Homeless in Arizona

Court strikes down Arizona's 20-week abortion ban

9th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Arizona 20-week abortion ban

Posted: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 3:00 pm | Updated: 3:08 pm, Tue May 21, 2013.

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Calling a woman's rights "unalterably clear,'' a federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down Arizona's nearly year-old ban on abortions at 20 weeks and beyond.

In a unanimous decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged that the law on what states can and cannot restrict has varied since the landmark 1973 case of Roe v. Wade. That ruling barred states from banning a woman's right to an abortion, at least early in her pregnancy.

But Judge Marsha Berzon, writing for the court, said one thing has remained constant.

"A woman has a constitutional right to choose to terminate her pregnancy before the fetus is viable,'' she said. "A prohibition on the exercise of that right is per se unconstitutional.''

While a federal judge last year declared the law valid, it has never been enforced. That's because the appellate court put it on "hold'' while it considered the appeal.

Tuesday's ruling is a setback not only for the majority of legislators who voted for the ban but also for Gov. Jan Brewer who signed the measure. She believes most abortions should be illegal.

But it is not likely the last word. Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who personally argued the case to the appellate court, has said he sees the law as a chance to have the whole issue of the viability standard revisited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

And Cathi Herrod, president of the anti-abortion Center for Arizona Policy, said she is "not surprised or discouraged.''

"The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is well known for opinions that get overturned by the United States Supreme Court,'' she said.

But Herrod said the high court does not have to overturn Roe v. Wade and subsequent rulings which have clearly said states cannot ban pre-viability abortions. Herrod said she believes the statute can be defended without asking the court to void its historic ruling.

"Obviously, I wouldn't be upset if they did,'' Herrod added.

The legislation makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion beyond the 19th week unless it's necessary to prevent a woman's death or "substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function."

Montgomery conceded during legal arguments last year in San Francisco that Supreme Court rulings generally prohibit states from interfering with a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy any time before a fetus is considered viable outside the womb. That is generally considered somewhere around the 23 or 24-week mark.

But he pointed out that the high court has allowed reasonable restrictions for legitimate reasons. And Montgomery said lawmakers had such justification for what he termed just a restriction.

One was the conclusion by the Legislature that a fetus at 20 weeks can feel pain. The other, also based on testimony, is there is an increased risk to the mother's health from an abortion at and after 20 weeks.

But Berzon said no amount of argument from Montgomery could overcome the fact that the Arizona law was not a restriction like a 24-hour waiting period but an outright ban. And that, she said, Arizona cannot do.

"Since Roe, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have repeated over and over again that viability remains the fulcrum of the balance between a pregnant woman's right to control her body and the state's interest in preventing her from undergoing an abortion,'' Berzon wrote. And because it is a ban, and not merely a limitation, "no state interest is strong enough to support it.''

In a concurring opinion, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld said there may be legal ways for the state to deal with its stated concerns.

"Were the statute limited to protecting fetuses from unnecessary infliction of excruciating pain before their death, Arizona might regulate abortions at or after 20 weeks by requiring anesthetization of the fetuses about to be killed, much as it requires anesthetization of prisoners prior to killing them when the death penalty is carried out,'' Kleinfeld wrote.

He also brushed aside the measure's stated interest in protecting a woman's health as a reason to keep her from getting an abortion at or after 20 weeks.

"People are free to do many things to their health, such as surgery to improve their quality of life but unnecessary to preserve life,'' Kleinfeld said. "There appears to be no authority for making an exception to this general liberty regarding one's own health for abortion.''

Kleinfeld acknowledged there are problems with using viability as the standard to determine when a state can and cannot ban abortion, pointing out that in 1973 that was considered 28 weeks. And he said medical science for premature babies may advance to where they are viable three or four weeks earlier than now.

But Kleinfeld said no one from the state is arguing that has happened, forcing his court to decide the legal issue based on the current state of science.

"The 9th Circuit got it exactly right,'' said Janet Creps, the attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights which challenged the law.

"When you tell somebody that they are absolutely forbidden to do something, that's a ban,'' Creps said. "Most people can pretty commonly understand when something is a ban and something is a regulation.''

Kleinfeld also said the fact that an Arizona woman wanting an abortion at or after 20 weeks can go to another state does not make the law any more unacceptable.

"I am unaware of any case in which one state might deprive someone of a constitutional right because the individual could exercise it in another state,'' he said.

Source

Court strikes down Arizona's 20-week abortion ban

By Paul Elias Associated Press Tue May 21, 2013 1:05 PM

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal court Tuesday struck down Arizona’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy absent a medical emergency.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the law violated a woman’s constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before a fetus is able to survive outside the womb. “Viability” of a fetus is generally considered to start at 24 weeks. Normal pregnancies run about 40 weeks.

Nine other states have enacted similar bans starting at 20 weeks or even earlier. Several of those bans had previously been placed on hold or struck down by other courts.

Judge Marsha Berzon, writing for the unanimous three-judge panel on the San Francisco-based court, said such bans before viability violate a long string of U.S. Supreme Court rulings starting with the seminal Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

The judge wrote that “a woman has a constitutional right to choose to terminate her pregnancy before the fetus is viable.”

Gov. Jan Brewer signed the ban into law in April 2012 after it was approved by the Republican-led Legislature. Supporters said the law was meant to protect the mother’s health and prevent fetuses from feeling pain. U.S. District Judge James Teilborg ruled it was constitutional, partly because of those concerns, but the 9th Circuit blocked the ban from going into effect until it ruled.

Lawyers representing Arizona argued that the ban wasn’t technically a law but rather a medical regulation because it allowed for doctors to perform abortions in medical emergencies. Berzon rejected that reasoning and deemed the legislation a law banning abortions before a fetus is viable.

“The challenged Arizona statute’s medical emergency exception does not transform the law from a prohibition on abortion into a regulation of abortion procedure,” Berzon wrote. “Allowing a physician to decide if abortion is medically necessary is not the same as allowing a woman to decide whether to carry her own pregnancy to term.”

Berzon was joined by judges Mary Schroeder and Andrew Kleinfeld.

Cathi Herrod, the head of a Christian social conservative group that championed the 2012 legislation, said the ruling overlooks the state’s interest in protecting maternal health,” but that the outcome wasn’t surprising because of the court’s reputation as siding with politically liberal causes.

“We look forward to an appeal to the United States Supreme Court,” said Herrod, president of the Phoenix-based Center for Arizona Policy. The group filed a legal brief in support of the Arizona law.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling is binding only in the nine Western states under the court’s jurisdiction, and Idaho is the only other state in the region with a similar ban. A federal judge earlier declared Idaho’s ban unconstitutional.

Janet Creppe, a lawyer who argued against the ban in court for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the ruling Tuesday affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion before viability.

“These laws are all unconstitutional,” she said. “This is not a close legal question at all. These laws are unconstitutional.”

Cops/FBI kill bombing suspect during questioning

If Ibragim Todashev had taken the 5th and refused to talk to the FBI he would be alive today!!!!

Any defense lawyer will tell you to ALWAYS take the 5th and refuse to answer any and all police questions.

You are NOT a criminal for taking the rights which the Founders died to give you!!!!

The problem is anything you tell the police will be used against you, and the police routinely take benign things you say and twist them around to make it look like you confessed to a crime.

Taking the Fifth and refusing to submit to police questions will prevent this from happening.

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Man tied to Boston bombing suspect killed in confrontation with FBI, others

By Sari Horwitz and Jenna Johnson, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:50 AM E-mail the writers

A Chechen man who was friends with one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was shot and killed in Orlando early Wednesday when an interview with the FBI and other police officers erupted into a violent confrontation, the FBI said.

The victim was identified as Ibragim Todashev, 27, who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev through the world of martial arts.

The FBI said in a statement that Todashev was being questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent, two Massachusetts state police officers and other law enforcement personnel when the witness turned violent. The FBI said that the agent, who was not identified, was injured and that Todashev was shot and killed.

Two federal law enforcement officials said that, during the questioning, Todashev had implicated himself and Tsarnaev in a triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., two years ago. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said Todashev brandished a knife and threatened the officers during the interview in his apartment.

Tsarnaev had been identified as a potential suspect in the triple slaying shortly after the bombings.

The FBI statement provided few details about the death in Orlando and did not address the Waltham killings. It said only that Todashev initiated a violent confrontation while being questioned. “During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries,” the statement said.

The FBI has been conducting interviews across the United States and in Russia with associates of Tsarnaev and his brother, Dzhokhar, over the past month to learn whether anyone else was associated with the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.

The interviews have focused heavily on people from the northern Caucasus area of Russia, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in 2012. The Tsarnaev family has roots in Chechnya, part of the restive region, and the FBI suspects he might have had contact with Islamic militants there last year.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police four days after the bombing. His brother was captured later that day and faces charges that could carry the death penalty. Before he was charged, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI that no one else was involved in the plot and that he and his brother had acted out of anger over the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A team of officers went to Todashev’s apartment in a residential area near Universal Studios in Orlando to interview him about his relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Khusen Taramov, who said he was a friend of Todashev, told an Orlando television station that Todashev used to live in Boston and knew Tsarnaev through marital arts circles.

“He was not radical at all,” Taramov told WESH-TV. He added that the FBI had been tracking Todashev since the Boston bombing.

At some point, Todashev moved to Florida. He was arrested for aggravated battery this month, according to police records, after getting into a fight with a man in a parking lot.

When the FBI agent and others arrived at his apartment early Wednesday, the law enforcement officials said Todashev initially was cooperative. They said he appeared on the verge of signing a confession to the killings of three people in Waltham in September 2011. They said he had implicated Tsarnaev in the homicides.

But the interview turned violent, the officials said, and Todashev went for a knife. He injured the FBI agent and was shot and killed. The FBI did not say whether he was shot by the agent or one of the other law enforcement officers.

Tsarnaev’s name has surfaced in earlier news reports about the Waltham slayings, which remain unsolved. Stephanie Guyotte, a spokeswoman for Middlesex County’s district attorney’s office, said the investigation is ongoing and refused to say whether Todashev or Tsarnaev was a suspect.

On Sept. 12, 2011, police found three men dead in a well-kept rental house on a short, quiet street in Waltham. The men were identified as Brendan Mess, 25, of Waltham, Erik Weissman, 31, of Cambridge, and Raphael Teken, 37, of Cambridge. The Boston Globe and other news outlets have reported that Tsarnaev was friends with Mess and that the two met through boxing.

A woman who lived next door to the rental house said she home that day and consoled Mess’s distraught girlfriend, who reportedly found the bodies and ran screaming outside. The neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she does not want her name associated with the gruesome slayings, said she was told that the men had their throats slashed and that their bodies were covered with pot.

“She was horrified,” the neighbor said of the girlfriend. “We didn’t hear a thing that night. . . . The fact that all of this attention has come here again is very painful.”

Authorities say that the men died early Sept. 12, but relatives of at least one of the victims insist that the men were killed Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. Sept. 11 is the date listed on the tombstone of Weissman, according to photos on an online memorial.

At the time of the killings, Waltham police issued a statement saying that detectives did not think the attack was random and that the victims probably knew their attacker or attackers. The Middlesex district attorney’s office later said in a statement that the men died of “sharp-force injuries of the neck.’’ The Globe reported that the deaths were probably drug-related.

Two friends of Teken and Weissman said they believed the deaths were connected to a massive May 2011 drug bust in nearby Watertown. The bust followed a year-long investigation by federal authorities and resulted in charges against 18 people. Weissman was a founder of a company that produced high-end glass bongs.

Julie Tate and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Source

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Many of the Founders died to give you your Fifth Amendment rights. You should always take it, like Lois Lerner did, who is a 34 year life time employee of the IRS.

Any defense attorney will tell you to NEVER answer police questions. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

One problem with talking to the police is frequently the questions are rigged, and any answer you give will be an admission of committing a crime. Even if you didn't know you were confessing to a crime.

In Arizona one trick question cops use to convict you of DUI or DWI is to ask "On a scale of 1 to 10 how intoxicated are you".

If you give the cop the answer he asked you for, which is a number between 1 and 10 you have admitted to committing the crime of drunk driving.

In Arizona the slightest bit of intoxication is consider to be drunk driving, so if you answer the question with "1", you have admitted to driving while drunk.

Of course the only answer to that question is ZERO, and the cops don't give you that as an option to answer the question with.

Source

Lois Lerner invokes Fifth Amendment in House hearing on IRS targeting

By William Branigin and Ed O’Keefe, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:46 AM E-mail the writers

The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress.

IRS controversy: Who knew what, and when

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, asked her to reconsider, to no avail, then dismissed her and her attorney from the hearing room. At that point, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) objected, saying Lerner waived her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment by making an opening statement. “She ought to stay here and answer our questions,” he declared.

Issa excused Lerner anyway “subject to recall” if the committee determines she did not properly invoke her right. He added that he might consult with the Justice Department about giving Lerner “limited immunity” to testify.

Lerner’s attorney informed the Oversight Committee Tuesday that she would invoke the Fifth Amendment, but she was required to appear anyway. She said in her opening statement that she has been a government employee for more than 34 years, moving to the IRS exempt organizations office in 2001 and becoming the director of that unit in 2006. She said she was responsible for 900 employees and the processing of more than 60,000 applications a year.

“I am very proud of the work that I have done in government,” Lerner said.

Appearing before the committee along with Lerner were Douglas Shulman, the Bush administration appointee who led the IRS during President Obama’s first term; J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration; and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin.

The House hearing was the latest in a series of Capitol Hill grillings of officials in connection with an audit by George’s office, which reported last week that it found inappropriate targeting of groups applying for tax-exempt status based on terms such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their case files.

In opening the hearing, Issa charged that George, who has been largely spared the grillings reserved for other officials in previous hearings, failed to keep Congress informed about his findings as the audit proceeded.

“We must also insist ... that we not wait 10 months to find out that there’s a there there,” Issa said. He called the delay “the greatest failing of an otherwise well-regarded inspector general.”

George reminded the committee that his office conducted an audit, not an investigation. He said the improper practices by an IRS unit in Cincinnati started in 2010 and were “not fully corrected’ until May 2012. “These practices were inappropriate,” he said. “They remained in effect for approximately 18 months.”

In questioning George, Issa said that under the law, “you have a responsibility to keep us continually and ... equally informed.”

George said there are “established procedures for conducting an audit” to ensure fairness and noted that information given to Capitol Hill “sometimes is not retained on the Hill.”

Issa retorted that the Obama administration has been known to leak information, and he charged that the IRS “maliciously leaked” the inspector general’s main finding in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the audit report.

With Lerner having refused to answer questions, lawmakers also turned their focus to Shulman, whose testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday irked some senators as he rebuffed attempts to blame him for the fiasco in which conservative groups were listed separately for special scrutiny.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House panel, criticized Shulman for not correcting his March 2012 testimony after learning that IRS employees had indeed targeted conservative groups.

“It seems to me that you would come back even if it were a phone call or a letter,” Cummings said. “I mean, common sense.”

Cummings also asked Shulman whether he was upset after learning from Steven T. Miller, who worked under Shulman at the time, that the IRS had targeted conservatives, an issue that members of Congress were concerned about.

“I felt comfort that the IG was going to look into this and report back to Congress at the appropriate time,” Shulman said.

Under questioning from Republicans, Shulman said he did not discuss the IRS targeting of conservative groups with the White House during what one GOP lawmaker said were more than 100 visits there in 2010 and 2011.

“It would not have been appropriate to have a conversation with anyone at the White House about the subject of discriminating against conservative groups,” Shulman said.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) also asked George to clarify whether officials at the Treasury Department or the White House ever directed IRS employees in the tax-exempt unit to target certain groups.

“We did pose that question,” George replied, adding that “the response was that there was no direction” of that nature from Treasury to the Cincinnati unit or from the unit’s affiliate office in Washington. He said in response to another question that his auditors “didn’t question anyone as to whether or not they’d received any direction from the White House.”

Norton urged George to look into that issue.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, Shulman said he was “saddened” by some of the agency’s actions regarding applications for tax-exempt status during his tenure.

“I certainly am not personally responsible for making a list that had inappropriate criteria on it,” Shulman said, adding: “With that said, this happened on my watch, and I very much regret that this happened on my watch.”

Asked at one point by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) whether he would apologize to Cornyn’s constituents who were unfairly targeted by the IRS, Shulman said that he was not sure what occurred specifically with Texas-based groups and announced his regret that the wrongdoing occurred on his watch.

“Well, I don’t think that qualifies as an apology,” Cornyn said.

The confrontation Tuesday was one more example of the growing acrimony surrounding congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the IRS targeting scandal as the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, his predecessor and the Treasury Department tax watchdog rejected the idea that political partisanship played any role in singling out conservative nonprofits for heightened scrutiny.

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Miller, the acting commissioner who submitted his resignation under pressure last week, sat alongside Shulman, who headed the IRS from March 2008 to November 2012, as each detailed how they first learned of the situation and the steps they took to remedy it.

Testifying for the first time since IRS officials admitted to the situation, Shulman was asked why he did not come forward before to acknowledge the improper screening that occurred before his departure.

“I did not have a full set of facts” before an IRS inspector general’s audit was made public last week, Shulman told the panel. He said he knew “sometime in the spring of 2012” that “there was a list being used” to designate groups for extra scrutiny and that the term “tea party” in a group’s name was a criterion. But he said that he did not know what other words were on the list and “didn’t know the scope and severity of this.”

“I agree that this is an issue that when someone spotted it, they should have brought it up the chain, and they didn’t,” Shulman said under questioning. “Why they didn’t, I don’t know.”

Shulman said several times that he was “dismayed” and “saddened” to read about the agency’s improper actions in the report released last week and said that he had made certain George’s office looked into the matter once he learned about it.

But Shulman refused several times to take personal responsibility for the situation or to explicitly apologize.

After Cornyn asked for an apology, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) offered Shulman another opportunity: “Are you responsible?”

“I’m deeply regretful,” Shulman said.

“Okay, never mind,” Roberts said, cutting him off. “Let’s just move on.”

Miller, as he had last week, took full responsibility for the agency’s decision to publicly apologize for the targeting by planting a question to raise the issue.

Under questioning, Miller explained that IRS leaders were aware that George was on the verge of releasing his report, so “we thought we should begin talking about this. We’d thought we’d get out an apology.”

Miller said he worked with Lerner, who leads the agency’s tax-exempt unit, to ensure that she would be asked a question about the controversy during a panel discussion at a conference.

“We wanted to reach out to the — to Hill staff about the same time [the report would] come out,” Miller said. But that strategy “did not work out,” he said. “Obviously, the entire thing was an incredibly bad idea.”

At a separate hearing held by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said he would have “advised against” the decision by the IRS to plant the question at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association in Washington instead of first notifying lawmakers.

Lew told the committee that he was not involved in the decision to plant the question but that some Treasury and IRS officials discussed the strategy in advance. He emphasized that the management of the matter was up to the IRS’s discretion.

Discussions about the IRS’s plans to apologize began in late April, according to a senior department official. That’s when IRS officials first told the Treasury that Lerner was considering making a speech in which she would make a public apology for inappropriate conduct. Also in late April, the IRS told Treasury that Miller would apologize when asked in forthcoming congressional testimony.

Treasury did not advise the IRS what it should do, the official said.

In both of these cases, Treasury discussed the potential disclosures with the White House and said that the department planned to defer to the IRS.

Finally, Treasury was told ahead of time that Lerner would be asked a question about the controversy at the American Bar Association conference.

Treasury did not tell the White House about the planned disclosure at the ABA conference.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the administration’s deliberations on the issue.

“It was very important, in our view . . . that we not take any action that could even be seen to create the appearance of intervening in an ongoing investigation like this. In this case, an independent inspector general audit. And so, of course, we did not,” Carney said.

Aaron Blake, Zachary A. Goldfarb, Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

Ron Paul slams Boston police in Marathon bombing

Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston

by Ron Paul

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

The “shelter in place” command imposed by the governor of Massachusetts was lifted before the suspect was caught. Only after this police state move was ended did the owner of the boat go outside to check on his property, and in so doing discover the suspect.

No, the suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public. He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.

As journalist Tim Carney wrote last week:

“Law enforcement in Boston used cameras to ID the bombing suspects, but not police cameras. Instead, authorities asked the public to submit all photos and videos of the finish-line area to the FBI, just in case any of them had relevant images. The surveillance videos the FBI posted online of the suspects came from private businesses that use surveillance to punish and deter crime on their property.”

Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe, but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston.

Three people were killed in Boston and that is tragic. But what of the fact that over 40 persons are killed in the United States each day, and sometimes ten persons can be killed in one city on any given weekend? These cities are not locked-down by paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.

This is unprecedented and is very dangerous. We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

Source

Ron Paul slams Boston police response to blasts

Catalina Camia, USA TODAY 3:47 p.m. EDT April 29, 2013

Former congressman Ron Paul was no fan of the police presence and manhunt tied to the Boston Marathon bombings.

The libertarian-thinking, former GOP presidential candidate slammed what he called the "military-style takeover" of Boston on April 19, the day Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick asked residents of Boston and its nearby suburbs to "shelter in place."

"The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city," Paul wrote on the website of Lew Rockwell, a libertarian writer. "This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged in connection with the blasts that left three people dead and more than 260 injured. His older brother, Tamerlan, died in a firefight with police hours before Dzhokhar was tracked down.

Paul served in Congress for 23 years, before retiring in January. The Texan was well known for criticizing what he believed was big government intrusion, in everything from tax and financial policy to national security. The scenes in Boston of police going door-to-door, closed businesses and public transportation shut down were more appropriate for "a military coup in a far off banana republic," Paul wrote.

Patrick last week defended the "shelter in place" decision. "I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time," he is quoted as saying in The Boston Globe.

Source

Ron Paul criticizes Marathon bombing response

Globe Staff

April 29, 2013

WASHINGTON — Former US representative Ron Paul has a warning for Americans after the Boston Marathon bombings, and it may come as a surprise.

The prominent libertarian says citizens should perhaps be more frightened by the police response to the attack — which killed three and injured scores more — than by the explosions themselves.

In an article called “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston,” the former Republican representative and two-time presidential candidate compares the intense April 19 search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to “scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic.”

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul writes. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

Paul argues that the Boston case sets a dangerous precedent, recounting scenes of “paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.”

“Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties,” Paul writes. “That is what happened in Boston.”

During the search, authorities encouraged residents in the Boston area to stay inside their homes.

It created surreal scenes on the Friday after the attack, with eerily quiet streets.

Governor Deval Patrick last week defended the decision to shut down the Boston area.

“I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time,” Patrick said at a news conference Friday.

— MATT VISER

<SNIP>

Politicians and cops are addicted to Federal pork???

Posted on May 17, 2013 11:27 am

First responders face cutbacks as federal funds dry up

My Turn by SCOTT SOMERS

Once again an American city has been the target of the brutality of terrorism. Our hearts go out to the victims and families affected by the Boston Marathon bombing. [If you ask me the police who flushed the Constitution rights of the people of Boston down the toilet to catch the two Boston bombers were bigger terrorists then the Boston Bombers were.]

Watching the news, we were witness to the value of a unified response by federal, state and local authorities. Videos document Boston firefighters, emergency medical personnel and local hospitals working together to treat the wounded. Pictures show FBI and ATF agents standing with Boston police to investigate the crime and apprehend those responsible.

Homeland security continues to be a highly visible, core responsibility for frontline first responders. [The only good thing about all this "homeland security" is that it make most people realized that America has turned into a police state!!!]

Federal, state and local agencies in the Valley have worked diligently to integrate communications and build regional preparedness capabilities. An example is the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. ACTIC was one of the first fusion centers to go into operation and is able to tie together intelligence agencies statewide. This partnership prepares the region to better respond to natural or human-caused disasters or terrorist events.

But critical programs face cuts amid a decline in federal preparedness efforts. [I disagree with that 100 percent. We don't need these wasteful police state pork programs any more then we need a hole in the head!!!]

Urban Area Security Initiative grants have been used by fire departments to improve capabilities to respond to hazardous-materials incidents. Some of these resources were used recently to respond to a suspicious letter containing an oily substance at the Phoenix office of Sen. Jeff Flake. [Yea, and I don't ever remember the cops using these megabucks of Federal pork to ever respond to any real threats. They usually end up blowing up a bag of dirty clothing that somebody forgot at a bus stop. And then claiming that they protected us from some imaginary terrorists]

Police have used UASI grants to increase explosive-ordinance disposal and SWAT and intelligence-analyzing capabilities. This equipment was on display when officers investigated a backpack left near 44th Street and McDowell Road. [I don't remember that incident, but if it was like all the others the cops probably ended up blowing up the backpack only to find out it wasn't a bomb, but a bag of dirty clothing.]

But Phoenix UASI decreased more than 50 percent between fiscal 2010 and 2012. [Thank God!!! We need a lot less of this wasteful government pork that has turned American into a police state]

The region is in jeopardy of losing its funding altogether as Congress continues to call for reductions in the number of regions receiving UASI grants. The president’s 2014 budget proposed consolidating state and local preparedness grants without adequate stakeholder input. [Yea, and lets hope they lose 100 percent of this wasteful police state pork!!!]

The Metropolitan Medical Response System grant was all but eliminated last year. MMRS helped strengthen medical surge capacity, mass vaccinations and treatment, decontamination capabilities and regional collaboration. [Translation, like the insane unconstitutional war on drugs, it's a jobs program for cops!!!]

In March, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell, along with council members Daniel Valenzuela of Phoenix and Sammy Chavira of Glendale and myself, met with representatives of the Department of Homeland Security to express concern about the decline in the region’s grant allocation. The issue is under review by DHS. [So it sounds like the author [Scott Sommers], along with Greg Stanton, Mark Mitchell, Daniel Valenzuela, and Sammy Chavira are part of the problem of this wasteful government spending on police state pork and all need to be booted out of office by the voters]

Homeland Security grants are needed to sustain critical capabilities, training and exercises for our first responders and community partners and to continue such successful programs as Terrorism Liaison Officers and Community Emergency Response Teams. These Phoenix regional programs were identified as “innovative best practices” in a 2009 DHS review. [Of course they were. The DHS wants as much government pork as it can get!!!]

Be assured that Valley first responders remain ever vigilant and prepared to prevent and respond to emergencies. But local responders need a committed federal partner to protect our homeland. [That's 100 percent BS. What we need to do is boot the police state politicians who are responsible for this wasteful government spending out of office!!!]

Scott Somers is a Mesa City Council member.

Andrew Walter wants to boot socialist Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema

Normally I would support an atheist running for Congress, but atheist Kyrsten Sinema is probably the worst Congressperson in Washington D.C if you ask me.

Kyrsten Sinema seems to be a socialist who never met a tax she didn't love.

While a member of the Arizona Legislator Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema seemed to be a big time supporter of the police state by introducing a law that would have gutted Arizona's medical marijuana law (Prop 203) by slapping a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Kyrsten Sinema is also a gun grabber.

Source

2 join 2014 race for Arizona Congress

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 17, 2013 10:27 PM

Two Republican candidates for Congress are getting an early jump on the midterm election.

Andrew Walter, a former Arizona State University quarterback, and Gabriela Saucedo Mercer, a Tucson activist, have officially launched campaigns for 2014.

Walter, a native of Scottsdale and a political newcomer, is competing for the metro Phoenix district held by freshman Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema. The seat is considered a toss-up.

After college, Walter, 31, spent five years in the NFL, earned a master’s in business administration from ASU, founded a small lending company and worked for MidFirst Bank.

He said his time as a team captain at ASU taught him leadership and teamwork. “That’s exactly what we need today” in Congress, he told The Arizona Republic.

Walter said he is motivated by out-of-control federal spending, a sluggish economic recovery, a poor education system and looming problems associated with implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

“There’s no time to waste on solving any of these issues,” he said. “I don’t think we have that much longer to act.”

Walter doesn’t want to be a “career politician” influenced by “special interests,” he said. When pressed, he said he would term-limit himself and vote for term limits, though he hasn’t decided what length of time a politician should serve. Walter said as far as special-interest donations to political-action committees go, if “it’s individuals or institutions that embrace an economic-freedom agenda, we have a lot to talk about.”

Other Republicans who have filed paperwork to run in District 9 are Wendy Rogers, Vernon Parker and Martin Sepulveda, who all ran last year. Rogers is the only candidate in the race who has raised much campaign cash to date.

But Sinema’s $333,000 haul from January through March has far surpassed the field. [Yes, money is what government is all about!!! And it seems like Kyrsten Sinema will tell you anything to get your vote and your cash!!!]

In southern Arizona, Saucedo Mercer will make a second run at Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat, who defeated her last cycle.

Saucedo Mercer has criticized Grijalva for his 2010 call to boycott Arizona after the state passed the tough immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070.

The district is heavily left-leaning, but Saucedo Mercer said in a written statement that Grijalva can be defeated.

“District 3 can elect a real representative to Congress who will work to bring back jobs, improve our education system, and defend our Constitutional rights,” she said. “Together, we can boycott this career politician, his fat cat political allies and special interest groups that are putting District 3 out of work.”

Kyrsten Sinema becomes a Republican???

Source

Salmon, Sinema agree on key elements of immigration reform

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 3, 2013 10:45 AM

They come from different political perspectives and sit on opposite sides of the aisle, but the Southeast Valley’s two U.S. representatives are in sync on the need for immigration reform.

Matt Salmon, the Republican veteran, and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic freshman, shared the platform Tuesday at the 2013 East Valley Statesperson’s Luncheon in Mesa presented by the East Valley Partnership.

Salmon represents Congressional District 5, which includes east Mesa, Gilbert, Queen Creek and parts of Chandler. He was re-elected in November after a 12-year absence from the U.S. House, where he served three previous terms. Sinema’s District 9 cuts a swath from north-central Phoenix through Tempe, west Mesa and Chandler into Ahwatukee.

“I think something will happen” this year on immigration reform, Salmon said, agreeing with Sinema on key elements of a plan that would improve border security while providing legal ways for foreign nationals to work here.

Sinema said legislation is likely to emerge from the House this month, but the end product will have to mesh with a Senate bill being pushed by the so-called “Gang of Eight,” which includes Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

Salmon and Sinema both said reform will help the economy, and it’s vital to provide ways for highly educated people to stay.

“One of the worst things we’re doing right now is bringing those folks here, training them, educating them, and then sending them back to their country where they are going to compete with us,” Sinema said.

Salmon agreed. “I’d like to see us operate a little more like the National Basketball Association,” Salmon said: If you can play, you can stay.

The lawmakers also talked about federal budget issues, which continue to make headlines as the so-called sequestration budget cuts slice day-to-day federal operations.

Sinema lamented the lack of bipartisanship on budget issues, but Salmon said the problems are more profound than that. [I think Kyrsten Sinema view is a) if it moves tax it b) if it doesn't move tax it too. I don't think Kyrsten Sinema ever met a tax she didn't love. Kyrsten Sinema is famous in Arizona for that 300 percent tax she tried to slap on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law Prop 203 down the toilet!!!]

It’s vital, he said, to find ways to cut the mandatory portions of the budget — now amounting to 65 percent of all federal spending. Those programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and debt service.

Salmon advocates raising the retirement age and other measures to keep future spending in check. “If we don’t, a lot of people are going to get hurt — a lot more than we talk about on the sequestration side,” he said.

Salmon and Sinema also agreed on the need to promote Arizona’s place in the inernational marketplace; Sinema said she has joined a group called the New Democratic Coalition, which includes about a quarter of House Democrats and is specifically interested in promoting global trade. [That's odd, Kyrsten Sinema seems to be your typical Democrat is is back by labor unions and wants to keep foreign workers out of the country. I suspect Kyrsten Sinema plays both sides of this issue in an attempt to grab both the Democratic and Republican votes.]

The biggest threat to that, she said, is America’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks. [Wow!!! Kyrsten Sinema seems to have flipped from an anti-war person to a big fan of the American military. Again I suspect Kyrsten Sinema will say anything to get your vote and is playing both the Democratic and Republican sides of this issue in an attempt to get both the Republican and Democratic votes]

“This is an area that is not talked about very much,” Sinema said, mostly because much of the information is classified. She added:

“But, I will tell you that the threat that our country is facing as a result of cybersecurity breaches is significant. The amount of money that we already have lost as a result of our inability to protect ourselves effectively from cybersecurity threats is literally in the trillions of dollars.”

Hackers in Russia, China and Iran are busily swiping financial data, patents and other sensitive information, Sinema said, and Congress hasn’t done nearly enough to stop them.

Kevin Rogers, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, asked the lawmakers to intervene in the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to force the Navajo Generating Station in northern Arizona to install expensive air scrubbers.

The resulting higher costs for electricity, he said, will hurt everyone in Arizona.

“I’m scared to death about the EPA proposals,” Salmon said. “It will dramatically increase the costs of water, and then the cost of everything. ...We’ve got to put our best foot forward to stop this from happening.”

Phones to be further examined for video of Bakersfield man's fatal beating

Normally this is a trivial task, but the cops probably also know how to make it a lot harder to recover the files, since they do this stuff all the time.

Kern County makes lame excuses to justify the murder of David Sal Silva

• "I cannot speculate whether they acted appropriately or not"
• "Baton strikes were used, but what I don't know ... if they ... caused death"
• Youngblood said the baton is a less lethal weapon
• Youngblood noted that no cause of death has been determined

I wonder if Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood would be making these same lame excuses if we had a video of 10 Black men beating up a cop with billy clubs???

Cops erase video of police murder in Bakersfield.

Based on my experience with crooked cops this doesn't surprise me the least bit. Every time I am stopped the police I take the 5th and refuse to answer any police questions.

Of course the cops always lie and tell me I don't have any 5th Amendment right to remain silent. And almost always the cops make up threats that bad, bad, bad things will happen to me if I don't answer their questions.

And most of the time the cops illegally search me looking for an ID, since I always refuse to them them my name.

The good news, is that even if the piggies erased the video of the Kern County sheriff's officers beating David Silva to death, frequently the file can be recovered.

Last if the police are so corrupt that they will erase the evidence that is needed to convict the 10 are so cops who beat David Silva to death, don't you think these crooked cops will also commit perjury and lie in court to convict people??? Or plant evidence to frame people???

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 21

There are various reasons you might not care about the Obama administration’s spying on journalist James Rosen and labeling him a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor” in an espionage case.

Liberals may not be particularly bothered because the targeted journalist works for Fox News. Conservatives may not be concerned because of their antipathy toward the news media generally. And the general public certainly doesn’t have much patience for journalists’ whining.

But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service. The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

Beyond that, the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.” If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?

When Rosen and I covered the Bush White House together a decade ago, I knew him as a scrappy reporter who had a fascination with Watergate trivia. He later wrote a sympathetic biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced attorney general. Now he’s learning just how abusive a Justice Department can be, from an administration that has launched more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.

My Post colleague Ann E. Marimow, who broke the Rosen story, obtained the affidavit by FBI agent Reginald Reyes seeking access to Rosen’s private e-mails. In the affidavit, Reyes stated that “there is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation” of the law against national security leaks. The affidavit detailed how the FBI had monitored Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department and tracked his various phone calls with the suspected leaker, analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

The administration snoops had spied on Rosen enough to know of his Watergate hobby: his Gmail address named for the Nixon aide who installed the secret taping system, and Rosen’s “clandestine communications plan” (a modern-day version of Bob Woodward’s fabled flowerpot) in which an e-mail containing one asterisk meant Rosen should contact Kim.

Rosen’s supposed crime? Reyes got his evidence from an e-mail from the reporter: “I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc. . . . I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses. . . . In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.”

That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.

And how did Rosen commit this crime? Kim told investigators Rosen is a “very convincing, persistent person” who “would tell me I was brilliant and it is possible I succumbed to flattery.”

Only in this Justice Department could flattery get you a prison term.

President Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters that there must be a “balance” between a free press and leaks that “can endanger the lives of men and women in uniform and other Americans serving overseas.”

True, but the 2009 reports that prompted the probe confirmed what was already conventional wisdom, that Kim Jong Un was likely to replace his father, Kim Jong Il, as North Korea’s leader, and that there were worries that North Korea would respond to new sanctions by launching a third nuclear test. As it happens, the intelligence was wrong, and Pyongyang didn’t launch another test at the time.

Carney told the White House press corps Tuesday that Obama doesn’t think “journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs” (perhaps he could remind the FBI of that), and the administration has renewed its support for a media shield law (a welcome but suspicious gesture, because the White House thwarted a previous attempt to pass the bill).

If Obama really is “a fierce defender of the First Amendment,” as his spokesman would have it, he will move quickly to fix this. Otherwise, Obama is establishing an ominous precedent for future leaders whose fondness for the First Amendment may not be so fierce.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Glendale police chief threatens to "Burn down store" of drug dealer

According to this articles Glendale assistant police chief Greg Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” of Spanky’s Smoke Shop for selling spice to his son.

If a civilian had done that he would probably be sitting in prison now. Of this piggy thinks his slap on the wrist punishment was too severe and is appealing it.

Spice, the drug in question was legal in Arizona until just recently. I don't know if spice was legal or illegal when Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” of Spanky’s Smoke Shop.

Source

Former Glendale assistant police chief says he regrets actions

By David Woodfill The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed May 22, 2013 8:27 PM

Glendale’s former assistant police chief who got demoted after accusations that he threatened a local business he thought sold drugs to his son told The Arizona Republic and 12 News Wednesday he regrets his actions, but acted as a concerned father.

Greg Dominguez was demoted one rank to commander, took a $15,000 pay cut and was suspended for a week following some sort of confrontation he had with an employee at Spanky’s Smoke Shop on Bell Road in Peoria.

The police department has disclosed few details from their internal investigation of the incident, but according to a Peoria police report, someone who worked at Spanky’s said Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” if he did not stop selling “stuff” to his son. The worker said threat was made during one of two encounters in February.

Dominguez acknowledged going to the store and using curse words, but said he doesn’t know exactly what he said other than “I asked him to stop selling to my son.”

He said he acted out of fear for his son.

He teared up as he described watching his son destroyed his health. At one point, he said he thought his son had died after he walked into the room and saw him laying perfectly still in his bed.

“Scared,” is how Dominguez described his state of mind when he decided to go into Spanky’s to confront the person he thought was selling the drug.

Dominguez said he doesn’t remember the exact date of his encounter with the employee, but said he knew his son had just gone to the store because he used a smart phone tracking application.

He never identified himself as a police officer, he said. "This was me going to try and save my son."

Dominguez said in hindsight he realized that convincing one person to stop selling his son drugs wasn’t going to help.

“I know different things now,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot about addiction, a lot about spice.”

Dominguez said he plans to stay at the Glendale Police Department and was appealing his punishment, which he said was too punitive. [That is 100 percent rubbish!!!! If a civilian had threatened to burn down the business of a police officer who committed a crime against him, the civiilan would almost certainly be convicted of a crime and be sitting for a long time in prison. Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez got a slap on the wrist for a serious felony and is now complaning that his punishment is too severe!!!! That is rubbish. Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez should be sitting in a prison cell, not running the Glendale Police Department]

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s defense plan detailed

Source

Horne’s defense plan detailed

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 23, 2013 10:17 PM

As the campaign-finance allegations against Attorney General Tom Horne hang in legal limbo, documents obtained by The Arizona Republic offer insights into the case Horne and his co-defendant would make if it goes to court.

An attorney representing Kathleen Winn, Horne’s director of community outreach, argues in the documents that allegations the two illegally coordinated campaign efforts are based on speculation. Attorney Timothy La Sota also questions investigators’ tactics, revealing they not only continued to tail Horne more than a year after the alleged violation, but also followed Winn’s attorney, Larry Debus.

Investigators’ techniques “raise questions of bias and political motives and taint this entire investigation,” La Sota wrote in a letter to the Secretary of State’s Office.

“Despite all the resources poured into this investigation, all the interviews and surveillance ... the FBI and Maricopa County Attorney’s Office have speculation and conjecture, but not hard evidence,” he wrote.

Horne and Winn last year were accused of unlawfully coordinating campaign spending during the 2010 election, when Horne was the Republican candidate for attorney general and Winn was chairwoman of Business Leaders for Arizona, an independent-expenditure committee. Both have denied wrongdoing.

After a 14-month investigation, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery accused Horne and Winn of collaborating to quickly raise more than $500,000 to run negative ads against his Democratic opponent. By law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate certain activities with independent-expenditure committees.

Montgomery pursued a civil-enforcement action, but a judge this month ruled the case could not move forward because of legal technicalities and procedural failings by the Secretary of State’s Office, which found reasonable cause exists to believe a campaign-finance violation occurred.

“While we certainly welcomed Mr. La Sota’s submission, it doesn’t change our reasonable cause determination,” said Matt Roberts, Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s spokesman. “It doesn’t sway our opinion at all.”

Montgomery declined to comment on La Sota’s letter.

A spokesman for the FBI also declined to comment.

The judge said the secretary of state must submit the case to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to determine how to proceed. The Attorney General’s Office can send the case to another law-enforcement agency or a private attorney for review, Montgomery has said.

While the case is with the Attorney General’s Office, Horne, Winn “and immediate staff such as executive assistants,” won’t have access to information, discussion, or decisions on the case, according to Horne’s spokeswoman.

In his letter to the secretary of state, La Sota says:

Despite authorities’ “exhaustive” and “expensive” investigation, they were only left with “speculation and conjecture” about coordination.

La Sota wrote that calls between Winn and Horne before the release of an attack ad against Horne’s Democratic rival were tied to a complex real-estate deal — not the ad. Horne never referred anyone to an independent campaign to make a donation, never suggested to Winn the names of people to be solicited for contributions, never spoke to anyone about contributing to an independent campaign, and never weighed in on how an independent campaign’s money should be spent.

A statute that Winn and Horne are accused of violating is unconstitutional.

La Sota argues the Arizona Revised Statute 16-905 “is blatantly unconstitutional” because contribution limits were too low, and therefore violated free speech and equal protection under the U.S. and Arizona constitutions. La Sota points out that the state Legislature this session raised contribution limits partly because “they were ripe for a free-speech challenge.”

La Sota says Montgomery, in testifying before lawmakers, blamed the number of investigations by his office on low contribution limits. An affidavit from an official with the Goldwater Institute declaring current individual contribution limits under current state statutes are unconstitutional is included with La Sota’s letter.

The FBI “came with an agenda and that was to get Tom Horne.”

La Sota questions why the FBI was involved in the investigation. Authorities have said the FBI took the case because Horne was conflicted from investigating himself. La Sota accuses the FBI of attempting to “intimidate witnesses and lie to them in order to get them to say what they wanted.” He accuses the FBI of threatening to use “the ‘Martha Stewart’ treatment”— to send them to prison for lying — to get them to cooperate.

La Sota says the FBI’s undercover surveillance of Horne was “the most unseemly part” of the investigation. “The FBI was following the Arizona Attorney General around years after alleged civil campaign finance violations had been committed, looking for any type of infraction that they might be able to pin on him,” he wrote. “What in the world did this have to do with a civil campaign finance matter?”

During that surveillance, the FBI saw Horne back a borrowed car into a Range Rover and leave without leaving a note. An FBI report states Horne did not leave a note because he was having an extramarital affair with a subordinate who was with him during the accident. Earlier this month, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge stemming from the incident and paid a $300 fine.

Democrats are trying to use Horne’s driving offense — and the FBI report accusing him of an affair — to their advantage as Horne gears up for a re-election campaign. One Democratic senator has called on lawmakers to initiate impeachment hearings against Horne, and this week, the state Democratic Party called on him to explain the circumstances surrounding the accident.

La Sota also takes issue with investigators having a mole in the Attorney General’s Office: “A one point and perhaps still to this day, the FBI had what they call a human asset apparently inside” the agency. La Sota said the mole raises questions about potential “invasions of attorney-client protected relationships to federalism concerns.”

Mexican gets 284 days in jail for possession of a pen in Arizona!!!!

Luz Ruiz Rascon a Mexican national who was working in Arizona copped a plea to possession of a forgery device to get out of Sheriff Joe's Tent City gulag.

That forgery device was the pen which she used to fill out her employment papers with.

The racist pigs and prosecutors in Maricopa County claim that despite the fact that the social security number made up by Luz Ruiz Rascon was not assigned to anyone she is still guilty of felony forgery crimes. What rubbish.

The article says that if a White person had committed the same crime they would have received at most 90 days.

Source

After Nine Months in Jail for Working Without Papers, Luz Ruiz Rascon Finally Will Go Free

By Stephen Lemons Thursday, May 23 2013

It took nine months of incarceration in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's notorious Estrella Jail, but what should have happened in August of last year, happened just recently in the case of Luz Ruiz Rascon, mother of two U.S.-citizen children, one of whom suffers from leukemia.

You may recall from my February 7 cover story, "Bill Montgomery Is No Immigration Moderate," that Rascon, 38, was arrested in an Arpaio raid on a GNC warehouse in Phoenix and charged with six class-four felonies involving identity theft and forgery.

Rascon had used a non-existent Social Security number to score work at GNC, though she didn't adopt a false identity. Moreover, for all 11 years that she'd worked at GNC, she filed tax returns using a taxpayer-identification number.

She has no prior criminal history and never had been in jail before.

But because she is undocumented and because the Maricopa County Attorney's Office intentionally overcharged her, she was held non-bondable under the dictates of Proposition 100, an amendment to the Arizona Constitution passed by voters in 2006.

On Monday May 20, after 284 days in custody, Rascon pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of possession of a forgery device in a deal with the MCAO.

The felony counts against her were dropped.

The "forgery device" in question? A pen. You know, the one she used to write the made-up Social Security number.

Before sentencing, Judge Peter Reinstein asked Rascon if she wished to address the court. She said yes, and spoke briefly.

"I would like to apologize for the harm I could have caused," Rascon explained in Spanish, via a court interpreter. "It was never my intent to hurt anybody by working."

She went on to thank the judge and the MCAO for offering the plea deal.

Judge Reinstein gave her a suspended sentence and six months unsupervised probation. She had served more than three times the usual 90 days someone with a class-four felony conviction receives in such cases.

"I don't think you hurt anyone by your actions," Reinstein told Rascon. "I'm glad the state saw fit to offer you this plea agreement. I think it's appropriate."

Afterward, a pink-handcuffed Rascon hugged Delia Salvatierra, one of the three attorneys involved with the case. (Salvatierra's co-counsel is Johnny Sinodis, and their partner in defending the undocumented is Dori Zavala.)

By the time this column went to press, Rascon had yet to be transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Once that happens, it's anticipated that ICE will release her.

Outside court, Salvatierra was pleased that her client soon would be free, but she lamented the obvious.

"I can't even say justice prevailed today," Salvatierra said. "Because she's been detained for nine months. That's a hard sentence for a woman for pre-conviction incarceration, when she didn't harm anybody."

Salvatierra praised her client's heroism in not surrendering. Initially, prosecutors wanted Rascon to plead to the lead. She refused.

If she'd copped to a felony, she would've gotten out of county sooner, but she would have faced deportation, a 10-year bar to legal re-entry and indefinite separation from her kids.

And under the current language of the Gang of Eight's immigration-reform bill, she wouldn't have been eligible for a probationary legal status, like the 11 million or 12 million other mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children who stand to benefit.

County Attorney Bill Montgomery is, in word if not in deed, an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform. He even backs a proposal that would carve out an exception in any immigration overhaul for undocumented people convicted of felonies related to identity theft and forgery.

Nevertheless, his office pursues a hard-line policy toward the undocumented, overcharging them, so as to hold them non-bondable in Arpaio's inhumane gulags, thereby coercing them into pleading to a felony that ultimately will cause their removal from the country.

Montgomery denies this, of course. But an ICE PowerPoint I got hold of earlier this year gives the lie to that denial. In it, ICE shows how to charge the undocumented to make certain their deportation. It was part of an ICE seminar for Montgomery's prosecutors at the beginning of 2012.

When I interviewed Montgomery for the cover story, he defended his prosecution of Rascon, claiming he had no choice but to charge the undocumented in the manner he does.

The fact that there was no victim in the Rascon case? Didn't matter, according to Monty.

He claimed the fake Social Security number Rascon used to work at GNC possibly could be assigned down the road to someone, and that person would be Rascon's victim.

Which is ridiculous, but the question remains, what has happened since that January interview to cause this minor dent in Montgomery's inflexible charging policy?

Sure, Salvatierra submitted what's called a deviation request in Rascon's case recently, and the plea deal was a consequence of that letter asking the prosecutor to deviate from the initial charges.

But Salvatierra had submitted a similar deviation request in February, so what gives?

A couple of things. First, since lawyers such as Salvatierra now are taking on these cases, Montgomery's prosecutors have had to start going to trial, rather than counting on the defendant to cave. This means Monty's office has begun to lose.

I've written about some of these cases. One of Rascon's fellow workers at GNC, Rafael Lavallade Gonzalez, a 70-year-old diabetic was found not guilty after a seven-day trial on felony forgery and identity-theft charges. He had spent six months in jail.

In April, Miguel Angel Morales, a worker caught up in Arpaio's raid on United Construction in Glendale, was found not guilty of similar allegations in a five-day trial. He, too, had done six months on charges that usually pull a 90-day sentence.

Also in April, Sol Zenil, received the same deal as Rascon following six months in jail, after arrest by the Arizona Department of Public Safety for working illegally at a retail store.

Zenil, 23, pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, but that was just to gain her freedom. The offer was made after the prosecutor admitted to Zenil's attorney that the Social Security number in question was legit, obtained when Zenil was much younger, and when the rules involved were much looser.

But most of the people charged with a class-four simply plead out to a felony to escape lockup in Arpaio's hoosegow.

Recently, 14 of the 23 individuals rounded up in the February raid on Sportex Apparel pleaded guilty to class-six felonies, though they weren't the sort of class-six charges that give an immigration attorney a solid chance at blocking deportation.

My colleagues in the press have been scrutinizing Monty on this issue. And some of the Hispanic organizations that Montgomery had been flirting with now want nothing to do with him.

He was denounced by the Hispanic Bar Association Los Abogados, and the civil rights group Puente demonstrated on the doorsteps of the county building where the MCAO has its offices. Children crying for their jailed mothers and grandmothers often participate.

Until Montgomery changes his policy across the board and deals with each of these cases according to its merits — handing out misdemeanors more often than not — then this issue will remain a problem for him.

I think Montgomery wants it to end. In some ways, he's a prisoner of his own right-wing rhetoric.

But if he takes out his telescope and gives the horizon a look-see, he'll glimpse a future without Arpaio, with immigration reform, and with Hispanics on the rise. That's where Monty wants to go, as long as the weight of his own actions doesn't keep him mired in the recent past.

Court - Sheriff Joe guilty of profiling Mexicans

Judge: Sheriff Arpaio’s agency engaged in racial profiling

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 24, 2013 10:06 PM

A federal judge’s ruling that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in racial profiling against Latinos could bring significant changes to the agency’s controversial approach to immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a lengthy ruling that prohibits sheriff’s deputies from using race as a factor in law-enforcement decisions, from detaining people solely for suspected immigration violations and from contacting federal immigration authorities to arrest suspected illegal immigrants who are not accused of committing state crimes.

The ruling, issued Friday afternoon — more than eight months after the final arguments were heard — brings an end to a case that started with the 2007 arrest near Cave Creek of Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a day laborer.

Snow’s ruling also provides thorough dissection of the constitutional violations that Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement efforts imposed on Latinos in Maricopa County, and it frequently contrasts Arpaio’s own news releases and statements to media with testimony he offered during the trial.

Critics of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement efforts, many of whom have for years accused the Sheriff’s Office of discriminating against Latinos, said they felt vindicated by the ruling.

“It seems like what we have always known, that racial profiling was being done, was brought out by Judge Snow; now I think we all need to look at the remedies,” said Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a longtime critic of the sheriff’s immigration policies.

“In my mind, people have been very abused in our communities,” she said. “We knew racial profiling was taking place and it was very hard to prove it.”

Arpaio’s attorney, Tim Casey, strongly denied that sheriff’s deputies ever engaged in racial profiling and promised to appeal the ruling.

Casey also took a broad view of the issue, drawing on recent court rulings, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, to conclude that the federal government is trying to send a message to local law enforcement.

“It is very clear that when it comes to people in the country unlawfully, that federal law does not want any local law-enforcement participation,” he said.

‘Nothing has changed’

Arpaio’s boast that his office would not change its approach to immigration enforcement after the federal government stripped deputies of that authority in 2009, and his subsequent decision to train deputies based on an inaccurate understanding of immigration law, made plaintiffs’ claims relevant, Snow wrote.

Had the Sheriff’s Office ceased immigration enforcement after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials removed the deputies “287(g)” authority to enforce federal immigration law, the plaintiff’s claims might have been moot, he wrote.

“As was made clear by the testimony of the sheriff and other members of the MCSO command staff at trial, nothing has changed,” Snow wrote.

The case began when Melendres, a Mexican tourist in the United States legally, was stopped outside a church in Cave Creek where day laborers were known to gather. Melendres, the passenger in a car driven by a White driver, claimed that deputies detained him for nine hours and that the detention was unlawful.

Eventually, the case grew to include complaints from two Hispanic siblings from Chicago who felt they were profiled by sheriff’s deputies, and from an assistant to former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon whose Hispanic husband claims he was detained and cited while nearby White motorists were treated differently.

The lawsuit did not seek monetary damages. Instead, plaintiffs asked for the kind of relief the Sheriff’s Office has resisted in the past: a declaration that spells out what deputies may or may not do when stopping potential suspects, and a court-appointed monitor to make sure the agency lives by those rules.

Snow gave each side 20 hours to present their case in a tightly controlled trial that took place in late July and early August last year in the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs took a three-pronged approach, using Arpaio’s own statements about undocumented immigrants along with racially insensitive requests from constituents for immigration enforcement to show what they called the sheriff’s callous attitude toward the rights of Latinos and his agency’s intention to discriminate.

Data showing that Latino drivers were more likely to be stopped during the sheriff’s immigration sweeps, and that those stops were likely to last longer, was designed to show the outcome of that intent. And statements from residents who claimed they were victims of profiling was intended to illustrate the impact of the sheriff’s policies.

Setting policy at the Sheriff’s Office

The ruling indicates that Snow, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2007, agreed with the attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union on many of their points. He frequently cites Arpaio’s statements to the media and his office’s news releases to draw conclusions about Arpaio’s point of view at the time of the immigration sweeps and work-site raids, regardless of what the sheriff said on the witness stand.

At one point, Snow says flatly that the sheriff’s testimony was incorrect when it came to the issue of whether racially insensitive e-mails from constituents motivated some of the sheriff’s saturation patrols, in which deputies would typically flood neighborhoods with high Hispanic populations.

“The evidence demonstrates that on October 4, 2007, the MCSO conducted a small-scale saturation patrol on the corner of Ellsworth and Ocotillo, based on a complaint transmitted to the MCSO on October 2 that Hispanic day laborers congregated there,” Snow wrote.

Cecillia Wang, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the ruling supports the ACLU’s claim that the direction in the Sheriff’s Office comes from Arpaio, despite deputies’ attempts during the trial to distance the six-term lawmaker from day-to-day decisions of the office.

“What he says publicly either to constituents in response to their racist e-mails, or what he writes in his book, did set the tone and set policy for the Sheriff’s Office. The evidence showed that the sheriff does set policy. His response to overly racist letters led down the road to these immigration raids,” Wang said. “This is an agency where you saw a classic instance of a law-enforcement culture that led directly to a situation where all the Latino residents of the county who the sheriff swore to protect and serve were victimized by his law enforcement.”

Snow also frequently cited data presented at the trial about the ethnicity of the suspects the sheriff arrests and detains to come to the conclusion that sheriff’s deputies used race as a factor in making law-enforcement decisions. Even if race was not the only factor, as the Sheriff’s Office has contended, the practice resulted in more Latinos being arrested during the sheriff’s sweeps and Latinos being detained longer than non-Latino counterparts during traffic stops.

The practices led to violations of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, Snow wrote.

Snow used the data provided to support his skeptical view that sheriff’s deputies actually engaged in a “zero tolerance” policy requiring them to arrest anyone who violated the law during patrols.

Several deputies testified that bad drivers are so prevalent in Maricopa County it is easy to find moving violations to make traffic stops. [Yea, and even if you aren't a bad drive they will make something up - Look he is weaving 2 nano inches every 2 miles.]

“To accept Deputy (Michael) Kike’s testimony in its entirety would mean that Deputy Kikes spent at least four days on traffic patrol in an environment where so many people commit traffic or equipment infractions it would be impossible to stop them all,” Snow wrote. “And all of that resulted in five arrests over four days, all of which just happened to be of Hispanic persons who were in the country without authorization.”

Monitoring still a sticky issue

The most immediate and visible effect of Snow’s ruling could be his injunction preventing sheriff’s deputies from contacting ICE when they have detained suspected undocumented immigrants who are not accused of violating a state law.

After deputies lost their federal-immigration authority, the Sheriff’s Office enacted a policy that authorized deputies to contact ICE’s law-enforcement agency response team whenever they encounter such immigrants.

The Sheriff’s Office has not had a formal saturation patrol in years, but the agency continues to engage in work-site raids looking for identity theft and fraud suspects. Casey, Arpaio’s attorney, said it was too early to tell what Snow’s ruling would do to those operations.

The stickier issue might come with the role of a court-appointed monitor to ensure the ruling is properly enacted: Arpaio flatly refused to consider the idea in an effort to resolve a racial-profiling complaint the U.S. Justice Department brought against the Sheriff’s Office. That case hasn’t been resolved. [F*** a court monitor. Sheriff Joe needs to be removed from the job and placed in prison for violating our rights!!!]

Casey indicated Arpaio’s feelings have not changed. [Arpaio is a corrupt racist cop who probably will never change]

“I don’t know how there can be a monitor on a constitutionally elected representative,” Casey said. “It will supplant the sheriff’s authority.” [Again, don't monitor Sheriff Joe, put him in prison where he belongs!!!]

Wang declined to provide details on what the ACLU will ask for, but said some oversight would be necessary to correct problems the federal court identified.

Snow set a hearing for mid-June to determine how the Sheriff’s Office will ensure it is adhering to the court’s ruling.

“When you’ve got an agency that is so deeply infected from the top with both a culture and a policy that results in this type of unconstitutional conduct, you need to have concrete provisions to ensure we uproot the problem,” Wang said.

But future hearings have no bearing on the significance of Friday’s ruling, Wang added.

“I want people in the county to know that this is an immediate and permanent injunction,” she said. “Anyone in the county who is discriminated against can immediately go into court and seek relief.”

And if that means more litigation, and more costs to taxpayers, Wilcox, the county supervisor, said the county would have to do whatever is necessary. [Mary "Bullet in the Butt" Rose Wilcox is also corrupt and just as bad as Sheriff Joe. She voted to steal a billion or so for that worthless Bank One Ball Park. Google Larry Naman]

“I hope the county is not having to suffer monetarily because of all this,” Wilcox said. “But whatever it takes to right it, we are going to have to bite the bullet and do what it takes.”

Judge: Arpaio's office systematically profiles Latinos

Judge: Arpaio's office systematically profiles Latinos

Posted: Friday, May 24, 2013 5:18 pm | Updated: 7:19 pm, Fri May 24, 2013.

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 4 comments

A federal judge on Friday found the department run by the self-professed "toughest sheriff in America'' was guilty of racial profiling and ordered the agency's practices permanently halted.

In a 140-page ruling, Judge Murray Snow said members of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, under the direction of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, were detaining individuals they believed to be in this country illegally without some other reason to arrest them for violating any state laws. Snow said that continued to occur even after the Department of Homeland Security revoked the MCSO's authority to identify and detain those not in the country legally.

RELATED: "Reasonable Doubt" -- The East Valley Tribune's five-part series investigating the hidden costs of the MCSO's immigration enforcement efforts... winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting [See this URL]

"In some instances these policies result in prolonging the traffic stop beyond the time necessary to resolve the issue that initially justified the stop,'' Snow wrote. And he said that, absent some reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, holding people longer than necessary violates their constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Snow said that entitled Hispanic individuals who sued to an injunction permanently barring the sheriff's department from using Hispanic ancestry or race to determine whether to stop a vehicle. It also prohibits deputies from detaining or arresting Latino vehicle occupants on a belief that they are in this country illegally if race is the only factor they have.

The order also bars the agency from detaining Latino occupants of vehicles stopped for traffic violations any longer than necessary to process the citation unless they have "reasonable suspicion'' that any are committing a federal or state crime.

Arpaio told Capitol Media Services he does not believe his agency engages in racial profiling.

"That's why we're going to appeal it,'' he said.

Byt Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said the ruling confirms the allegations that Latinos have been "terrorized'' by MCSO deputies and "forced to endure years of racial harassment and abuse.'' And Pochoda, in a prepared statement, said all that can be laid at the feet of "Arpaio's proven willingness to seek political gain at the expense of public safety and constitutional guarantees.''

Snow said that, at least on paper, the instructions to deputies were that vehicles were not to be stopped based on the race of any subject in a vehicle.

But he said evidence painted a somewhat different picture.

"While officers were prohibited from using race as the only basis to undertake a law enforcement investigation, they were allowed as a matter of policy and instruction to consider race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions in the context of immigration enforcement,'' the judge wrote.

Snow reached his ruling after reviewing years of crime prevention "saturation patrols'' by the department. He said these were far from neutral.

"The MCSO almost always scheduled its day labor and small-scale saturation patrols where Latino day laborers congregated,'' he said. "The same is true for a considerable number of its large-scale saturation patrols.''

And Snow said it is clear that the purpose of these patrols was to enforce immigration laws, citing the news releases issued by the agency's public relations department.

"These news releases either emphasized that the patrols' purpose was immigration enforcement, or prominently featured the number of unauthorized aliens arrested during such operations,'' Snow said. "Most of the time, the reports ignored any other arrests that took place.''

Snow also said the saturation operations were just a pretext to stop vehicles with people who may be in this country illegally.

"During saturation patrols, participating deputies conducted many stops for minor violations of the traffic code, including minor equipment violations,'' the judge said. "This departments from MCSO's traffic enforcement priorities during regular patrols.''

And Snow said that, generally speaking, deputies "had no difficulty in finding a basis to stop any vehicle they wished for a traffic infraction.''

Arpaio’s fantasy ends here

Arpaio’s fantasy ends here

The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 24, 2013 6:56 PM

From the beginning, this racial-profiling case clearly had legs.

It was brought against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio by people of Hispanic ancestry with real-life stories to tell.

By Americans from Chicago. By Mexican citizens with a perfectly legitimate right to be in the United States. By people of a darker hue who suffered the indignity of seeing lighter-hued people in the same car treated far, far more kindly by Arpaio’s deputies.

All of those plaintiffs, according to U.S. District Judge Murray Snow, told the same story with clarity: They were targeted in the course of sweeps by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office solely because they were Latino.

Snow ruled on Friday, nearly eight months after the seven-day trial, that Arpaio’s department had engaged in forbidden racial profiling.

The case parallels the still-pending federal case against Arpaio brought by the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights. But while that case — led by President Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Labor, Thomas Perez — appears to rest heavily on expert testimony and statistical analysis, this case stands on evidence closer to the ground.

That evidence included Sheriff Arpaio’s own words.

In addition to weighing the strong, personal stories related by the plaintiffs, Judge Snow also considered Arpaio’s often intemperate observations about his rationale for conducting so-called “crime sweeps” in neighborhoods that just happened to be largely Hispanic.

Hubris and ego have long been hallmarks of America’s Toughest Sheriff. His snarky, smirking, contempt-laden denials that his sweeps profiled Hispanics always pushed the margins of believability. Now, a federal judge has called him on it.

The ruling will be appealed. That was guaranteed, regardless of which way the judge ruled. But Snow’s order that the Sheriff’s Office halt its practice of using Hispanic ancestry as a reason for stopping drivers is only the beginning. In addition to the Justice Department case, Snow indicated that still more remedies may follow his injunction against Arpaio’s practices.

The motivation behind Arpaio’s obnoxious sweeps can be traced to a specific incident in 2005, which constituted a political epiphany for the image-conscious sheriff. He saw the public reaction — outrage — when a young veteran was arrested for holding a group of suspected illegal aliens at gunpoint.

From that moment forward, he saw political gold in transforming himself into America’s Toughest Immigration Warrior.

Judge Snow’s decision is evidence that Arpaio’s gold fantasy is finally turning back into lead.

The rise of the fourth branch of government

And at the same time these members of Congress who are doling out pork and cash can deny giving special treatment to the people who gave them campaign contributions by saying "I didn't write those laws. Those laws were created by some unnamed federal bureaucrat in some unnamed federal agency. I am shocked at how those unnamed, unaccountable bureaucrats are wasting out tax dollars [but of course they never will pass any laws to stop it, because they agree with those unnamed, unaccountable bureaucrats who are helping them rob us taxpayers blind]"

Government also frequently works like this at the state, county and city levels too. When elected officials can blame unelected bureaucrats for their decisions it makes it a lot easier for them to rob us blind and get reelected at the same time.

Source

The rise of the fourth branch of government

By Jonathan Turley, Published: May 24 E-mail the writer

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under administrative charges.

The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S. citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.

Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference.

Some agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the independence of the agency.

It’s a small percentage of agency matters that rise to the level of presidential notice. The rest remain the sole concern of agency discretion.

As the power of the fourth branch has grown, conflicts between the other branches have become more acute. There is no better example than the fights over presidential appointments.

Wielding its power to confirm, block or deny nominees is one of the few remaining ways Congress can influence agency policy and get a window into agency activity. Nominations now commonly trigger congressional demands for explanations of agencies’ decisions and disclosures of their documents. And that commonly leads to standoffs with the White House.

Take the fight over Richard Cordray, nominated to serve as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray is highly qualified, but Republican senators oppose the independence of the new bureau and have questions about its jurisdiction and funding. After those senators repeatedly blocked the nomination, Obama used a congressional break in January to make a recess appointment. Since then, two federal appeals courts have ruled that Obama’s recess appointments violated the Constitution and usurped congressional authority. While the fight continues in the Senate, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such conflicts as products of our dysfunctional, partisan times. Today’s political divisions are mild compared with those in the early republic, as when President Thomas Jefferson described his predecessor’s tenure as “the reign of the witches.” Rather, today’s confrontations reflect the serious imbalance in the system.

The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is generally perfunctory and dismissive.

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

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Arizona sheriff illegally used racial profiling, judge rules

Arizona sheriff illegally used racial profiling, judge rules

By Michael Mello, Los Angeles Times

May 24, 2013, 11:17 p.m.

TUCSON — A federal judge has ruled that the immigration enforcement policies of the man who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff" violated the Constitution by using racial profiling.

For years, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has ordered his deputies to detain people they suspect of residing in the country illegally and to hold them for federal authorities.

The 142-page ruling issued Friday by Judge G. Murray Snow came as part of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Latino plaintiffs who asserted that race was a major factor in initiating immigration enforcement stops.

Snow wrote that the sheriff's practices did in fact rely heavily on race, violating the Constitution's 4th and 14th amendments. The 4th Amendment guards against unreasonable search and seizure; the 14th Amendment was created to cement the rights of U.S. citizens.

Attorney Tim Casey, who represents the Sheriff's Office, said the agency would comply with the judge's order but pursue an appeal.

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office "is disappointed in the decision reached today," Casey said. "The position was and always has been that race is not used to make law enforcement decisions."

He also suggested that if there were problems, they arose from training deputies received from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency. "There was some bad training," he said.

ICE officials could not immediately be reached for comment Friday evening.

Maricopa County is home to Arizona's biggest city, Phoenix, and has significant Latino and immigrant populations.

In his ruling, Snow took issue with many of the six-term sheriff's actions. The judge noted that deputies frequented places where day laborers gather. In four day-labor sweeps he cited, none of the 35 people arrested was detained for violation of state or local laws, and all were passengers in vehicles, not drivers.

Snow issued an order immediately and permanently barring the Sheriff's Office from detaining or arresting Latinos or stopping Latinos in vehicles simply because of a suspicion they may be in the country illegally.

Snow noted that at one time the federal Department of Homeland Security — which oversees enforcement of immigration laws — had authorized the Sheriff's Office to use race as a factor in determining who should be detained. However, Homeland Security officials have since retracted that right, an act that formed the basis for most of Snow's decision.

Friday's ruling was cheered by immigrant rights activists.

"Today's decision vindicates the rights of Latinos in Maricopa County who've been terrorized by discriminatory [Sheriff's Office] practices and have had their communities torn apart," Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said in a statement. "The court recognized that racial profiling within the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is a pervasive and widespread problem that can only be addressed through substantive, meaningful changes to eradicate this egregious practice and begin rebuilding public trust."

nation@latimes.com

Judge rules against 'America's toughest sheriff' in racial profiling lawsuit

Judge rules against 'America's toughest sheriff' in racial profiling lawsuit

Tim Gaynor and David Schwartz Reuters

10:35 a.m. CDT, May 25, 2013

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers in his crackdown on illegal immigration, a federal judge found on Friday, and ordered him to stop using race as a factor in law enforcement decisions.

The ruling against the Maricopa County sheriff came in response to a class-action lawsuit brought by Hispanic drivers that tested whether police can target illegal immigrants without racially profiling U.S. citizens and legal residents of Hispanic origin.

U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow ruled that the sheriff's policies violated the drivers' constitutional rights and ordered Arpaio's office to cease using race or ancestry as a grounds to stop, detain or hold occupants of vehicles - some of them in crime sweeps dubbed "saturation patrols."

"The great weight of the evidence is that all types of saturation patrols at issue in this case incorporated race as a consideration into their operations," Snow said in a written ruling.

He added that race had factored into which vehicles the deputies decided to stop, and into who they decided to investigate for immigration violations.

The lawsuit contended that Arpaio, who styles himself "America's toughest sheriff," and his officers violated the constitutional rights of both U.S. citizens and legal immigrants alike in their zeal to crack down on people they believe to be in the country illegally.

The ruling came days after a U.S. Senate panel approved a landmark comprehensive immigration legislation that would usher in the biggest changes in immigration policy in a generation if passed by Congress.

The bill would put 11 million immigrants without legal status on a 13-year path to citizenship while further strengthening security along the porous southwestern border with Mexico.

Arpaio declined to comment on the ruling. An attorney representing the sheriff's office said his clients were "deeply disappointed by the ruling" and would lodge an appeal.

"The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has always held the position that they never have used race and never will use race in making a law enforcement decision," attorney Tim Casey told Reuters.

"We do disagree with the findings and my clients do intend to appeal, but at the same time ... we will work with the court and with the opposing counsel to comply fully with the letter and the spirit of this order," he added.

'ILLEGAL AND PLAIN UN-AMERICAN'

Cecillia Wang, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants' Rights Project and plaintiffs' counsel, called the judge's ruling "an important victory that will resound far beyond Maricopa County."

"Singling people out for traffic stops and detentions simply because they're Latino is illegal and just plain un-American," Wang said after the ruling was made public.

"Let this be a warning to anyone who hides behind a badge to wage their own private campaign against Latinos or immigrants that there is no exception in the Constitution for violating people's rights in immigration enforcement."

During testimony in the non-jury trial last year, Arpaio said he was against racial profiling and denied his office arrested people because of the color of their skin.

The sheriff, who won re-election to a sixth term in November, has been a lightning rod for controversy over his aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in the state, which borders Mexico, as well as an investigation into the validity of President Barack Obama's U.S. birth certificate.

The lawsuit was brought against Arpaio and his office on behalf of five Hispanic drivers who said they had been stopped by deputies because of their ethnicity.

The plaintiffs, which include the Somos America immigrants' rights coalition and all Latino drivers stopped by the sheriff's office since 2007, were seeking corrective action but not monetary damages.

Arpaio has been the subject of other probes and lawsuits. In August, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona said it had closed a criminal investigation into accusations of financial misconduct by Arpaio, and it declined to bring charges.

A separate U.S. Justice Department investigation and lawsuit relating to accusations of civil rights abuses by Arpaio's office is ongoing.

Arizona has been at the heart of a bitter national debate over immigration since Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed a 2010 crackdown on illegal immigration.

The federal government challenged the crackdown in court and said the U.S. Constitution gives it sole authority over immigration policy. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has allowed to stand the part of the law permitting police to question people they stop about their immigration status.

Snow scheduled a hearing in the case for June 14 at 9:30 a.m. at the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Federal Courthouse in Phoenix.

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor and David Schwartz; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Eric Walsh, Toni Reinhold)

Judge Finds Violations of Rights by Sheriff Joe

Judge Finds Violations of Rights by Sheriff

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: May 24, 2013

PHOENIX — A federal judge ruled on Friday that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies had violated the constitutional rights of Latinos by targeting them during raids and traffic stops here and throughout Maricopa County.

With his ruling, Judge G. Murray Snow of United States District Court delivered the most decisive defeat so far to Sheriff Arpaio, who has come to symbolize Arizona’s strict approach to immigration enforcement by making it the leading mission for many of the 800 deputies under his command at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

At 142 pages, the decision is peppered with stinging criticism of the policies and practices espoused by Sheriff Arpaio, who Judge Snow said had turned much of his focus to arresting immigrants who were in the country illegally, in most cases civil violations, at the expense of fighting crimes.

He said the sheriff relied on racial profiling and illegal detentions to target Latinos, using their ethnicity as the main basis for suspecting they were in the country illegally. Many of the people targeted were American citizens or legal residents.

“In an immigration enforcement context,” Judge Snow ruled, the sheriff’s office “did not believe that it constituted racial profiling to consider race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions.” In fact, he said its plans and policies confirmed that, “in the context of immigration enforcement,” deputies “could consider race as one factor among others.”

The ruling prohibits the sheriff’s office from using “race or Latino ancestry” as a factor in deciding to stop any vehicle with Latino occupants, or as a factor in deciding whether they may be in the country without authorization.

It also prohibits deputies from reporting a vehicle’s Latino occupants to federal immigration authorities or detaining, holding or arresting them, unless there is more than just a “reasonable belief” that they are in the country illegally. To detain them, the ruling said, the deputies must also have reasonable suspicion that the occupants are violating the state’s human-trafficking and employment laws or committing other crimes.

Tim Casey, a lawyer for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said the office intended to appeal, but in the meantime it would “comply with the letter and spirit of the court’s decision.”

He said the office’s position is that it “has never used race and never will use race to make any law enforcement decision.”

The office relied on training from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, he said, adding, “It’s obvious it received bad training from the federal government.”

The ruling is a result of a federal civil trial last summer in which Sheriff Arpaio and his office were accused in a class-action lawsuit of singling out Latinos for stops, questioning and detention. It says deputies considered the prevalence of Latinos when deciding where to carry out enforcement operations, in many cases in response to complaints based solely on assumptions that Latinos or “Mexicans,” as some complainants put it, were necessarily illegal immigrants.

Regardless of the type of enforcement — workplace raids, traffic stops or targeted patrols in areas frequented by day laborers — Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies were required to keep track of the number of people arrested on federal immigration violations, as well as state charges, Judge Snow said. In news releases, Sheriff Arpaio’s office often referred to the operations as integral parts of the sheriff’s “illegal immigrant stance.”

Cecillia Wang, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit, said, “Let this be a warning to anyone who hides behind a badge to wage their own private campaign against Latinos or immigrants that there is no exception in the Constitution for violating people’s rights in immigration enforcement.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from New York

Judge: Ariz. sheriff's office profiles Latinos

Judge: Ariz. sheriff's office profiles Latinos

By JACQUES BILLEAUD and WALTER BERRY Associated Press

Posted: 05/25/2013 01:28:35 AM PDT

PHOENIX—A federal judge has ruled that the office of America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff systematically singled out Latinos in its trademark immigration patrols, marking the first finding by a court that the agency racially profiles people.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Murray Snow in Phoenix backs up years of allegations from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's critics who say his officers violate the constitutional rights of Latinos in relying on race in their immigration enforcement.

Snow, whose ruling Friday came more than eight months after a seven-day, non-jury trial, also ruled Arpaio's deputies unreasonably prolonged the detentions of people who were pulled over.

The ruling marks a thorough repudiation of the immigration patrols that made Arpaio a national political figure, and it represents a victory for those who pushed the lawsuit.

"For too long the sheriff has been victimizing the people he's meant to serve with his discriminatory policy," said Cecillia D. Wang, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Right Project. "Today we're seeing justice for everyone in the county."

Monetary damages weren't sought in the lawsuit but rather a declaration that Arpaio's office engages in racial profiling and an order that requires it to make policy changes.

Stanley Young, the lead lawyer who argued the case against Arpaio, said Snow set a hearing for June 14 where he will hear from the two sides on how to make sure the orders in the ruling are carried out.

The sheriff, who has repeatedly denied the allegations, won't face jail time as a result of Friday's ruling.

Tim Casey, Arapio's lead attorney in the case, said an appeal was planned in the next 30 days.

"In the meantime, we will meet with the court and comply with the letter and spirit of the order," he said.

A small group of Latinos alleged in their lawsuit that Arpaio's deputies pulled over some vehicles only to make immigration status checks. The group asked Snow to issue injunctions barring the sheriff's office from discriminatory policing and the judge ruled that more remedies could be ordered in the future.

The group also accused the sheriff of ordering some immigration patrols not based on reports of crime but rather on letters and emails from Arizonans who complained about people with dark skin congregating in an area or speaking Spanish. The group's attorneys noted Arpaio sent thank-you notes to some who wrote the complaints.

The sheriff said his deputies only stop people when they think a crime has been committed and that he wasn't the person who picked the location of the patrols. His lawyers said there was nothing wrong with the thank-you notes.

Young, the group's lawyer, said he was still reading the decision Friday but noted it contained "very detailed findings of discriminatory intent and effect."

Casey said that MCSO's position "is that it has never used race and will never use race in its law-enforcement decisions." He added the sheriff's office relied on "bad training" from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A call to ICE officials in Phoenix for comment wasn't immediately returned Friday evening.

Arpaio, who turns 81 next month, was elected in November to his sixth consecutive term as sheriff in Arizona's most populous county.

Known for jailing inmates in tents and making prisoners wear pink underwear, Arpaio started doing immigration enforcement in 2006 amid Arizona voter frustration with the state's role as the nation's busiest illegal entryway.

Snow wrote that "in the absence of further facts that would give rise to reasonable suspicion or probable cause that a violation of either federal criminal law or applicable state law is occurring," Arpaio's office now is enjoined from enforcing its policy "on checking the immigration status of people detained without state charges, using Hispanic ancestry or race as any factor in making law enforcement decisions pertaining to whether a person is authorized to be in the country, and unconstitutionally lengthening stops."

Snow added "the evidence introduced at trial establishes that, in the past, the MCSO has aggressively protected its right to engage in immigration and immigration-related enforcement operations even when it had no accurate legal basis for doing so."

The trial that ended Aug. 2 focused on Latinos who were stopped during both routine traffic patrols and special immigration patrols known as "sweeps."

During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city—in some cases, heavily Latino areas—over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Immigrants who were in the country illegally accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio's office.

At trial, plaintiffs' lawyers drew testimony from witnesses who broke down in tears as they described encounters with authorities, saying they were pulled over because they were Hispanic and officers wanted to check their immigration status, not because they had committed an infraction. The sheriff's attorneys disputed such characterizations, typically working to show that officers had probable cause to stop the drivers based on a traffic violation.

Plaintiffs' lawyers also presented statistics to show Latinos are more likely to be stopped on days of immigration patrols and showed emails containing offensive jokes about people of Mexican heritage that were circulated among sheriff's department employees, including a supervisor in Arpaio's immigrant smuggling squad.

Defense lawyers disputed the statistical findings and said officers who circulated offensive jokes were disciplined. They also denied the complaint letters prompted patrols with a discriminatory motive.

The ruling used Arpaio's own words in interviews, news conferences and press releases against him as he trumpeted his efforts in cracking down on immigrants. When it came to making traffic stops, Arpaio said in 2007 that deputies are not bound by state laws in finding a reason to stop immigrants.

"Ours is an operation, whether it's the state law or the federal, to go after illegals, not the crime first, that they happen to be illegals," the ruling quoted Arpaio as saying. "My program, my philosophy is a pure program. You go after illegals. I'm not afraid to say that. And you go after them and you lock them up."

Some immigrant traffic stops were made "purely on the observation of the undercover officers that the vehicles had picked up Hispanic day laborers from sites where Latino day laborers were known to gather," the ruling said.

The judge also said the sheriff's office declared on many occasions that racial profiling is strictly prohibited and not tolerated, while witnesses said it was appropriate to consider race as a factor in rounding up immigrants.

"This is a blow to" the sheriff's office, said David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studied racial profiling and wrote a book on the subject.

Arpaio's lawyers will have "an uphill climb" in the appeals process because of all "the gross statistical evidence," he said.

NYPD street stops called profiling, big change sought

The legal definition of arrest is when the police detain a person for any reason and that person is not free to leave or go. If a cop stops you to write a traffic ticket under this definition you have been arrested while the cop wrote you the traffic ticket.

I was taught that it was illegal for the police to detain a person or arrest a person unless they had either "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion".

While lawyers and judges can argue for weeks about what these terms mean in a nutshell "probable cause" means a cop saw you commit a crime and thus can arrest or detain you for that crime.

"Reasonable suspicion" means that you match the description of a person who just committed a crime and a cop can arrest or detain you to determine if you are the person that committed the crime.

So with that in mind it is illegal for the police to stop and detain a person simply because they look suspicious.

My understanding of the Fourth Amendment is that it is illegal for the police to search anyone, unless the the police have a search warrant, or the person is arrested for a crime.

There is one exception to that from the case of Terry v Ohio, in which the Supreme Court said it is legal for the police to give a person a pat down search on their outer garments looking for weapons, if the police want to question the person.

Source

NYPD street stops called profiling, big change sought

By Colleen Long Associated Press Sat May 25, 2013 9:08 AM

NEW YORK — It once was an accepted tactic as old as policing itself and, according to the New York Police Department, a key to the city’s dramatic drop in crime: patrol officers stopping young men on the street to see if they’re up to no good. [What what I have read all of this would be illegal in Arizona]

But thanks to rising concerns about racial profiling, a lawsuit and a 10-week trial with testimony ending May 20, the tool the NYPD calls stop, question and frisk has been scrutinized like never before. A judge could rule to change the way the department makes the stops to better protect civil rights. But skeptics warn the changes could come with a price. [Yea, we could go from being a police state in NYC to a free country!]

“It’s hard to see how a cop will be able to leave the station house without some potential adverse impact on his personnel folder if it all goes into effect,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The public may suffer, too — what officer would want to engage someone on the street if he’s looking over his shoulder all the time?” [If a police officer is afraid of someone looking over his shoulder he is probably doing something illegal and shouldn't be a police officer]

The men who sued the NYPD because they believe they were stopped solely for being minorities want across-the-board reforms that include more supervision from department superiors, more comprehensive training and stricter discipline for officers who make illegal stops. They also want a court-appointed monitor to oversee the reforms. [I think that is 100 percent BS. The police should be forbidden from stopping anybody, unless the person is committing a crime.]

Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminology professor and expert in police policy working pro bono for the plaintiffs, proposed a database where information on an officer — complaints, days on patrol, stop and frisks, and arrests made — would be collected and analyzed to catch potential problem officers. Right now there is no centralized database. [If a police officer is violating somebody's constitutional rights he should be fired, not entered in some silly database.]

He said sergeants and other supervisors must review officer conduct, not solely their enforcement numbers, and they should be reviewing officers quarterly, not annually. He suggested more training for officers on racial profiling and stop and frisk at the police academy and on the job.

Community input on how to implement the changes through phone surveys, mailings and calls to people who have reported incidents with police should be included.

“A comprehensive approach is absolutely essential because if any one of the components is absent or weak and ineffective, the entire accountability system begins to collapse,” Walker said.

The reforms are necessary, lawyers say, because they believe the policy has created a culture of fear in minority communities. The tactic has existed in some form for decades, but the volume of stops increased dramatically under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and about 5 million stop and frisks have been made during the past decade.

U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin is not being asked to ban the tactic, which has already been found to be legal. Her options are to leave it as is or order reforms, which appear likely since she’s ruled previously on related cases that changes are needed. [I think she should ban the activity! Period!!!]

Mid-trial, city lawmakers said they’d reached broad agreement on a proposal to create an inspector general to oversee the department in part because of stop and frisk and a series of stories by The Associated Press on the monitoring of Muslims. The inspector general would function on a macro level weighing in on policy, while the court monitor would enforce nuts-and-bolts changes related to the stop-and-frisk policy.

But morale is already low among the rank-and-file and such changes might make it worse for them, O’Donnell said. [Any cop who's moral is low because they are not allowed to stop and search anybody they want to stop should be fired!!!]

“This will all rain down on the cops,” he said. “The mayor is bullet proof. All the policy makers who formulate or acquiesce to this strategy will be held harmless.”

But O’Donnell, and other experts not related to the case, say some reforms are necessary.

“A court has recognized that while stops and frisk are a legal tactic, what we have going on here is way too much of a good thing,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who is an expert on street stops.

“Crime has gone down, down, down and especially in minority communities. And still there is a fair degree of alienation and anger. What is happening is that they’re glad there’s less crime than there used to be, but does it have to be done like this? Is there another way?” [If you ask me I would rather live with more crime, then live in a police state where I am shaken down by police criminals]

The city’s expert witness, James Stewart, the director for the Law Enforcement and Justice Policy at the Center for Naval Analysis, said the department already does much of what the lawsuit seeks. Officers receive extensive training at the academy, a training officer is assigned to police precincts and the department has beefed up safeguards to the stop-and-frisk policy.

To add unnecessary oversight would create additional work and heap more stress on officers who perform an already difficult, dangerous job, the city experts said. Stewart referred to cameras worn by officers in another city, and the judge seized on it, wondering whether it should be used in the NYPD on an experimental basis. [That's 100 percent BS. From what I have read most of this stop and frisk nonsense is done to find people who have marijuana and are certainly not dangerous criminals]

“I’m intrigued by it,” Scheindlin said. “It seems to me it would solve a lot of problems.”

Police and city officials question why — in a city that has seen a precipitous drop in crime — they’re under fire. [Duh!!! Because the police are now criminals who are terrorizing the people they pretend to protect!!!]

“The attacks most often come from those who play no constructive role in keeping our city safe, but rather view their jobs as pointing fingers from the steps of City Hall,” Bloomberg said in a recent speech to police. “Some of them scream that they know better than you how to run the department.” [No these attacks come from people who are tired of living in a police state and would like to return to a normal world where we are assumed innocent until proven guilty, not the current NYC police state of being guilty until you prove you are innocent]

Sex-offender data is used to collect money and intimidate

I have always disliked the governments requirement that sex offenders are required to register with the government and have their personal information placed in online databases that anybody can view on the internet.

I think the governments intent is to humiliate, belittle and intimidate the alleged sex offenders and it doesn't serve any legitimate function of protecting public.

Last the term "sex offender" is misleading. If you get arrested for taking a leak in an alley under Arizona's laws you are considered a "sex offender" and required to register under this stupid law.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio - We don't racially profile Mexicans

Game and Fish cop embezzles $13,600

Source

DPS inquiry: Game and Fish official stole agency funds

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Mon May 27, 2013 10:50 PM

A former law-enforcement boss at the Arizona Game and Fish Department embezzled thousands of dollars from an undercover account set up to catch wildlife poachers and should be charged with felony theft, a state police investigation concludes.

The Department of Public Safety report alleges that John G. Romero, who resigned while under investigation in early February, set up a covert bank account using his old undercover name and siphoned public money for three years before it was detected.

Investigative findings, including a request for prosecution, were submitted to Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne more than two months ago. No charges have been filed to date, and a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office said she could not comment.

Romero, who could not be reached, told investigators he did not use funds for personal expenses, according to the report. But he admitted a failure to maintain records or to get payments approved, the report says.

Gary Hovatter, special assistant to the Game and Fish director, said the 22-year officer retired with full benefits.

Hovatter said a claim may be filed for recovery of the cash. He also said the matter was referred to the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, which regulates law-enforcement officers and is empowered to withdraw certification.

According to the DPS report, Game and Fish officials requested an independent probe in October after an audit of the Operation Game Thief program, designed to catch wildlife poachers. Records showed cash withdrawals by an unknown person named Greg D. Gomez. Romero had been given that pseudonym, with a matching driver’s license and Social Security card, years earlier when he worked undercover in the department’s Special Operations Unit.

Game and Fish officials told DPS investigators that the fake identity was canceled in 2000 and that Romero had not worked undercover since 2004. They said Romero never received permission to resurrect the identity or create a covert bank account and never filed expense reports concerning the payouts.

The DPS report says at least $13,600 went into the “Gomez” account, which was linked to Romero’s home address. Nearly all that money was withdrawn.

DPS investigators concluded that Romero improperly authorized his own expenses and was not challenged because the employee who issued checks “knows not to ask any questions” about undercover operations.

State police said that most of the withdrawals by Romero took place on days when he did not work and when his personal bank account was low or empty.

The report says Romero failed to provide documentation of how the funds were used and stammered when asked to explain, as illustrated by a transcribed excerpt: “You know, I spend it on, uh, you know, mostly it’s for the uh, you know, the payment of, of, of services. Uh, use it for the, uh, the, you know, I help out other regions with, uh, with payments of, of, uh, just informant money or projects or, you know, just different things of that nature.”

Romero told investigators he kept his activity reports at home but was “not the best bookkeeper. … It seems like I’m playing fast and loose with this,” he added, “and sometimes I do.”

Romero, whose salary was $65,362, wrote the Game and Fish Department’s policy manuals for investigations and special operations. He was a nationally recognized expert on illegal trafficking of reptiles and served as a training officer.

Department records obtained via a public-records request show that Romero had been promoted through the ranks to a top enforcement job despite repeated disciplinary memos for failure to maintain and submit official records.

Hovatter said Game and Fish administrators have taken steps to prevent future violations of financial-accountability rules at the agency.

Reach the reporter at dennis.wagner@arizonarepublic.com.

Goldwater Institute threatens suit over Phoenix practice of ‘spiking’ pensions

From this article it sure sounds like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a liar who will say anything to get elected.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton Stanton lied to the public when he had campaigned and said he would end this practice in this article.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton also lied to the public when he campaigned and said he would end the temporary Phoenix sales tax, which mostly goes to the Phoenix police and fire departments.

It sure looks like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton doesn't support the people that elected him, but rather is owned by the special interest groups in the Phoenix Police and Phoenix Fire Department unions.

I suspect those 2,400 retired Phoenix cops and firefighters vote for Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton because he supports their government pork.

Source

Goldwater Institute threatens suit over Phoenix practice of ‘spiking’ pensions

By Craig Harris The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 28, 2013 11:23 PM

The Goldwater Institute has threatened to sue Phoenix if the city does not end a legally questionable policy that allows police officers and firefighters to increase the amount of their pensions by cashing in unused sick leave, vacation and other benefits.

The Phoenix-based conservative watchdog group, which has a history of winning suits against municipalities, sent a letter late last week to Mayor Greg Stanton, saying state law is clear that the practice of “spiking” pensions is illegal. The letter also said “attempts to evade the obvious meaning of this law are, at best, erroneous, at worst, dishonest.”

Stanton, who had campaigned on pension reform but has taken no action to end pension spiking by public-safety officers, declined an interview request. [Just like he also campaigned and promised to remove the temporary sales tax which he didn't.]

His spokeswoman, Sarah Muench, issued a statement saying Stanton “will ask for a meeting to bring together the Goldwater Institute and our City Attorney.” [Sounds like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is just shoveling the BS to keep the reporters and public at bay for a little bit longer]

“He looks forward to discussing it. He has no further comment at this time,” Muench said.

One Fire Department captain, meanwhile, said Goldwater would be wasting taxpayer funds if it forced Phoenix to defend itself in court. [Of course the only people that benefit from this practice are members of the Phoenix Fire Department and Phoenix Police Department]

If a lawsuit is filed, Goldwater likely will seek a judgment declaring the practice illegal.

In the face of such a judgment, the statewide Public Safety Personnel Retirement System would have no choice but to seek refunds from retired police officers and firefighters who received enhanced pension benefits because of pay spiking, system administrator Jared Smout said.

“We would have to figure out what their pension should have been, and any overpayment, and collect that,” Smout said. “The way we typically collect is by reducing pensions. ... This potentially would affect a large amount of people.”

The city could avoid a legal judgment by voluntarily agreeing to change its policy.

In that case, it is unclear whether the retirement system would try to recoup past overpayments, because it could face a lawsuit by retirees. [Who have been stealing our tax dollars and want to keep the stolen loot]

Smout said the retirement system would prefer to have a court ruling in advance so that whatever steps it takes to recoup overpayments are legally binding and less vulnerable to litigation.

It is unknown how many Phoenix retirees could be affected, but such repayments could be significant.

For example, in one instance, a former assistant fire chief increased his lump-sum retirement check by roughly a quarter of a million dollars, to $795,983, and he increased his annual pension benefits by more than $40,000 — to $130,046 a year.

There are approximately 2,400 Phoenix retirees receiving benefits from the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System. Rank-and-file officers say they have been unfairly criticized by the public as greedy because a few high-ranking executives have significantly enhanced their pensions through spiking. [Have to disagree with that. The retired rank and file police officers and firemen screw the taxpayers just as much as the high ranking ones]

However, there has been no organized movement to curb abuses in the pension system.

Smout said the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, of which Phoenix is the largest member, has requested information from the city on its justification for allowing police officers and firefighters to spike their pensions.

The pension fund has taken no action against the city and has stated that pension spiking by Phoenix only hurts the city because it results in a larger bill the city must pay to the state pension trust for retirement benefits.

Phoenix budgeted $109 million this fiscal year for public-safety pension costs, and that figure will increase by $20 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1. In fiscal 2003, the city paid $7.2 million.

Pension spiking accounts for only a portion of the increased payment. Substantial investment losses by the pension trust, and other factors such as highly paid and experienced public-safety officers, account for the city’s increased payments.

An inquiry by the state pension system, and Goldwater’s legal threat, come after The Arizona Republic earlier this month reported the city’s pension-spiking policy, which has allowed a few retirees to become millionaires shortly after retirement.

The newspaper also found that the spiking policy allowed a few police officers and firefighters to make more in retirement than when they worked.

The average public-safety pension for a Phoenix retiree is $59,341, about $10,000 more than the statewide average. There are 153 Phoenix public-safety retirees who receive pensions greater than $88,000 — more than two times the average income in Arizona.

The Republic initially reported that pension spiking occurs because the city allows public-safety officers to cash in unused sick leave, vacation and deferred compensation to calculate their pensions.

The Republic has since learned that the city also counts compensation paid for emergency shifts, bonuses and vehicle and cellphone allowances to be calculated into salary totals that determine pension benefits.

State law says “unused sick leave, payment in lieu of vacation, payment for unused compensatory time or payment for any fringe benefits” cannot be used as compensation to compute retirement benefits.

State law also says that only “base salary, overtime pay, shift differential pay, military differential wage pay, compensatory time used by an employee in lieu of overtime not otherwise paid by an employer and holiday pay” may be used to calculate pension benefits.

Final compensation and length of service are the key components in determining the amount of a public pension in Arizona. The more a person makes at the end of a career, the higher the lifetime pension. Salary spiking, therefore, increases pensions and the long-term costs for taxpayers.

The city issued a statement Tuesday saying that its public-safety employees have bargained for fewer vacation and sick days in exchange for a higher salary. It also said that, in certain circumstances, an employee can quit accruing sick and vacation leave in return for additional salary.

The statement also said “whether a public- safety employee’s compensation is pensionable under state statute is a decision to be made by the PSPRS administrators.”

Smout and other public-safety administrators said they do not have the resources to determine whether an employee’s compensation is “pensionable.” Instead, they say, they rely upon the accuracy and honesty of governments that are part of the system to report the accurate compensation of public-safety officers.

Jon Riches, an attorney from Goldwater, said the demand letter was intended to put the city on notice.

“Hopefully, they will take action to change these policies. If the policy remains as it is, it’s difficult to imagine a situation where a lawsuit wouldn’t occur,” Riches said. “Hopefully, Phoenix does the right thing and changes a policy that is abusive and illegal.”

City Councilman Sal DiCiccio, an outspoken critic of the costs of public pensions, agreed.

“Under the best case scenario, the city of Phoenix is purposely circumventing the law. In the worst case, which is the current situation, the city is breaking the law,” he said.

But John Teffy, a Phoenix Fire Department captain, said Goldwater should stand down.

“It seems to me that if the Goldwater Institute took the time to understand how the city works and how contracts work, they would know there is a much simpler way to address this than with (threats of) frivolous lawsuits,” Teffy said.

Police: Scottsdale chef found with marijuana

I suspect the pot was found when the police were in the process of stealing his car. In Arizona if you are stopped by the police and don't have a valid car registration or insurance we have some silly draconian police state laws that allow the police to steal your car until you "prove your innocent". These laws don't serve any valid purpose other then allowing the police to raise money for themselves by legally stealing cars from people.

Source

Police: Scottsdale chef found with marijuana, suspended license

By Matthew Longdon The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed May 29, 2013 6:31 AM

Chef Eddie Matney was recently arrested on charges of drug possession and driving on a suspended license, Scottsdale police say.

Matney, owner and executive chef at Eddie’s House in Scottsdale, was stopped last week by Scottsdale police near 68th Street and Camelback Road because of an obscured license plate, according to police.

They say a subsequent check showed Matney’s registration and driving privileges had been suspended. While waiting for a tow truck, police officers say they found marijuana in Matney’s vehicle. [In Arizona if you don't have a valid car registration the police are allowed to steal your car, and hold it hostage till you prove your innocent of the crime. The bottom line is this practice is just a form of legalize theft used by the police to raise money]

In a statement Tuesday night, Matney said “a very small amount of marijuana was found with fishing equipment.”

The same day, Matney told 12 News he doesn’t smoke marijuana and doesn’t know why it was in the vehicle. He also said he didn’t know his license was suspended.

Innocent man freed from prison gets master’s degree

Source

Innocent man freed from prison gets master’s degree

By Jonathan Bandler (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News Wed May 29, 2013 7:02 AM

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - When he last donned a cap and gown, Jeffrey Deskovic was a 20-year-old convict getting an associate degree at an upstate prison.

That was in 1994. It took 12 more years for him to prove he had been wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a Peekskill schoolmate and get out of prison.

On Tuesday, he marched near the front of the procession at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice graduation ceremony as he received his master’s degree.

It was an important milestone for the 39-year-old exoneree, who sat in the front row during the ceremony at the Javits Center in Manhattan and was recognized in the school president’s remarks.

“I got a bit emotional there because it was surreal thinking about how far I’ve come,” he said. “I had a real sense of accomplishment and it touched me to walk across that stage and hear the cheers.”

He was 17 when convicted in the 1989 slaying of 15-year-old Angela Correa, even though the jury knew his DNA didn’t match the evidence. He had been arrested after giving a false confession to police after hours of interrogation. [The police probably used a technique called the "9 Step Reid Method" to get the confession. The "9 Step Reid Method" replaced the old technique of beating people with physical rubber hoses to get confessions by using psychological rubbers hoses to mentally beat confessions out of them]

He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison and spent years trying to get the DNA evidence retested.

After the Innocence Project got involved, the evidence was retested and the real killer, Steven Cunningham, was identified. Deskovic was released in September 2006, nearly 16 years into his prison term.

He has so far received $8.3 million from New York state and Westchester County, and his federal lawsuit against Peekskill and Putnam County is still pending. He used $1.5 million of his compensation money last year to start The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which fights wrongful convictions and assists those exonerated.

At the graduation, honorary degrees went to Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, co-founders of the Innocence Project, which has helped win exoneration for 307 people through DNA testing.

Scheck said Deskovic’s case was emblematic of the work of freeing the innocent.

“We were able to learn a lot of lessons about what went wrong with the criminal-justice system and how to fix it,” Scheck told the crowd, adding that Deskovic is “carrying on that mission.”

The work for Deskovic seems never-ending. From the foundation’s Rye Brook, N.Y., office, he oversees a staff of four, plus interns.

They have received more than 800 requests and have taken on 12 cases, 10 murder convictions, an assault and an arson. Each accepted case has to have two things -- a plausible claim of innocence, “not just a hunch,” Deskovic says -- and a concrete direction to go in. They are paying close attention to cases from Brooklyn as the District Attorney’s Office reviews 50 convictions linked to a homicide detective whose handling of witnesses has come under scrutiny.

Deskovic meets with potential donors, speaks at conferences and lends his voice at protests. He has stood outside courthouses in White Plains and New York City, handing out the foundation’s Thinking Juror’s Handbook. It offers his story, a primer on wrongful convictions and a heavy pitch for unswayed jurors to hold their ground.

He even found time to learn Spanish and guest-host a WVOX radio show.

But there are constant frustrations. He still struggles socially. And he wants to help everyone but knows he can’t.

There was an “awkward moment” Thursday while speaking with people at The Castle, the Fortune Society’s halfway house for ex-cons in Harlem, as some in the audience tried to get his help on convictions they claimed were bogus.

“People think I have this super-large staff and we can take on anything,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that and it bothers me.”

Although waiting for a big success to spur fundraising, the foundation did play a role this year in the release of William Lopez, who served more than 22 years for the 1989 murder of a Brooklyn drug dealer. The foundation helped track down a witness in the Dominican Republic. He testified by video earlier this year, insisting that Lopez was not the killer.

Once freed, Lopez got help from the foundation with temporary housing and finding a therapist. And when Lopez moved into a new apartment last week, Deskovic took to Facebook with an appeal for some of the furniture, appliances and other items Lopez needed to fill it.

“He’s been awesome, everything he’s done to help me acclimate,” Lopez said Tuesday afternoon. “You hear people who say ‘When I get out I’m going to do this and this to help people,’ but not many of them do. Jeffrey keeps doing it. He means business.”

Deskovic’s thesis on wrongful convictions offered a dozen causes for innocent people ending up in prison and remedies for each. One of his thesis advisers at John Jay, Andrew Karmen, called Deskovic an “inspiration.”

“He’s resilient, someone who went through an unfathomable, unbelievable experience losing all those years of his life who can now speak with authority on these issues,” said Karmen, who serves on the foundation’s board. “He sees injustice and he wants to prevent it from happening to other people.”

Deskovic doesn’t rule out more education, maybe even law school. But it won’t be immediate. He has too much on his plate.

“I enjoy school, I wish I was going back in the fall,” he said. “But until the foundation takes off, how can I?”

If a cop doesn't think he will get a fair trial what chance does a civilian have???

Vindication for an LAPD officer who was fired from the force

By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

May 27, 2013, 9:14 p.m.

Just 11 months into his job as a Los Angeles police officer, Sergio Arreola had a choice to make: resign or be fired.

The day before, April 11, 2012, he had been handcuffed and booked by Pomona police for allegedly assaulting them during a traffic accident investigation and resisting arrest. Arreola's captain had issued the ultimatum after getting word of the incident from Pomona officials.

The 25-year-old Marine veteran, who had dreamed about becoming an LAPD cop, felt his world crumbling around him.

For a moment, the young officer considered resigning. Doing so, the captain told him, would spare him the black mark of being fired and give him a chance at finding another job. But Arreola dismissed the idea just as quickly. Resigning would signal that he had done something wrong.

He told the captain that he hadn't done any of the things the Pomona officers alleged. Arreola asked the captain to investigate the situation before signing the paper that would boot him from the force. He offered the captain the phone number for a tow truck driver who had witnessed the incident and told him that at least one other witness, his brother-in-law, had recorded a video of it.

"With all due respect, I have done a lot for this country and I've worked really hard to get here — to get to this position as a police officer," Arreola said. "I'm not going to resign. If you want to terminate me, go ahead."

The captain was unmoved. The Pomona officers' description of the incident made it clear that Arreola was not LAPD material.

Arreola turned in his equipment and left the station for what he assumed would be the last time. Once out of earshot in the parking garage, he dialed his wife.

"He fired me," Arreola told her, tears streaming down his face.

Arreola had been on the way to his in-law's house in Pomona after having finished an overnight shift when his wife called. A relative had gotten into a minor traffic accident nearby, she told him. She gave Arreola the location and asked him to meet her there.

Pomona police Officer Eric Hamilton, who first responded to the call of a single car accident in a quiet neighborhood, said in his arrest report that Arreola immediately was aggressive and belligerent when he arrived, refusing to obey Hamilton's commands.

When Arreola identified himself as an off-duty LAPD officer, Hamilton demanded to see his badge. Arreola went to his trunk to pull out the rain jacket where he had pinned his badge and lifted it up for the officer to see. Hamilton had an audio recording device running. [Why do cops always tell the cop that stopped them they are cops??? Is it to get special treatment??? I wonder if it would do any good to show the cop that pulled me over to show him my employment badge that shows I work at Wennie World, the finest hot dog stand in the world!!!]

On the recording, a copy of which The Times has obtained, Hamilton is heard telling other officers after the arrest that he was so suspicious of Arreola that he "broke leather" — cop lingo for unclasping the safety lock on his gun holster — as he saw Arreola move toward the trunk and kept a grip on his gun in case he needed to draw it quickly.

Worried that he was losing control of the situation, Hamilton put out a call over the radio, asking for assistance to deal with a combative LAPD officer. Officer Chris Tucker heard the call and rushed to the scene. Both officers described Arreola's demeanor as "extremely angry," and, within minutes of arriving, Tucker attempted to handcuff Arreola. He tackled him to the ground when Arreola "began to twist and tense up, pulling his arms from our grasp," Tucker said in his report. Hamilton quickly came over to assist. The officers alleged that Arreola tried to punch Hamilton in the face as they restrained him.

But, according to Arreola, it was Hamilton who was hostile from the outset. As he approached the intersection, Arreola recalled seeing Hamilton yelling at this wife. Confused, Arreola said he got out of his car and, from about 30 feet away, called out to his wife, "What's going on, Erika? Let's go."

Hamilton responded angrily, swearing at Arreola and telling his wife to "shut up" while pulling her back by the elbow, Arreola recounted in his official account of the incident to LAPD officials. Arreola acknowledged that he told Hamilton a few times that he shouldn't be talking to his wife "like a criminal" over something as minor as a one-car traffic accident. Hamilton, he said, responded with more profanities and threatened to arrest Arreola. At that point, Arreola said, he asked Hamilton to call for his supervisor.

Arreola denied ever resisting the officers. Tucker, he said, intentionally pulled him off balance while he was being frisked and, when Arreola stumbled, the officer used it as an excuse to take him to the ground.

On Hamilton's recording, the officer is heard telling Arreola repeatedly to "stop resisting" and Arreola saying that he is not resisting. Arreola is also heard pleading with onlookers to record the scene. Once on the ground, Arreola said, the officers punched him repeatedly. Hamilton, he said, bent his left arm back violently and Tucker attempted to subdue him by using a choke hold.

Through the head of the union that represents Pomona police, both Hamilton and Tucker declined to be interviewed for this article. The union official cited an ongoing internal investigation by the Pomona department into the officers' conduct, which he said bars them from speaking publicly.

Based on the officers' account of Arreola's behavior, prosecutors in the L.A. County district attorney's office charged Arreola with three misdemeanors for resisting arrest, assaulting Hamilton and obstructing the officers' work. Although they eventually dropped the assault charge, Robert Rico, Arreola's attorney in the criminal trial, said prosecutors refused to discuss any sort of deal on the other two accusations. Their only concession, Rico said, was to spare Arreola time in jail if he pleaded guilty to the charges.

The hard line that prosecutors took was moot, since Arreola wouldn't consider a deal. "They've ruined my life, they've ruined my name," he recalled saying when Rico gave him the option to plead guilty. "What's the worst they can do? Send me to jail?"

In the months leading up to his trial, Arreola struggled to keep himself and his wife afloat. He ran his credit card to its limit and refinanced his house and car loans. He borrowed money from his wife's father to keep them going while he studied at a local college hoping for a degree that would help him land a new job. Peter Casey, an LAPD lieutenant who had supervised him, wrote a check to help cover his legal fees.

Arreola's chances at trial appeared bleak. The tow truck driver did not testify, telling Rico he had been harassed by a Pomona detective, the attorney said. [So cops do threaten people with physical harm to prevent them from testifying, just like the Mafia does???] And Pomona police claimed they found no video of the arrest on the brother-in-law's phone, despite his insistence that he recorded it, according to Rico. [I'm sure the Pomona cops will deny erasing the video, like the Bakersfield and Kern County Sheriff's office denied erasing the video of a man beaten to death by Kern County Sheriff's officers in Bakersfield] But several of Arreola's supervisors and old partners testified on his behalf, describing him as soft spoken and respectful. Arreola himself took the unusual step of testifying. And, at one point, the judge told the jury to disregard the testimony of a Pomona sergeant because it was factually wrong.

Rico said he used the audio recording to show that Arreola had followed the officer's orders and not been combative. On the recording, jurors heard Arreola telling Hamilton, "You know I didn't do anything," and Hamilton retorting by calling Arreola "a fool."

Later in the recording, as Hamilton tells Arreola's wife that he's arresting her as well, Hamilton said, "I'm going to make sure your husband is never a police officer in the state of California again. I'll talk to Chief Beck myself personally," referring to the LAPD chief.

And jurors listened as Hamilton and Tucker recounted the arrest for other officers. "I just about broke his left arm. I wanted to break his arm," Hamilton said.

"I had my arm around him to choke his ass out," Tucker said.

The jury found Arreola not guilty.

The acquittal was important, but it wasn't everything.

Earlier this month, Arreola once again was summoned into the captain's office where he had been told his career with the LAPD was over. This time, the captain, who declined to be interviewed, wanted to welcome Arreola back to the force — a result of months of negotiations between department officials and Matthew McNicholas, an attorney representing Arreola in a lawsuit against Hamilton, Tucker and the Pomona Police Department.

"It feels good," Arreola said of returning to the job. "I want to show the LAPD that the people who supported me and believed in me were right all along."

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Ruling prompts changes at MCSO

Source

Ruling prompts changes at MCSO

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed May 29, 2013 10:32 PM

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office human-smuggling unit no longer patrols county highways looking for undocumented immigrants, and any plans for work-site enforcement operations have been put on hold following a federal judge’s ruling that found the agency discriminated against Latinos.

The ramifications of last week’s landmark federal-court decision have started to appear in the day-to-day operations at the Sheriff’s Office, but experts said the ruling will likely have a broader impact on other police departments around the country that relied on the same legal advice as MCSO to pursue similar immigration-enforcement policing methods.

Kevin Johnson, dean of the law school at the University of California-Davis, said the judge’s ruling that Arpaio’s office engaged in racial profiling has put other police departments that followed the guidance of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach on notice that their methods are flawed.

Johnson said that U.S. District Judge Murray Snow’s ruling Friday was a clear rebuke of the way sheriff’s deputies had been trained and called into question Kobach’s legal interpretation that local police have inherent authority to be involved in immigration enforcement, which MCSO and other agencies had relied on.

“It seems to me that police departments across the country are on notice that maybe Kris Kobach is not the best person you want to put together a program that is going to withstand legal scrutiny,” Johnson said.

But Kobach, a professor of law and an architect of Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070, defended his interpretation of federal law.

And he said it was Snow’s analysis of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures, that was flawed and inconsistent with legal precedent. [Yea, the tyrants that support the police state always say the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to them. How silly of us to think the 4th Amendment means what it says. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"]

“The judge has written his opinion in a way that doesn’t respect the inherent authority of local law enforcement,” Kobach said. [Translation - I got a gun and a badge and can do anything I want. F* the Constitution, I got a gun and a badge]

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement program was, in his words, a “pure program … you go after illegals.”

Those words came back to bite Arpaio in Snow’s 142-page ruling that settled long-standing racial-profiling allegations against the Sheriff’s Office in favor of a group of citizens that grew to include every Latino stopped by deputies since 2007.

The judge drew heavily from Arpaio’s news releases and media statements to illustrate the sharp contrasts between what the sheriff and his deputies said on the witness stand vs. what they said when immigration-enforcement efforts were at their peak.

Part of the controversy over the program came from the use of traffic stops to engage in immigration enforcement. The relatively routine stops for minor traffic violations gave deputies an opening to come into contact with drivers and passengers. If the deputies became suspicious that vehicle occupants were in the country without authorization, based on factors like language, appearance and ethnicity, the deputies could ask their immigration status.

That practice, driven by political considerations and public perceptions, Snow ruled, led to more Latino drivers being stopped during certain sheriff’s operations and longer detention times for Latinos while they waited for deputies to confirm their immigration status, which Snow found to be in violation of the Constitution.

Snow found flawed training that the Sheriff’s Office offered its deputies compounded the errors.

“This training erroneously instructed MCSO deputies that a person within the country without authorization was necessarily committing a federal crime, and they thus maintained the authority to detain them for criminal violations,” Snow wrote.

Much of the sheriff’s ability to enforce federal immigration law is rooted in a theory that gives local police “inherent authority” to administer federal statutes.

Before 2009, that authority was bolstered by an agreement with the federal government that gave 160 deputies training to enforce federal immigration law. After the Department of Homeland Security rescinded that agreement with the Sheriff’s Office in October 2009, the Sheriff’s Office contracted with Kobach to offer training for all of Arpaio’s deputies.

Kobach, who was paid $300 per hour for his work with the Sheriff’s Office, opens the training videos with a primer on the legal basis of “inherent authority.” [Wow! He gets paid $300 an hour to help Sheriff Joe flush our rights down the toilet!!!]

Snow spent a good portion of his ruling dismantling that argument. Experts said the federal judge’s position should serve as a cautionary sign to other agencies that have incorporated Kobach’s line of reasoning into their enforcement practices.

“Here you have a fairly clear rebuke by a federal court of what officers were being trained in and what they were doing,” said Johnson, the UC-Davis law-school dean.

“(Snow) is a conservative in the way that respects the rule of the law, and he took some offense to the fact that Sheriff Arpaio can say things like, ‘They took away my 287(g) agreement, but I can do what I want anyway,’ ” Johnson said.

“This claim of inherent authority and ability to do whatever the heck the head of the Sheriff’s Office wants to do was something that stuck in Judge Snow’s craw. This is a nation ruled by laws, and I think this judge takes the rule of law seriously.” [Somebody needs to tell Judge Snow that if you got a gun and a badge you are above the law!!! Or at least that's what Sheriff Joe would like]

Kobach first appeared in Arizona when he was a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He agreed to help the state defend its employer-sanctions law, which gives prosecutors the power to revoke the business license of an employer found to have knowingly hired an illegal immigrant, and later made a name for himself as an author of SB 1070.

Kobach’s stance on immigration enforcement stems from his work in the U.S. Justice Department, which in 2002 issued an opinion that gave local police the inherent authority to enforce immigration law.

Kobach said Snow’s ruling was inconsistent with legal precedent, including last year’s Supreme Court decision that struck down much of SB 1070.

“There are a number of elements of the injunction that are really dramatic and go way beyond what the law allows,” Kobach said. “This injunction suggests that holding a person for a few extra minutes while they (local police) make that phone call (to federal agencies) is prohibited.”

The ruling is sound in its stance against targeting motorists and passengers because of their race, Kobach said, but Snow’s view of the inherent powers of local police is wrong. [yea, some how Judge Snow doesn't realize that if you have a gun and a badge you can do anything you want and you are above the Constitution!!!! Well at least that's how Sheriff Joe thinks.]

“At that point, the judge starts making mistakes. The judge has written his opinion in a way that doesn’t respect the inherent authority of local law enforcement,” Kobach said. “This opinion could potentially cripple state and federal cooperation on enforcement of immigration law.” [And we certainly wouldn't want every cop in America to think he had to obey the law. Hey any cop knows when you have a gun and a badge you are above the law. As Tempe Police Sergeant Chuck Schoville said on the Tempe government propaganda TV channel Tempe StreetBeat - “You know why you say I’m right? Because I’ve got a gun and a badge. I’m always right.” ]

Arpaio has promised to adhere to the ruling, though he disagrees with it, and pulling the members of the human-smuggling unit off Maricopa County highways was part of that plan, he said. [Give Sheriff Joe 30 days and he will be telling the media he ain't going to let some stinking judge tell him how to do his job. Hey, he's got a gun and a badge and will do what he feels like]

The 16 deputies in that unit, along with six assigned to investigate work-site violations, will all continue to investigate and follow up on suspects charged with violating Arizona law, Arpaio said.

“As sheriff, I uphold the law. The court’s order is now clear: we will no longer detain persons believed to be in the country without authorization whom we cannot arrest on state charges. I have already so instructed my deputies,” Arpaio said in a statement.

Snow’s ruling can be read as another step in the ongoing definition of state and federal roles when it comes to immigration enforcement, said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh professor and national expert on racial profiling.

Arpaio and Arizona both rose to the national forefront of the immigration-enforcement movement, he said, and the Supreme Court ruling on SB 1070 and the District Court ruling on the sheriff’s enforcement tactics have helped paint a complete picture for observers nationwide.

“To the extent that people said, ‘Hey, they did it in Arizona, and it’s working there,’ they may also now say, ‘A federal court has said, This is wrong, it’s unconstitutional and it’s going to stop,’ ” Harris said. “In the formal sense, the ruling doesn’t reach beyond Arizona, but it will have a wide ripple effect across the country because Arizona was the first state to try this type of enforcement.”

Arpaio’s attorneys have vowed to appeal Snow’s order, and Lyle Mann, executive director of the Arizona police standards board, said it will take an Appeals Court ruling to set the kind of precedent that could require Arizona officials to offer police new training.

Kobach anticipates an appeal against Snow’s ruling. “The ruling is legally weak,” he said. “The final word on this particular case is still coming.”

Some IED incidents I was involved in????

Sure nobody was hurt and no property was damaged but I suspect the police officers at the Homeland Security wouldn't want to let that get into their way of bragging that they are heroes who saved the country and the world from phoney baloney alleged terrorists like me.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

His prank, if we can believe what the police said is putting some dry ice in a pop bottle and letting the bottle pop when the dry ice turned to gas and forced the top off of the pop bottle.

Back in the old days when 16 ounce pop bottles were made out of glass I had bought a 16 ounce bottle of Coke on my trip to the grocery store.

When I got home I unloaded my groceries and took them inside, but I forgot about the unopened 16 ounce bottle of soda pop and left it on the roof of my VW.

I heard a small explosion or pop while I was inside my house, but I didn't think anything of it.

It wasn't until later that I went outside and saw that the sun had heated up my pop bottle causing it to explode.

I thought I was lucky, because if I had been out side when the bottle of Coke had exploded I might have been injured by flying glass.

I cleaned up the glass and didn't think anything about it.

Of course I am lucky it happened 20 years ago and not now.

If it had happened now, I probably would be arrested for having an illegal explosive device which would probably get me 20 years in prison. Yea, don't tell the goons at Homeland Security that a 16 ounce bottle of Coke is not an IED because that might get in their way of making themselves look like heroes by arresting me for being a terrorist who is endangering the whole American way of life.

I probably would also be charged with a terrorist bombing attack and attempted murder of everybody who lived on my street.

Of course don't try to use and logic and reason and tell the goons at Homeland Security that this wasn't a bombing attack nor was it was an attempted mass murder. I just forgot to bring my Coke inside and it blew up in the hot Arizona sun.

Of course they could care less about the facts if it gets in the way of arresting me and pretending that they saved America from another terrorist attack and that they are heroes for arresting some smuck who left his Coke in the Arizona sun.

Here is another incident that happened years ago and involved IED or Improvised Explosive Devices as the cops and Homeland like to call them. I guess us normal people don't call them IEDs or improvised explosive devices like the cops do, but bottles of soda pop.

Again I suspect that if the goons at Homeland Security had been around when this had happened I would also h ave been arrested and put in prison for many years over this incident which involved a bottle of soda pop.

I was at work and me and a co-worker were walking to Circle K to get some junk food.

My friend had a two liter bottle of soda pop and for some reason he tossed it up into the air.

When the bottle hit the ground it burst open and took off like a rocket flying thru the air. It was pretty cool. I suspect all the carbon dioxide gas it the soda pop provided the energy.

And we were both lucky that the 2 liter bottle of pop didn't hit either of us. It could have caused some serious damage.

Again we didn't think anything of the incident, other then that the pop bottle looked pretty cool when it took off like a rocket.

We told our other co-workers about the incident when we got back from our junk food run to Circle K.

Of course if that had happened today we both probably would have been arrested and charged with possession of explosive devices, IEDs or improvised explosives devices as the goons at Homeland Security love to call them.

Of course that sounds so much more dangerous then calling the bottles of soda pop.

And of course the goons from Homeland Security would probably be laughed out of court if they tried to tell the judge they were arresting us for possession of a soda pop bottle. So that probably why they love to say IEDs instead of 2 liter bottles of soda pop.

Of course my friend, who thru the bottle of soda pop would have been arrested for attempted murder. Attempted murder of me.

And since I was there I probably would have also been arrested on a charge of being an accessory to attempted murder. Yea, the attempted murder of myself. How silly!!!!

But it's not silly to the cops who would be using this bogus incident in an attempt to make themselves look like heroes that saved the world from a phoney baloney terrorists like me and my friend.

Judge Snow's Decision Damns Not Just Arpaio, but All of Maricopa County

One of the reasons "constitutions" are created is so that governments will not trample on the rights of minorities.

Sadly the restrictions on government in "constitutions" are routinely ignored because our government masters think that those restrictions will get in their way of their visions of good governments in which they aid the majority segments of the population who wants to terrorize minorities they dislike.

And when that happens you get things like Sheriff Joe's reign of terror. Also the insane and unconstitutional drug war is another example.

Source

Judge Snow's Decision Damns Not Just Arpaio, but All of Maricopa County

By Stephen Lemons Thursday, May 30 2013

Shortly after the release of U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow's 142-page ruling in the 5 1/2-year-long civil rights lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio, members of the Hispanic and activist communities gathered at Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox's El Portal restaurant for an impromptu press conference.

Essentially, Snow found that the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office under Joe Arpaio had engaged for years in a pattern and practice of discriminatory policing aimed at Latinos.

He issued a broad injunctive order forbidding the use of "race or Latino ancestry" by the MCSO for law enforcement functions, including stopping vehicles, detaining those vehicles' occupants, and investigating them for violations of federal immigration law, in addition to state laws such as the human-smuggling and employer-sanctions laws.

Snow's decision was a long time coming. The original lawsuit was filed in late 2007 and finally went to trial before Snow last summer. In that time, Arpaio twice was re-elected, using Hispanic-hunting sweeps and employer raids to bolster his popularity with a majority of Maricopa County's electorate.

Several of the community leaders attending the El Portal press conference called on Arpaio to resign and praised Snow's detailed and unambiguous analysis of the evidence presented at trial and of the testimonies of Arpaio, his henchmen, and his deputies.

Others expressed the desire for Snow to appoint a monitor over the MCSO to ensure that Arpaio's office complies. This would be a smart move, considering that the MCSO was found to have destroyed evidence in the case and that the MCSO already violated a previous injunctive order from Snow.

The general mood at Wilcox's restaurant was one of vindication. After all, everyone present was intimately familiar with Arpaio's harassment and terrorizing of Maricopa County's Latino community.

Not that Arpaio has ever kept secret the bigoted nature of his law enforcement priorities. Snow often uses Arpaio's own words and the language in his agency's press releases to illustrate the MCSO's malicious intent.

Of all the speakers, veteran criminal attorney and civil rights activists Antonio Bustamante made the most salient point.

"The majority of people in Maricopa County allowed this to happen," he told the news media. "We have that kind of majority, that kind of community. That is the greatest outrage. Because that is to whom Arpaio was playing. That was his audience."

In fact, it is safe to say that Arpaio would not have turned the MCSO into an immigration-enforcement agency without the approval of the county's electorate.

To be sure, Arpaio's corruption and brutality precedes the wave of post-9/11 nativism that engulfed this state. But Arpaio's embrace of bigotry as a guiding principle of law enforcement did not create the wave. He just rode it.

In 2005, when his deputies arrested nativist wacko Patrick Haab for holding seven Mexicans at gunpoint at a Valley rest stop, Arpaio decried Haab as a vigilante.

"You don't go around pulling guns on people," Arpaio said of Haab at the time. "Being illegal is not a serious crime. You can't go to jail for being an illegal alien . . . You can only be deported."

Arpaio was behind the curve. The Minuteman Project was ongoing at the border, already drawing extremists and opportunists such as neo-Nazi and eventual baby-killer J.T. Ready and minutewoman and future murderess Shawna Forde, among others.

Up 'til that point, Arpaio's shtick had been cruelty toward the incarcerated. Even though more than 70 percent of those in his jails were pre-trial detainees, the idea of punishment before trial was popular with the electorate, even when it involved guards choking people to death in restraint chairs or denying a diabetic her medication until she slipped into a coma and died.

Keeping his vast incarceration complex a harsh and occasionally fatal one guaranteed Arpaio a high approval rating. On the Haab incident, however, he faced backlash from angry whites, while a relative newcomer, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas (later to be disbarred and disgraced), earned cheers for refusing to charge Haab.

A cunning and adept politician, Arpaio took note and began to act accordingly. The MCSO created a Human Smuggling Unit in 2006 and began to take advantage of Thomas' interpretation of a new state anti-human-smuggling statute, in which Thomas asserted that the average migrant could be prosecuted for helping to smuggle himself or herself into the country.

"I'm going to catch as many [illegal immigrants] as I can and throw them in my jail," Arpaio told the Associated Press in 2006 while announcing a new 250-member anti-immigration posse. "And the jails are not that nice."

And what about the efforts of pro-immigration advocates and civil libertarians to stop him in court?

"I get sued when I go to the toilet," he harrumphed. "If they think I'm going to slow down because of these threats, I've got news for them — I'm not going to slow down. I'll do more of it."

It was just this sort of bluster that Joe's fans loved. And, interestingly, it was just the sort of bluster absent on Friday when Snow's ruling was published.

In the recent past, when the U.S. Department of Justice issued a letter finding that the MCSO engages in discriminatory policing or when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement jerked its grant of immigration authority to Arpaio's gendarmes under the so-called 287(g) program, Arpaio used such incidents as an opportunity for a chest-thumping news conference, a media stunt, or both.

This time, the MCSO's reply came from Arpaio attorney Tim Casey, promising an appeal and offering the conflicting assertions that the MCSO does not engage in racial profiling and that whatever the MCSO did was ICE's fault because it was ICE that trained the MCSO on immigration to begin with.

That last bit from Casey ignored ICE's removing the MCSO's 287(g) field authority in 2009, in large part because the Sheriff's Office was running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution with its large-scale anti-immigrant sweeps.

Arpaio's office knew it was going to lose its 287(g) authority before it actually was taken way. So, as Snow recounts in his ruling, Deputy Chief Brian Sands asked Human Smuggling Unit Sergeant Brett Palmer to "conduct legal research into whether the MCSO had authority to enforce immigration law absent the authorization of the Department of Homeland Security."

Palmer is not a lawyer, and if you've ever seen him interviewed, you might assume that Walmart wasn't hiring security guards the day he applied to be a deputy sheriff.

Still, after an Internet search, Palmer reported back to Sands that local cops do have authority "to investigate and arrest violators of federal immigration statutes," without the knowledge of the feds. He even cited a federal law to this effect.

There was one big problem, however: The law didn't exist. This didn't stop Arpaio from citing it during an interview with right-wing TV pundit Glenn Beck not long after his losing 287(g) field authority.

Palmer, his colleagues, Arpaio, and a large portion of the public also were under the delusion that all undocumented persons were guilty of a federal criminal offense.

Snow disabuses them of this misconception, in part, by quoting from the U.S. Supreme Court's Senate Bill 1070 ruling in Arizona vs. United States.

"As a general rule," the Supreme Court wrote, "it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. If the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent."

Casey's contention that it was ICE that trained the MCSO to racially profile has an element of truth to it. Deputies testified that ICE taught them that race could be used as a factor, if not the sole factor, in detaining people and inquiring into their immigration status.

But Snow finds that this belief is a misinterpretation of a Supreme Court decision, one rejected by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that "in locations where a significant portion of the legal resident population is of Hispanic ancestry, Hispanic descent was not a permissible factor to consider, either alone or in conjunction with other factors, in forming reasonable suspicion justifying the detention of a suspect based on his or her unauthorized presence."

No doubt, the 287(g) program, dusted off and proliferated by the administration of President George W. Bush as part of the response to the 9/11 attacks, was fatally flawed.

Nevertheless, when then-Governor Janet Napolitano and the Bush administration conspired in 2007 to bring the 287(g) program to Arizona and give Napolitano's political pal Arpaio the largest 287(g) force in the nation, they were handing a dangerous new law enforcement tool to a bad actor engaged in persistent violations of civil rights.

Napolitano and the Bush administration also were introducing 287(g) to Arizona at a time when anti-Mexican animus was reaching a fever pitch. That a power-mad egomaniac like Arpaio would go nuclear with his new toy was predictable.

But the complicity of ICE and Napolitano (currently Homeland Defense secretary) does not alleviate any of the MCSO's guilt or the guilt of the majority of a public that applauded Arpaio's every racist deed and action.

The MCSO simply assumed it did not engage in racial profiling, and as long as it had a legitimate reason to stop a vehicle or person, MCSO satraps figured they were off the hook.

But Snow observes that several deputies testified that they could develop probable cause to pull over any vehicle after just following it for a couple of minutes.

With this in mind, the MCSO's poorly defined "zero tolerance" policy became a license to racially profile, since the MCSO made it clear before, during, and after its sweeps that the purpose of these "crime-suppression operations" was the arrest of as many illegal immigrants as possible.

The court found credible expert testimony that Latinos were far more likely to be stopped, detained, and arrested during the sweeps, in some cases 54 percent more likely.

This was backed up by a study of MCSO records — at least those the MCSO did not destroy — and by anecdotal evidence as well, such as one Hispanic driver whose ID was checked while that of his non-Hispanic wife was never asked for, an unusual occurrence considering that MCSO deputies were known for checking the ID of all Latinos in a vehicle.

Perhaps the most egregious example comes from the arrest of the lead plaintiff in the case, Manuel de Jesus Ortega-Melendres, who, in 2007, was a passenger in a vehicle driven by an Anglo.

The deputy who pulled over the car was ordered by the Human Smuggling Unit to follow it and develop probable cause to stop it. This after Melendres, a day laborer, got into the driver's truck. (Note: Another bit of Archie Bunker-like bigotry by the MCSO was that it equated day laborers with illegal immigrants, something Snow remarks upon.)

The driver was pulled over for speeding and got off with a warning. Though Melendres was authorized to be in the country, and had the proof on him, the MCSO turned him over to ICE nonetheless. ICE eventually cut him loose after examining his documents.

I and other witnesses to Arpaio's sweeps have seen human suffering and fear on a grand scale: crying children separated from their mothers, Latinos afraid to take to the roads, pedestrians stopped and forced to identify themselves, Hispanic kids menaced by black and gold MCSO cars, and deputies patrolling the streets in ski masks.

There were many in the county who fought back — an army of volunteers led by Phoenix Copwatch dogged MCSO vehicles during the sweeeps. Human rights activist Lydia Guzman of Respect/Respeto helped lawyers with first-person accounts of profiling she culled from those who contacted her.

Attorneys from the ACLU of Arizona, like Annie Lai and Dan Pochoda, spent countless hours researching and investigating the sweeps. Pochoda was even wrongly arrested during one of the MCSO's first large-scale actions, at Pruitt's Furniture in Phoenix.

Activists such as Sal Reza and Carlos Garcia organized the community and documented the racism overwhelming us all. Many, including Reza, were arrested in acts of civil disobedience, and Reza also was targeted by the MCSO and wrongfully arrested in retaliation.

There were the plaintiffs like Melendres, brave enough to come forward and submit themselves to scrutiny, and the many lawyers who worked on the lawsuit, including those who argued for the plaintiffs in front of Snow, such as Cecillia Wang of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project and Stanley Young of the firm Covington & Burling LLP.

When this era of American history is written, future generations will look at Arizona as the repository of the sort of ugliness the Deep South was during the civil rights struggle.

They'll look at the photos and videos of the moms in handcuffs, the lines of arrestees, a self-inflated sheriff, high on his own authority, and they'll wonder, "What did you do to stop it?"

And if you don't have an answer, well, that is your own unique form of punishment.

Not that you're alone in Maricopa County.

AZ Governor Jan Brewer drug war hypocrite!!!!!!

What a lying hypocrite. At the same time Jan Brewer is trying to send people who commit the victimless crime of using medical marijuana to prison she pretends she is happy because Mexico released another victimless drug war criminal.

Source

Gov. Jan Brewer 'thrilled' by mother's release from Mexico jail

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 31, 2013 12:53 PM

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said today she is “thrilled” Yanira Maldonado, the Goodyear mother who was detained for nine days in a Mexico jail on suspicion of marijuana smuggling, has been released and is on her way home.

During a news conference at the state capitol, the governor said she has tried to reach Maldonado’s family but the line has been busy.

“What’s most important this morning is that Yanira is back in Arizona, home safely with her family and her friends who love her,” Brewer said. “As Americans, we all know that our precious constitutional rights don’t extend beyond our nation’s border. It’s this kind of case that once again illustrates how blessed we are in this country. [Of course Jan Brewer seems to forget she is trying to flush both the Arizona Constitution and the US Constitution down the toilet with her frivolous lawsuits trying to nullify Arizona's medical law, which is Prop 203!!!]

“Most of all, I’m so happy for the family, that they can now put this chapter of their life behind us,” she said.

Brewer is scheduled to make a previously scheduled appearance today with Sonora Governor Guillermo Padrés Elías at the 2013 AMC Manufacturer of the Year Summit and Awards Luncheon in downtown Phoenix. Brewer said she expects to speak with Padrés Elías about the Maldonado case.

Asked by The Arizona Republic if she is concerned how the Maldonado case might affect tourism between Arizona and Sonora, Brewer said it’s important Arizonans exercise caution while traveling abroad.

Mexico is Arizona’s largest trade partner, with visitors from Mexico spending an average of $7.3 million a day in Arizona stores, restaurants, hotels and other businesses, according to recent figures from the Arizona-Mexico Commission.

During Maldonado’s ordeal, Brewer said her staff was in contact with Mexican and American authorities. Brewer said she does not know if Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto had a role in Maldonado’s release.

“I tried to reach out to her family this morning … the phone is really busy and so we either can’t get through or I can’t leave a message,” the governor said.

Maldonado, 42, was in Mexico with her husband for a funeral and was detained after soldiers found 12 pounds of marijuana taped under her seat on a bus she was taking back to the United States. She was detained on drug charges last week and was released just before midnight Thursday, after a judge reviewed security footage that showed her boarding the bus carrying only blankets, bottles of water and her purse.

Maldonado has said she believes drug smugglers were responsible for hiding the marijuana found under her bus seat and she just happened to be the unlucky passenger who sat there.

Following her Friday morning news conference, Brewer told The Republic she could not assess how Mexican authorities handled Maldonado’s case.

“It’s always a difficult thing to say because you’re not down there, and you get all your information from staff and third hand, or from the news,” Brewer said. “My heart was breaking for her and her family. Today, I think we’re just all rejoicing that it worked out great for them. Unfortunately, she had to spend nine days down there, but she’s home safely now and she can go on with her family and her life.”

Joe Arpaio supporters pooh pooh judge’s ruling

They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Also I suspect if this were Nazi Germany instead of Arizona, the same folks that blindly support Sheriff Joe and is racist and illegal treatment of Mexicans and Latinos would be the nut jobs that blindly supported Hitler and his murdering of the Jews.

Source

Joe Arpaio supporters pooh pooh judge’s ruling

A federal judge’s ruling that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office systematically violated the constitutional rights of Latinos was met with cheers from both the right and the left this week.

From Latino activists, who are urging the six-term sheriff to resign, and from Joe Arpaio’s supporters, who are urging him to carry on.

And from officials in the Republican Party, the one that talks about reaching out to Latinos?

Cue the crickets.

Last week’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow has had an immediate effect, with Arpaio calling a halt to his immigration patrols even as he vowed to appeal.

Sadly, though, it doesn’t appear to have changed any minds about what has been going on around here.

“It seems the so-called conservative label the judge espoused under Bush was just a “Snow job” as he seeks to appease those who can protect and feather his nest in the Obama administration,” wrote Gary, one of many Arpaio supporters who contacted me after my Wednesday column on Snow’s ruling. “He knows which side his bread is buttered on. Just like you.”

Gary, by the way, acknowledged that he hadn’t read the 142-page ruling.

But then he, like many others who called, e-mailed and posted to my Facebook page and azcentral.com blog, didn’t need to read what Snow wrote in order to dismiss it as the work of an activist judge doing the devious bidding of the open borders crowd.

Some blame Immigration and Customs Enforcement, noting the judge’s observation that ICE improperly trained deputies to believe that ethnicity or race could be a factor in immigration enforcement. They were silent, however, on Snow’s observations that MCSO’s trampling of the constitution went well beyond that ICE training.

Others simply disagreed with the underlying point in Snow’s ruling — that it’s not OK to pull people over because their skin is brown or to make them to make them wait on the side of the street longer than the rest of us.

“Joe is doing the ‘profiling’ the job requires,” wrote Richard of Goodyear, who asked that his last name not be used. “If the TSA did the same job – you & I wouldn’t have to endure strip searches at our airports when we know damn well what these terrorists look like!!”

While I can appreciate Richard’s frustration – certainly, it would be easier to combat illegal immigration if police could just stop every Latino and demand his or her papers – there is that inconvenient restraint called the U.S. Constitution.

So I asked Richard and several other Arpaio supporters this question: does the end justify the means? Is it OK to sideline the Constitution — the parts that shield us from unreasonable police actions and guarantee that the law protects us equally — in order to rid the country of people who are here illegally?

“Short answer? YES!” Richard replied. “When we have 11 million ‘gatecrashers’ here – to inconvenience a few Latinos with traffic stops/job checks/etc suits me just fine. Twice this year I’ve been inconvenienced/fondled/searched/slowed down/stressed out needlessly because a few Muslims think blowing up infidels like me is just fine. Our laws & tactics are not perfect but I’ll back Joe on this one.”

Fortunately, the judge and others in the community see the danger in sacrificing the constitution for convenience or expediency.

“When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, Justice Robert Jackson dissented, warning that upholding such an order on the basis of a perceived ‘emergency’ would give law-enforcement officials a dangerous weapon to violate the rights of citizens …,” said the Goldwater Institute’s Clint Bolick, who previously worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “When police stop Arabs or Hispanics—or members of any group—not because they have committed a crime but because of their race or ethnicity, it profoundly offends the rule of law.”

“This is eerily similar to what the Obama IRS did to conservative groups, singling them out for adverse treatment not because of wrongdoing but because the IRS concluded that conservative groups were more likely to abuse their non-profit tax status. Anyone who condemns that practice also should condemn the practice of stopping Hispanics because they are Hispanic.”

He’s right, of course. What IRS did to the tea parties – singling them out for special scrutiny because they are conservative — is wrong.

Just as what Arpaio did to Latinos – singling them out for special scrutiny because they are brown – is wrong.

Yet the silence is startling.

Mandatory DUI tests unconstitutional????

The article doesn't come out and say it like I just did, but I think that is the effect of the ruling.

From a historical perspective I think that the royal rulers of Arizona said that driving is not a right but a privilege that the state can give you.

And if you wish to accept the privilege of driving you must give up your 4th Amendment right against the government searching you. And that by signing your drivers license you give up your 4th Amendment right.

Some back ground on this would the the Northwest Ordinance.

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the first laws passed by the US Congress and I think it was passed on July 13, 1787.

The Northwest Ordinance says that for any new states to enter the Union they must agree not to tax people who travel on public roads for noncommercial purposes.

Back in those days the main public roads were rivers, which were kind of like the freeways of those days.

Some legal scholars says that that the Northwest Ordinance makes it illegal for states to require you to get a drivers license for non-commercial travel on government highways.

One key point here is that states can't tax people who travel on public highways for non-commercial reasons. But the Northwest Ordinance does allow states to tax people who travel on public highways for commercial reasons.

It was called the Northwest Ordinance because it covered the Northwest Territories which included Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Source

Arizona Supreme Court bars DUI blood tests without warrant

HOWARD FISCHER Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX -- Police cannot use the state's traffic laws to draw blood from suspected drunk drivers without a warrant absent their specific permission at the time of the test, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

In a unanimous decision, the justices rejected the contention by the Pima County Attorney's Office that all Arizona motorists give "implied consent" to having blood, breath or urine tests as a condition to be licensed to drive. They said that means, absent a clear -- and voluntary -- consent immediately prior to the blood draw, it is an illegal search without a warrant.

In a wide-ranging ruling, the high court also said that the ability of juveniles to give that voluntary consent is not absolute -- and not the same as an adult. Justice Scott Bales, writing for the court, said a trial judge must consider all the factors, including the age of the suspect and the failure to notify parents.

But the justices refused to rule that the absence of a juvenile's parents automatically means any consent is not voluntary.

Thursday's ruling most immediately means that charges of driving under the influence of drugs will be dropped against the youth, identified in court records only as Tyler B. because he was 16 at the time of the arrest.

But he is not out of the legal woods yet. Deputy County Attorney Nicolette Kneut said Tyler, who has since turned 18, still faces charges of possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia in justice court as an adult.

Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall said Thursday's ruling will complicate the job that police statewide are required to do. She said the high court has provided no guidance.

"How is the officer supposed to know whether or not it's been an express consent," she said. "It just makes it really, really tough because there isn't any bright line." [Duh, the 4th Amendment you idiot!!!!]

LaWall said the ruling means that her office will advise police to get a court-ordered warrant whenever possible before drawing blood, even when a motorist -- and now, especially a juvenile -- gives approval for a blood draw. That, she said, eliminates any possibility of having that consent later ruled involuntary.

According to court records, Tyler and two friends arrived late to school. A school monitor smelled marijuana on the boys and also saw drug paraphernalia in Tyler's car.

The boys were detained in separate rooms while sheriff's deputies were contacted.

A deputy read Tyler his Miranda warnings against self-incrimination and the right to an attorney. But the court files said that Tyler, in the presence of several school officials, admitted he had driven his car to school after smoking marijuana and that he owned some of the paraphernalia in the car.

When the deputy placed Tyler under arrested, the youth became agitated and was placed in handcuffs while the deputy retrieved a blood-draw kit from his car.

On returning, he saw Tyler had calmed down and he removed the cuffs. He then read Tyler from the law which says that Arizona motorists must consent to blood or other tests and that refusal will result in automatic suspension of driving privileges.

Tyler agreed verbally and in writing to the blood draw. But when the case went to court, Tyler argued his consent was not voluntary and that, as a minor, he lacked capacity to consent.

When the court commissioner agreed and suppressed the evidence, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Bales said the issue has never been decided in Arizona.

Bales rejected arguments by prosecutors that "implied consent" law means there is no need to determine whether a consent at the time of the blood draw is voluntary.

"A compelled blood draw, even when administered pursuant to (the implied consent law) is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment's constraints," he wrote for the court. "Such an invasion of bodily integrity implicates an individual's most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy."

He said the law says only that an officer must ask a suspect to submit to the test -- and that if a person refuses, a warrant is needed and the suspect's licenses is suspended.

Bales said a motorist can allow a warrantless search "provided the consent is voluntary." But that, he said has to be decided by a court based on all the circumstances, including the suspect's age -- and even whether a parent is present.

In this case, Bales wrote, the court commissioner was correct in ruling that, based on the evidence she had, Tyler's consent was not voluntary.

He said Tyler was detained for about two hours in a room in the presence of school officials and a deputy, without his parents.

"Tyler initially was shaking and visibly nervous," Bales wrote, and placed in handcuffs until he calmed down. And he said that the law read to him about "implied consent" ended with the statement, "You are, therefore, required to submit to the specified tests."

It was only then, Bales said, Tyler consented to the blood draw.

Thursday's ruling drew a special comment from Justice John Pelander. He said his own review of the evidence leads him to believe Tyler did voluntarily consent.

But Pelander said Arizona law requires he and the other justices not to reweigh the evidence but only to consider whether the court commissioner abused her discretion in suppressing the evidence.

Ruling will change DUI enforcement

Sadly over the years the DUI laws have changed from allegedly protecting us from drunk drivers to being a way for the government to raise money by shaking down people who are not even close to drunk.

When the DUI laws were first invented the legal limit was .15. It takes me about 5 beers to get to .15 and I think I am pretty damn drunk after that many beers.

Over the years the Federal government bribed the state governments with cold hard cash to get the states to lower the legal limit to .10, then to .08 and now is considering again bribing the states to get them to lower the legal limit to .05.

At the .08 legal limit a 100 pound person is legally drunk after 1 beer. At the .08 limit I am legally drunk before I can finish my third beer.

In both cases I seriously doubt that is enough alcohol to impair a person driving and think the DUI laws are mainly designed to raise revenue for the government.

In Arizona the DUI fines used to start at $1,000 for a simple DUI ticket. I think that was recently raises to $2,000. An extreme DUI for .15, which was the first DUI level will probably set you back $5,000 to $10,000 in fines.

When you read about holiday weekend DUI arrests in Arizona the cops routinely arrest 500 or more people for DUI, which under the new laws is at least $1 million dollars in DUI fines.

Source

Ruling will change DUI enforcement

Arizona has some of the toughest DUI laws in the nation, but a new state Supreme Court ruling could complicate how those laws are enforced.

In an opinion issued, the court ruled that blood draws are voluntarily and must be done with a suspect’s consent — that is, unless officers get a warrant to draw the blood first.

The ruling throws up further roadblocks to complete the tests on juveniles. As Capitol Media Services reports, some departments will be advised to just get the warrant, anyway, even if suspects consent to the test.

That could make it difficult to get accurate blood-alcohol results. Warrants take time that the body can use to process what’s in the system. Or, it could result in a greater focus on people who are clearly drunk, not necessarily those that are on the borderline.

The ruling is even more interesting in light of the national debate to lower the legal blood-alcohol limit to .05.

Judge: Google must give user info to FBI

Judge: Google must give user info to FBI

By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press

Updated 10:44 am, Saturday, June 1, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google must comply with the FBI's demand for data on certain customers as part of a national security investigation, according to a ruling by a federal judge who earlier this year determined such government requests are unconstitutional.

The decision involves "National Security Letters," thousands of which are sent yearly by the FBI to banks, telecommunication companies and other businesses. The letters, an outgrowth of the USA Patriot Act passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, are supposed to be used exclusively for national security purposes and are sent without judicial review. Recipients are barred from disclosing anything about them.

In March, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston sided with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a lawsuit brought on behalf of an unidentified telecommunications company, ruling the letters violate free speech rights. She said the government failed to show the letters and the blanket non-disclosure policy "serve the compelling need of national security" and the gag order creates "too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted."

She put that ruling on hold while the government appeals to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In the latest case, Illston sided with the FBI after Google contested the constitutionality and necessity of the letters but again put her ruling on hold until the 9th Circuit rules. After receiving sworn statements from two top-ranking FBI officials, Illston said she was satisfied that 17 of the 19 letters were issued properly. She wanted more information on two other letters.

It was unclear from the judge's ruling what type of information the government sought to obtain with the letters. It was also unclear who the government was targeting.

Kurt Opsah, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he was "disappointed that the same judge who declared these letters unconstitutional is now requiring compliance with them."

Illston's May 20 order omits any mention of Google or that the proceedings were closed to the public. But the judge said "the petitioner" was involved in a similar case filed on April 22 in New York federal court.

Public records obtained Friday by The Associated Press show that on that same day, the federal government filed a "petition to enforce National Security Letter" against Google after the company declined to cooperate with government demands.

Neither Google nor the FBI would comment.

The letters issued by the FBI can be used to collect unlimited kinds of private information, such as financial and phone records. The FBI sent 16,511 letters requests for information regarding 7,201 people in 2011, the latest data available.

Critics contend the government is overly zealous in using the letters, unnecessarily infringing on privacy rights of American citizens. In 2007, the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread violations by the FBI, including sending demands without proper authorization. The FBI has since tightened oversight of the system.

Mexican President Vicente Fox backs pot legalization in US

Video: Former president of Mexico Vicente Fox backs marijuana legalization in US

By jakeellisonseattlepi-com-jake-ellison@blog.timesunion.com

At a press conference in Seattle today the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, backed plans in Washington and Colorado to make a legal market for marijuana in the United States.

Citing the loss of human life in his country due to the failed war on drugs and the black market that grew up in its shadows to feed the massive market for marijuana in the U.S., Fox said he hoped for an orderly and tightly regulated marijuana market here.

“We all understand that we human beings perform best in scenarios of peace and harmony. A new responsible society will bring this peace and harmony. About the loses? We cannot be worse than where we are. The war [on drugs] has been lost all along and it has been lost again and again. It’s time for a new start. It’s time for a new vision. That’s why I applaud this group,” Fox said.

The conference was organized by former Microsoft manager and now marijuana advocate Jamen Shively to announce his company’s plans to create a national brand and business out of the legal marijuana markets coming online in Washington and Colorado.

Check out the videos for the rest of the story: Above Fox expresses his support and concerns and below Jamen Shively, CEO of Diego Pellicer Inc., lays out his company’s plan to become a major player in an international and national marijuana market.

Supreme Court - Cops can take DNA samples from arrestees

Sadly the Supreme Court didn't agree with that and now the police routinely force people to give them their fingerprints, which are put into police databases and used to identify people.

It looks like the same path is going to be taken with DNA according to this Supreme Court decision.

Source

Supreme Court upholds Maryland law, says police may take DNA samples from arrestees

By Robert Barnes, Monday, June 3, 8:08 AM E-mail the writer

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that police may take DNA samples as part of a routine arrest booking for serious crimes, narrowly upholding a Maryland law and saying the samples can be considered similar to fingerprints.

“DNA identification represents an important advance in the techniques used by law enforcement to serve legitimate police concerns for as long as there have been arrests,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the 5 to 4 ruling.

The decision overturned a ruling by Maryland’s highest court that the law allows unlawful searches of those arrested to see whether they can be connected to unsolved crimes. The federal government and 28 other states allow taking DNA samples.

The court split in an unusual fashion. The dissenters were three of the court’s liberals, and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who amplified his displeasure by reading a summary of his dissent from the bench.

“The court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our Fourth Amendment law: that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found,” Scalia said from the bench.

He added: “Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Kennedy wrote that the decision was more limited than that: DNA can be taken from those suspected of “serious” crimes. He said that police have a legitimate interest in identifying the person taken into custody and that the DNA samples could make sure that a dangerous criminal is not released on bail.

“By comparison to this substantial government interest and the unique effectiveness of DNA identification, the intrusion of a cheek swab to obtain a DNA sample is a minimal one,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The challenge to the Maryland law was brought by Alonzo Jay King Jr., whose DNA was taken after a 2009 arrest for assault and used to connect him to an unsolved rape.

Video of racist Mesa police beating up Black man????

If you look closely another cop seems to be having some stun gun fun on the man, again, while the man is on the ground and under control of the police. The cop seems to be placing his stun gun on the mans bare back and shocking him. According to the spokesperson from the Mesa Police Department in the following article this type of police stun gun fun is 100 percent acceptable under the Mesa Police policies.

Towards the end of the video the camera takes a shot of a truck that appears to have crashed into a traffic light. That may have been the cop that caused the crash mentioned in the article.

Source

Mesa police arrest video going viral online

The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jun 3, 2013 1:18 PM

A spokesman for the Mesa Police Department says the YouTube video of a fight between an officer and suspect during an arrest doesn't show anything outside of protocol. [So I guess punching, kicking and having a little stun gun fun on a person that has been arrested and is under control is 100 percent OK under the Mesa police policy. I wonder if this is just for Black folks, or if the Mesa police are equal opportunity *sshole and beat up all races equally well.]

Mesa Sgt. Tony Landato said the officer followed procedure when the suspect resisted arrest outside a Circle K near Center Street and McKellips Road.

The video, posted on YouTube on Saturday, shows a Mesa police officer attempting to arrest a man who then resists. The two go off camera for a moment then get into a struggle that appears to include a security guard jumping in to help the officer. A Mesa police officer is seen shooting the man with a stun gun while officers have the man on the ground.

Also heard during the altercation is a loud crashing sound that involved a second officer getting into a car crash while responding to the Circle K.

Information on the intial arrest attempt and the accident involving the officer is not available

Linda Valdez comments on the beating

Beating video is powerful teaching tool

It’s hard to watch. It’s important to see.

The YouTube video of Mesa Police pummeling and stun gunning a suspect who was resisting arrest isn’t easy to judge, though.

The guy provoked things. He wouldn’t comply with the cop. But once he was down, he was beaten by a number of officers who had him under enough control that one cop administered a stun gun shot with the cool precision of a surgeon.

This is police work the way the public doesn’t usually see it. Asphalt hard. Ugly.

Was it mean, too? Was it police brutality?

Clearly the suspect would have been better off if he hadn’t resisted. He got several chances to comply. He didn’t.

But still.

One can’t tell from the video how hard he continued to resist as cops held him down. He’s a big guy. A spokesman for the Mesa Police Department say the video of the incident shows nothing outside protocol. [Have EVER heard a police spokesperson admitting the police committed crimes???]

The officers followed procedure.

Well.

Many things will be said about the fact that the suspect is Black and the cops are White. Many questions will be raised about whether the violence inflicted on him after he was down was excessive – and, if so, was it because of his race.

But this is not just about race.

It’s about the price of a civil society.

Maintaining the kind of order we all want and the kind of freedom we expect involves a delicate balance.

Police need the ability to keep themselves safe and enforce the laws. But our freedom-loving society has to be on guard against the natural, human temptation of police to go too far in the heat of a dangerous moment. Police work would be easier if cops didn’t have to worry about people’s civil rights. [I can assure you the police rarely worry about a persons civil rights!!!!! It's usually only with high profile suspected criminals who can afford lawyers that the cops worry about there rights. Mainly because they know if they violate the rights of somebody that can afford a lawyer the case might get thrown out]

But they do. I don’t want to live in a society where the police are not held to an extremely high standard. Do you? [That is rubbish!!! Even when the police are caught red handed violating people civil rights they rarely get more them a slap on the wrist for punishment, if that much!!!! Around Nov. 24, 2004 a News 12 helicopter caught some Phoenix Police beating up a suspected carjacker who and surrendered and was laying on the ground. The Maricopa County Attorneys Office didn't even charge the cops with a crime because they claimed they probably would not be convicted. That article follows this article]

Did these cops go too far? If so, that’s a problem. A big problem.

This video probably won’t be used for calm discussion about how to preserve that balance.

But it could be a valuable tool to do that.

It also provides insight into what goes on out there between cops and suspects in the public spaces that you want kept safe. It shows things that are hard to watch, important to think about.

Source

Original Article

Police in scuffle with carjack suspect

David J. Cieslak

The Arizona Republic

Nov. 24, 2004 12:00 AM

Phoenix police are investigating the actions of several officers involved in a scuffle Tuesday afternoon with a handcuffed carjacking suspect.

The officers were arresting a 23-year-old man, one of two suspects accused of assaulting and robbing a pregnant woman at gunpoint outside a supermarket near 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road, Phoenix police Sgt. Randy Force said. The woman was not seriously injured in the attack.

After assaulting the woman, the gunman forced her into the vehicle and led police on a high-speed pursuit that ended at Thomas and 27th Avenue, authorities said. The suspect then jumped out of the vehicle and began running from officers.

When police caught up with the suspect, a crew from 12 News inside the television station's helicopter videotaped officers striking the handcuffed suspect several times.

Among the actions shown on the unedited tape:

An officer throws his body into the suspect, who was facing a wall and did not appear to be resisting.

Once the suspect is on the ground, an officer strikes him twice in the torso with his hand. Officers then drag the suspect in the dirt before an officer places a foot on his midsection.

An officer talks to the suspect with his hand on the man's head and neck, clearly placing a large amount of weight on him.

The officers roll the man onto his back and begin searching his pockets. A short time later, an officer punches him in the groin. They flip the man back over and an officer stands on the back of the suspect's left knee for a few seconds.

As police walk the suspect to a patrol car, an officer strikes the suspect's face with his elbow.

Force said the officers will not be investigated for criminal misconduct, but an administrative review of the incident was under way Tuesday night.

"It's believed the officers' conduct constitutes an issue with our policies, but not a violation of law," Force said. "Looking at the tape, there are concerns about the officers' actions and whether the force used was reasonable under the circumstances. That is going to be the focus of the internal investigation."

Force and members of the department's Professional Standards Bureau and Special Investigations Detail reviewed the tape Tuesday night at 12 News. The officer who initially tackled the suspect declined to comment when contacted at the scene by 12 News.

Police also took the other robbery suspect into custody.

Horne uses Jodi Arias verdict to keep his plea bargain out of the news????

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Horne re-election campaign e-mail attacks media, Obama to raise money

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jun 3, 2013 10:24 PM

Republican Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s campaign is attacking the media and President Barack Obama as it tries to raise money for Horne’s re-election.

In an e-mail to supporters late last week, Horne accused the “liberal media” of comparing him to murderer Jodi Arias, calling it “a new low and a disgusting attack” that cannot be allowed to stand.

“Tom Horne has taken conservative stands that have made enemies — including the media,” the e-mail said. “So the media is fighting back. One news report compared a $300 traffic fine to Jodi Arias, a cold-blooded murderer. Its (sic) disgusting. As conservatives, we need to FIGHT BACK and FIGHT BACK HARD.”

The e-mail appears to refer to a story by a local TV station that suggested Horne timed entering his no-contest plea to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge on the same afternoon the verdict was to come down in the closely watched Arias trial.

A Phoenix court official told the station that Horne’s attorney called him several times on May 8 to get on a judge’s calendar that day; Horne’s case originally was scheduled for May 28.

Horne denied to the TV station that he used the Arias verdict to try to bury news of his plea — which resulted in a $300 fine. The plea is tied to a March 2012 fender-bender in which Horne, along with subordinate Carmen Chenal, backed into another vehicle, then left without leaving a note. They were under surveillance by the FBI as part of an investigation involving the campaign-finance case.

Authorities concluded that Horne, a married man, did not leave a note so that he could hide a relationship with Chenal.

Horne is running for re-election in 2014. It is unclear if he will face another Republican in the primary.

Mark Brnovich, director of the Arizona Department of Gaming, on Monday said he is “seriously considering” a run for the attorney general’s post.

Brnovich, a former state and federal prosecutor, said he has been approached “by a number of prominent and well-respected people in the community” about running.”

“I think it’s important we have the strongest Republican we can running next November,” he told The Arizona Republic. “I believe that, with my experience, my temperament, my qualifications, that I would make an excellent attorney general.”

On the Democratic side, attorney Felecia Rotellini, whom Horne narrowly defeated in 2010, is gearing up for another run.

Attacking “liberal media bias” and Obama are tried-and-true Republican fundraising tactics.

In the e-mail, the Horne campaign says Horne has also fought against “Obamacare, against drugs and for protecting our border.”

“Look at what the liberals are up to lately,” the e-mail says. “They have the IRS go after the tea party, they blame Bengazi (sic) on an internet video and go after Fox News.”

An e-mail link takes supporters to Horne’s campaign website

Cops are paid very well and have cushy jobs????

First any job that required driving an automobile is a dangerous job. Thousands of Americans die every year in auto accidents. Thus any jobs that requires driving an automobile is usually more dangerous then one that doesn't.

And police officers like mailmen, taxi cab drivers, ice cream sales truck drivers, bus drivers, pizza delivery guys, UPS and FEDEX delivery guys and meter readers drive automobiles, which makes their job a dangerous job.

But cops don't risk their lives to protect us everyday any more then mailmen, taxi cab drivers, ice cream sales truck drivers, and pizza delivery guys risk their lives for us to bring us packages and junk food.

The really dangerous jobs in American are fishermen, loggers or lumberjacks and constructions workers. Year in and year out these three jobs are usually in the top 3 most dangerous jobs according to statistics compiled by the US government.

I have only seen the job of a police officer in the top 10 once and they were seventh.

And when it comes to people being murdered on the job, again cops are not even close to the top of the list.

The jobs with the highest chance of being murdered while at work are convenience store clerks like at Circle Ks and 7/11s, along with liquor store clerks.

Yes, every now and then a cop gets murdered, but not any where near the rate that store clerks do. Criminals are usually smart enough only to rob unarmed people that can't defend themselves and for that reason avoid robbing armed police officers who can defend themselves.

Last I think Bill Richardson is also a little biased when he sings the blues on how underpaid cops are.

The police and fire unions are very powerful unions and have done an excellent job in getting police and firemen very high pay rates along with excellent retirement benefits.

In the Phoenix area most police forces start their entry level cops at about $50,000 a year. That is comparable to the starting pay of a computer science engineer who is just getting out of college. But cops in Arizona don't need a college degree.

If you look at the public databases which list the salaries for cops in Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe and other valley city there are a very large number of cops making $100,000 or even $150,000 a year.

And of course the retirement benefits for cops are fantastic.

I believe that a cop can retire after 20 years and get 80 percent of his highest pay for the rest of his life.

How many other jobs can you be hired as a 21 year old rookie at $50,000 and after 20 years retire at 41 and make $80,000 a year for the rest of your life.

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Richardson: ‘Selective scrutiny’ over police, fire pension programs a dangerous game

Posted: Friday, May 31, 2013 5:47 am

Guest Commentary by Bill Richardson

‘Selective scrutiny’ over police, fire pension programs a dangerous game

May 2013 will go down as one of the worst periods in Arizona history when it comes to the loss of first responders.

On May 6, Department of Public Safety officer Tim Hoffman was murdered while investigating an accident near Yuma. Twelve days later, Phoenix firefighter Bradley Harper was killed at a fire scene. The next day, Phoenix Police officer Daryl Raetz was murdered while arresting a drunk driver.

Three dead in two weeks.

The last time this kind of tragedy struck Arizona was in 1970-71, when two Phoenix police officers died on Dec. 28, 1970, two Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies died Jan. 18, 1971, and two DPS officers Feb. 5 and Feb. 7. Five were murdered and one died while responding to a dying officer’s call for help. One of the murdered deputies was the father of one of the Phoenix officers who died.

Many widows and orphans were made in that five-week period.

No one ever told us being a cop or firefighter was going to be without risk or danger. Doing police work or fighting fires right is dirty, dangerous and where there’s always a chance of dying and leaving behind a widow and orphans. We just expected that our families would be taken of as promised if anything ever happened to us. Sadly promises were broken and contracts breached by the Arizona State Legislature.

Over the last two years the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, Arizona’s police and fire pension plan, has come under selective scrutiny by powerful media interests and the Legislature.

Tales of a handful of pension abuses and a few double and triple dippers made headlines and became the catalyst for the legislature to climb onboard the pension reform train following years of plumping up their own pension plan, part-time elected officials get better pensions than police officers and firefighters, the same elected officials giving their retirement fund administrator a nearly quarter million dollar annual pension all while failing in their fiduciary and legislative responsibilities that threw the once nationally heralded public safety pension fund into mismanagement and underfunding.

Following a series of newspaper stories, the legislature led by its own in-house double and triple dippers looked more like cats covering up feces in a sand box than a responsible elected body trying to fix a broken pension system.

In its zeal and fear of being targeted by the media as against pension reform, the legislature enacted drastic changes in a few short months instead of taking a long and hard look at what had worked exceptionally well until its members fell asleep at the switch. Their repair effort looked more like using duct tape to fix a failed bridge instead of studying the problem and fixing it right once they had good advice and all the facts. Already their patch is showing signs of failure.

While the legislative leadership and their minions can boast to the media of taking on the pension abusers and pro-labor forces, you don’t hear them bragging about cutting survivor’s benefits to the widows and orphans of police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty. You see that the legislature wiped out the paltry annual cost living adjustments given to widows and orphans — many of who are unable to obtain Social Security survivor’s benefits because their spouse’s employers didn’t enroll public safety employees in Social Security.

As usual legislators will tout their support for police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty following the recent deaths of Huffman, Harper and Raetz. If they supported them so much then why did create a situation that would hurt their survivors?

It’s time for the state legislature to fix what they broke and restore benefits to the widows and orphans of those fallen police officers and firefighters our legislator’s profess to the cameras and newspapers they respect so much and thank for their service.

Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

Arpaio nailed but not corralled

And of course it will probably take another 4 more years of lawsuits for the Feds to order him to stop.

Sadly there isn't much difference between how Sheriff Joe violates the rights of alleged criminals and that of most other police departments across America. The only real difference is that Sheriff Joe brags about his civil rights violations, while most other police departments pretend to honer the civil rights of people they abuse.

Kind of like that video tape of the Mesa police beating up a Black man last week. The spokesperson for the Mesa police said the beating conformed to the policies of the Mesa police and the Mesa cops did nothing wrong.

Source

Arpaio nailed but not corralled

Those who believe that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has finally been nailed and corralled on the issue of racial profiling shouldn’t be so confident.

The decision by federal Judge G. Murray Snow certainly nailed Arpaio on the question of whether he unconstitutionally targeted Latinos with his immigration sweeps.

During these sweeps, Arpaio’s deputies targeted cars with Latino drivers and occupants to follow. The deputies claimed that virtually any car could be found in violation of some traffic law in a matter of minutes. When a car with Latino occupants was pulled over, all Latinos were questioned about their legal status. Arpaio’s position was that if a pretext were found for the initial stop, there was no racial profiling.

Simply put, Arpaio was targeting certain residents for special scrutiny because of their race. That’s a disgraceful violation of fundamental American principles and the U.S. Constitution.

The problem with Snow’s decision is in its attempt to corral Arpaio through injunctive relief.

According to Snow, illegal presence in the United States is a civil offense. And when the federal government stripped Arpaio’s office of its ability to act as federal immigration enforcement agents, Arpaio lost the right to take action regarding civil violations.

Snow explicitly enjoined Arpaio’s office from prolonging a traffic stop except to investigate other state or federal criminal law violations, which according to Snow doesn’t include illegal presence.

In the first place, the claim that illegal presence is just a civil offense is far from clear-cut. It is true that there is no federal crime for illegal presence. But it is a federal crime for foreign citizens to remain in this country without registering with the federal government. Illegal immigrants are obviously in violation of that criminal statute.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s hard to square Snow’s decision with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the stop provisions of SB 1070. That Arizona law requires local law enforcement, in the course of a lawful stop for some other reason, to make a reasonable attempt “to determine the immigration status” of those reasonably suspected of being “unlawfully present in the United States.”

The court said this provision didn’t per se violate the U.S. Constitution. So, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, local law enforcement can seek, during a traffic stop, to determine “immigration status,” irrespective of whether it is a civil or a criminal matter.

While the court acknowledged that prolonging a stop solely to determine immigration status would raise a constitutional question, obviously following up on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence requires some expenditure of time. The court reserved the question of how long a stop could reasonably be prolonged and under what conditions.

So, Snow is saying that Arpaio can’t do what the U.S. Supreme Court has said not only that local law enforcement can do but that state law can require them to do.

Now, it’s important to point out that Arpaio’s sweeps also violated SB 1070. There is no evidence that Arpaio’s deputies established reasonable suspicion before trying to determine the immigration status of Latinos detained.

Snow’s remedy is vulnerable on appeal. If he seeks to impose a court monitor, as the decision hints he’s inclined, the decision becomes more vulnerable. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear its dislike of federal courts micromanaging the day-to-day operations of local governments.

There’s a non-judicial remedy that would be, in some respects, more satisfying. That Arpaio unconstitutionally violated the rights of Latino residents during his immigration sweeps is now unarguable. That should offend the conscience of the entire body politic.

An appropriate expression of condemnation would be a resolution by the Board of Supervisors forbidding any county money from being expended on such sweeps in the future. Arpaio might sue, saying that the board doesn’t have the authority to tell him how to spend his budget.

But it’s hard to imagine more favorable, or appropriate, circumstances for the board to attempt to expand its powers of the purse.

Arizona Bar dismisses a charge vs. Horne in campaign-finance case

Source

Arizona Bar dismisses a charge vs. Horne in campaign-finance case

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 5, 2013 11:21 AM

The State Bar of Arizona has dismissed a charge against Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne stemming from a 14-month investigation by the FBI and county authorities into alleged campaign-finance violations.

The Bar, which licenses and regulates attorneys, attempted to determine whether Horne violated ethical rules.

Horne has been notified of the dismissal. Horne’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said the attorney general “won’t have any comment” on the dismissal.

A separate Bar investigation into Horne’s involvement in a March 2012 hit-and-run accident is ongoing, said Rick DeBruhl, chief communications officer for the Bar.

Citing court rules, DeBruhl said he could not provide details about why the campaign finance-related charge was dismissed.

“As the underlying campaign finance violation proceeding has now been dismissed, it appears uncertain whether or when that matter may be pursued,” according to a May 22 letter to Horne’s attorney obtained by The Arizona Republic.

“Accordingly, we will dismiss our concurrent proceeding to await a final outcome of any future case relating to the alleged campaign finance violations and revisit our investigation at that time. This matter may be reopened at any time prior to that should the State Bar discover that there is evidence of a violation that would require immediate pursuit.”

After a 14-month investigation, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery accused Horne and a political-ally-turned-staffer of collaborating to quickly raise more than $500,000 to fund negative ads targeting his Democratic opponent during the 2010 election. By law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate certain activities with independent-expenditure committees.

Horne and his staffer, Kathleen Winn, have said they did nothing wrong, that authorities have misinterpreted evidence and have criticized their investigative techniques.

Montgomery pursued a civil-enforcement action, but a judge last month ruled the case could not move forward because of legal technicalities and procedural failings by the Secretary of State's Office, which found reasonable cause exists to believe a campaign-finance violation occurred.

The Secretary of State’s Office can still pursue the case through another prosecutor.

The pending Bar investigation into Horne is tied to an accident he was involved in while driving a car borrowed from an attorney general’s staffer. That fender-bender was witnessed by two FBI agents who were tailing Horne as part of the campaign-finance investigation.

Horne last month pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge and paid a $300 fine.

There’s no hooking Tom Horne

Source

There’s no hooking Tom Horne

Attorney General Tom Horne could make a fortune in the self-help business by putting out a series of instructional videos under the title: “How to Wriggle Off a Hook.”

The man is a master.

Evidence of this surfaced again this week when the State Bar of Arizona dismissed a charge against Horne that involved alleged campaign-finance violations.

The reason the State Bar dismissed the charge is that Horne had previously wriggled off another hook.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Secretary of State Ken Bennett thought Montgomery could pursue a civil case against Horne for campaign hanky-panky but Horne wriggled out of it on a technicality when a judge ruled that Montgomery and Bennett acted incorrectly.

The court actually said the complaint against Horne should first have been forwarded to the office of … Horne.

All of this was preceded by Horne wriggling off yet another hook.

This one involved a minor fender bender witnessed by FBI agents who were tailing the attorney general. (That’s correct. The person we elected as the top law enforcement officer in the state was being tailed by the FBI.)

The agents, who supposedly were working on the campaign violations case, spotted Horne and a woman who works with him leave the AG’s office separately. The couple eventually wound up in the same car with Horne driving. While the attorney general was attempting to park near the woman’s residence the FBI agents said Horne backed into another vehicle and didn’t report it. He and the woman then went into the building where she lives.

I know – ick.

Horne has since pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge and paid a $300 fine.

The campaign finance case Montgomery was pursuing involved Horne’s 2010 run for attorney general. The allegation is that Horne improperly coordinated efforts with an independent-expenditure committee that attacked Horne’s opponent in the general election. That would be illegal.

But, owing to the technicality over procedure, that case has gone nowhere.

And all of this represents only Horne’s most recent hook wriggling.

As a young man, Horne got snagged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The incident has been reported a number of times in this and other publications. Horne is barred by the SEC from associating with brokers, dealers, investment advisers and investment companies.

Why?

Among other things the SEC alleged that a company Horne ran “violated the record-keeping, anti-fraud, and broker-dealer net capital provisions of the federal securities laws and filed false financial reports with the commission.”

The SEC said Horne’s firm “attempted to induce the purchase and sale of securities when it did not have the required net capital” and misrepresented its financial condition to its customers.

Without admitting guilt Horne agreed to the lifetime trading ban.

Also, The Arizona Republic reported back in 2010 that Horne checked “no” on a report filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission asking if he had ever been a partner in a business that went bankrupt. It turns out the company for which he’d gotten into trouble with the SEC had gone belly up.

Horne told the Republic’s Casey Newton, “I didn’t think about it because it was 40 years ago.”

Horne’s then-Republican primary opponent, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who himself was later disbarred, said at the time, “The attorney general is the chief defender of the public when it comes to fraud and white-collar financial crimes. I’ve prosecuted plenty of con artists, and Tom Horne unfortunately falls on the other side of that list.”

Through it all, Horne was elected to the Arizona legislature. He was elected Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. And he was elected is Attorney General. And he is running for re-election.

Like I said, he’s a master.

When I mentioned my “How to Wriggle Off a Hook” idea to a long-time Arizona political observer Wednesday he told me:

“We’ve had a lot of politicians in Arizona who could write that book. But the thing you have to remember about wriggling is — no matter how successful you are at it you’re still a worm.”

Police union leaders don't like to be called "union bosses"

If you look at the letter from the "union bosses" to the city of Phoenix at the end of the article half of the unions have the term police or fire as part of their names.

Source

Phoenix labor leaders asking for a ban on the term “union bosses”

In the latest bizarre twist over at Phoenix city hall, the city’s public employee unions are going after Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio for name calling, asking for “an immediate censure and sanction” against him..

It seems they don’t like being referred to as “union bosses” and they want Mayor Greg Stanton and the rest of the City Council to tell him to cut it out.

“Councilman DiCiccio’s language is truly inflammatory and insulting,” the presidents of the city’s public employee unions wrote, in their letter sent Monday to the council. “His continued use of the word ‘union bosses’, a phrase with both historical and racially bigoted overtones, is deliberately and repeatedly chosen by him because it’s (sic) very meaning can be nothing other than offensive and derogatory to anyone who hears it.”

The letter goes on to ask the Phoenix City Council to “make a public declaration that such conduct among its members is not condoned by them, is unacceptable and that an immediate end to the use of this offensive and deliberately inflammatory phrase shall ensue.”

No seriously, that’s what they’re asking.

The unions have good reason to despise DiCiccio. He has questioned employee pay raises. He has loudly and repeatedly called for an end to the food tax that coincidentally is roughly equal to the general-fund amount needed to fund those raises during the recession. He’s no fan of public pensions and he is gearing up for the next big fight at city hall – over the longstanding and probably illegal practice of pension spiking.

I’ve long suspected that one or more of the unions are the moneybags behind the Campaign for Better Neighborhoods, a stealth group that, from the cover of darkness, is attempting to unseat DiCiccio in this year’s council race. They desperately want him gone.

What I can’t figure out is why they think that decrying his use of the union boss label would hurt DiCiccio in his district, which covers Ahwatukee, the Biltmore and Arcadia. If anything, I’m guessing their complaint will wind up in DiCiccio’s campaign ads this summer.

DiCiccio, in a statement e-mailed over this afternoon, sounds delighted by the labor leaders’ letter.

“I will not be bullied into silence by labor representatives of the City of Phoenix (a.k.a. union bosses),” he wrote. “The letters and the social media posts will not deter me from doing the right thing for the taxpayers. … These Chicago-style intimidation tactics are clearly why Mayor Stanton is afraid to keep his campaign promises of repealing the food tax and stopping pension spiking.”

Any bets on how many of the union groups will join Stanton in supporting DiCiccio’s opponent, Karlene Keogh Parks?

–

Below is the full text of their letter:

Mayor Greg Stanton and Council,

This is a joint letter from labor representatives of the City of Phoenix [ie. police and firemen union bosses] requesting an immediate censure and sanction against Councilman Sal DiCiccio for his continued use of offensive and derogatory language towards elected labor representatives of the City.

It is one thing to disagree on the course of the city and its finances, and to debate the merits of a budget proposal or tax. However, it should never be acceptable for any one of us speaking at a public Council meeting or other public arenas to use offensive language towards one another, employees or elected officials.

Councilman DiCiccio’s language is truly inflammatory and insulting. His continued use of the word ‘union bosses’, a phrase with both historical and racially bigoted overtones, is deliberately and repeatedly chosen by him because it’s (sic) very meaning can be nothing other than offensive and derogatory to anyone who hears it. Elected labor representatives are as much ‘bosses’ over their unions as Mr. DiCiccio is a ‘boss’ over District 6.

It is as much an honor to serve as a democratically elected representative of workers in this city as it is for Mr. DiCiccio to serve as an elected councilperson. His continued attempt at degrading both the leadership and members of our city’s [police and firemen] unions with inflammatory rhetoric is beneath the dignity and the office of Councilperson and shows ignorance of the true purpose of our associations.

The long history of defending workers rights and safety, establishing FMLA, Social Security, Medicare, ending child labor, establishing sick days, minimum wage laws, bringing the 40 hour work week to fruition and above all bringing dignity to workers is well established. [Give me a break, most police officers in the Phoenix metro area START at around $50,000 a year which is about $25 and hour. Arizona police officers can retire after 20 years at 80 percent of their highest pay which is far better then most of the taxpayers who pay their wages]

Perhaps Mr. DiCiccio is not aware that it was in Memphis, Tennessee that sanitation workers, aspiring to become labor union representatives and members picked up signs and declared proudly, ‘I Am a Man,’ and that this moment was the backgrop for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech.

While we can disagree and debate on the many financial [Bingo - It's about MONEY. The unions always want more money, and calling them unions bosses makes them sound like money grubbing thieves, which is why they don't like to be called union bosses] and other issues affecting our city a basic decorum f respect and civility should be the norm. The council deserves it, we deserve it, and certainly those citizens who have elected all of us deserve it.

Therefore, we request that the Mayor and council make a public declaration that such conduct among its members is not condoned by them, is unacceptable and that an immediate end to the use of this offensive and deliberately inflammatory phrase shall ensue.”

Signed:

Frank A. Piccioli, president, AFSCME 2960

Ran Ramirez, president, Administrative Supervisory Professional & Technical Employees Association

Joe Clure, president Phoenix Law Enforcement Association

Sean Mattson, president, Phoenix Police Sergeants and Lieutenants Association

Luis Schmidt, president, AFSCME 2384

Bill Higgins, chapter president, Laborers International Union of North America Local 777

Pete Gorraiz, president International Association of Firefighters 493; and Rebekah Friend, executive director, Arizona AFL-CIO

Rebekah Friend, executive director, Arizona AFL-CIO

50% of inmates were arrested for victimless drug war crimes???

In this editorial George Will says about 50 percent of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes.

I recently posted another article from Barrons that said about 8 percent of the people in American prisons are there for victimless marijuana drug war crimes.

I usually say about two thirds or 66 percent of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I think I got that figure from Reason Magazine.

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Leahy and Paul plan on mandatory sentencing makes sense

By George F. Will, Published: June 5 E-mail the writer

Libertarians believe government should have a compelling reason before it restricts an individual’s liberty. Today’s liberals believe almost any reason will do, because liberty is less important than equality, fraternity, fighting obesity and many other aspirations. Now, however, one of the most senior and liberal U.S. senators and one of the most junior and libertarian have a proposal that could slow and even repair some of the fraying of society.

Seven-term Democrat Pat Leahy’s 38 Senate years have made him Judiciary Committee chairman. Republican Rand Paul is in his third Senate year. They hope to reduce the cruelty, irrationality and cost of the current regime of mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.

Such crimes are multiplying at a rate of more than 500 a decade, even though the Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to criminalize only a few activities that are national in nature (e.g., counterfeiting, treason, crimes on the high seas). The federal government, having failed at core functions, such as fairly administering a rational revenue system, acts like a sheriff with attention-deficit disorder, haphazardly criminalizing this and that behavior in order to express righteous alarm about various wrongs that excite attention.

Approximately 80,000 people are sentenced in federal courts each year. There are an estimated 4,500 federal criminal statutes and tens of thousands of regulations backed by criminal penalties, including incarceration. There can be felony penalties for violating arcane regulations that do not give clear notice of behavior that is prescribed or proscribed. This violates the mens rea requirement — people deserve criminal punishment only if they intentionally engage in conduct that is inherently wrong or that they know to be illegal. No wonder that the federal prison population — currently approximately 219,000, about half serving drug sentences — has expanded 51 percent since 2000 and federal prisons are at 138 percent of their supposed capacity.

The Leahy-Paul measure would expand to all federal crimes the discretion federal judges have in many drug cases to impose sentences less than the mandatory minimums. This would, as Leahy says, allow judges — most of whom oppose mandatory minimums — to judge. Paul says mandatory minimum sentences, in the context of the proliferation of federal crimes, undermine federalism, the separation of powers and “the bedrock principle that people should be treated as individuals.”

Almost everyone who enters the desensitizing world of U.S. prisons is going to return to society, and many will have been socially handicapped by the experience. Until the 1970s, about 100 per 100,000 Americans were in prison. Today 700 per 100,000 are. America has nearly 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of its prisoners. African Americans are 13 percent of the nation’s population but 37 percent of the prison population, and one in three African American men spends time incarcerated. All this takes a staggering toll on shattered families and disordered neighborhoods.

The House Judiciary Committee has created an Over-Criminalization Task Force. Its members should read “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” by Harvey Silverglate, a libertarian lawyer whose book argues that prosecutors could indict most of us for three felonies a day. And the task force should read the short essay “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime” by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. Given the axiom that a competent prosecutor can persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and given the reality of prosecutorial abuse — particularly, compelling plea bargains by overcharging with “kitchen sink” indictments — Reynolds believes “the decision to charge a person criminally should itself undergo some degree of due process scrutiny.”

He also suggests banning plea bargains: “An understanding that every criminal charge filed would have to be either backed up in open court or ignominiously dropped would significantly reduce the incentive to overcharge. . . . Our criminal justice system, as presently practiced, is basically a plea-bargain system with actual trials of guilt or innocence a bit of showy froth floating on top.”

U.S. prosecutors win more than 90 percent of their cases, 97 percent of those without complete trials. British and Canadian prosecutors win significantly less, and for many offenses, the sentences in those nations are less severe.

Making mandatory minimums less severe would lessen the power of prosecutors to pressure defendants by overcharging them in order to expose them to draconian penalties. The Leahy-Paul measure is a way to begin reforming a criminal justice system in which justice is a diminishing component.

Uncle Sam reads your email and listens to your phone calls

Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports

Sure the jackbooted thugs in the FBI, Homeland Security, DEA, BATF, and ICE who created this program are the problem, but the real problem is the members of the US Congress and US Senate who passed the unconstitutional laws such as the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allow the police thugs in those government agencies to do this.

The article didn't mention this but in addition to monitoring our phone conversations and reading our emails the government at both the Federal, state, county and city levels routinely monitor our websites, chat rooms, Facebook, Tweeter and other internet activities.

Every day some of my web pages get a visit from an IP address in Shady Grove, Maryland, which I suspect is the home of some Federal police agency. On a map Shady Grove, Maryland looks like a suburb in the Washington, D.C. metro area and I suspect it is the home of one branch or another of the US Department of Homeland Security.

I have read a number of articles in the Arizona Republic about people who have been arrested by police from the cities of Tempe, Phoenix and the Arizona Department of Public Safety who troll the internet pretending to be horny underage girls who want to have sex with older men.

Source

Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports

Associated Press Fri Jun 7, 2013 7:42 AM

A leaked document has laid bare the monumental scope of the government's surveillance of Americans' phone records — hundreds of millions of calls — in the first hard evidence of a massive data collection program aimed at combating terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.

At issue is a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. Intelligence experts said the government, though not listening in on calls, would be looking for patterns that could lead to terrorists — and that there was every reason to believe similar orders were in place for other phone companies.

Some critics in Congress, as well as civil liberties advocates, declared that the sweeping nature of the National Security Agency program represented an unwarranted intrusion into Americans' private lives. But a number of lawmakers, including some Republicans who normally jump at the chance to criticize the Obama administration, lauded the program's effectiveness. Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said the program had helped thwart at least one attempted terrorist attack in the United States, "possibly saving American lives."

Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported Thursday the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans.

The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Post said PalTalk has had numerous posts about the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It also said Dropbox would soon be included.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple said in statements that they do not provide the government with direct access to their records.

"When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law," the company said.

The leaks about the programs brought a sharp response from James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. In an unusual statement late Thursday, Clapper called disclosure of the Internet surveillance program "reprehensible" and said the leak about the phone record collecting could cause long-lasting and irreversible harm to the nation's ability to respond to threats.

Clapper said news reports about the programs contained inaccuracies and omitted key information. He declassified some details about the authority used in the phone records program because he said Americans must know the program's limits. Those details included that a special national security court reviews the program every 90 days and that the court prohibits the government from indiscriminately sifting through phone data. Queries are only allowed when facts support reasonable suspicion, Clapper said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said of the phone-records collecting: "When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we're going to have a real debate."

But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Americans have no cause for concern. "If you're not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you've got nothing to worry about," he said. [Yea, and if this were Nazi Germany, I am sure Sen. Lindsey Graham would have said the Jews shouldn't be alarmed at some of the things Hitler was doing, after all they were aimed at Jews, but rather at helping the Nazis catch bad criminals.]

A senior administration official pointed out that the collection of communication cited in the Washington Post and Guardian articles involves "extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court [FISA courts, secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are normally not open to the public, and which don't keep records of their decisions that are open to the public, and which meet in location which the public is not allowed], to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons." The official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and requested anonymity, added that Congress had recently reauthorized the program.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the order was a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice that is supervised by federal judges who balance efforts to protect the country from terror attacks against the need to safeguard Americans' privacy. The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011.

While the scale of the program might not have been news to some congressional leaders, the disclosure offered a public glimpse into a program whose breadth is not widely understood. Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said it was the type of surveillance that "I have long said would shock the public if they knew about it."

The government has hardly been forthcoming.

Wyden released a video of himself pressing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the matter during a Senate hearing in March.

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked.

"No, sir," Clapper answered.

"It does not?" Wyden pressed.

Clapper quickly softened his answer. "Not wittingly," he said. "There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly."

There was no immediate comment from Clapper's office Thursday on his testimony in March.

The public is now on notice that the government has been collecting data — even if not listening to the conversations — on every phone call every American makes, a program that has operated in the shadows for years, under President George W. Bush, and continued by President Barack Obama.

"It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that if you make calls in the United States the NSA has those records," wrote Cindy Cohn, general counsel of the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and staff attorney Mark Rumold, in a blog post.

Without confirming the authenticity of the court order, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said such surveillance powers are "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats," by helping officials determine if people in the U.S. who may have been engaged in terrorist activities have been in touch with other known or suspected terrorists.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., stressed that phone records are collected under court orders that are approved by the Senate and House Intelligence committees and regularly reviewed.

And Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada played down the significance of the revelation.

"Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new," he said. "This is a program that's been in effect for seven years, as I recall. It's a program that has worked to prevent not all terrorism but certainly the vast, vast majority. Now is the program perfect? Of course not." [Yea, and Harry Reid probably would have said the same things to the Jews in Nazi Germany. Trust your government, these laws are not aimed at murdering Jews, but at catching criminals. Trust the government, we are here to help you, not harm you!!!]

But privacy advocates said the scope of the program was indefensible.

"This confirms our worst fears," said Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. "If the government can track who we call," he said, "the right to privacy has not just been compromised — it has been defeated."

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who sponsored the USA Patriot Act that governs the collection, said he was "extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation." [Another government liar who will say anything to get elected??? If this tyrant is so concerned about the Patriot Act he created why doesn't he pass a law to repeal it??? Probably because he is getting money from the special interest groups in the FBI and other Homeland Security agencies]

Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.

House Speaker John Boehner called on Obama to explain why the program is necessary.

It would "be helpful if they'd come forward with the details here," he said.

The disclosure comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Obama administration. The president already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists' phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead. [I have always said Obama is a carbon copy clone of George W. Bush, now it seems like Obama is also a clone of Richard M. Nixon!!!]

At a minimum, it's all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.

The Verizon order, granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, according to The Guardian.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA's computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify "communities of interest" — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

Rogers said once the data has been collected, officials still must follow "a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number." [From what I have read these FISA courts are secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are normally not open to the public, and which don't keep public records of their decisions. So that really isn't a system of checks and balances to prevent government abuses, in fact it's an invitation to government abuses]

But Jim Harper, a communications and privacy expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, questioned the effectiveness of pattern analyses to intercept terrorism. He said that kind of analysis would produce many false positives and give the government access to intricate data about people's calling habits.

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company isn't allowed to comment on any such court order.

"Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard its customers' privacy," he wrote. "Nevertheless, the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply."

The company listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. [That is about one third of American's population of 310 million people]

The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency "is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans' civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability."

Under Bush, the NSA built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown, but one aspect was to monitor massive numbers of incoming and outgoing U.S. calls to look for suspicious patterns, said an official familiar with the program. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

After The New York Times revealed the existence of that wiretapping program, the data collection continued under the Patriot Act, the official said. The official did not know if the program was continuous or whether it stopped and restarted at times.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Obama defends phone data collection program

F*ck you Obama, I will take 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience any day of the year over having your police thugs spy on me to protect me from enemies which YOUR foreign policies created!!!!

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Obama defends phone data collection program

Josh Lederman and Donna Cassata Fri Jun 7, 2013 10:08 AM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama vigorously defended sweeping secret surveillance into America’s phone records and foreigners’ Internet use, declaring “we have to make choices as a society.”

Taking questions Friday from reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif., Obama said, “It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers. The leaked document first reported by the Guardian newspaper gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon’s land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies too. Another secret program revealed Thursday scours the Internet usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of nine U.S.-based internet providers such as Microsoft and Google.

In his first comments since the programs were publicly revealed this week, Obama said safeguards are in place.

“They help us prevent terrorist attacks,” Obama said. He said he has concluded that prevention is worth the “modest encroachments on privacy.” [Yea, and modest violations of the Bill of Rights, as if a modest violations are OK]

Obama said he came into office with a “healthy skepticism” of the program and increased some of the “safeguards” on the programs. He said Congress and federal judges have oversight on the program, and a judge would have to approve monitoring of the content of a call and it’s not a “program run amok.” [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

He said government officials are “’’looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”

“They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata they might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism,” Obama said. [per the 4th Amendment you have to have "probable cause" to spy on people and when you say "might" you don't have "probable cause"]

The president’s remarks followed an unusual late-night statement Thursday from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who denounced the leaks of highly classified documents that revealed the programs and warned that America’s security will suffer. He called the disclosure of a program that targets foreigners’ Internet use “reprehensible,” and said the leak of another program that lets the government collect Americans’ phone records would change America’s enemies behavior and make it harder to understand their intentions.

“The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” Clapper said of the phone-tracking program.

At the same time, Clapper offered new information about the secret programs.

“I believe it is important for the American people to understand the limits of this targeted counterterrorism program and the principles that govern its use,” he said.

Among the previously classified information about the phone records collection that Clapper revealed:

—The program is conducted under authority granted by Congress and is authorized by the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Court which determines the legality of the program. [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

—The government is prohibited from “indiscriminately sifting” through the data acquired. It can only be reviewed “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” He also said only counterterrorism personnel trained in the program may access the records.

—The information acquired is overseen by the Justice Department and the FISA court. Only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed, he said. [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

—The program is reviewed every 90 days. [Yea, by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

The Obama administration’s defense of the two programs came as members of Congress were vowing to change a program they voted to authorize and exasperated civil liberties advocates were crying foul, questioning how Obama, a former constitutional scholar who sought privacy protections as a U.S. senator, could embrace policies aligned with President George W. Bush, whose approach to national security he had vowed to leave behind.

Clapper alleged that articles about the Internet program “contain numerous inaccuracies.” He did not specify.

Senior administration officials defended the programs as critical tools and said the intelligence they yield is among the most valuable data the U.S. collects. Clapper said the Internet program, known as PRISM, can’t be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the U.S, and that data accidentally collected about Americans is kept to a minimum. [Yea, and secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records will guarantee that!!!]

Leaders of Congress’ intelligence panels dismissed the furor over what they said was standard three-month renewal to a program that’s operated for seven years. Committee leaders also said the program recently helped thwart what would have been a significant domestic terrorist attack.

The NSA must collect the phone data in broad swaths, Clapper said, because collecting it narrowly would make it harder to identify terrorism-related communications. [Why not just add a section to the Patriot Act that requires every American to give the keys to their home so an FBI agent can stop in any time and spy on them just to make sure they are not up to no good??? Hey, it's not flushing the 4th Amendment down the toilet any more then the rest of the Patriot Act does!!!!]

But the widespread notion of a government dragnet ensnaring terror suspects and innocent Americans pushed typical political foes to stand together against Obama as he enforces what many likened to Bush-era policies.

“When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call from is private information,” [yea, between them the FBI, NSA and only a few thousand other people in the government] said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “As a result of the disclosures that came to light today, now we’re going to have a real debate in the Congress and the country and that’s long overdue.”

Officials from Clapper’s office, the Justice Department, NSA and FBI briefed 27 senators for some two hours late Thursday at a hurriedly convened session prompted by severe criticism and uncertainty about the program.

“The National Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters’ phone records, it would appear that this administration has now sunk to a new low.”

Paul said he will introduce legislation ensuring that the Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to government search of phone records. [Well at least he actually admits the Patriot Act has made the 4th Amendment null and void and he will pass legislation to un-repeal the 4th Amendment for a few purposes]

The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011. Republicans who usually don’t miss a chance to criticize the administration offered full support.

“I’m a Verizon customer. I could care less if they’re looking at my phone records. … If you’re not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you got nothing to worry about,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. [So if I associate with somebody the government considers a terrorist I have something to worry about??? Like my cousin who is an immigrant from Syria???]

The disclosures come at a particularly inopportune time for Obama. His administration already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service’s improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists’ phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.

At a minimum, it’s all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.

The Verizon order, granted by the secret FISA court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, The Guardian reported.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA’s computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify “communities of interest” — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said that once the data has been collected, officials still must follow “a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number.” [Yea, checks and ballances by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

The steps are shrouded in government secrecy, which some lawmakers say should change.

“The American public can’t be kept in the dark about the basic architecture of the programs designed to protect them,” said Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. [Yea and secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records are part of the architecture designed to protect us!!!!]

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company can’t comment on any such court order. He said Verizon take steps to protect customers’ privacy, but must comply with court orders. Verizon listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April.

The NSA is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency “is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans’ civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability.”

Emerging from the briefing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Intelligence committee, said the government must gather intelligence to prevent plots and keep Americans alive. “That’s the goal. If we can do it another way, we’re looking to do it another way. We’d like to.”

She said Congress is always open to changes, “but that doesn’t mean there will be any.”

We "MUST" be able to trust our Valley law enforcement officials

Source

Richardson: We must be able to trust our Valley law enforcement officials

Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

Posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 11:15 am

Guest Commentary by Bill Richardson

You can’t pick up the paper or turn on the news without hearing about yet another Arizona police officer being fired or investigated for a crime or violating their department’s rules of conduct. [And you never hear about the hundreds more that commit crimes against the people they pretend to serve and don't make it to the news]

Last Saturday’s Arizona Republic told about a member of the Phoenix Police Department’s DUI unit being investigated for filing a false police report and insurance fraud. He reportedly lied about his stolen truck. Last July a Phoenix sergeant was caught on video stealing cash from a business during a burglary investigation.

On Friday the Republic reported an ex-con who was friendly with deputies at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office obtained a sheriff’s badge and access to county vehicles, uniforms and was impersonating a deputy. The list of misconduct at MCSO is lengthy. Last April a deputy pled guilty to stealing $5,000. Another deputy just pled guilty to beating a man and faces prison.

Last week an ex-Tempe officer was jailed for stealing city property. Earlier in the year a Tempe detective pled guilty to stealing evidence from the police station. A few weeks ago a Tempe officer was allowed to retire after he lied to get a search warrant. [Instead of being fired like he should have been, and slapped with criminal charges of perjury like a civilian would have been.] In December a Tempe detective reportedly violated internal policies and procedures, lied to a murder victim’s mother and botched a murder investigation along with several other serious felonies. He still has his job.

A Mesa police sergeant was indicted last summer. A Coolidge sergeant was arrested for beating his wife and a Pinal deputy was investigated for homicide.

In December it was reported a police motorcycle gang was involved in a drunken melee that sent a citizen to the hospital. Criminal charges are pending. [Yea, but don't count on it. Crooked cops are rarely charged with crimes. Of course if a civilian had committed the same crime he would still be in jail waiting to go to trial]

For whatever reason Arizona seems to be plagued with excessive police misconduct. The problems aren’t just with lower ranking officers. [You forgot to mention Sheriff Joe, he is the biggest criminal in Maricopa County]

In my April 20, 2012 column (Arizona lacking in good, honest law enforcement leaders,” evtnow.com/5ju) I wrote about the reported integrity and conduct issues of two sheriffs, the MCSO ex-chief deputy, the ex-Glendale, Quartzite and Glendale police chiefs, the current Tempe chief, the Arizona Attorney General and the head of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Since I wrote that column a Glendale assistant police chief has been demoted for intimidating a business owner.

Law enforcement officers are only as good as their leadership. Weak and corruptive leadership can trickle down and negatively affect an agencies organizational integrity and effectiveness.

The Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, or AZPOST, is the agency that licenses officers and operates under the wing of DPS. AZPOST has no standards for what it takes to be a police chief and has been hit and miss when it comes to holding some officers accountable for their conduct. In many cases new police chiefs and command officers aren’t required to submit to a polygraph or a new background investigation. [Look Bill, even though I hate corrupt cops, a lie detector test or polygraph test is a subjective tool that is worthless in rooting out corrupt cops. That is why it's not allowed to be used as evidence in courts]

AZPOST allowed a fired Chandler officer who cost the city millions after his negligence resulted in the deaths of two people to keep his officer’s license. They refused to take action against the Tempe detective who botched the murder case I mentioned above. Lying by a police officer in Arizona is no longer sure grounds to lose your license. Lying by an officer can’t be tolerated in any form. [But of course it is a crime for us civilians to lie to cops and people who do it are routinely arrested and punished. On the other hand the Supreme Court has said a number of times it is OK for cops to lie to civilians to trick them into confession to crimes. And the "9 Step Reid Method" which is used by most police departments across the USA and world is based on using LIES to get suspects to confess!!!!]

With the serious corruptive influences from Mexican Drug Cartels ever present in Arizona, the integrity of our police should be of utmost concern.

Several officers who work for a department with a history of problems told me they’re proud to wear the badge, but ashamed of the departmental patch.

Just one bad officer can cause the public to distrust the police. [Sadly it ain't just ONE corrupt cop, the police have more corrupt cops then honest ones] It’s not fair to the officers who serve honorably to be painted with the same brush as the crooked officers who continually make the news. It’s also not fair to us. If we want a safe community to live in we must be able to trust the police and their leadership unequivocally. [And that isn't going to happen. So if you want to keep the system from screwing you you should figure out right now that the police are corrupt to the core and can't be trusted for ANYTHING]

• Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - Use it to encrypt your data

Personally I suspect that if you can encrypt it the government can decrypt it. The only question is how long will it take for the government to decrypt it and how much will it cost the government to decrypt it.

When Phil Zimmermann first invented PGP the US government threatened to put him in jail if he gave people outside of the USA copies of the software. The government says PGP is a munition and therefor subject to the governments control.

Phil Zimmermann got around that problem and put the source code on the internet and the cat has been out of the bag since then. The government didn't carry out it's threat to put him in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

http://www.gnupg.org/

The free version of PGP

http://www.pgpi.org/

More free PGP software

http://www.symantec.com/encryption

The commercial version of PGP

http://cryptography.org/getpgp.htm

Where to get PGP

http://www.openpgp.org/

http://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/

NYC to police the police - Probably not!!!!

Well at least that's how the cops feel, and the elected officials that cater to the police unions like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

On the other hand I doubt any new laws will make the police obey the law. After all we currently have the US Bill of Rights and the police at the city, county, state and Federal levels routinely flush those constitutional rights down the toilet. Yea, sure every once in a while a cop gets more then a slap on the wrist for violating our rights but that is the exception rather then the rule.

Just two days ago I was falsely arrested by the police in Chandler, Arizona for unknown reason. When I took the 5th and refused to answer their questions the pigs did as they always do and told me the 5th Amendment didn't apply in this case. What rubbish. The pigs that arrested me were G. Peterson or G. Patterson #200, L.J. Morris badge #270 and piggy B Lucas, who refused to give me his badge and made it almost impossible to get this name.

I am not going to waste my time filing a complain with the Chandler Police Department because like most police departments they are corrupt.

I do plan to file a lawsuit in Federal Court suing the pigs for false arrest and civil rights violations, but I don't expect to win it. Not because my civil rights weren't violated or because I wasn't falsely arrested, but because it is THEIR SYSTEM and it is also corrupt.

Source

New York City Council Votes to Increase Oversight of Police Dept.

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Published: June 27, 2013

Over the strident objections of the mayor and police commissioner, the New York City Council early Thursday morning approved by veto-proof majorities a pair of bills aimed at increasing oversight of the Police Department and expanding New Yorkers’ ability to sue over racial profiling by officers. [Yea, but don't count on this new law being enforced if it is passed. The cops currently flush the Bill of Rights done the toilet with out any punishment. Another toothless law won't change things]

The two bills, known together as the Community Safety Act, passed during a late-night meeting of the Council that began after 11 p.m., lasted more than three hours and in which members also voted to pass the city’s budget and override a mayoral veto of a law on paid sick leave.

But it was the two policing bills that for months have stirred a heated public debate between its supporters, who are seeking a legal means to change the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who have warned that the measures would hamstring police officers and lead to a dangerous spike in crime. [Yea, it's really hamstringing cops when you expect them to obey the same laws they expect the rest of us to obey]

One, known as Intro 1079, would create an independent inspector general to monitor and review police policy, conduct investigations and recommend changes to the department. The monitor would be part of the city’s Investigation Department alongside the inspectors general for other city agencies.

The law would go into effect Jan. 1, 2014, leaving the matter of choosing the monitor to the next mayor.

The other bill, Intro 1080, would expand the definition of bias-based profiling to include age, gender, housing status and sexual orientation. It also would allow individuals to sue the Police Department in state court — not only for individual instances of bias, but also for policies that disproportionately affect people in any protected categories without serving a significant law enforcement goal. [Sorry to tell you this it is already illegal to stop people because of their age, gender, and race, but the police do it anyhow]

Both measures passed the 51-member Council with the votes needed to override a mayoral veto. As that threshold was passed just after 2:20 a.m., scores of supporters who had filled the chamber’s gallery and waited hours through the debate erupted into cheers.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has promised to veto both measures and this week called his opposition to them a matter of “life and death,” released a statement after the vote. “I will veto this harmful legislation and continue to make our case to Council members over the coming days and weeks,” he said. [It's a life or death matter when the police are expected to obey the law???? Obliviously Bloomberg thinks he is a royal ruler and we are all serfs expected to obey him.]

An attempt to override his veto would extend the protracted clash between the mayor and the Council over policing. The process could take more than two months, putting the override vote only weeks before the mayoral primary.

The legislation has already been a nettlesome issue in the Democratic race for mayor, especially for Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker, who has faced a growing challenge to her early front-runner status. She supported the measure creating an independent inspector general for the Police Department, which passed by a vote of 40 to 11, but she opposed the other, on police profiling, which received 34 votes in favor and 17 against.

“I worry about having too much judicial involvement,” she said before casting her vote, explaining that she did not believe the profiling bill would make New Yorkers less safe. [We already have the Bill of Rights and it doesn't make us safer, because the government has flushed it down the toilet. If passed this law will almost certainly be flushed down the toilet like the Bill of Rights has been]

Despite her earlier stated opposition, she allowed both bills to move forward, and on Monday presided over a so-called discharge vote — the first since the current structure of the Council was established in 1989 — to bring the legislation out of committee, where it had stalled.

The two bills were first introduced as a package last year by Councilmen Jumaane D. Williams and Brad Lander.

Mr. Bloomberg has 30 days to veto the bills. If he does so, the City Council then has 30 days from its next full meeting to hold an override vote. The mayor and the Police Department have lobbied hard against the bills in public and behind the scenes, and they appeared likely to keep up the pressure between the veto and the override vote in an effort to change the minds of supporters.

Mr. Kelly sent a letter on Tuesday to each of the Council members, arguing that the profiling bill could be used to force the removal of surveillance cameras and urging them to vote against it. “The bill would allow virtually everyone in New York City to sue the Police Department and individual police officers over the entire range of law enforcement functions they perform,” Mr. Kelly wrote. [We certainly can't have laws where citizens are allowed to sue crooked cops can we???? Well that's how the cops feel, althought the rest of us serfs think it is a good idea]

Mr. Williams, responding to Mr. Kelly’s letter, said: “If the cameras were put in high crime neighborhoods as a response, that’s good policing. If he put them there because black people live there, that’s a problem.”

At least one Council member received a call from his local police station commander to protest the legislation ahead of the vote.

“They were deeply concerned about 250s and said they would be unable to perform them because of the profiling part of the reform,” said Councilman Daniel Dromm of Queens, referring to the police form used for street stops. “But for me, it’s the teeth of the reform; it’s the needed piece.” He voted for both bills.

In voting against the two measures early Thursday morning, Peter F. Vallone Jr., the chairman of the public safety committee, said, “New Yorkers went to bed a long time ago, safe in their beds. But they are going to wake up in a much more dangerous city.”

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

Remember all the times we have been told that despite being a government entity the US Postal Service is run like a private business.

That is a big lie. In this article it certainly sounds like the the US Postal Service is a government entity that is helping the FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, DEA, BATF and other alphabet of police agencies spy on the American public.

Source

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By RON NIXON

Published: July 3, 2013

WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.

“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.

In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed.

In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.

Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”

But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”

For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.

The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed because judges have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for information contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not revisited the issue.

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, was awarded nearly $1 million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his immigration raids in Arizona, who, among other things, obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.

In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.

A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.

Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.

Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.

Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.

“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”

Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.

Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema

Kyrsten Sinema shovels the BS???

Remember Kyrsten Sinema is the Arizona Senator who introduced a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana. Kyrsten Sinema is now a US Congresswoman.

I guess the title of this article should have been "Vote for me and I will give you free stuff"

Source

Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema

The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jul 5, 2013 6:27 PM

The first-term congresswoman reflects on her first six months in Washington.

After six months in Congress, what’s the No. 1 thing you’ve learned about the place?

I’ve learned I can still get a lot done for Congressional District 9 even though leaders in Congress aren’t accomplishing much. [I suspect Kyrsten Sinema means that she has accomplished tons of stuff while her fellow slackers have accomplished nothing. Of course if you ask me I would have said none of them have accomplished anything - well other then robbing us blind and micro-managing our lives]

In our district office, social workers help constituents solve problems every day. In our D.C. office, we help businesses access federal agencies, support local groups seeking federal grant funding, and advocate for the issues important to CD9 residents and businesses. [Translation - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]

What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?

I’ve always believed that relationships are key to solving problems.

In the Legislature, my relationships with Republicans and Democrats alike helped me serve my constituents well. In Congress, I’m working to build bipartisan relationships as well, though it’ll take a bit longer to make friends with all 537 of my colleagues! [Kyrsten, you didn't answer the question. It was "What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?" - But I guess the main purpose of this article is to tell the voters that if they vote for you, you will give them free stuff, so who cares if you answer the question]

What’s the biggest frustration? The biggest satisfaction?

Unfortunately, issues that shouldn’t be partisan, like military sexual trauma and college affordability, have been stymied by political posturing in Congress. Leaders in Congress should stop playing games and get to work solving our country’s challenges.

However, our office has been able to make a tremendous difference in the lives of CD9 residents.

For example, we recently helped Glen in Phoenix, who has a brain tumor. Last month, Glen had to choose to either buy expensive medicine to treat his tumor or buy a replacement bed for his home.

We worked with local charities and the pharmaceutical company to help him get both a bed and his life-saving medication. [Again - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]

As a member of the minority party, it’s hard to get a bill passed. What have you been able to accomplish?

Congress is pretty divided right now and sadly, they’re not getting much done.

I’m proud to be one of the founding members of the United Solutions Caucus. We’re a group of 38 freshmen, Democrats and Republicans, working together to solve our fiscal crisis and reduce our debt and deficit. [Don't make me laugh Kyrsten, when it comes to taxing and spending in the Arizona legislator you were number #1. I am sure that in the US Congress you are also the #1 Congresswoman when it comes to taxing and spending. You reduce our debt??? Again don't make me laugh!!! Kyrsten, as the debt goes up you will probably cause it to increase more then any other Congressperson!!!!]

We’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which cuts $200 billion in wasteful spending. Earlier this year, I helped pass the Violence Against Women Act.

Are there any issues you’re working on with other Arizona members? [Well other then that "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]

I’m working with Reps. Matt Salmon and Raul Grijalva on a bill to prevent the NSA from gathering innocent civilians’ private data. [Give me a break Kyrsten, on every election sign of your you have the fact that you are supported by the police unions on the signs. I find it hard to believe that you are trying to reduce the police state, when the police unions helped you get elected!!!] Reps. Ron Barber, Ann Kirkpatrick and I are working on legislation to help veterans get quicker and better access to VA services. [More of the old "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]

You and Salmon, a Republican, have made several joint appearances. What’s the connection?

Our offices work closely together on constituent cases, and Matt and I share similar views on issues like global competitiveness, increasing foreign investment in Arizona companies, and increasing trade and exports. Plus, he’s a good guy and we get along.

What will immigration reform look like when the House is finished with it?

It’s too early to predict, but I’m committed to a bill that secures our border [so you do support the police state - 20,000 new Border Patrol cops???], creates a workable plan for a future flow of workers into the United States, and settles the status of “dreamers” and hard-working families living in the U.S. Compromise must be a part of any viable solution, and I hope the House is ready to get to “yes.” I certainly am! [Kyrsten, when a politician like you says "compromise" it means "if you vote for my pork, I will vote for your pork". Kyrsten with that in mind, I suspect you know how to compromise better then any other Congressman or Senator in Washington D.C.]

Cops have hand held fingerprinting machines to ID you

Almost always the next thing that happens is the cops steal my wallet and search it looking for an ID card which I don't carry, and in the process violating my 4th Amendment rights too.

I have not been stopped yet by a pig with one of these handheld finger printing devices but I suspect when I am, and when I refuse to voluntarily submit to finger printing, I will be physically restrained then my finger prints will be forcefully taken against my will.

I won't resist because I would rather be alive, then be murdered by some pig for thinking I have "constitutional rights"

I was falsely arrested on June 25, 2013 in Chandler and videotaped about 9 minutes of the false arrest. In the video at this URL http://tinyurl.com/chandlerarrest you can Chandler piggy G Pederson telling me that I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights in that case after I mentioned that in Miranda v Arizona the Supremes said that when a person takes the 5th the police must "immediately cease questioning" the person.

Source

Valley police departments utiliizing digital fingerprinting

By Michelle Mitchell The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jul 8, 2013 11:22 PM

A hand-held device that resembles a cellphone and taps fingerprint databases to help police officers identify people in the field is catching on with several departments in the Valley.

Officers say the devices are a valuable tool — particularly when they encounter people who aren’t carrying ID cards or who give false information.

“With these finger scanners ... you’re talking less than a minute (and) you know who you’re dealing with,” Chandler Sgt. Joe Favazzo said.

“The safety factor and the time-saving factors are just amazing.”

Not everyone is as sold on them, however, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has voiced privacy concerns.

The devices also raise concerns about identity theft and how that personal information is stored and transferred, particularly if a person is not charged with a crime, said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona.

The devices are not designed to store fingerprint data — although they could be modified to do that — but to transfer the information through the officer’s existing in-car computer system, said Robert Horton, spokesman for manufacturer MorphoTrak.

Police departments in Mesa, Tempe and Phoenix began a pilot program last year using the MorphoTrak scanners.

Tempe and Mesa have now expanded those pilot programs.

“We were sold on how fantastic they are,” Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley said.

“It gives us a very quick response.”

Tempe had 14 scanners during the pilot and recently purchased 30 more.

Other departments have signed on, including Chandler, which bought 36 scanners; Scottsdale, which purchased 10, and Peoria, which bought five as a trial.

Chandler police skipped a smaller-scale pilot after hearing about their effectiveness from Mesa police officers through the East Valley Gang and Criminal Information Fusion Center, Favazzo said.

The cost of the scanners varies, but Valley cities paid about $1,200 to $1,800 per unit.

The devices allow officers in the field to scan a person’s fingerprints and compare them to local, state and federal databases.

The scanners will save officers time when someone does not have identification or provides false information, Favazzo said.

Without these devices, officers run variations of the name and birth date provided in an attempt to locate a driver’s license, warrant or other information about the person, Favazzo said.

If that does not work, officers will take the person to the station, [i.e. -falsely arrest them and make them prove they are not a criminal before releasing them] fingerprint them and wait for identity information.

“It will also let us know right away if we are dealing with a violent felon before we ever transport them,” Favazzo said.

The Tempe Police Department recently discovered by using the mobile fingerprint scanner that a man they had encountered was wanted by the FBI, Pooley said.

“We would have ended up letting this guy go,” he said.

Police departments find that the devices save them money by not having to transport people to the station and that they act as a force multiplier by keeping officers on the street, MorphoTrak’s Horton said.

The device will scan two fingerprints and the officer will receive a response in 30 seconds to several minutes, he said.

The Phoenix Police Department, which received three scanners last year as part of a pilot program, still is evaluating whether to expand the program, Sgt. Tommy Thompson said.

“Obviously as technology advances, we want to be involved in those advances, but we want to make sure they meet our needs and they’re a useful tool,” Thompson said.

Officers say they are sensitive to privacy concerns expressed by the ACLU. [Yea, sure. Like in my case where I am always told I don't have any stinking 5th Amendment right to refuse police questioning, which is almost always followed by an illegal search of my wallet in which the cop is hoping to find my ID]

Mesa officers are not trying to collect personal information, Sgt. Tony Landato said. [That's 100 percent BS. That is the WHOLE purpose of the fingerprint scanners - to get person information about the person - i.e. name and date of birth so the cops can search for outstanding warrants]

“We’re not taking a census,” Landato said. “We’re just trying to ensure the accuracy of the information that we’re taking down.

“If we can do this in a way that’s quicker for the officer and quicker for the citizen, then, hey, we both win.”

The state and FBI fingerprint databases that the scanners check do not contain citizenship or immigration-status information, although that could be possible in the future if the scanners are connected to Department of Homeland Security databases, Horton said.

The state ACLU’s Soler said departments should create policies that inform people who are not under arrest that they have the right to refuse submitting their fingerprints. [Yea, sure. Like I am always lied to by the police and told I don't have any 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer police questions]

“It’s critical that we think about these things before rolling out these new high-tech systems, and more often than not that doesn’t happen,” she said. “In this day and age when the technology so far outpaces the privacy laws, the individuals end up giving up a lot in terms of their privacy.”

The use of fingerprint scanners falls under existing Mesa Police Department policy, Landato said.

“We’re not going to fingerprint somebody unless we’ve got them under arrest or we have their consent,” he said. [Yea, I'm am 100 percent positive that is a big lie!!!!! I was also falsely arrested by the Mesa Police who also told me I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights. See false arrest by Mesa Police and lawsuit against Mesa Police]

Tempe police are writing a policy that would require officers to get consent from a person who is not under arrest, Pooley said. [Yea, sure. I also sure the Tempe for false arrest]

“Right now, there’s no authority that can compel a person to put their fingers on one of these gadgets, short of them being arrested,” said Sigmund Popko, clinical professor of law at Arizona State University. [Rubbish, what are you going to do when a cop with a gun and a badge forces you to give him your fingerprints??? Resist and be killed????]

While drivers are required to provide a license if they are pulled over, a passenger or pedestrian who is not in violation of a law would not be required to provide identification or fingerprints, said attorney John Phebus, vice chair of the criminal-justice section of the State Bar of Arizona. [Of course the police routinely lie to these people and tell them they are required to]

“Most people don’t know you can say no,” Phebus said. “When you’re in that moment, it’s awful hard to say no.”

Reach the reporter at michelle .mitchell@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-7983.

RELATED INFO

Handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners About the scanner

What it does: The MorphoIDent handheld device scans a person’s fingerprints and transfers the information to a police officer’s phone or computer via Bluetooth or USB. It compares prints with state and federal fingerprint databases and reports a name and date of birth if a match is found.

Manufacturer: MorphoTrak, based in Alexandria, Va.

Cost: Varies, but Valley departments have paid $1,200 to $1,800 per device.

Dimensions: About 5 inches by 3 inches. Weight is about 5 ounces.

Who’s using the devices

Several Valley police departments are testing or using handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners:.

Chandler: 36 scanners, expected to be in use by August.

Glendale: 2 scanners (pilot), not yet deployed.

Tempe: 44 scanners, 14 currently in use.

Peoria: 5 scanners (pilot), purchased two months ago, not yet deployed.

Phoenix: 3 scanners (pilot), in use since the fall.

Scottsdale: 10 scanners, expected to be in use by late July.

Proof elected officials can't be trusted???

State attorney argues legislators can ignore voter-mandated education funding law

Last this is a damn good example of why we need the Second Amendment, which is our right to keep and bear arms. The politicians and government bureaucrats can't be trusted to obey the Constitution and the "people" need to have some means to force them to.

Source

State attorney argues legislators can ignore voter-mandated education funding law

Posted: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 1:26 pm | Updated: 2:16 pm, Tue Jul 23, 2013.

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 0 comments

PHOENIX — Legislators are free to ignore a voter mandate to boost education funding each year to account for inflation, an attorney for the state told the Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Kathleen Sweeney, an assistant attorney general, conceded voters did approve the inflation adjustment in 2000, and she also did not dispute that the Arizona Constitution prohibits legislators from repealing or altering voter-approved laws.

But Sweeney, seeking to allow the Legislature to disregard the 2000 law, told the justices voters had no constitutional right to enact the funding mandate in the first place.

That brought a somewhat surprised reaction from Chief Justice Rebecca Berch. She pointed out it was the Legislature that put the inflation adjustment provision on the ballot in the first place.

"They got the voters to vote on their bad language,'' she said. “And now they're trying to disavow their bad language.''

Sweeney did not exactly contest the question of whether lawmakers essentially had pulled a fast one on voters, getting them to approve a law that had no legal standing.

"Perhaps, your honor,'' she replied to Berch.

And Sweeney gave essentially the same response to a query by Justice John Pelander, who asked if she was arguing that the 2000 vote was "a fruitless, useless act.''

The fight most immediately affects whether lawmakers are required to annually adjust education funding.

That 2000 ballot measure boosted the state's 5-percent sales tax by six-tenths of a cent. It also requires the Legislature to increase funding for schools by 2 percent or the change in the gross domestic price deflator, whichever is less.

Lawmakers did that until the 2010 when, facing a budget deficit, they reinterpreted what the law requires. The result is that, since then, schools have lost anywhere from $189 million to $240 million, depending on whose figures are used. Don Peters, representing several school districts, filed suit.

Legislators did add $82 million in inflation funding for the new fiscal year that began July 1 after the state Court of Appeals sided with challengers. But they are hoping the Supreme Court concludes that mandate is legally unenforceable.

The outcome of this fight has larger implications — and not only for future education funding. It also could set the precedent for what voters have the right to tell the Legislature to do.

Sweeney argued there are limits, despite the constitutional right of voters to approve their own laws and despite the Voter Protection Act that shields these laws from legislative tinkering.

She said the 2000 measure sets the formula for increasing state aid — and then tells the Legislature to find the money from somewhere. Sweeney argued that infringes on the constitutional right of lawmakers to decide funding priorities.

Justice Scott Bales pointed out the inflation formula is a statute. He said while it was enacted by voters, it should have the same legal status as a law approved by legislators themselves.

"Do you think the Legislature can simply ignore statutes providing that it shall do certain things?'' he asked.

"Yes,'' Sweeney responded.

Peters disagreed.

"The statute that requires inflation adjustments is the law,'' he told the justices. “The Legislature has to obey the law like all the rest of us.''

And Peters said the constitutional Voter Protection Act precludes the Legislature from altering that law without first asking voter permission.

"Therefore, it must do what the statute required unless the people change it,'' he said.

Pelander questioned whether there are limits on what voters can tell the Legislature to do. Peters responded that the Arizona Constitution gives voters broad powers to make their own laws as long as those measures do not "offend'' other state or federal constitutional provisions.

"So they can do pretty much anything they want to,'' Peters told the justices. “And that includes giving instructions to the Legislature.''

Peters acknowledged the Supreme Court has previously said a law approved by one Legislature cannot bind future lawmakers.

But he argued that, as far as voter-approved laws, all that changed in 1998 with enactment of the Voter Protection Act.

"That balance of power is different,'' Peters said.

The justices gave no indication when they will rule.

Peters acknowledged after Tuesday's hearing that he could win his legal argument and still have a problem.

The high court could rule that lawmakers cannot ignore the 2000 law. But the justices have consistently refused to actually order the Legislature to find the additional dollars to fully fund the formula.

That could result in a situation where schools get the higher per-student funding as the formula requires, at least until the cash appropriated by the Legislature runs out. But Peters said he doubts lawmakers are willing to endure the wrath of voters if schools need to shut their doors before the end of the school year.

Corporate welfare at Tempe Town Lake!!!!

Corporate welfare at Tempe Town Toilet!!!!

1) A large part of the time the park is not open to the public, but used for events to raise money for the royal rulers of Tempe. And these events are expensive to attend and most of the working class people that live in Tempe can't afford to attend the events, despite the fact that these people were forced to pay for Tempe Town Toilet with their hard earned tax dollars.

2) These events cause huge traffic jams and parking problems in the downtown Tempe area

3) When these events are concerts they routinely keep people awake late at night in the entire downtown area, and as far north as Roosevelt Road in Scottsdale which is also Continental Drive in Tempe. I am not sure how far south the concerts can be heard.

Also check out:

Source

Tempe to weigh revising Town Lake plan

By Dianna M. Náñez The Republic | azcentral.com

Tue Jul 30, 2013 12:10 AM

The Tempe City Council took a leap of faith more than a decade ago when it sank $44.8 million into building a 2 1/2-mile-long lake in the desert.

The council hoped that risking the debt to create high-profile waterfront property would pay off in the long run for Tempe, then a landlocked city desperate for new development.

But 14 years after the lake opened in 1999, city finance officials say Tempe is faced with a reality check that Town Lake is far from reaching the city’s development goals.

Tonight, the council is expected to consider revising a financing plan for Town Lake.

City finance officials have said the revised plan would give developers a financial break on their share of costs tied to the man-made lake [i.e. - stiff us taxpayers with the cost], make private development more affordable [i.e. stiff us taxpayers with the cost] and, ultimately, advance Tempe’s plans to secure sufficient lakeshore private development to ease the hefty public costs of maintaining Town Lake. [now the last phrase certainly is an oxymoron - give tax dollars private developers to lower the cost to taxpayers - now that's an impossibility - the more we give them the more it costs us]

But critics argue that taxpayers have long carried the financial burden for private lake development.

The new plan offers no guarantee that economic breaks for developers will actually spur construction, argue Joe Pospicil and Art Jacobs, two longtime Tempe residents who regularly question city finances and criticize lake expenses.

If approved, the revised plan also would shift the burden of paying for a new west-end lake dam, which the city has estimated will cost at least $37.4 million, to Tempe taxpayers, freeing developers from sharing the expense to replace the dam. [That a fancy way of saying give boatloads of our hard earned tax dollars out in corporate welfare rich corporations - the rich corporations that give bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions to the members of the Tempe City Council]

Approval of the city proposal would mark the second time a Tempe City Council, aiming to drive development, has tweaked the original 1995 lake-financing plan in favor of developers. The first was in 1997.

Mayor Mark Mitchell said he believes the proposal merits more time in the public realm so that council members may gain sufficient community feedback. [Translation - he wants to make it look like the taxpayers approve of the members of the Tempe City Council giving boatloads of our cash to the rich corporations that gave the members of the Tempe City Council bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions]

But it remains to be seen whether Mitchell’s colleagues agree that the council has a responsibility to arrange future forums for the public to question and comment on the proposal.

As of Monday, the proposed changes were included on the agenda for today’s council meeting.

The finance proposal is not set for a two-hearing process, which would have allowed for public comment at the first hearing and then required a vote and a second opportunity for public comment at a future council meeting.

That means the council could choose to approve the revised Town Lake financing plan with little opportunity for public input.

But before the council agenda was posted on the city’s website Friday, Mitchell said he still had questions about the financing plan.

“When we initially developed the lake, we had a plan, but it’s a working document,” he said. “We might change it, we might not. (But) we’ll have enough time to thoroughly review (any formal changes).” [translation - we know how to run your life better then you do, but if we screw it up don't blame us]

Mitchell said he expects staff today to merely explain the long-term impact of the proposed changes. [That pretty simple Mayor Mitchell, you and the other royal members of the Tempe City Council will be giving our hard earned tax dollars out as corporate welfare for years to come to corporations that give you bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions]

The proposed finance changes were triggered by an economic reality check, Roger Hallsted, the city finance analyst for the Rio Salado Community Facilities District, told The Arizona Republic.

“From all of our original projections, (we were) thinking really by about this time ... the lake would be built out,” Hallsted said.

Tempe’s goal is for private development on 120 acres to generate assessment fees covering 60 percent of annual operations costs. [So us taxpayers will be forced to pay for 40 percent of the developers costs]

But a Republic analysis last year revealed that in the 13 years since the lake was filled, private development still only covered about 20 percent of operation and maintenance costs, well below the 60 percent envisioned in the original city plan. [So in stead of us taxpayers being stuck with paying 40 percent of the developers costs, we are stuck with paying 80 percent of the developers costs - if you ask me us taxpayers are getting screwed on this deal]

Tempe taxpayers have and continue to pay the majority of the $2 million to $3 million in annual costs for operations and maintenance as well as most of the bill for the $44.8 million in original construction costs. [translation - us taxpayers are getting screwed - also did you know that the city of Tempe spends more on Tempe Town Toilet, aka Tempe Town Lake then on all the other parks in Tempe combined???]

Private investment has spurred construction of about 24 acres of condos, high-rise office and commercial space around the lake. Town Lake supporters blame the recession for slower-than-expected development. [Well why didn't the freaking geniuses on the Tempe City Council figure out this??? I guess they were too busy taking bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions from the rich developers]

The proposed changes to the financing plan are aimed at making land surrounding Town Lake more attractive to private development, Hallsted said. [yea, like giving then 10 times as much corporate welfare as originally planned]

If the council approves the changes, Town Lake developers would pay less toward their share of payments for the original construction costs. [And us taxpayers get screwed again and will have to make up the difference]

The proposal emanated from Tempe’s Enhanced Services Commission, Tempe Finance Manager Ken Jones said. [It sounds more like it came from the developers who will be getting the corporate welfare if you ask me!!!!]

The commission includes representation from Jones; Town Lake developers; Nancy Hormann, the president of the group that manages the downtown Tempe district; and Arizona State University, which owns and is attempting to develop acres of lakeshore property. [yes I was right, it did come from the developers who will are getting the corporate welfare!!!!]

A Republic review of public records from the commission meetings shows that commission members have spent the past year discussing development and maintenance plans for the lake.

At a January meeting, Jones asked for “the logic behind asking the council to cover the cost of replacing the dams,” according to public records of the meeting. [If you remember it was the idiots on the Tempe City Council who get screwed on the damn. The accepted a worthless ORAL 30 year guarantee on the damn, which failed after 10 years causing us taxpayers to get stuck with the replacement costs]

Hallsted said shifting the cost of the dams from being a shared debt with private developers to a taxpayer-only-funded cost is the result of the original rubber dam deteriorating years earlier than expected. [yea, like I just said]

“These new dams, at $38 million to $50 million, if we were to put that in at the true cost, just the (Town Lake) infrastructure replacement budget would have gone from $531,000 (annually) to $2 million,” he said.

The city had to face facts, he said, that it would have to shoulder the dam’s cost rather than “bankrupting every single (lake) property owner,” Hallsted said. [f*ck you!!!! bankrupt the developers for making dumb decisions, not the taxpayers. Or let the members of the Tempe City Council pay for the whole thing.]

The commission questioned whether it’s “more expensive to build at the lake than anywhere else in the Valley” and whether the city was “willing to offer an incentive to level the playing field,” according to public meeting records. [Well maybe the idiots on the Tempe City Council should not have build the lake, since it is a money losing experience]

The commission recommended a plan that would lower an annual “holding fee” of sorts that developers pay until they build on their lake property. [translation - make the taxpayers pay more of the developers expenses - i.e. more corporate welfare for the rich corporations building stuff on Tempe Town Toilet]

If the revised plan is approved, that fee would be reduced from the current 5 percent to the rate of inflation, which is currently 2.2 percent, Hallsted said. [which the Tempe taxpayers will pay]

The financing proposal also includes lowering the annual interest rate developers pay over the 25 years they are allowed to pay back their share of lake construction. [again, which the Tempe taxpayers will pay]

The current interest rate is 5 percent, and the proposal would lower it to 3.64 percent, Hallsted said. He added that the proposal calls for the council to make the rate reduction retroactive to July 1, 2009.

If the council approves rolling back the fee, developers that have built existing commercial and residential development at the lake would receive credits on biannual debt payments they are currently making. [and us taxpayers will be stuck with even bigger bills. Of course the members of the Tempe City Council will get to keep the bribes, oops, I mean campaign contributions they accepted from the developers of property at Tempe Town Toilet]

While critics worry that taxpayers are funding too much of the cost for Town Lake, Hallsted reasons that the revised plan will establish a realistic financing plan for the lake and encourage development that will help pay a greater share of the lake’s annual operations and maintenance costs. [why expect the developers to pay for their costs, when they can give small bribes, oops, I mean small campaign contributions to the Tempe City Council members who will stiff the taxpayers with the bill]

“The key thing,” he said, “is being fair to the citizens, but try to make it more enticing for developers to come in.” [translation - the key to this is SCREWING the taxpayers and forcing them to pay the developers bills]

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