Tag Archives: Police

Dems: Don’t Defund the Police. Break Them! by Ann Coulter

Posted on July 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

Don’t end the police’s qualified immunity from prosecution. Rather, end the absolute immunity that most government officials enjoy and grant them to only qualified immunity. From Ann Coulter at townhall.com:

Dems: Don't Defund the Police. Break Them!

Source: AP Photo/Jeff Roberson

In the left’s ongoing war on the police, their plan to strip cops of qualified immunity is among the most preposterous. The sole objective is to jam up cops and make them more passive.

Qualified immunity means a police officer can’t be sued for violating someone’s constitutional rights unless those rights are “clearly established.” Officers can still be fired. They can still be disciplined. And they can still be criminally prosecuted. They just can’t be sued by every lowlife they arrest.

Liberals act as if qualified immunity is some extra-special benefit bestowed only on police, unheard of in any other line of work. Michigan’s power-mad Attorney General Dana Nessel says, “We’re not asking that police officers even be held to a higher standard than other professions, just to the same standard as other professions.”

How about you, Dana? Can you be sued?

No, but that’s different.

Indeed, the Michigan attorney general doesn’t have mere “qualified immunity” from civil suits: She has absolute immunity. Unlike police officers, even if Nessel violates clearly established constitutional rights, she cannot be sued.

If Nessel is so hot to hold police “just to the same standard as other professions,” how about holding them to the standard she’s held to? Why does she get bonus immunity?

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Drivers Beware: The Deadly Perils of Blank Check Traffic Stops, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on May 27, 2021 | 1 comment

Police can do pretty much anything they want to somebody on a traffic stop and redress, even for flagrant and egregious cases of police abuse of Constitutional rights, is not at all certain. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation

We’ve all been there before.

You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.

You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.

For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.

So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you have every reason to be.

Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

Try to assert your right to merely ask a question during a traffic stop and see how far it gets you.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Law, Tyranny

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10 Signs That “Things Are Getting Better In America”, by Michael Snyder

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s some sarcasm in the title. From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Everything is great, and America is about to enter a golden new era that will be overflowing with peace, prosperity and happiness.  If you believe that, there is a very large bridge that I would like to sell to you.  There is certainly nothing wrong with being optimistic about the future, and personally I am very excited about the next chapters in my life.  But if you think that the United States is heading in the right direction you are not thinking straight.  Evidence of our advanced state of decline is all around us, and yet we continue to embrace our self-destructive ways.

Over the years, I have literally shared thousands of examples that show that our society is coming apart at the seams, and today I would like to share 10 more…

#1 New York City was once one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world, but now giant mountains of trash are piled up everywhere and approximately 2 million rats are rampaging all over the place.  In an attempt to turn the tide, city officials plan to create a “City Cleanup Corps”…

New York City is being forced to deploy an army of 10,000 cleanup workers in response to worsening problems with trash and rats.

A newly created ‘City Cleanup Corps’ will be tasked with fighting the piles of garbage on the streets of the Big Apple, with complaints surging by 150% between March and August last year.

After a $100 million cut to the city’s sanitation budget, filth and rodent infestations have become a common sight, with data revealing that waste tonnage rose 15% by the end of March compared to the early months of the pandemic.

#2 In 2020, homicide rates increased by an average of more than 30 percent in major U.S. cities, and now homicide rates in many of those cities are even higher in 2021…

A Baltimore sanitation worker was fatally shot yesterday evening on his trash truck. The city has 94 homicides in less than four months.

To the south, DC had two more homicides yesterday, bringing its tally to 62, up 41 pct over 2020.

To the north, Philly has 156, up 31 pct.

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Police Problems? Embrace Liberty! by Ron Paul

Posted on April 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

The more laws, the more problems you’ll have with police behavior, acknowledged or not. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Many Americans saw former policeman Derek Chauvin’s conviction on all counts last week as affirming the principle that no one is above the law. Many others were concerned that the jury was scared that anything less than a full conviction would result in riots, and even violence against themselves and their families.

Was the jury’s verdict influenced by politicians and media figures who were calling for the jury to deliver the “right” verdict? Attempts to intimidate juries are just as offensive to the rule of law as suggestions that George Floyd’s criminal record somehow meant his rights were not important.

The video of then-policeman Chauvin restraining Floyd led people across the political and ideological spectrums to consider police reform. Sadly, there have also been riots across the country orchestrated by left-wing activists and organizations seeking to exploit concern about police misconduct to advance their agendas.

It is ironic to see self-described Marxists, progressives, and other leftists protesting violence by government agents. After all, their ideology rests on the use of force to compel people to obey politicians and bureaucrats.

It is also ironic to see those who claim to want to protect and improve “black lives” support big government.

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Peak National Dysfunction, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on April 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Peak national dysfunction . . . so far. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

No need to argue anymore about defunding the police. The police across America have been successfully disarmed and castrated. Why would any cop with a sense of self-preservation interfere in the commission of a crime now? Just assume that the social contract is cancelled. You’re on your own.

Interesting factoids, by the way: rape reports are up 322 percent in New York City over the past year, shootings were up 97 percent and murders up 44 percent — a good start to the new era of all-against-all, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But don’t worry, Benjamin Crump and his legion of super-hero personal injury lawyers stand ready to enforce the suspension of law, seeking multi-million-dollar payouts in civil suits, such as the $27-million recently settled on the family of George Floyd, which is $27-million more than Jesus of Nazareth got for somewhat harsher treatment years back, though, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, George Floyd has by far outpaced the old lord-and-savior in sheer saintliness mojo. Looks like George and Jesus will soon be vying for Speaker of Kingdom Come in the new, revised cosmos of American Wokery.

Anyway, New York’s City Council voted last month to end qualified immunity for police officers, which formerly shielded them from personal lawsuits in the performance of their duties. Predictable result: they will no longer perform their duties. This is on top of Mayor Bill de Blasio ending the age-old practice of posting bail for charged felons pending disposition of a criminal case. Meanwhile, the city’s main jail, Rikers Island, is scheduled to be closed down in 2026. Abolish incarceration! Well done, Big Apple!

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Education, Governments, Law, Politics, Propaganda, race relations

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Machinery of Death: When the Government Acts as Judge, Jury and Executioner, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on February 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

There is virtually no restraint on the government’s power against individuals. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Police fail to grasp that they are public servants for peace. They should provide a civil service, to enforce the laws equally, without bias and with discretion. They must understand that they do not have immunity or special privileges and — most importantly — are just responsible for apprehending suspects, and should not act as judge, jury and executioner, which too many of them truly believe themselves to be.”—Frank Serpico, former police detective who exposed corruption within the NYPD

The government should not be in the business of killing its citizens.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.

That the death penalty was recently abolished in Virginia is just the tip of the iceberg.

While any effort to scale back the government’s haphazard application of the death penalty—meted out as a punishment, a threat, and a chilling glimpse into the government’s quest for ultimate dominion over its constituents—is a welcome one, capital punishment remains a very small part of the American police state’s machinery of death.

Yet it’s not enough to declare a moratorium on federal and state death penalty executions.

What we need is a moratorium on federal and state violence in all their varied forms (on police shootings of unarmed citizens, innocent civilians killed by the nation’s endless wars abroad, unknowing victims of secret government experiments, politicians whose profit-over-principle priorities leave Americans vulnerable to predatory tactics, etc.), because as long as government-sanctioned murder and mayhem continue unabated, the right to life affirmed by the nation’s founders in the Declaration of Independence remains unattainable.

The danger is real.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Intelligence, Law, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

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Watch: Palm Beach Cop Harasses Woman At Her House Over Facebook Remark, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

Yet another reason to flee social media: the police monitor it. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A Palm Beach woman who joked on Facebook about dumping ‘thousands of masks’ on the lawn of the county commissioner got a visit from the Sheriff’s office on Feb. 12, after authorities had surveilled the conversation.

Angelique Contreras, a mother of three, was discussing the county’s new policy to exclude people who refuse to wear masks from public meetings, when a man named Anthony Collins joked about leaving “hundreds of bags of garbage” on the lawn of the county commissioner, to which Contreras added “Thousands of Mask(s).”

Later, an officer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office who identified himself as Detective Horton showed up at Contreras’ house and warned her against ‘trespassing’ and illegal activity, according to WND.com.

“The reason why we’re here is, bothering you on a Friday night, is, I guess you and some guy named Anthony were posting on social media that you were gonna go trespass on a county commissioner’s property, dump garbage on her property,” says Horton.

“I didn’t say that I would dump garbage on her property,” Contreras replied.

“That’s the discussion you guys were having,” Horton replied.

“No I wasn’t,” Contreras shot back.

“I can show you the post,” replied Horton – to which Contreras said “I plead the Fifth.”

The only crime committed by Contreras was filming the encounter in vertical mode. Watch:

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The reimagined police as servants of the left, by Carol Brown

Posted on December 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

Will police become the left’s storm troopers? From Carol Brown at americanthinker.com:

We back the blue, but will they back us?

Like most conservatives, I support the police and the vital role they serve in a civilized society.

But like many conservatives, watching them stand down on orders from blue-state mayors during months of riots was jarring.  (They even stood down during a Back the Blue rally in Denver when speakers were attacked.)

Many of us asked how the police could obey such orders and allow criminals to have free rein in our streets — criminals whose victims, I might add, included over 2,000 police officers.

Don’t police officers swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution?  Well, yes, they do.  In fact, that is their paramount responsibility.

Perhaps this year, it seems we witnessed the rule and not the exception — the rule being that most people, including the police, will be cowards in the face of tyrants.

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Portland Prosecutor Likely to Drop Charges Against Rioters Who Injure Cops, Citing ‘Instinctive Reaction’ to Police, by Victoria Taft

Posted on August 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

Portland, in a bid to burnish its reputation as a haven for rioters and lawlessness, is dropping charges against rioters. From Victoria Taft at pjmedia.com:

AP Photo/Noah Berger
Well, we’ve heard it all now. Rioters have been given what is tantamount to carte blanche in Portland. It’s open season on Portlanders, open season on cops, and open season on the rule of law.

Scores of the 500 people who were arrested during the nearly 75 days of violent Portland riots will have their charges dropped by the new Black Lives Matter-approved district attorney.

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced that his default position is not to prosecute and that most crimes by rioters will be forgiven and forgotten.

That list of crimes includes interfering with a police officer, disorderly conduct, and rioting.

-interfering with a police officer
-disorderly conduct
-criminal trespass
-harassment
-escape in the 3rd degree
-riot (somtimes in some circumstances)

Attacks on police officers and resisting arrest will be scrutinized based on whether – and we’re not making this up – police caused rioters to react because they used tear gas or other crowd-control measures causing rioters to “instinctively lash out.”

…the instinctive reaction of people who have been gassed repeatedly, who have been struck with kinetic projectile weapons, and who have seen other protestors arrested in ways they deeply disapprove of.

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crime Over 100 Police Agencies Ditch Agreement To Guard DNC, by Steve Watson

Posted on July 31, 2020 | Leave a comment

Gee, you can’t just shit all over the police and then expect them to protect you. What a surprise. From Steve Watson at summit.news:

Cops are sick of being subjugated and defunded by Democrats

Screensh

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that more than 100 police agencies across the country have ditched previous agreements to provide security for the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to take place in Milwaukee in August.

The report notes that the move by cops is a reaction to Democrat responses to the anti-police unrest that has raged throughout the Summer.

“They were concerned with directives placed on the police department, including not allowing tear gas or pepper spray,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales.

“It is apparent there is a lack of commitment to provide the Milwaukee Police Department with the resources it needs to ensure the safety of peaceful protesters, attendees, citizens and police personnel,” noted Wisconsin, Franklin Police Chief Rick Oliva.

“I can not send personnel if they are not properly equipped or will not be allowed to engage in appropriate actions which would ensure their safety,” Oliva added.

“I understand that use of chemical irritants and pepper spray is serious and those are to be used only when legally justified. But when you take that out of the continuum that doesn’t leave the officers much other than getting harmed or using deadly force and that’s not good for any officer or the public,” Waukesha Police Chief Daniel Thompson also warned.

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