Enforcers category archive

Republicans move to establish a secret(ive) police force in Virginia, apparently because they believe the no account should be no-accountable.

You can read more here.

Carrion crow in blue.

Eight Los Angeles police officers who mistakenly opened fire on Los Angeles Times newspaper delivery women thinking they were rogue ex-cop Christopher Dorner in 2013 will not be criminally charged, the L.A. County district attorney’s office announced Wednesday.

The short version of the District Attorney’s ruling is this: They were a-skeert, so they’re allowed.

Follow the link for more.

It it’s not captured in a photograpn, it must not have happened.

Fomenting frolics.

Via Juanita Jean.

Via Job’s Anger.

Recently, I heard a podcast in which an American ex-pat currently living in southeast Asia said, almost as an aside, for the podcast was decidedly apolitical, “America is a police state.”

His bland matter-of-fact tone was more chilling than would have been fervent emotion.

With that as an introduction, I commend Werner Herzog’s Bear to your attention.

Addendum:

Tony Norman has more.

A local police force has started sending its recruits to the Virginia Holocaust Museum as part of their training. The intent is “to show them what can happen when power is untethered from duty and decency.” Here’s a bit of the story; follow the link for more.

(Norfolk, Va., Police Chief–ed.) Goldsmith is following in the footsteps of Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia’s police commissioner who previously served as Washington’s police chief. While there in 1998, he accepted an invitation to come to the National Holocaust Museum and got a tour from a survivor.

He learned that, almost from the beginning of the Nazi Party’s rise to power, local police were intimately involved in helping them and were soon nearly indistinguishable from military groups like the SS.

Ramsey wrote a paper 16 years later about the tour and how it forced him to ask fundamental questions about the role police play in a democracy. Lest police and the public dismiss the lessons as something that happened long ago in a far away place, he draws connection between police in Nazi Germany and officers who helped enforce Jim Crow laws in the American South. Or more recently, when police watched while inner-city neighborhoods deteriorated into ghettos during the 1980s crack epidemic without trying to fix the underlying problems fueling it.

One can be skeptical of the extent to which a one-day tour may have a lasting effect, but one can only applaud the intent and effort, especially as one considers that many of our own police forces are already “nearly indistinguishable from military groups.”

Via Balloon Juice.

Even though CSI’s Gil Grissom kept saying, “Follow the science,” science has little or nothing to do with forensic evidence. Matthew T. Mangino reports:

Imagine visiting your doctor and she recommends a course of treatment but warns that the treatment has been applied with little or no scientific validation and with inadequate research, assessments or reliability.

Your doctor is telling you, let’s use this treatment, but “neither I — nor anyone else — knows if it works.” No way — the FDA, the Medical Society, even the National Academy of Sciences would never let that happen.

Unfortunately, no one is preventing it from happening on a regular basis in America’s courtrooms. The use of inadequately tested or assessed courtroom evidence results in offenders being locked away for years — in some cases for life.

Follow the link to follow the evidence.