Starvin Larry

The ruling upholds the idea that police officers can profile and detain people who aren’t actually committing any crimes.

Kingsville, TX — Last Thursday, the Fifth Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled that it is suspicious for a vehicle to have air fresheners, rosaries, or pro-police bumper stickers.

The ruling stems from a 2011 Texas court case in which a couple was pulled over for having rosaries hanging from the rearview mirror, as well as a few air fresheners, and a DARE sticker on the back of the vehicle.

Nohemi Pena-Gonzalez was pulled over by Police Officer Mike Tamez when she was driving just 2 MPH over the speed limit. The officer did not pull her over because she was speeding, but because he suspected that she was trafficking drugs, and found the contents of her vehicle and the sticker to be suspicious.

Eventually, the officer questioned her husband, Ruben Pena-Gonzalez, who agreed to allow the officer search to their vehicle. The officer did not find any drugs, but did find a large sum of cash that he confiscated, and then sent Ruben Pena-Gonzalez to jail.

Recently, the case was taken to the Court of Appeals, where it was decided that Officer Tamez had reasonable suspicion to detain the family and ask to search their vehicle.

The court wrote in its decision that

“We do have concerns that classifying pro-law enforcement and anti-drug stickers or certain religious imagery as indicators of criminal activity risks putting drivers in a classic ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ position. But we need not decide whether these items alone, or in combination with one another, amount to reasonable suspicion because we find the more suspicious evidence to be the array of air fresheners and inconsistencies in the driver’s responses to the officer’s basic questions. We have long recognized that the presence of air fresheners, let alone four of them placed throughout an SUV, suggests a desire to mask the odor of contraband.”

This ruling upholds the idea that police officers can profile and detain people who aren’t actually committing any crimes. Police already profile people according to a number of different factors, and now they have confirmation that their tactics are legally acceptable.

Source for this bullshit

Due to the foot or so of rain NE Ohio got in June,and a bunch more in early July,I’m  playing catch-up on jobs.

One of my biggest jobs of the year is almost done,it’s been damn near impossible to get a lot of it done due to weather-the weather this week’s been great,just a couple thunderstorms here and there.

I only stopped now because it’s dark outside-will be back at it at 7 am,and working ’till dark,wash,rinse,repeat until Sun. or Mon.

I’ll try to get a few posts up during early mornings and after dark Ohio time until job is done.

Via Sultan Knish

Before Mohammad Youssduf Adulazeer shot up a military recruiting center in Chattanooga from a car and then sped away, another Mohammed, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad did much the same thing in 2009.

Both struck military recruiting centers in the South, but the 2009 Mohammed had a message for Americans that we unfortunately failed to heed.

“This is not the first attack, and won’t be the last,” Muhammad warned. “I’m just one Muhammad. There are millions of Muhammads out there. And I hope and pray the next one be more deadlier than Muhammad Atta!”

There are millions of Mohammeds out there. It took exactly six years for one of them to finish what his predecessor started. In a world with lots of Mohammeds, we really need to consider whether we want Mohammed becoming the most common name for a boy in America, as it already has in countries like the UK.

The murderous Mohammeds embody the values of the original Mohammed, the founder of their brutal ideology. They kill like him. They kill in his name.

A country with more Mohammeds, is a country with more Muslim terrorism. And if the first Mohammed doesn’t kill enough people, the next one will. We have to be lucky every time. The Mohammeds only have to be lucky once for there to be a bloody scene, handfuls of wilted flowers at makeshift memorials on concrete and Americans crying because a Mohammed has struck again.
Americans that unfortunately went unheeded.

The family that names a son Mohammed believes that the warlord who raped and murdered his way across Arabia in a manner that ISIS copied was a model for human behavior. Is it any surprise that the model Mohammed eventually imitates his bloody namesake’s crimes?

When a Mohammed rapes young girls in the UK, as quite a few of them have, he is only doing what his prophet did. When a Mohammed opens fire on American soldiers, he is following the teachings of his namesake and prophet. Why blame a Mohammed for acting like Mohammed?

During WW2, we would not have allowed millions of Germans named after the Fuhrer, who admired him and worshiped him, into the country. And if we had done something that stupid, we would have had only ourselves to blame when the darling Adolfs shot and bombed their way across America.

A country with more Mohammeds is a more dangerous place. If a million mothers named their offspring after Charles Manson and raised them to embody Manson Family values, America would be a much scarier place. An America with a million Mohammeds will be even worse.

Read all of it here

The police aren’t making too many friends these days. It seems like there isn’t a day that goes by where some tragic and outrageous story comes out involving the the cops and somehow violating somebodies rights, or even killing them. But, no matter how much we see this behavior, no matter how frequent it becomes, there seems to be an army of ignorant, dependent, terrified people who will jump in to defend the police from any criticism, because, you know, they are heroes…. Next time you encounter somebody like that, show them this article, and if they still dismiss it, just move on, there’s plenty of people with eyes to see and ears to hear if you aren’t wasting your time with the willfully apathetic.

But first off, I want to give a shout out to all of the alternative media outlets that tirelessly cover issues of police abuse, and show us just how common these violations are:

Now, just why should we be skeptical of the police? Well where do I begin….

1. The Police Have No Duty To Protect You
It’s plastered right on the side of many police cruisers: “To Protect And to Serve”, but this serves as little more then a PR slogan for the public to feel more comfortable and trusting of the police. In 2005 the supreme court ruled in a case titled Warren Vs The District of Columbia it was ruled that police do not have a constitutional duty to protect, all the way to and including against a women who has a protection from abuse order from a husband and is being attacked by said husband. Being stalked? No duty to protect. Locked away somewhere by an attacker. No duty to protect. Being raped? Well, you get the point, unfortunately. The court went as far as to say “”[t]he duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists. ”. Supporters of this verdict will tell you that it is because individuals are expected to protect themselves and their loved ones, which is true, but many states such as New York, and New Jersey get in the way of that with their draconian gun laws, effectively making them reliant on police, who then have no duty to oblige. A viscous cycle indeed.

2. Private Prisons Have “Lockup Quotas”
In 2011 Management & Training Corp threatened to sue the state of Arizona over a line in the contract between the two that required that the prison remain 97% full. The lawsuit threat was spurred after 3 murder convicts escaped from the prison, and the state found the prison to be “dysfunctional” and thus stopped sending inmates to the facility. The state caved and paid 3 Million dollars in tax payer dollars to a prison that let 3 murderers escape from their facility to cover the losses created by the diverted prisoner population. This notion of “lockup quotas” or “guaranteed occupancy rates” has actually found to be a common practice after analyzing over 60 contracts between states and prisons, with some Arizona prisons having an expectation of 100% occupancy!

This could help to explain why even though Crime is consistently falling over the past 20 years, The U.S continues to maintain the worlds largest prison populations as lawmakers look to write laws to appease prison contracts instead of serving the people. There are more prisons then schools in this country. Think about that for a second.

3. Police Profit From Enforcing the War On Drugs
Did you know that when the police arrest somebody for a drug charge, even marijuana, they actually earn money? Yup, for any low level arrest, a department can make $153 per arrest in federal grants, called Byrne Grants. This totally changes the incentives for what police work is. When you combine this, with the fact that drugs are widely available, hugely demanded, very profitable, and in some states, marijuana is becoming legal, the fact that there are lockup quotas, this makes the average citizen a fish to be baited into the system for profit, more then a master that is to be served, as all government is supposed to be. Then there is asset forfeiture, another very profitable revenue stream. This is where alleged drug dealers have their property stolen under the suspicion that they got that property from nasty drug money. It’s literally legal theft. It’s such an unsustainable method of revenue generation that many departments have a blanket opposition to legalized marijuana, despite its overwhelming medical potential in addition to the moral hazard of assuming what control over what people can do with their own bodies, that departments have even expressed that the stability of their budgets is dependent on this insane practice.

4. SWAT Teams Are Corporations, And Are Used VERY Commonly
In a 2014 report on police militarization, the ACLU was effectively told by Massachusetts SWAT agencies, that they are private corporations, and thus are not subject to open records requests, and generally not obligated to answer to the public. The report went on to find that SWAT are overseen by LECs or Law Enforcement Councils made up of police chiefs in the surrounding area, and funded by these same departments. Somehow, even though it’s a police agency made up of police departments and police officers, these LECs were able to incorporate into 501(c)(3) status, granting them corporate privacy. In Massachusetts alone 240 of the existing 351 departments belong to these LECs, effectively creating a blanket of secrecy over SWAT and it’s operations.

This is met with a dramatic rise in the use of SWAT teams over the past 25 years. It is commonly thought that SWAT are used for hostage crises and other extreme situations, but more often then not, they are used for suspected drug raids. And as we have seen, they often get it tragically wrong. The methods used for a lot of these drug raids are overwhelmingly forceful using no knock, forced entry, flash grenades, and other excessive shows of force, even for $2 worth of marijuana. Some studies have shown that SWAT teams are called out as much as 40,000 Times a year.

5. Police Can, And Do, Lie To The Public
Many people think that as “authority figures” that police have an obligation to be honest, but that is untrue. The most common example of this is undercover police telling suspects that they are not undercover. But this extends quite a bit. Police commonly use intimidation tactics in order to scare or trick you into giving up your rights to privacy and not to incriminate yourself. They can tell you that a witness has seen you that hasn’t, that a confession was made that never was, that you are legally obligated to do things that you aren’t, like submit to searches. The most effective defense is knowledge, courage, and a camera.

Read the whole thing Here