Enforcers category archive

They were not caught in the act, but they did match the description. Funny how, when stuff like this happens, the suspects always “match the description.”

Two stepbrothers suspected of trying to steal beer from a grocery store were not armed with guns when they were later shot Thursday by a police officer who confronted them in the state’s capital city.

(snip)

Officers split up to search for the suspects. Donald encountered two men with skateboards who fit witnesses’ descriptions, and moments later, he radioed in that shots had been fired, the police chief said.

In radio calls released by police, Donald calls dispatchers once he spots the men and again to report that he fired shots.

The all-purpose Teflon badge number.

Officer Friendly is no more.

Say hello to Officer Fiendly.

Via Juanita Jean.

Honest to Pete, you can’t make this stuff up.

Thoreau explains how Teflon blue is the Catch-22 of the color pallet.

Organization of persons who habitually rush to judgement alleges “rush to judgement.”

Jim Wright has more.

Via Job’s Anger.

Werner Herzog’s Bear explains.
Just read it.

Steven D.

Afterthought:

Q. What is the difference between a riot and an uprising?

A. Who writes the press release.

The patrol got one.

One of my great uncles, after his retirement, compiled several slim volumes of forgotten lore, mostly tales, legends, and memories of the pre-war South. I should still have my copies in a box somewhere, they are not the sort of objects I would throw out or donate. I’m too lazy to look for them today.

A line one of the children’s songs that he included in one of the books has stuck in my mind since I first read it, back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un. It’s the only bit of the song that I remember:

Run, N****r, run! Patrol’ll get you.

Video via Raw Story.

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.