Gangsters in Blue

National Review relays two troubling stories on Obama AG nominee Eric Holder’s role in the Elian Gonzalez case.

Here’s the first:

In the period before armed agents seized the child, the Justice Department had been leaking its intention to avoid any sort of armed intervention. It would all be done quietly, they suggested. When top Department officials were asked about it, they said nothing to change that impression. About two weeks before the raid, Tim Russert asked Holder, “You wouldn’t send a SWAT team in the dark of night to kidnap the child, in effect?” Holder answered, “No, we don’t expect anything like that to happen.” Then the Department did precisely that. The day after the seizure, Holder appeared again with Russert, who asked, “Why such a dramatic change in position?” “I’m not sure I’d call it a dramatic change,” Holder answered. “We waited ‘til five in the morning, just before dawn.”

It’s one thing to not want to tip your hand about what you’re planning. It’s something else to be retroactively smug about sending armed agents into a private home to pry a kid out his relatives’ arms at gunpoint.

Then there’s this:

Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general, appeared on Fox News a few hours after the raid that morning. Judge Andrew Napolitano accused the Justice Department of taking the child at gunpoint. Mr. Holder denied the charge. What he didn’t realize was that he was appearing on a split screen, the other half showing the Alan Diaz photo. “Not taken at gunpoint?” an incredulous Napolitano shot back. “Have you seen the photograph?“

He probably he hadn’t. Which is why he thought he could get away with lying about how Gonzalez was seized.

Hat tip for both stories to Rob Port.

This one was 10 months old and leashed when the officer apparently entered the wrong backyard, then shot and killed it.

The Villager at Electronic Villager is keeping us up to date on the unfortunate Case study: The Death of Darryl Turner. Villager reports:

Amnesty International is tracking taser abuse as a human rights abuse issue in the United States. Since June 2001, more than 320 individuals in the United States have died after being shocked by police TASERs. Most of those individuals were not carrying a weapon. Amnesty International is concerned that TASERs are being used as tools of routine force -- rather than as an alternative to firearms.

They recently posted a case study about the taser-related death of Darryl Turner.

Hat/Tip and shout out to Villager for always keeping us informed.

It’s done a lot. We have a lot of prisoners in there totally naked. — Timothy Swanson, Sheriff of Stark County, Ohio.

For the past several months, Sheriff Tim Swanson has refused all requests for interviews about the Hope Steffey case, claiming that it was inappropriate to comment on the case in the media while it was still being reviewed in court. Of course this was complete bollocks; as he just proved, the real issue was that he had an election coming up in November, and he didn’t want to say anything on teevee that could be used against him, and now that he has been safely re-elected he is happy to wallow around in front of a camera and say any damn thing he pleases about the case. For example, that his gang of hired muscle down at the jail are doing this sort of thing all the time, and it’s not his fault because he can’t ship people down to the local mental ward anymore and that it’s O.K. for his crew to strip down women with men in the room because he just can’t be bothered to figure out how to hire enough women that he won’t be routinely sexually traumatizing women in his jail, for their own good, but, hey, it’s all O.K. for the Stark County Sheriff’s office to be running their own personal Abu Ghraib, because the mixed-gender hired muscle that strips women down in cells and leaves them there naked for hours at a time has a nifty four-letter acronym, which makes it all official and O.K.

There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent, nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad, not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it. They are a pack of dangerous predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.

See also:

• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2008-03-07: Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward
• GT 2008-03-08: In Their Own Words: Just following orders edition
• GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in uniform #3: a sixth woman comes forward
• GT 2008-06-23: We need government cops and government courts because private protection forces and private arbitrators would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people. (#2)

This afternoon, Virginia Circuit Court Judge Marjorie A.T. Arrington denied Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert’s odd request to have Ryan Frederick’s trial moved out of the Chesapeake area.

I’ve never heard of a change of venue being granted to prosecutors over the objections of the defense.  None of the defense attorneys I’ve asked about the case could, either.

That Ebert even tried I think shows that he knows his case against Frederick is coming apart at the seams.

(Via Marja Erwin.)

Memphis police identified the body of transgender woman Duanna Johnson lying in the street near Hollywood and Staten Avenue early this morning.

Police believe Johnson was shot some time before midnight on Sunday. No suspects are in custody at this time.

Johnson was the victim of a Memphis police brutality case this summer when a video of former officer Bridges McRae beating her in a jail holding area was released to the media.

The video led to the eventual firing of McRae and Officer James Swain. It also led to the formation of a Stop Police Brutality Memphis, a coalition of human rights activists who lobbied the city council for more sensitivity training for Memphis Police officers.

A statement from the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center: Duanna bravely confronted the Memphis Police Department officers who brutalized her while she was in police custody. At great personal cost, Duanna was the public face of our community’s campaign against racism, homophobia, and transphobia. There was no justice for Duanna Johnson in life. The Mid-South Peace & Justice Center calls for justice in the investigation and prosecution of Duanna’s murder.

—Bianca Phillips, Memphis Flyer (2008-11-10): Transgender Beating Victim Found Dead in North Memphis

Because it’s important, and because it’s the decent thing to do, it’s one of the things you have to do in this life. But I hate remembering our dead. I am sick of there being more people every year that we have nothing left of but a memory. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

But they deserve at least that. Duanna Johnson deserves at least that.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is held every year around November 20th. There is a list of community events online.

See also:

• GT 2008-06-30: Law and Orders #8: Memphis cop Bridges McRae exceeds expectations by punching Duanna Johnson repeatedly in the face with handcuffs over his knuckles for failing to stand up on command in the booking area at 201 Poplar

15-year-old arrested for pretending a bag of parsely was marijuana.

Avowed commies Rage Against the Machine’s rider demands Cocal-Cola, Pepsi, Dom, Ocean Spray, Amstel, Snapple.  w00t, capitalism!  w00t, poseurs!

Memphis transvestite transsexual who was suing the city after getting beaten by police in a police station (all capture on videotape) was murdered on Sunday. Sad story.

Seventeen percent of San Jose, California’s parking meter enforcement patrol is under arrest for fixing tickets.

Eminent domained in Indiana.  State is suing a couple despite their consent to the state’s offer on their land–which the couple really had no option to refuse.

Next up in the bailout bonanza?  Public transportation systems in cities across the country.  Step up and get your fix.  The federal government’s paying.

Cheye Calvo, you’ll remember, is the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor whose home was mistakenly raided by Prince George’s County, Maryland police.  Calvo’s two black labs were shot and killed, and he and his mother-in-law were bound at gunpoint for hours, even after it was clear that the police had made a mistake.  The raid came after police intercepted a package of marijuana sent to Calvo’s address through a delivery service.  Police conducted no additional investigation before sweeping in with the SWAT team.

When asked about Calvo’s case in an interview a local newspaper last month, Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson offered up a truly bewildering response:

Johnson said he didn’t think an apology was necessary and said he has not spoken with Calvo about the incident.

“Well, I think in America that is the apology, when we’re cleared,” he said. “The authorities have to be able to follow evidence. Sometimes we realize that people are victimized. … At the end of the day, the investigation showed he was not involved. And that’s, you know, a pat on the back for everybody involved, I think.”

He expressed condolences for Calvo’s pets but said he understood the actions of law enforcement.

“I try putting myself in the situation of the sheriff who entered the house,” he said. “They had one set of information at the time. … The thing we have to do is make sure those incidents don’t happen again.”

I’m having a hard time comprehending what sort of mindset you’d need to have to come to the conclusion that Calvo’s innocence equates to “a pat on the back for everybody involved.”  As for making sure incidents like what happened to Calvo “don’t happen again,” the utter cluelessness of politicians like Jack Johnson is precisely why they do keep happening.  Over and over.  It also likely factors into why Johnson presides over the county with one of the worst police misconduct records in the country.

I last wrote about Calvo’s case in response to a Milwaukee police detective who had defended the raid in a letter to the editor of National Review.

So apparently, the Toledo SWAT team does some 400 raids per year. Of the two shown in the linked video, one hit the wrong house, with two innocent people inside. The other apparently finds some dope, but there’s also a young kid in the house.

One of the officers adds:

“We try the best we can because a lot of us are parents and the last thing we want is to have any type of accident with a child. You go in with the worst-case scenario on your mind. Is there going to be shots fired? You think about it all the time when you’re doing a raid,” says Sgt. Szymanski.

One wrong move can get an officer or a suspect killed or injured.

“There have been mix-ups in the past; I’m not going to say there hasn’t.”

Mississippi death investigation system moves slowly, kicking and screaming, into the 1980s.

Cop tasers undercover alcohol control agent he mistook for a robber. Should be interesting to see whose side of this story comes out on top.

McCain campaign flack Michael Goldfarb gets flummoxed.

More bad Halloween costumes (link NSFW–or good taste).

Noted without comment.

The dog ate it.

So this is the kind of thing it’s helpful to keep in mind when some politician tells you why we need to track more things in government databases. Like health care records.

Finally…

In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?