Photo emerges of George Zimmerman’s bloodied head. Also, Zimmerman apparently once canvased his neighborhood demanding that the white son of a local cop who beat a black homeless man be brought to justice. Neither necessarily means he’s innocent. But both are examples of lapses in reporting, nearly all of which seemed have erred in the direction if implicating Zimmerman.
Government still trying to prohibit cocaine; cocaine prices still dropping. Meanwhile, government continues to try to make higher ed, health care, home ownership cheaper, and the cost of all three continue to soar. Funny how that works.
California liberals worry that federal pot raids will make people distrustful of government. Let’s hope so!
National Guard Units aiding state drug war efforts. And possibly in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kyllo.
This article on the Otto Zehm killing aptly demonstrates the many problems with police unions.
Both Reuters and Walter Olson throw water on the notion that Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws are filling the streets with blood.
The sponsors the 1978 California law that substantially expanded the state’s use of the death penalty are now arguing for its repeal.
Clark County, Nevada DA won’t charge a cop who was caught on film repeatedly kicking a man in the head. The man was in diabetic shock at the time. The officer has a history of misconduct, which the DA apparently didn’t know about until it was uncovered by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Union claims it should be able to force anyone who wants to work in a particular field to join the union and pay dues, and that it should then be able to use a portion of those dues for political activities. And it claims that preventing it from doing so is a violation of the union’s free speech.
I have a feature-length piece up at Huffington Post looking at the myriad issues to spill out of the Collinsville, Illinois traffic stop of two Star Trek fans last December. It delves into asset forfeiture, the effectiveness of drug dogs, and how difficult it is to get rid of a bad cop.
I also wrote an accompanying sidebar in which I examined the data of one Illinois State Police K9 unit over an 11-month period in 2007 and 2008. The dog had a false alert rate of 28 percent. It rose to 74 percent if you include cases where it alerted to drugs, but police could only find “residue” or “shake.” (Which of course wouldn’t have been tested for verification.)
I suggested “Set Phasers To Violate” for the main article’s headline.
Eugene, Oregon police officer gets a $250,000 settlement for his demotion after he raised concerns about “multiple, inadvertent discharges of high-powered weapons by SWAT team members.”
Family of Rachel Hoffman, the 24 year-old Florida woman murdered after she was pressured to work as a police informant, gets a $2.4 million settlement.
Here’s video of Collinsville, Illinois K9 officer Michael Reichert violating the civil rights of two guys returning from a Star Trek convention. This one has it all. According to the video, Reichert lies about why he pulled them over. He lies to justify the K9 search. He then conducts a dubious pass around the car with his dog, after which he lies about the dog alerting. When he doesn’t find any drugs, he lies about the dog alerting to some marijuana “shake” on the floor. Finally, we learn at the end of the video that Reichert has two (!) prior convictions and had resign from a previous police department for lying under oath about a drug case.
The kicker: Reichert found out that the driver had an old arrest that was supposed to have been expunged when he ran the driver’s license. This was one of his justifications for conducting a search.
MORE: I’m looking into this story. Looks like Reichert only has one conviction, for selling knock-off sunglasses. The other incident referred to in the video involved a federal drug case in which the judge dismissed Reichert’s testimony. More to come.
MORE II: The Collinsville Police Department obviously disputes the video narrator’s interpretation of the stop and search and Reichert’s justification for them. I’ll have a piece on this for HuffPost soon.
New Orleans police officials confirmed Thursday that the 20-year-old man who was fatally shot by a plain-clothed narcotics officer during a drug raid at a Gentilly house a day earlier was unarmed. New Orleans police officer Joshua Colclough, 28, fired a single shot Wednesday evening that killed Wendell Allen, 20. Police officials were guarded in their comments about the shooting Thursday, citing the ongoing investigation.
We have not been able to yet completely understand what exactly occurred,” Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said Thursday.
The shooting took place inside a red-brick, two-story home at 2651 Prentiss Ave. in Gentilly. Officers were executing a search warrant at the home following a days-old probe of marijuana dealing. Serpas said officers later found drug paraphernalia and 138 grams of marijuana — about four and a half ounces — inside the residence.
The actual suspect (not Allen) was already in custody before the raid.