Enforcers category archive

A Tampa Bay Times investigation has found that Tampa police are targeting poor, black neighborhoods with obscure subsections of a Florida statute that outlaws things most people have tried on a bike, like riding with no light or carrying a friend on the handlebars.

Officers use these minor violations as an excuse to stop, question and search almost anyone on wheels. The department doesn’t just condone these stops, it encourages them, pushing officers who patrol high-crime neighborhoods to do as many as possible.

There was the 56-year-old man who rode his bike through a stop sign while pulling a lawnmower. Police handcuffed him while verifying he had, indeed, borrowed the mower from a friend.

There was the 54-year-old man whose bike was confiscated because he couldn’t produce a receipt to prove it was his.

There’s more.

Hell, I bought my bike eight or nine years ago with cash from a small non-profit that restores bikes for poor kids. I don’t have any idea where the receipt is, if indeed there was a receipt.

The cops are trying to defend this as a war against crime, as if bicycle violations are some sort of “gateway crime.”

Yeah. Right.

This surprises you how?

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

In related news, don’t believe the “cyber” in CSI: Cyber>. It’s so absurd that you can’t debunk it, because there’s just too damned much bunk. It makes em>Godzilla look like a true-to-life nature documentary.

As Tony Norman points out, it’s no longer a game if you let Barney Fife have the bullet.

And this surprises you how?

Two Transportation Security Administration screeners have been fired for conspiring to allow the fondling of attractive male travelerers passing through a security checkpoint at Denver’s airport, investigators report.

Police learned of the illicit activity last month when an official with the TSA’s inspector general’s office contacted them “in regards to a possible Unlawful Sexual Contact” at Denver International Airport, according to a Denver Police Department report first disclosed by CBS4.

Opportunists take opportunities. It’s what they do.

Via Kos.

Bad dogs! Bad dogs! Bad dogs!
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

A company called BioPet Vet Lab, out of Knoxville, Tenn., says its PooPrints testing kits are now in 26 apartment and condo complexes and homeowner associations in greater Seattle.

You see, some of the tenants, they let their pets do their business pretty much anywhere.

It seems that the soil for this endeavor have been well-fertilized. Now the villains can be sniffed out.

The fascinating bit of this discussion is where Thom and his guest discuss how enforcers on campus select their victims targets.

I did a year’s grad work at the University of Virginia.

If the Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Board really wants to get serious about underage drinking in Charlottesville, they would close fraternity row instead of beating up random black students.

Via Job’s Anger.

What’s the point of having enforcers if you can’t criminalize everyone?

Shaun Mullen explains that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Afterthought:

Moveon was right.

Via Job’s Anger.