Denver: USPS Surveillance Cams Capture License Plates, Faces

Posted: March 12, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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Photo by: Jonathan McIntosh

Around Thanksgiving of 2014, a US Postal Service customer noticed something odd: surveillance cameras outside a local Golden, Colorado post office that were aimed to capture vehicle license plates and the faces of customers exiting the building.

Just recently, a Denver Fox TV affiliate confirmed the presence of these surveillance cameras in an investigative report. Although the US Postal Inspection Service claimed that they were for law enforcement and security, there were no surveillance cameras that captured activities at the employee entrance or loading dock at the building.

Pamela Durkee, a U.S. Postal Inspector explained in an email to FOX31, “(We) do not engage in routine or random surveillance. Cameras are deployed for law enforcement or security purposes, which may include the security of our facilities, the safety of our customers and employees, or for criminal investigations. Employees of the Postal Inspection Service are sworn to uphold the United States Constitution, including protecting the privacy of the American public.”

But according to Lee Tian, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these cameras violate the spirit of the Constitution.  “Part of being a responsible, constitutional government is explaining why it is doing surveillance on its citizens,” Tian said. “The government should not be collecting this kind of sensitive information. And it is sensitive! It’s about your relationships, your associations with other people, which can be friendship or political or religious. The idea that we give up that privacy simply because we use the U.S. mail is, I think, a silly idea.”

Tian continues: “The idea that they [law enforcement] would be able to keep that information forever and search through it whenever they want to – that seems very, very wrong to us because it means you’ll be able to accumulate over time a lot of innocent peoples’ information and then use it in the kinds of ways that would not be overseen by any kind of court or independent third party.”

ACTION ALERT! —————————–

Want to help a Forward Observer project?  Then we need photos and locations of these types of surveillance cameras at post offices around you.  Help us create a map of known locations where surveillance cameras capture the license plates and/or faces of innocent post office customers.  Send in your information to: USPS (at) readfomag (dot) com!

The CIA is giving its surveillance tech to US law enforcement

Posted: March 11, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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Las Cruces Air

The Justice Department’s newest electronic dragnet–plane-mounted “dirtboxes” that can slurp thousands of cellular phone ID’s from the air — was originally developed by the CIA to hunt terrorists in the Middle East, The Wall Street Journal reports. Now however, it’s being used domestically to track American citizens. That’s not good.

According to a new report from the WSJ, the US Marshals Service, with assistance from both the CIA and Boeing, developed these Cessna-mounted devices. They are electronic sniffers that mimic cellular tower signals to incite any cellular telephone within range to broadcast its identifying registration information. It’s essentially an aerial man-in-the-middle attack and one that has cost US taxpayers more than $100 million to create. With this information, US Marshals can effectively locate, identify, and lock on to specific cell phones — out of a sample population of thousands or even tens of thousands of devices — to within an accuracy of just three yards. What’s more, once the suspect phone is found, Marshals can then listen in on any calls originating from it. According to the WSJ, these devices have been in operation since 2007, mounted on Cessna aircraft flying out of five metropolitan airfields throughout the US and can access a majority of the US population.

This isn’t the first time that this technology has been put to use by US officials, mind you. Dirtbox technology first debuted in the Middle East where it was utilized in the hunt for terrorists in both Afghanistan and Iraq. However, this new program marks a troubling collaboration between domestic law enforcement and the nation spy agency that blurs a very important operational distinction between the two agencies.

That is, the CIA is an outward-looking agency; its purpose is to gather information from abroad regarding external threats to national security. The US Marshals (and the DOJ in general), instead is tasked with enforcing federal law here in the States. To provide the DOJ with more than a million dollars worth of equipment designed specifically to hunt people that aren’t protected by the Constitution and then allow federal officials to listen in on calls may conform to the letter of the law — as both the CIA and DOJ have asserted to the WSJ — but it certainly doesn’t conform to the spirit. And it could very well lead to further and more aggressive domestic surveillance efforts in the future.

Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have already filed FOIA requests regarding the program and have requested “additional information about the Department of Justice’s and Department of Homeland Security’s acquisition, possession, and use of cell site simulators deployed on aircraft” ahead of any further legal action.

We’ve already seen that the Feds have very few qualms about utilizing digital dragnets like PRISM. This Dirtbox technology appears to signal a newfound readiness to apply these overreaching information gathering practices to not just our online lives but to our mobile devices as well.

Source  http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/10/the-cia-is-giving-its-surveillance-tech-to-us-law-enforcement/

How DNA Is Turning Us Into a Nation of Suspects, by John W. Whitehead

Posted: March 10, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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Orwell’s Big Brother on ‘roids

Moreover, despite the insistence by government agents that DNA is infallible, New York Times reporter Andrew Pollack makes a clear and convincing case that DNA evidence can, in fact, be fabricated. Israeli scientists “fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva,” stated Pollack. “They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.” The danger, warns scientist Dan Frumkin, is that crime scenes can be engineered with fabricated DNA.

Now if you happen to be the kind of person who trusts the government implicitly and refuses to believe it would ever do anything illegal or immoral, then the prospect of government officials—police, especially—using fake DNA samples to influence the outcome of a case might seem outlandish. But for those who know their history, the probability of our government acting in a way that is not only illegal but immoral becomes less a question of “if” and more a question of “when.”

Robert Gore's avatarSTRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

Big Brother is collecting your DNA. From John Whitehead, at theburningplatform.com:

“The year is 2025. The population is 325 million, and the FBI has the DNA profiles of all of them. Unlike fingerprints, these profiles reveal vital medical information. The universal database arrived surreptitiously. First, the Department of Defense’s repository of DNA samples from all military personnel, established to identify remains of soldiers missing from action, was given to the FBI. Then local police across the country shadowed individuals, collecting shed DNA for the databank. On the way, thousands of innocent people were imprisoned because they had the misfortune to have race-based crime genes in their DNA samples. Sadly, it did not have to be this way. If only we had passed laws against collecting and using shed DNA….”—Professor David H. Kaye

Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta…

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