Curiouser and Curiouser

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WTF?

Sanford cops a problem for prosecutors in Zimmerman case, experts say

It was a strange development in a case that has seen more than its share: Chris Serino, the lead Sanford police investigator in the Trayvon Martin shooting, hired famed Casey Anthony defense attorney Jose Baez to represent him at his upcoming deposition in the case.

It’s unclear what prompted Serino to hire a private attorney — eschewing available representation by the city of Sanford, his employer. But one issue likely to come up is his double-talk on whether there was enough evidence to support George Zimmerman’s arrest as controversy surrounding the case spiraled out of control last spring.

Serino wrote in a sworn affidavit that there was probable cause to arrest Zimmerman. But he later told the Federal Bureau of Investigation he was pressured to author that document and didn’t believe the evidence was sufficient for the manslaughter charge he recommended.

“Nobody put a gun to his head,” says Michael Grieco, a Miami defense lawyer and former prosecutor. “When you sign an affidavit, you swear under oath.”

And Serino isn’t the only Sanford officer whose testimony could prove troublesome for prosecutors in the second-degree murder case against Zimmerman: High-ranking fellow officers largely agreed in March that there was not sufficient evidence to arrest Zimmerman.

Zimmerman’s legal team has since listed several of them, including former Sanford police Chief Bill Lee Jr. and Serino’s supervisors, as witnesses the defense plans to call at trial.

Baez was not available to comment for this story. But in a recent interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Baez said that Serino hired him because “it’s a very politically charged case, and he just wants to make sure that everything is done by the book.” Special Prosecutor Angela Corey’s office — which Gov. Rick Scott appointed to handle the case — also did not respond to requests for comment.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former police officer and prosecutor who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said Serino’s decision to hire his own lawyer “is very wise.”

Holy shit!

This kind of thing is virtually unheard of. The only case I can recall where a cop hired his own attorney during a murder case was when Mark Fuhrman got caught committing perjury on the stand during the OJ Simpson trial.

Baez was Casey Anthony’s attorney. If you are a cop you don’t go out and hire a big name attorney like that unless you know your ass is in trouble. And it ain’t civil liability he’s worried about.

The feces have definitely made contact with the air circulation device.

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The war on drug users

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Radley Balko tells a tale that will shock you:

A year and a half ago she was beaten by a neighborhood thug outside of a city bar. It took months of do-it-yourself sleuthing, a meeting with a city alderman and a public shaming in a community newspaper before the Chicago Police Department would pay any attention to her. About a year later, Shaver got more attention from cops than she ever could have wanted: A team of Chicago cops took down her door with a battering ram and raided her apartment, searching for drugs.

Shaver has no evidence that the two incidents are related, and they likely aren’t in any direct way. But they provide a striking example of how the drug war perverts the priorities of America’s police departments. Federal anti-drug grants, asset forfeiture policies and a generation of battlefield rhetoric from politicians have made pursuing low-level drug dealers and drug users a top priority for police departments across the country. There’s only so much time in the day, and the focus on drugs often comes at the expense of investigating violent crimes with victims like Jessica Shaver. In the span of about a year, she experienced both problems firsthand.

[...]

Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn’t bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants.

“The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats,” said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

“When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,” Downing said.

[...]

The most perverse policy may be asset forfeiture. Under civil asset forfeiture, police can seize property from people merely suspected of drug crimes. So long as police can show even the slightest link of drug activity to a car, some cash, or even a home, they can seize it. In the majority of cases, most or all of the seized cash goes back to the police department. In some cases, the department has taken possession of cars as well, but generally non-cash property is auctioned off, with the proceeds then going back to the department. An innocent person who has property seized must go to court and prove his property was earned legitimately, even if he was never charged with a crime. The process of going to court can often be more expensive than the value of the property itself.

Asset forfeiture not only encourages police agencies to use resources and manpower on drug crimes at the expense of violent crimes, it also provides an incentive for police agencies to actually wait until drugs are on the streets before making a bust. In a 1994 study reported in Justice Quarterly, criminologists J. Mitchell Miller and Lance H. Selva watched several police agencies delay busts of suspected drug dealers in order to maximize the cash the department could seize. A stash of illegal drugs isn’t of much value to a police department. Letting the dealers sell the drugs first is more lucrative.

Earlier this year, Nashville’s News 5 ran a report on how police in Tennessee are pulling over suspected drug dealers and seizing their cash along I-40, often without bothering to make an arrest. The station combed through police reports showing that officers spent 10 times as long policing the side of the interstate where a drug runner would be leaving after he sold his supply — and thus would be flush with sizable amounts of cash — than on the side where he was likely to be flush with drugs. The police were letting the drugs be sold in order to get their hands on the cash.

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Where I live in California’s Central Valley used to be a popular spot for meth labs. The Mexican drug gangs would set up in isolated farm houses and cook 20-30 pounds of crystal meth a week.

So then came the drug cops. There were all kinds of state and federal grants to add more cops, more prosecutors and to form special task forces. With all the cops around, the drug gangs moved their labs somewhere else.

But even though the meth labs are gone the drug cops are still here, because you can’t EVER reduce the number of cops. An politician who tries will be accused of being soft on crime.

And we’re not really any safer because those drug cops don’t do anything but look for drugs. They don’t hunt rapists and murderers, they don’t look for drunk drivers. Since we don’t have meth labs anymore they search for pot farmers.

We still have those.

BTW – Jeralyn tells a funny joke.

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This is excessive force

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10 Occupy protesters arrested at UC Davis quad

A confrontation between police and Occupy protesters at UC Davis ended Friday afternoon with the arrest of 10 students after police officers used pepper spray to force protesters from an encampment in the campus quad, according to protest supporters and a campus spokeswoman.

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The video shows a cop using a crowd-control version of pepper spray to blast a bunch of protesters who are sitting on the ground. The are not resisting or fighting in any way.

The officer responsible (a supervisor) should lose his job.

Cops are allowed to use reasonable force to overcome resistance. This is an example of unreasonable and excessive force.

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Occupy Freeze Their Butts

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JSOnline in Milwaukee:

Protesters who blocked traffic Thursday and invited arrest declared victory and marched off after Police Chief Edward Flynn said that officers wouldn’t help them fulfill their “martyrdom fantasies” and that they could stay “and freeze their butts off.”

Hundreds of protesters sat or stood on the North Ave. bridge over Interstate 43 for two hours.

Flynn, speaking to TV cameras as protesters chanted “We are the 99%,” said he was withdrawing most of the couple dozen officers who had been watching the protesters “so we can answer 911 calls and protect the community.”

The demonstration demanding economic justice coincided with others around the country on the two-month anniversary of the first Occupy Wall Street protests in New York.

Asked about the economic issues in the protest, Flynn told reporters, “If they’re angry about the economy, go to Wall Street. There’s 35% unemployment in this neighborhood. Who are they disrupting?”

Referring to below-freezing evening temperatures, Flynn said, “They can sit and freeze their butts off, I don’t care.”

[...]

For a while, it looked as if the protesters were going to stay on the bridge for the night, as five tents went up in the westbound lanes. Some protesters wore red arm bands to signify they were willing to be arrested in a case of civil disobedience, said Peter Rickman, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law student who was with the protesters.

But Flynn told the media, “We’re not going to fulfill the martyrdom fantasies of people who insist on being arrested while they disrupt the lives of this neighborhood.”

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They just don’t make fascist oppressors like they used to.

Meanwhile:

For SEIU, Obama and Occupy

The Service Employees International Union, a political powerhouse on the Democratic side, made its early endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday; today, its president Mary Kay Henry is in New York for an Occupy demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

With Obama and Democrats trying to benefit from the energy of the Occupy movement while keeping it at arm’s length, I asked her how those two things go together.

“There’s an economic emergency in this country and both things are required in order to turn this country around for working people,” Henry said. “The president has been fighting for American families by introducing the American Jobs Act. The Occupy Wall Street movement has made an incredible case to the country about this gross economic inequality. These two movements work together incredibly well.”

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Whenever one of the Occupations needs to pump up their numbers for a march or rally, union members show up. Specifically the members of unions that are supporting Barack Obama.

No astroturf here, nope, nosiree.

Completely organic.

Here’s some old-fashioned police brutality:

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Pride, Integrity and Guts

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To hear Thom Hartmann (and others) tell it, we live in a police state. I must have missed the memo that says liberals and progressives are supposed to hate the police. I was raised to like and respect the police.

I despise bad cops, but I don’t hate cops in general. And I’ve had more than my share of bad experiences with the police. They once even kicked in my front door and hauled me off to jail (I was innocent and the case was dismissed).

I was watching the livestream reports the other night when the NYPD cleansed Zuccotti. People were standing right next to the police as they recorded events. Contrary to popular belief the police do not have to give the press free access to everything.

With a few notable exceptions the police in New York City, Oakland, Denver and other cities around the country have acted with professionalism and restrain in dealing with Occupiers. The police did not just rush in swinging billy clubs at peaceful demonstrators. The people that got arrested chose that option.

Here is one of the reasons I respect the police and the job they do:

Vallejo cop killed by suspected bank robber

A Vallejo police officer was shot and killed Thursday during a foot chase after a bank robbery suspect lost control of his car and ran into a backyard, authorities said.

The officer, James Capoot, a respected 19-year veteran of the Vallejo Police Department and the married father of three daughters, was driving alone in his cruiser just after 1:30 p.m. when he came across a fleeing silver SUV wanted in a robbery that had just occurred at the Bank of America at Springstowne Center on Springs Road.
Vehicle chase

Capoot chased the sport utility vehicle for 3 to 4 miles before using his cruiser to do a “pit maneuver” that forced the SUV to spin out of control on the 100 block of Janice Street, said Vallejo police Sgt. Jeff Bassett.

At least one suspect fled on foot, and Capoot got out of his car and ran after him as two other police officers were pulling up in their cars, Bassett said. Those two officers heard several gunshots and found Capoot wounded in a backyard, Bassett said.

Capoot, 45, of Vacaville was pronounced dead about an hour later at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Vallejo, where colleagues gathered after the shooting.

“The officer did not discharge his weapon,” Bassett said.

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Think about that the next time you see a protester screaming “Fuck the police.”

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Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Rankings

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Occupy UC Berkeley

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Police move to disband UC Berkeley ‘Occupy’ camp

Dozens of police in riot gear confronted anti-Wall Street protesters at the University of California at Berkeley as the demonstrators tried to establish an encampment on campus.

Television news footage from outside the university’s main administration building late Wednesday night showed officers pulling people off the steps and nudging others with batons as the crowd chanted, “We are the 99 percent!” and “Stop Beating Students!”

[...]

The university reported earlier Wednesday evening that an administrator had told the protesters they could stay around the clock for a week, but only if they didn’t pitch tents, use stoves or other items that would suggest people were sleeping there.

The protesters voted not to comply with the demand and to go ahead with setting up a tent site they dubbed “Occupy Cal” to protest financial policies they blame for causing deep cuts in higher education spending.

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What the cops are doing in that first video is quite a bit more than “nudging.” I didn’t see the protesters doing anything to justify that level of force. One cop in particular appears to be out of control.

On the other hand, excessive use of force by the police does not retroactively justify the protesters breaking the law.

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