Like far too many legislators in far too many states, Tennessee’s lawmakers have jumped on the book banning bandwagon. For years, public libraries and school libraries were stocked at the discretion of librarians and largely operated without a lot of interference from state governments. While attempts to ban certain books happened now and then, there was never a concerted effort to remove wide swaths of literature from public library shelves.

Now, it’s just the sort of thing that happens multiple times on a daily basis. And the number of book challenges and book ban attempts continue to increase exponentially as idiots push their personal agendas using the government’s power to control what content the public has access to.

The law passed by the state legislature doesn’t actually ban books from school libraries. But no matter what the text says, that’s obviously the end goal. (h/t BookRiot)

Passed earlier this year, the bill amended the state’s “Age-Appropriate Materials Act,” signed into law by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2022, which, according to the ACLU of Tennessee, requires schools to maintain and post lists of the materials in their libraries and to evaluate challenged materials to determine whether or not they are “age-appropriate.”

So, now every Tom, Dick, and Karen can simply challenge a book and force librarians to review the content to see whether or not it’s “age-appropriate.” The initial bill didn’t even bother to define the few terms it bothered to use to describe the age-appropriateness of content, much less provide librarians with guidelines for handling challenges and/or eventual book removals.

The “fixed” version isn’t much better. While it does provide a list of things legislators think are inappropriate for all students (including those in their senior year of high school, where they’re often treated legally as adults when charged with crimes), the laundry list of inappropriate things is still far too vague.

H.B. 843 clarifies that books containing “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse” are not appropriate for K–12 students, regardless of the context in which those descriptions or depictions appear in the material.

How much violence is “excessive?” Will health textbooks depicting nudity, sexual conduct, and “sexual excitement” be removed from classrooms? Will no one under the age of 18 be able to access content they’re legally allowed to access anywhere else but in a public library?

Perhaps more importantly, what of the Bible?

During debate on the Tennessee Senate floor, state Sen. Jeff Yarbro (D) noted that the bill’s definition of what is “inappropriate” applies to the Bible. “You cannot read the book of Samuel or Kings or Chronicles, much less much of the first five books of the Bible, without significant discussions of rape, sexual excitement, multiple wives, bestiality — numerous things. That’s before you get in just to, you know, very express and explicit descriptions of violence,” Yarbro argued, according to WKRN News 2.

If this point gets pressed, you can rest assured a carve-out will be created for “religious texts,” but… you know… only applied to one specific religion and its main text.

The terms are vague and overly broad. The guidelines for compliance are still mostly nonexistent. And so, at least one school is reopening for the school year with its library closed.

A Wilson County high school is warning teachers to skip classroom libraries and closed the school library over concerns surrounding a new state law.

Under the law, any brief mention of sex, nudity or excess violence can lead to a book ban.

The Wilson County Director of Schools says they are temporarily closing the library at Green Hill High School to sort through books to make sure they get rid of the those that are required to be banned.

So, as teachers and librarians follow the government’s orders to ensure they’re only exposed to content the legislative majority likes, students are going be struggling to comprehend the things they’re learning in civics classes about their fundamental rights.

And all the bill’s supporters have to offer are patently false assertions about how bad things have been for unprotected students prior to the institution of this law.

Senator Pody explains they are trying to protect children from pornography which they’ve found in the past to be available in public schools.

I guarantee you this isn’t true. Notably, Senator Pody offers no times, dates, locations, or any other verification of his claim “pornography” has been found in school libraries or classrooms. Unfortunately, he’s representative of the legislative majority and its ideals. It’s nothing but censorship propelled by bigotry and backed by lies. Caught in the crossfire are the kids and the public school employees who just want to give them the best education they can.

It’s never about the children. Supporters of age verification laws, book bans, drag show bans, and abortion bans always claim they’re doing these things to protect children. But it’s always just about themselves. They want to impose their morality on other adults. That’s all there is to it.

Abortion bans are just a way to strip women of bodily autonomy. If it was really about cherishing children and new lives, these same legislators wouldn’t be routinely stripping school lunch programs of funding, introducing onerous means testing to government aid programs, and generally treating children as a presumptive drain on society.

The same goes for book bans. They claim they want to prevent children from accessing inappropriate material. But you can only prevent children from accessing it by removing it entirely from public libraries, which means even adults will no longer be able to read these books.

The laws targeting drag shows aren’t about children. They’re about punishing certain people for being the way they are — people whose mere existence seems to be considered wholly unacceptable by bigots with far too much power.

The slew of age verification laws introduced in recent years are being shot down by courts almost as swiftly as they’re enacted. And for good reason. Age verification laws are unconstitutional. And they’re certainly not being enacted to prevent children from accessing porn.

Of course, none of the people pushing this kind of legislation will ever openly admit their reasons for doing so. But they will admit it to people they think are like-minded. All it takes is a tiny bit of subterfuge to tease these admissions out of activist groups that want to control what content adults have access to — something that’s barely hidden by their “for the children” facade.

As Shawn Musgrave reports for The Intercept, a couple of people managed to coax this admission out of a former Trump official simply by pretending they were there to give his pet project a bunch of cash.

“I actually never talk about our porn agenda,” said Russell Vought, a former top Trump administration official, in late July. Vought was chatting with two men he thought were potential donors to his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. 

For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals. 

[…]

But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly. 

“Thinly veiled” is right. While it’s somewhat amusing Vought was taken in so easily and was immediately willing to say the quiet part loud when he thought cash was on the line, he’s made his antipathy towards porn exceedingly clear. As Musgrave notes in his article, Vought’s contribution to Project 2025 — a right-wing masturbatory fantasy masquerading as policy proposals should Trump take office again — almost immediately veers into the sort of territory normally only explored by dictators and autocrats who relied heavily on domestic surveillance, forced labor camps, and torture to rein in those who disagreed with their moral stances.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this paragraph (and, indeed, a lot of Vought’s contribution to Project 2025) is that it isn’t written in all caps with a “follow me on xTwitter” link attached. These are not the words of a hinged person. They are the opposite — the ravings of a man in desperate need of a competent re-hinging service.

And he’s wrong about everything in this paragraph, especially his assertion that pornography is not a First Amendment issue. It is. That’s why so many of these laws are getting rejected by federal courts. The rest is hyperbole that pretends it’s just bold, common sense assertions. I would like to hear more about the epidemic of porn overdoses that’s leaving children parentless and overloading our health system. And who can forget the recent killing sprees of the Sinoloa Porn Cartel, which has led to federal intervention from the Mexican government?

But the most horrifying part is Vought’s desire to imprison people for producing porn and converting librarians to registered sex offenders just because their libraries carry some content that personally offends his sensibilities.

These are the words and actions of people who strongly support fascism so long as they’re part of the ruling party. They don’t care about kids, America, democracy, or the Constitution. They want a nation of followers and the power to punish anyone who steps out of line. The Center for Renewing America is only one of several groups with the same ideology and the same censorial urges. These are dangerous people, but their ideas and policy proposals are now so common it’s almost impossible to classify it as “extremist.” There are a lot of Americans who would rather see the nation destroyed than have to, at minimum, tolerate people and ideas they don’t personally like. Their ugliness needs to be dragged out into the open as often as possible, if only to force them to confront the things they’ve actually said and done.

It’s about the stupidest thing anyone could claim in defense of an unlawful detention and search, but Waterbury, CT police office Nicholas Andrzejewski did it anyway. He actually told a court (twice!) that someone respecting every single law applicable to them at the point of this unwelcome interaction was at least reasonable suspicion for a search, if not actual probable cause.

Here’s how this started, taken from the Second Circuit Appeals Court’s rejection [PDF] of the officer’s attempt to walk away from this civil rights suit:

At approximately 8:43 p.m. on November 12, 2018, Basel Soukaneh stopped his car with the engine running on the side of a street in Waterbury, Connecticut. Soukaneh’s iPhone GPS, located in a holder mounted to the car’s dashboard, was frozen, and he stopped his car to fix it. The area “was dark and [known as] a high crime area well known for prostitution, drug transactions and other criminal activity.”

Ah. The old boilerplate. These assertions about dark, high crime, drug area, blah blah blah presumably autofill whenever a cop starts a sentence explaining their reasonable suspicions on their incident report. It’s so overused and so devoid of actual facts that it’s become a parody of itself. Here’s Scott Greenfield’s take on this part of the officer’s narrative:

Was there articulable suspicion that a crime was being committed because Souhaneh stopped his car on the street? It was dark, as nights tend to be. It was in a high crime area, as is every area in pretty much any city anywhere. And yet, the court saw no problem with Andrzejewski demanding his license, for doing exactly what drivers are instructed to do by pulling over rather than driving while their attention is focused elsewhere. 

Any reasonable person will read this and realize that this self-proclaimed reasonable cop’s narrative has at least a couple of strikes against it. And that’s well before Officer Andrzejewski decided to convert this truly unnecessary non-stop into a full blown invasion of the interior of Soukaneh’s car and a constantly escalating series of rights violations.

Within seconds after Soukaneh stopped his car, Officer Nicholas Andrzejewski approached the vehicle, knocked on the driver’s side window, and according to Soukaneh, loudly demanded Soukaneh’s driver’s license. The interior vehicle light was on, so although the area was dark, Andrzejewski could see the activity inside of the car when he approached the window. As Soukaneh complied and handed his license over, he also provided Andrzejewski with a facially valid firearms permit. While doing so, Soukaneh also disclosed to Andrzejewski that, per the permit, he was in lawful possession of a pistol that was located in the driver’s side door compartment.

That this is being recounted in a court decision means the officer didn’t just take a look at the permit and wish Soukaneh a good evening. No, it went the other way. And it’s the sort of thing you need to shove directly in the eyeballs of every bootlicking person, police union rep, politician, and law enforcement official who claims police brutality only exists because people “don’t comply” and should just stop “breaking the law.” All laws were followed. Soukaneh did better than simply comply, he volunteered information. And this is what he got for being a model law-abiding citizen.

Following that exchange, Andrzejewski ordered Soukaneh out of the vehicle. According to Soukaneh’s description, Andrzejewski then violently “dragged [him] out of the car,” pushed him to the ground, yelled and screamed at him, handcuffed him, and pat-searched his person, recovering neither a weapon nor contraband. Andrzejewski then “shoved [Soukaneh] into the rear area of [Andrzejewski’s police] cruiser,” and left Soukaneh “bent over and partially on the floor of the vehicle.” Soukaneh remained “in that position, facing down and unable to see, until another police officer came along several minutes later and helped him sit up.”

Once the other officer repositioned Soukaneh in the cruiser, Soukaneh saw Andrzejewski search his “entire car, both front and rear,” as well as the car’s trunk. After the search, Andrzejewski returned to the cruiser and kept Soukaneh handcuffed and detained in it for an additional half hour, during which time “a group of seven to ten police officers gathered.” Id. At one point, Andrzejewski began writing on his onboard computer and turned to a fellow officer who had arrived at the scene and asked, “What should I write him up for?” The other officer laughed and the sergeant, who had also since arrived, told Andrzejewski what to write.

Unsurprisingly, the lower court rejected the officer’s request for immunity, pointing out that while the initial encounter may have been justified, nothing that followed that (pulling Soukaneh from the car, handcuffing him, searching his vehicle, detaining him for another half-hour while trying to figure out what to cite him with) was supported by probable cause.

The Second Circuit comes to the same conclusion. Simply being made aware Soukaneh possessed an item millions of Americans also own legally is not probable cause for anything the officer did past that point.

On the facts before us, Andrzejewski does not provide an articulable reason why he, or any
other reasonable officer, could conclude that there was probable cause to believe that Soukaneh possessed his firearm unlawfully in violation of Section 29-38(a). To find otherwise would consign those validly carrying firearms pursuant to a license to automatic detention because it would effectively presume that gun permits are invalid until proven valid, or that lawfully owned guns are per se contraband until proven otherwise. Such a finding would effectively render armed individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights meaningless when they are lawfully carrying firearms.

The same goes for the officer’s attempt to invoke qualified immunity by claiming no case on point would have made him aware he was not allowed to so thoroughly and lengthily violate this person’s rights. The Second Circuit says it’s not even sure why it’s spending so much time discussing this because it’s blatantly clear what happened here isn’t permissible under the Fourth Amendment.

This is not a close case, about which reasonable officers could differ. The law as it stood at the time of the events in question left no doubt that a person in possession of a firearm and a facially valid permit for that firearm had a clearly established right to be free from the kind of forcible and prolonged detention to which Soukaneh was subjected, absent any objective reason to suspect that the permit was forged or otherwise invalid.

That covers the forcible removal of Soukaneh from his car, his handcuffing, the search of his car, and his extended detention while the officer tried to come up with something to justify his actions after the fact.

It goes back to the lower court. But I imagine it will only be there briefly before Soukaneh is offered a settlement. Hopefully, that settlement will come hand-in-hand with the firing of Officer Andrzejewski. If this is the one time he got caught, just imagine what he’s gotten away with.

Here’s yet more anecdotal evidence demonstrating why we’re be better off routing mental health calls to mental health professionals, rather than to people who tend to respond to things they can’t immediately control with violence. The good news is more cities are experimenting with multiple options for 911 response. The better news is that those experiments have been successful.

The bad news is everything else. Most cities aren’t willing to do this. And because they’re unwilling to explore their options, more people suffering mental health crises are going to end up dead. That’s what happened to Roy Scott, a Las Vegas resident who was “helped” to death by Las Vegas police officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman.

Here’s another story that’s all too familiar here in the United States, as recounted at the opening of the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

Early in the morning on March 3, 2019, Roy Scott called the police for help. But he did not get it. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman came to the scene. Scott was unarmed and in mental distress. Though he complied with the officers’ orders and was not suspected of a crime, Smith and Huntsman initiated physical contact, forced Scott to the ground, and used bodyweight force to restrain him. Shortly after, Scott lost consciousness and he was later pronounced dead.

The one-two punch of “called for help”/”but he did not get it” makes it clear the officers’ response to the situation was objectively terrible, at least in the Appeal Court’s eyes. The phrase “initiated physical contact” gives a hint of what’s to follow in the narrative: an unwarranted deployment of force against an unarmed person who was already experiencing distress long before these officers decided to end his life.

The district court nailed it on the first pass, denying qualified immunity to both officers. The officers appealed, but are greeted with more of the same at the next judiciary level.

The first two paragraphs recounting the violent incident in greater detail contain some pretty chilling facts. First, the evidence shows both officers clearly understood they were dealing with someone in mental distress, rather than some sort of dangerous criminal.

Scott was distressed and hallucinating when Officers Smith and Huntsman arrived at his apartment. After Smith and Huntsman knocked and identified themselves, Scott yelled to the officers to “break the door down” claiming that there were people inside his house. The officers did not break the door in because they did not hear anyone inside the apartment. Instead, they continued to knock and order Scott to come to the door. About two minutes after first knocking on the door, Smith told Huntsman, “this is a 421A for sure,” using the department code to indicate he believed Scott was mentally ill. Huntsman then called through the door: “Sir, have you been diagnosed with any mental diseases?” After Scott did not come to the door, Smith asked dispatch to call Scott back to ask him to come to the door, noting again that Scott appeared to be mentally ill. Smith then said to Huntsman: “I ain’t going in there. That’s too sketchy.” Huntsman agreed, “That dude’s wacky.” Peering into Scott’s window, Huntsman asked Smith if he could see the “crazed look in [Scott’s] eye.” They could not see anyone else in Scott’s apartment.

While it’s obviously possible for someone to both be in mental distress and pose a safety threat to others, the first fact that matters is that both officers affirmed (in their own body cam recordings) that they believed they were dealing with a mental health issues, rather than actual criminal activity.

The next paragraph contains a pretty damning fact — one that is a leading indicator that police violence, misconduct, or rights violations will be the most likely outcome of any encounter.

When Scott did not open the door, Smith called their sergeant, turning off his body worn camera. On Huntsman’s camera, Smith can be heard telling their sergeant that Scott sounds mentally ill. After ending the call, Smith told Huntsman that their sergeant said that “at the end of the day we can’t do anything if we don’t hear any reason to have an exigent circumstance.” Smith also explained that their Sergeant suggested they try again to get Scott to come to the door.

Never a good sign. Fortunately for Scott’s survivors, the other officer continued recording and captured the rest of Roy Scott’s killing. Scott finally answered the door carrying a metal pipe — one that he immediately dropped when the officers asked him to. They asked if he had any other weapons. Scott handed them a knife he had in pocket — handle-first — and said “I am sorry.” The officers pushed him up against a wall, shining a flashlight in his face. Scott asked to be put in the cop car, telling officers he had schizophrenia and that the light was bothering him. This request was ignored. The officers told Scott, “We are out here to help you.”

They didn’t.

At first, the officers held Scott’s arms at his sides while he was lying on his back. In this position, Scott screamed, struggled, and pled with the officers to leave him alone for over two minutes. The officers then eventually rolled Scott onto his stomach, repeatedly ordering Scott to “stop.” With Scott on his stomach and with his hands restrained behind his back, Huntsman put his bodyweight on Scott’s back and neck for about one to two minutes. At the same time Smith put his weight on Scott’s legs, restraining his lower body. Scott’s pleas turned increasingly incoherent and breathless as Huntsman applied his bodyweight. After handcuffing him, the officers attempted to roll Scott on his side, as he continued to incoherently cry out that he wanted to be left alone. When they rolled Scott over, his face was bloody from contact with the ground. Scott stopped yelling and thrashing around after a few minutes. Scott did not respond when Smith and Huntsman tried to wake or revive him. Shortly after, when the paramedics arrived, Scott was still unresponsive. Scott was pronounced dead after paramedics removed him from the scene. Plaintiffs’ expert found that Scott had died from restraint asphyxia.

From there, the fact-finding is simple, especially since it was recorded. While the officers presented their one-sided argument for qualified immunity, the appeals court shuts this attempt down. First of all, the facts are on the side of the non-moving party’s assertions at this point. Second, the body cam footage takes care of most of the questions of fact and what’s left to be decided should be done in front of a jury.

The officers’ attempt to portray Scott as a threat falls flattest, in terms of appellate arguments. The officers claimed Scott was a threat because he was carrying two weapons — a metal pipe and a knife. The court reminds the officers that one had been dropped and the other voluntarily handed to officers well before the officers decided to take Scott to the ground and restrain him to death.

The law was clearly established when the officers ended Scott’s life. And the precedent is almost directly on point.

The similarities between this case and Drummond are striking. Scott was not suspected of a crime. Instead, he was taken into custody because of his mental health. Though they were presented with an individual experiencing a mental health crisis and presenting no obvious danger to others, Smith and Huntsman crushed Scott’s back and neck to subdue him while handcuffing him. Scott also cried out with increasing distress and incoherence as the officers’ force escalated. Reasonable officers would have known that their force was not reasonable and that it created a serious risk of asphyxiating Scott.

When the law is clearly established and any facts that might help the officers push their version of the events still in dispute (not including those caught on camera, which are indisputable), qualified immunity is not an option. This will return to the lower court to be argued in front of a jury, assuming the city of Los Angeles doesn’t decide to settle first. No matter how this ends up being resolved, the city and the PD would be wise to look into alternative response options for mental health calls. It’s pretty clear police officers can’t — or won’t — handle these calls responsibly.

There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.

In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.

In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.

The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.

First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.

Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’s] CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.

Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.

But this is what New York’s getting, whether it wants it or not. And whether it works or not. More details here, via reporting by Ana Ley and Hurubie Meko for the New York Times.

New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.

The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.

Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.

It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.

While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.

Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.

But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.

The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.

The state of New Jersey has been sued twice over its infant DNA program. Like the rest of the nation, New Jersey hospitals collect a blood sample from newborns to test them for 60 different health disorders. That part is normal.

But New Jersey is different. Rather than discard the samples after the testing is complete, it holds onto them. For twenty-three years. That’s unusual. And it’s a fair bet that almost 100% of New Jersey parents are unaware of this fact.

There’s a reason parents don’t know this and it has nothing to do with parents just not paying attention when this test is performed. According to the lawsuits, New Jersey healthcare professionals do what they can to portray the testing as mandatory, even though it isn’t. They also take care to keep parents uninformed, never once informing them that they are free to opt out of the testing for religious reasons.

The state, however, is fine with this. The biggest beneficiary of this program is state law enforcement, which can freely obtain these DNA samples without having to go through the trouble of obtaining a warrant. Warrants are needed to obtain DNA samples from criminal suspects, but there’s nothing stopping cops from searching the DNA database for younger relatives of the suspect whose DNA might still be in the possession of the state’s Health Department.

That’s why the state is facing multiple lawsuits, making it an anomaly in this group of 50 states we Americans call home. And that’s likely why the state’s health officials are trying to healthwash this by crafting a new narrative for this uniquely New Jersey handling of infant blood tests. Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown with a summary of the rebranding for Reason.

Mandatory genomic sequencing of all newborns—it sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi story. But it could become a reality in New Jersey, where health officials are considering adding this analysis to the state’s mandatory newborn testing regime.

Genomic sequencing can determine a person’s “entire genetic makeup,” the National Cancer Institute website explains. Using genomic sequencing, doctors can diagnose diseases and abnormalities, reveal sensitivities to environmental stimulants, and assess a person’s risk of developing conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Ernest Post, chairman of the New Jersey Newborn Screening Advisory Review Committee (NSARC), discussed newborn genomic sequencing at an NSARC meeting in May. An NSARC subcommittee has been convened to explore the issue and is expected to issue recommendations later this year. It’s considering questions such as whether sequencing would be optional or mandatory, the New Jersey Monitor reported.

The state wants to take what’s already problematic and make it a privacy nightmare. But, you know, for the children. The framing encourages people to think this is about early detection and preemptive responses to expected long-term health problems.

And that’s not to stay it won’t have the stated effect. The problem is the state hasn’t been honest about its newborn DNA collection in the past and health care providers (whether ignorant of the facts or instructed to maximize consent) haven’t been exactly trustworthy either.

Now, the state wants to expand what it can do with these blood samples despite not having done anything to correct what’s wrong with the program as it exists already. This just opens up additional avenues of abuse for the government — something it shouldn’t even be considering while it’s still facing two lawsuits related to the existing DNA harvesting program.

The ACLU is obviously opposed to this expansion. The statement it gave to the New Jersey Monitor makes it clear what’s at stake, and what needs to happen before the state moves forward with gene sequencing of newborn blood samples.

If New Jersey adopts genomic sequencing, policymakers must create “a real privacy-protective infrastructure to make sure that genomic data isn’t abused,” said Dillon Reisman, an ACLU-NJ staff attorney.

“What we’re talking about is information from kids that could allow the state and other actors to use that data to monitor and surveil them and their families for the rest of their lives,” Reisman said. “If the goal is the health of children, it does not serve the health of children to have a wild west of genomic data just sitting out there for anyone to abuse.”

Maybe that will happen before this program goes into effect. But it seems unlikely. Given the history of the existing program, the most probable outcome is a handful of alterations as the result of court orders in the lawsuits that are sure to greet the rollout of this program. The state seems super-interested in getting out ahead of health problems. But it seemingly couldn’t care less about heading off the inherent privacy problems the new program would create.

Say what you will about the roster of Trump apologists being hosted by the Volokh Conspiracy (and I will say plenty if given the chance), but at least Eugene Volokh continues to surface truly interesting cases. (Ilya Somin remains worth reading as well.)

And this one is one for the record books. Possibly the first First Amendment case that involves one human and one horse. And it’s no regular horse, which is why this is a First Amendment lawsuit. The horse in question was ridden by Ocean City (Maryland) police officer Matthew Foreman.

What started as a nuisance call quickly became something else once plaintiff Reniel Meyler realized just how easily Officer Foreman’s mount could be taken off task.

The opinion [PDF] issued by the Maryland federal court recounts the evening’s events that led to this lawsuit. Reniel Meyler finished his shift at work and then headed to a local bar. Having only arrived shortly before the Cork Bar’s closing, Meyler downed a beer and then headed out to the parking lot to socialize with a couple of his friends, Yokimba Bernier and Christoper Clarke. While waiting in the car for Clarke to return from taking a walk with another friend, Meyler and Bernier listened to some music at high volume.

How high? That’s not on the record. It was apparently loud enough to “draw the attention” of two Ocean City PD officers, one of which was riding a horse named “Moose.” As the officers (and their horse) approached, the pair turned down the volume.

Most of the ensuing encounter was captured on Officer Foreman’s body camera. What it captured was something out of the ordinary. But first, the ordinary stuff.

Immediately upon Foreman’s arrival on the scene, the following exchange took place.

Foreman: Where in the world do you guys think this is OK at 2 o’clock in the morning?

Meyler: Jamaica.

Foreman: Well then go back to Jamaica, cause you can’t do it here.

Bernier: [Inaudible]

Foreman: We can hear you [from] three blocks away, and you can go to jail for noise in Ocean City. OK? You guys really want to go to jail for noise?

Bernier: [Inaudible]

Foreman: No, not a ticket. Jail. Like, handcuffs. Jail. Noise.

Having established the baseline and his control of the scene, Foreman hung around to make sure the music didn’t again rise to law-breaking levels. However, it soon became clear that although Foreman had control of the scene, he no longer had control of his horse.

About 1 minute and 50 seconds into the video, Meyler turns towards Moose and makes some clicking sounds. Moose does not immediately react, but about five seconds later he visibly moves his head and appears to take a step or two in response to the clicking.

!!!

Officer Foreman reined in Moose to stop the movement. As the ruling notes, the horse appeared to “remain calm for the remainder of the video.” Not so for everyone else. Some more arguing about noise levels occurred with Officer Foreman delivering some noises of his own.

In response to either Bernier or Meyler, Foreman says “no, no, you don’t wave your hands at me, boom boom boom you go to these.” As he says “boom boom boom” Foreman takes out a pair of handcuffs and brandishes them in front of Meyler and Bernier, implying they will be arrested.

Shortly after Officer Foreman’s “boom boom boom,” Meyler went back to his click click click, earning this response from the horse’s boss:

“Stop antagonizing my horse. You’re not allowed to do that. You can’t interrupt my animal.”

Just an amazing set of sentences, each one more amazing than the last. Even in context, there’s nothing quite like a cop telling a civilian not to “interrupt” their “animal.”

Then Meyler’s friend (Bernier) decided to up the ante by declaring it wasn’t illegal to “interrupt” Foreman’s horse, pointing out that people pet police horses and talk to them or whatever without being threatened with an arrest. Au contraire, said Officer Foreman, albeit in different words. And different actions.

TL; DR: Meyler continued to click. Foreman continued to yell stuff about “interfering” with his horse. The end result was Meyler being arrested for antagonizing a cop, even if the cop said it was all about antagonizing an animal that remained pretty much unperturbed for the running time of the body cam video.

The official charges were “failure to obey a lawful order” and “interference with a police animal.” The charges were voluntarily dismissed by the prosecutor a month after the arrest. The lawsuit followed, with Meyler arguing being arrested for clicking at a police horse violated his First Amendment rights.

While Meyler still has the opportunity to pursue this in court (the complaint was dismissed without prejudice), it’s unlikely any of his federal constitutional claims have any chance of being found in his favor. (He still has a state law claim he can pursue, however.) And he certainly won’t be allowed to claim his free speech rights were violated when he was first told, then arrested for talking to a cop horse.

Unsurprisingly, there’s absolutely no precedent establishing this particular form of expression:

Here, Meyler has not pointed to a single case involving an arrest made under Ocean City’s police animal interference ordinance, or, for that matter, any case anywhere involving any claims of wrongful arrest related to alleged interference with police animals. Nor has he pointed to any cases involving the application of First Amendment rights to human-animal interactions.

With probable cause supporting the arrest and the complete lack of precedent in play, qualified immunity protects Officer Foreman from this lawsuit. And the court’s not about to use this case to establish Dr. Doolittle-esque precedent protecting people who say things to or make noises at government animals. Meyler’s moonshot has failed. He’ll just have to live with the less satisfying victory of having the charges dismissed. And, given the circumstances, that’s probably the better of both options.

We didn’t really need more precedent assuring us our rights don’t mean anything at the borders, but we got it anyway.

Within 100 miles of any US border (and that includes international airports), courts have generally ruled that rights are optional. If they seem to be getting in the way of “securing” the border, they have to go. And that’s why intrusive device searches have increased steadily in recent years, despite the Supreme Court’s 2014 Riley decision. That ruling said warrants were required to search cell phones because cell phones, unlike someone’s trunk or pants pockets, contained a wealth of personal and private information previously unseen in the history of the nation.

Given the rationale for the warrant requirement, you’d think courts would extend it to cover the nation’s borders. But no court has. When it comes to border searches, Riley simply doesn’t apply.

Not every court has reached this conclusion. A federal judge in the 2nd Circuit said Riley applied at the border. But that ruling was never ratified at the appellate level, so it hardly changes things in the Second Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court — which covers the largest amount of southern border (which is where pretty much all the intrusion takes place) — did place some restraints on warrantless border device searches, limiting them to searches for “contraband.” How much that changed anything is unknown, but it was a small step further than any other circuit has been willing to go.

The circuit with the second largest amount of border territory (the Fifth Circuit) hasn’t had any qualms about eradicating the Fourth Amendment at border crossings. An unequivocal “no warrants needed” was handed down by that circuit late last summer.

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court recently revisited this issue. Its earlier ruling on the issue was pretty much a punt. The court decided it didn’t need to deliver any ruling on the issue at that point because it could use the “good faith” release valve to sidestep anything approaching precedent.

The primary positions staked out by the parties could not be more starkly contrasted. The defendant argues that nothing less than a warrant authorizes a search of electronic devices at the border. The government asserts that it may conduct these searches without any particularized suspicion at all. In the end, though, we need not adopt either of these positions, and indeed may avoid entirely the thorny issue of the appropriate level of suspicion required. Instead, we affirm the district court’s denial of the motion to suppress because these agents acted in good faith when they searched the devices with reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime was being committed, at a time when no court had ever required more than reasonable suspicion for any search at the border.

That’s how it went in April 2019. Here’s how it’s going now:

The “longstanding recognition that searches at our borders without probable cause and without a warrant are nonetheless ‘reasonable’ has a history as old as the Fourth Amendment itself.” United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 619 (1977). That history leads us to join the uniform view of our sister circuits to hold that searches of electronics at the border—like any other border search—do not require a warrant or probable cause, and that the kind of routine, manual search of the phone initially performed here requires no individualized suspicion. We affirm.

That’s from the opening of the appeals court decision [PDF], one that portrays a CBP agent’s trawl through a traveler’s phone as a “routine, manual search,” which included demanding (and obtaining) a passcode, digging through images stored on the phone, and unlocking (with the provided passcode) another application where more images of child sexual abuse were discovered.

The traveler (and the person seeking to suppress the evidence discovered on his phone) is Marcos Mendez, a US citizen who had previous arrests for solicitation of a child and CSAM possession. So, he was already on the CBP radar. That being said, it’s a bit chilling to realize this is what the CBP thinks is an indicator of child sexual abuse — something the Seventh Circuit tacitly endorses by placing it in the decision without further comment:

Mendez also fit the profile for child-pornography offenders: a single adult male traveling alone.

Well… OK, then. The supposed connective tissue was the fact that Mendez traveled alone to Ecuador, which is apparently just as suspicious because… well… rank speculation, I guess?

[M]endez was returning from Ecuador, which CBP officers classified as a potential child trafficking source country.

Couldn’t literally any country be considered a “potential child trafficking source country?” I mean, we’re just talking potential here. It’s not other countries, which are known destinations for people seeking to engage in sex with minors. All this says is that Ecuador, like every other country in the world, has minors in its population and those minors have the potential to be trafficked for sex.

Anyway, the Seventh Circuit isn’t going to let itself get bogged down by questionable assertions about suspicion asserted by our valiant border officers. Instead, it’s just going to get down to business aligning itself with every other circuit by going on (permanent) record with a free pass on constitutional violations anywhere people might enter or exit the United States.

And, in doing so, the court says things the Supreme Court didn’t say about the Riley decision, even as it uses a very selective direct quote. According to the Seventh Circuit, Riley doesn’t apply at the borders because the incident underlying that historic decision did not occur at the border.

Riley involved the search incident to arrest exception and “carefully tailored its analysis to that context.” Wood, 16 F.4th at 533. What is unreasonable after arrest may be perfectly reasonable at customs, as Riley itself anticipated. See Riley, 573 U.S. at 401–02 (“[O]ther case-specific exceptions may still justify a warrantless search of a particular phone.”)

But the Seventh Circuit’s blanket exception for border searches ignores a crucial part of the very decision it quotes:

“[O]ther case-specific exceptions…”

This ruling has nothing to say about specifics. While it’s certainly true a known sex offender will receive greater scrutiny when entering or exiting the country, the ruling here applies this line of thought to everyone crossing borders, whether or not any reasonable suspicion exists to justify the seizure and search of someone’s phone.

There’s evidence here this search was likely justified under the lower level of constitutional protections at our nation’s borders, but the Seventh Circuit looks at a case-specific exception and makes it a blanket exception by refusing to undo precedent that says federal officers can pretty much do whatever they want, so long as it happens within 100 miles of any border crossing.

So, it’s not a great ruling or even a good one. It just is. And because no appellate circuit has been willing to upset this free-for-all at the border by instituting a warrant requirement, every other appellate circuit thinks it’s OK to ignore the greater message of the Riley decision (that being that almost any search of a person’s phone is intrusive) in favor of just keeping their heads down and allowing the status to remain quo.

When school students are tested, those overseeing the tests seemingly are willing to do whatever it takes to prevent cheating, even if it means utilizing extremely intrusive spyware to lower the risk of dishonesty. Students are just supposed to take this in stride, but the lessons they’ll often learn of just how little respect school administrators have for them.

But when it comes to cops taking tests, no one even bothers to do the bare minimum. Here’s Jonathan Bailey of Plagarism Today describing the far-from-sterile testing environment afforded to NYPD officers taking a sergeants exam:

The city did just about everything possible wrong when administering this test: It did not enforce cell phone rules, it allowed ineligible people to sit for it, it did not change the questions between sessions/days, and it did not adequately follow up on allegations of cheating.

That’s the upshot of the detailed report [PDF] on this cheating scandal compiled by the city’s Department of Investigation. Somewhat ironically, this came to light thanks to the complaints made by honest cops who apparently didn’t appreciate the massive amount of dishonesty they had witnessed.

In the days and weeks following the Exam, which consisted of 100 multiple choice questions, DOI received approximately 80 complaints from NYPD police officers alleging widespread cheating, involving candidates who took the Exam on Day 1 and passed questions and answers to candidates taking the Exam on Day 2. It was reported that officers used their cell phones in the waiting room and received communications or disseminated information to other test-takers, and that officers who took the Exam on Day 2 received answers to the Exam through social media posts and text messages

Of course, the ratio of honest cops to dishonest cops was still pretty low. Even if we generously assume the 80 complaints came from 80 different officers, the total number of officers who participated in this test was 10,300. Sure, not all of them cheated and obviously not every officer was privy to cheating by others, but that’s still a pretty low number given the total number of test takers.

The large number of test takers was due to the COVID pandemic, which delayed the annual testing for two years. So, there was obviously pressure on the department to get as many officers through the testing as possible, which probably contributed to the nearly nonexistent efforts made to deter cheating.

Not every officer had a chance to cheat. But a whole lot of officers were provided with the opportunity by other officers who were even more ethically compromised than the people they helped cheat.

DOI found that after that first session, 35% of the test questions and answers were disseminated via social media to more than 1,200 Exam candidates.

Given the opportunity for cheating and the lax testing room standards, the real surprise here is how many officers failed to pass the test.

Of the 10,399 candidates taking the exam, only 1,730 of the test takers candidates (17%) achieved a passing score.

While the DOI report notes that some test takers are not eligible for a promotion to sergeant, many officers still take tests like these to polish their test-taking skills, something the department allows. And while that may have contributed to this very low percentage of passing scores, it doesn’t explain why so many officers who desire this promotion are so ill-prepared for a test like this, especially when (at least in this case) some were given questions and answers by other test takers. (Then again, as noted elsewhere in the report, about half of the answers shared on social media by NYPD officers were wrong.)

Then there’s whatever the hell this is:

DOI discussed with IAB the candidate who received a score of 3%. IAB identified that candidate as a retired NYPD captain who was not eligible for the exam because he had retired more than three years prior to taking the exam. The retired captain currently runs a promotional exam school which charges approximately $800 per student for a 20-week course; while still at NYPD he cofounded an NYPD promotional exam training academy. He explained in his interview with IAB that he scored 3% because he intentionally chooses the wrong answers to be able to protest any questions he believes to be unfair. It is unclear how the selection of incorrect answers would support a “protest” of test questions because, according to DCAS, protests are deemed valid only if a candidate can establish that the answer they selected is as accurate — or more accurate — than the answer in the test’s answer key.

In any event, the retired captain registered for 19 exams from 2002 to the present, and was ineligible for all of them. According to the Sergeant’s Exam requirements, applicants must maintain the title of NYPD Police Officer for at least three years preceding the date of the Exam. DOI reviewed the retired captain’s NYPD employment record and DCAS exam history and found that he was promoted to NYPD captain in September 1999 and retired from the NYPD in October 2013. Since 2002, the retired captain has registered for 19 NYPD promotional exams, 11 of which were from 2002 to 2012 while he was employed as an NYPD captain. DOI reviewed the Exam application, which outlines eligibility requirements, and found that the retired captain was not eligible to take any of the 19 exams for which he registered. While DOI did not establish that the captain took any exam for an improper purpose, allowing ineligible candidates to sit for exams plainly poses a risk to exam integrity.

Great stuff, that. Some cop boss who thinks he’s better than the tests was allowed to take tests he wasn’t permitted to take, perform some sort of performative failure during testing, and take all the info he had gathered and use it to run a for-profit test-taking class for other NYPD officers.

And what’s come out of this other than a bit of temporary embarrassment for the NYPD? Not much. According to Bailey’s write-up at Plagiarism Today, only seven officers were lightly wrist-slapped for receiving test answers from others via text messages or social media. 103 officers were declared ineligible to take the test and their tests were thrown out. But no effort was made to perform a do-over in a more sterile testing environment and the two government contractors who combined forces to deliver this test-taking farce are apparently still considered valid options for future testing.

While this may show police officers are, above all else, human beings just as prone to temptation as the rest of us, they’re supposed to hold themselves to higher standards. But only about 80 of them did. The department they work for apparently isn’t willing to hold them to a higher standard either. And if NYPD brass doesn’t give a fuck, why should they?

Definitely loving all of this. And right up front (just in case the defendant thinks she can rob Peter Techdirt to pay Paul Eric Posey), I’ll make it clear this post will be filled with colorful expression, hyperbole, highly opinionated takes on the lawsuit, and… possibly… archaic slang.

A lot of people (especially the most awful ones) think libel laws in this country are too restrictive. They claim it’s almost impossible to rifle through someone’s wallet via court order because someone said something about them they didn’t like. In most cases, those people are like the defendant here — someone who probably thought it was impossible to get successfully sued for libel in the United States.

You know these people. They’re the ones who cry libel every time one of their own is insulted but say dumb shit like “facts don’t care about your feelings” when other people complain about the garbage flowing out their social media accounts.

The saddest thing about this case is that this person continued to do the libel even after she knew what she was saying on social media was definitively not true. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy)

A jury has awarded more than $1.1 million in damages to the drag performer who sued a blogger for defamation.

The unanimous verdict was returned Friday. The jury found that blogger Summer Bushnell defamed Post Falls resident Eric Posey when she accused him of exposing himself to the crowd while he performed in drag at the Coeur d’Alene City Park bandshell in June 2022.

That’s hilarious. Not so much for Eric Posey, who was falsely accused of exposing himself. He sued the blogger in 2022 for claiming something had happened that actually hadn’t happened.

And, of course, the posting Posey sued Bushnell over was motivated by her own bigotry. It was also an attempt to rouse a rabble that rarely needs an excuse to be roused.

The day of Posey’s performance, June 11, 2022, Bushnell posted a video of herself discussing the mass arrest of Patriot Front members near City Park, as well as footage from Posey’s performance.

“Why did no one arrest the man in a dress who flashed his genitalia to minors and people in the crowd?” she said in the video. “No one said anything about it and there’s video. I’m going to put up a blurred video to prove it.”

Yes, this is the kind of person who thinks posting an edited video can “prove” anything. However, it did prove this: there are plenty of suckers in Idaho and some of them wear government-issued uniforms. After racking up a few thousand views on social media, the edited video generated national news coverage as well as a local police investigation. Fortunately, the criminal charges were dropped after prosecutors took a look at the unedited video.

City prosecutors ultimately declined to file charges and stated publicly that the unedited video showed no exposure.

Here’s what Bushnell posted, as included in Posey’s lawsuit [PDF] against the blogger:

Here’s the same shot in unedited form:

After being sued by the drag performer, the blogger claimed this was all just an unfortunate misunderstanding. The video had been passed on to her by another person who had blurred the crotch area and Bushnell was just passing along this information.

But that excuse only lasted until she was called to the stand to testify.

Wendy J. Olsen, legal counsel for Posey, questioned Bushnell about Facebook messages she sent to multiple friends, including ones in which she references being able to see Posey’s genitals in an unedited video.

“And you knew at the time it was false,” Olsen said.

“It was not accurate,” Bushnell replied.

“You knew that at the time,” Olsen said.

“Correct,” Bushnell said.

That’s libel, folks. That’s fully admitted defamation by the defamer on the record in court during a jury trial. That can’t be undone. That’s how you lose a libel case in the United States. You say something defamatory, knowing it’s not true.

Bushnell’s lawyer, despite the $1.1 million damages award and despite his client’s own admission she had lied to people about the drag performer, continues to engage in self-delusion of his own.

Attorney Colton Boyles, who represents Bushnell, told jurors that his client’s allegations were “close to the line” but did not cross the line into defamation. He maintained that Bushnell’s “honest belief” is that Posey exposed himself, though she admitted on the witness stand that she never saw the “fully exposed genitals” she described to others.

“That remains her steadfast testimony to this day,” Boyles said.

There’s a very good reason Colton Boyles would represent someone like Bushnell. And it’s not because he’s such a great litigator. No, this is all ideological. Colton’s decision to take this case was likely motivated by his own personal animus against people like drag performer Eric Posey.

Boyles, whose full name is Dennis Colton Boyles, was recently retained by the Community Library Network – the group of Kootenai County libraries outside of Coeur d’Alene – whose board members have ambitions of restricting books and services.

He defended former Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin when she lost a public records lawsuit to the Idaho Press Club.

Boyles pleaded guilty to a driving under the influence misdemeanor late last year and is on unsupervised probation until Dec. 12.

He has appeared as a guest on far-right internet shows, such as “The Pete Santilli Show.” Pete Santilli was a vocal supporter of anti-government activist Ammon Bundy during the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Ammon Bundy’s governor campaign paid Boyles’ firm $5,000 in 2022 for legal advice.

In an Epoch Times documentary, Boyles pushed deep state conspiracy theories about Child Protective Services.

“I would say it is a state- and federal-funded kidnapping system,” Boyles said.

[…]

In 2021, Boyles donated $500 to Post Falls School Board candidate David Reilly, a former radio host who has expressed antisemitic views and attended the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

With competent representation, the blogger may have been able to secure a settlement in the low thousands. She might have been able to walk away with nothing more than a public apology. But she chose to retain a showboating rube. I hope he can explain to Bushnell how he just cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars and makes it clear that no matter how many libs the two have collectively “owned,” being stupid on social media can’t really be considered a stable revenue stream.

“Odor of marijuana” still remains — even in an era of widespread legalization — a favorite method of justifying warrantless searches. It’s an odor, so it can’t be caught on camera, which are becoming far more prevalent, whether they’re mounted to cop cars, pinned to officers’ chests, or carried by passersby.

Any claim an odor was detected pits the officer’s word against the criminal defendant’s. Even though this is a nation where innocence is supposed to be presumed, the reality of the criminal justice system is that everyone from the cops to the court to the jury tend to view people only accused of crimes as guilty.

But this equation changed a bit as states and cities continued to legalize weed possession. Once that happened, the claim that the “odor” of marijuana had been “detected” only meant the cops had managed to detect the odor of a legal substance. The same thing for their dogs. Drug dogs are considered the piece de resistance in warrantless roadside searches — an odor “detected” by a four-legged police officer that’s completely incapable of being cross-examined during a jury trial.

As legalization spreads, courts have responded. There have been handful of decisions handed down that clearly indicate what the future holds: cops and dog cops that smell weed where weed is legal don’t have much legal footing when it comes to warrantless searches. Observing something legal has never been — and will never be — justification for a search, much less reasonable suspicion to extend a stop.

The present has yet to arrive in the Seventh Circuit. Detecting the odor of a legal substance is still considered to be a permission slip for a warrantless search. And that’s only because there’s one weird stipulation in the law governing legal marijuana possession in Illinois.

In this case, a traffic stop led to the “detection” of the odor of marijuana. That led to the driver fleeing the traffic stop and dropping a gun he was carrying. And that led to felon-in-possession charges for Prentiss Jackson, who has just seen his motion to suppress this evidence rejected by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court.

Here’s how this all started, as recounted in the appeals court decision [PDF]:

The officer smelled the odor of unburnt marijuana emanating from the car. He knew the odor came from inside the car, as he had not smelled it before he approached the vehicle. During their conversation about the license and registration, the officer told Jackson he smelled “a little bit of weed” and asked if Jackson and the passenger had been smoking. Jackson said he had, but that was earlier in the day, and he had not smoked inside the car.

Through the officer’s training, he knew the most common signs of impairment for driving under the influence were the odor of marijuana or alcohol and speech issues. He was also taught to look for traffic violations. Concerned that Jackson might be driving under the influence because of the head and taillight violation, the odor of marijuana, and Jackson’s admission that he had smoked earlier, the officer asked Jackson whether he was “safe to drive home.” Jackson said he was. His speech was not slurred during the interaction, and his responses were appropriate.

Now, I’m not a federal judge. (And probably shouldn’t be one, for several reasons.) But I think I would have immediately called bullshit here. According to the officer’s own statements, his “training” led him to believe things like unburnt marijuana and unlit headlights/taillights are indicators of “driving under the influence.” I would have asked for the officer to dig deep into the reserves of his “training” to explain these assertions. The only one that fits is Jackson’s admission he had smoked “earlier.” And, even with that admission, Jackson cleared the impairment test.

The officer, however, insisted he had probable cause to engage in a warrantless search of the car, based exclusively on his detection of the odor of “unburnt” marijuana. The officer told Jackson he was going to cite him for weed possession (not for the amount, but for how it was stored in the car). He also told the passenger he would make an arrest if Jackson did not “agree” to a “probable cause search.”

Jackson moved to the back of his car as ordered by the officer. Shortly before the patdown began, Jackson fled, dropping a handgun he was not legally allowed to possess.

Jackson challenged the search in his motion to suppress, arguing that marijuana legalization meant an assertion that the odor of a (legal) drug had been detected by an officer meant nothing in terms of probable cause for a warrantless search. The lower court rejected Jackson’s argument. The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court agrees with the trial court.

First, the court says marijuana, while legal in Illinois, is still illegal under federal law. And the suspicion a federal law has been broken (even if it can’t be enforced locally) is still enough to justify further questions and further exploration of a car.

Furthermore, state requirements for transporting legal marijuana in personal vehicles were not met by Jackson’s baggies of personal use weed.

[T]he [Illinois] Vehicle Code […] clearly states that when cannabis is transported in a private vehicle, the cannabis must be stored in a sealed, odor-proof container—in other words, the cannabis should be undetectable by smell by a police officer.”

That’s a really weird stipulation. It basically tells residents that in order to legally transport drugs they must act like drug smugglers. And, while I haven’t seen a case raising this issue yet, one can be sure people have been criminally charged for following the law because officers believe efforts made to prevent officers from detecting drugs is, at the very least, reasonable suspicion to extend a stop or, better yet, probable cause to engage in a warrantless search.

And this is likely why that particular stipulation (which I haven’t seen in other places where weed is legal) was included in this law: it doesn’t remove one of the handiest excuses to perform a warrantless search — the “odor of marijuana.”

The smell of unburnt marijuana outside a sealed container independently supplied probable cause and thus supported the direction for Jackson to step out of the car for the search.

That’s pretty handy… at least for cops. It allows them to “detect” the odor of a legal substance in order to treat it as contraband. And they need to do little more than claim in court they smelled it — something that’s impossible to disprove. Illinois has managed to do the seemingly impossible: it has legalized a substance while allowing law enforcement officers to treat it as illegal. That’s quite the trick. And because of that, it’s still perfectly legal to pretend legal substances are contraband when it comes to traffic stops in Illinois.

Very few governments and government agencies value the transparency and accountability that robust open records laws create. It took an act of Congress to even establish a presumptive right of access to government records. And all across the United States, state governments are always trying to find some way to limit access without getting hit with an injunction from courts that seem far more respectful of this right than the governments and agencies obliged to conform with statutory requirements.

Not for nothing is it pretty much de rigueur to engage in litigation to obtain records from entities legally required to hand them over. New Jersey is the latest state to help itself to more opacity while placing more obligations on the public — you know, the people who pay their salaries. While there have been a few moves towards the positive side of this equation over the past decade, legislators and Governor Phil Murphy have decided the public only deserves to know what the government feels like telling it.

As Matt Friedman reports for Politico, the new normal in New Jersey is discouraging people from suing after their records requests have been blown off by state agencies. This isn’t anything state residents want. This is the governor protecting the government from the people it’s supposed to be serving.

The problematic law doesn’t dial back any obligations to respond to requests. Instead, it’s a bit more nefarious. It assumes government entities will fail to comply with their statutory obligations, but passes that cost on to the people directly by making it far more expensive to force records out of agencies’ hands.

Here’s the impetus:

The push for the bill has largely come from lobbyists for county and local governments, who say records custodians are burdened by commercial and unreasonable requests by a small number of people.

And here’s the outcome:

Most controversially, the legislation would end the current practice of mandatory “fee shifting,” in which governments pay the “reasonable” legal costs for any requester who successfully challenges a records denial in court. It would instead leave it up to a judge, who would only be required to award the legal costs to the plaintiff if they determine the denial was made in “bad faith,” “unreasonably,” or the government agency “knowingly or willfully” violated the law.

That places the burden of litigation almost entirely on records requesters. If they decide to initiate litigation to obtain what the law says the state must turn over, they’re now faced with the possibility of not being able to recover their litigation costs even if a judge rules a government agency must turn over the requested records. All the government needs to demonstrate (and a judge needs to trust its narrative) is that any failure to provide records wasn’t a “knowing” violation of the law. This is the government seeing all the litigation non-compliant agencies generate and somehow arriving at the conclusion that it just must be too easy to sue the government for refusing to uphold its end of the public records bargain.

And that’s not all. The law also grants a presumptive fee burden on requesters, requiring them to demonstrate (to agencies already unwilling to comply with requests) that the requested fees are “unreasonable.” More specificity is also demanded of requesters, which is insane because requesters in some cases can’t possibly know the specifics of the records they’re requesting and will likely only have those specifics if the government agency actually hands over the records.

Bizarrely, it also bars requesters from sharing any photo or video received via a public records request if it contains “any indecent or graphic images of the subject’s intimate part” without getting direct permission from the person captured in the recording or photo. And that makes it pretty easy for the government to bury photos and recordings it doesn’t want to have shared by refusing to redact or blur any footage/photos containing an “intimate part.”

That means things like a violent arrest of person suffering a mental health crisis could be buried just because (as happens frequently in cases like these) the person being violently subdued by cops is underclothed or naked. If nothing else, it passes on the expense of redacting footage to those receiving the recordings, rather than place that obligation on those releasing records that might violate the stipulations of the revised public records law.

The gist of the law — and definitely the gist of the governor’s statement [PDF] in support of his own signature on said law — is that the government is real victim here. It’s being steadily crushed under the litigious heel of requesters who sue when the government violates the law, refuses to hand over records it’s obligated to hand over, or just make what the government considers to be too many records requests.

After a thorough examination of the provisions of the bill, I am persuaded that the changes, viewed comprehensively, are relatively modest.

Hmmm. Except that no one but government entities seeking greater opacity (or at least angling for a lower obligation for responses) is in favor of this law. Anyone actually engaged in transparency and accountability efforts doesn’t see this as “modest” revision of the state’s public records law, much less as a win for the general public. This is the government doing what it does with its greatest enthusiasm: protecting itself from the people it’s supposed to be serving.

I don’t know why I’m drawn to doomed litigation but there’s no denying this impulse.

I know what the plaintiff wants to achieve. That much is made clear by Justin Rodrich’s reporting on the lawsuit for the Daily Beast. But I don’t know how he (or any other pronoun! — it’s filed as “Doe”) expects this to stop a rogue state from trying to kill them, much less put $5 million in his pockets.

Nonetheless, here we are:

An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal, forcing him underground, in an undisclosed location, following a botched kidnapping attempt.

In a heavily anonymized federal lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast, “John Doe” says Iranian agents torched his car, broke into his home, and threatened his relatives after learning he was working with the American government. He now lives “in constant fear” of being killed by Iranian agents who have carried out dozens of hits and hundreds of abductions in various countries “with impunity,” according to his complaint.

Because Doe is a marked man, he went into exile in a nearby nation where he “must now avoid any public interaction, in order to remain safe,” the complaint states.

Unlike a lot of other fatally flawed (perhaps a poor choice of words in this case) litigation I’ve covered, Doe has a legitimate beef: a foreign nation is trying to kill him on, perhaps on his own soil — soil, it must be noted, that does not belong to the nation of Iran.

As legitimate claims go, demanding to be compensated for living in constant fear of your own safety is a pretty good one.

But the beef aside, how does the plaintiff expect this to actually go? For one thing, the federal court must agree that Washington, DC is the proper venue to hear this case. It may decide that it is, but in doing so, may provide a few hints for Doe’s assassins as to their general location.

The plaintiff has also secured legal representation. If you’re a state-sponsored hacker, that’s where you’re going first if you’re trying to discover the location of a person you want to kill.

And, since Iran has allegedly already engaged in intimidation, attempted kidnapping, and other threats on the informant’s life abroad, it’s unlikely the country is going to suddenly develop a healthy respect for US civil litigation procedures and respond to this lawsuit in a timely fashion… or at all, actually.

Iran has already broken the gentlemen’s agreement over assassination in foreign countries that you’re not actually at war with. Given that, the threat of default judgment isn’t actually a threat. It’s just one more thing you can file in your “IDGAF” drawer.

Even if the Iranian government does respond to this lawsuit, one would expect the invocation of sovereign immunity. One would also hope that a US Court would refuse to rule that sovereign immunity covers extrajudicial assassinations by countries not currently engaged in declared wars on said target and said target’s nation.

One would hope. But then again, maybe it won’t!. I mean, that’s exactly the thing that’s central to the initiation of Iran’s (alleged) assassination attempts:

An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal…

We’re not technically or legally at war with Iran. And yet! So, that kind of ruins that argument. This government is only at war with things at the moment. There’s the War on Drugs. The War on Terror. The War on Fentanyl. The War on [Political Hot Button Topic Du Jour]. But we’re not at war with Iran. Nor are we at war with Yemeni wedding parties or foreign journalists, but nonetheless we’ve killed both with extrajudicial military actions and/or drone strikes.

While that adds more legitimacy to the plaintiff’s arguments and, conversely, detracts from the imagined defenses of the Iranian government, the lawsuit [PDF] doesn’t have a chance in hell of (1) stopping Iran from trying to kill this person, and (2) resulting in a $5 million payout to cover the alleged damages suffered due to the threatened person having to shut down his businesses.

So, as tragic and awful as the plaintiff’s situation is, this lawsuit only has the potential to make things worse. All of this means nothing when you’re dealing with a government willing to violate any number of official and unofficial agreements to kill someone on foreign soil. And that appears to be something Iran’s government is especially willing to do:

All told, Doe contends, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which in recent years has declared war on, among others, a podcaster in Vancouver who discussed sex on the air and a journalist in Brooklyn who criticized the regime, has “intentionally inflicted emotional distress, induced severe mental anguish and emotional and psychological pain and suffering, and caused the need for medical treatment.”

If there’s any entity in the US with some legal culpability, it might be the FBI, which clearly hasn’t done its best to protect this informant. Then again, it might just be the informant’s limited OpSec ability, which allegedly resulted in him being “followed” by Iranian agents and photographed entering the “US facility” where he turned over information to their handlers.

This is all very awful and hopefully the publications of these allegations, as well as the resulting lawsuit, will prompt the US government to do what it can to protect its source and adjust its diplomatic relationship with the Iranian government. But suing Iran isn’t going to stop it from trying to kill people it wants dead. And it certainly isn’t going to be offering any settlements to foreign residents who have, so far, managed to avoid being assassinated.

More bad news for ShotSpotter, which recently re-branded to “SoundThinking” to distance itself from exactly this sort of negative press. Four legislators (three senators, one congressperson) are asking the DHS Inspector General to take a closer look at the tech the DHS is funding via one of its grant programs.

The problem with Spotshotter is it seems unlikely to put a dent in the public’s arsenal. Multiple cities have chosen to dump the tech rather than continue to pay for false positives, altered shot reports, and nonexistent public safety increases.

The problem with the DHS is that it has already started spending money on a portable “Gunshot Detection System.” It’s capitalized for a reason. It’s a bespoke version of a product already offered by a company called [re-reads DHS press release] Shooter Detection Systems — a redesign of its [deep breath] Guardian Indoor Active Shooter Detection System.

According to the DHS’s PR team, the “enhanced” version of this off-the-shelf shot spotter will detect both sounds and light flashes, apparently aiming to reduce the number of false positives generated by acoustic-only detection systems… like the one offered by [coughs at first half of rebrand] SoundThinking, formerly ShotSpotter.

Whether adding “eyes” to “ears” to spot shots has accomplished a reduction in false positives is still an open question. Whether or not the DHS should continue to pay for shot spotting tech — namely the one offered by the former ShotSpotter — is exactly the question these four lawmakers would like the DHS Inspector General to answer.

The question — as posed in this letter [PDF] from Sen. Ed Markey, Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Congressperson Ayanna Pressley — is a bit leading perhaps. But the question is valid and the lawmakers’ letter contains plenty of evidence that lends validity to the question: should the DHS really be spending federal dollars on grants to local law enforcement agencies seeking to acquire ShotSpotter tech?

Several recent reports have cast substantial doubt on the accuracy and effectiveness of the “ShotSpotter” gunshot detection system and have raised serious questions about its contribution to unjustified surveillance and over-policing of Black, Brown, and Latino communities. Through the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provides funding to localities to deploy the ShotSpotter system. We request that the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigate DHS’s spending of taxpayer dollars on ShotSpotter, including potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal financial assistance from discriminating based on race, color, and national origin.

And that’s only part of the problem. It’s not even necessarily a ShotSpotter problem per se, but a long-standing problem with law enforcement agencies, who almost always deploy new surveillance “solutions” in low-income neighborhoods, especially those heavily populated by minorities.

The other problem is more technical: the tech just doesn’t work as advertised. Multiple investigations have shown the tech is either (1) unable to reliably detect gunshots, or (2) doesn’t lead to better enforcement of gun-related crime. The cities now dumping the tech say it’s both unreliable and useless. Of course, SoundThinking/ShotSpotter insists otherwise in responses to the latest negative reporting and in its marketing materials, which are still somehow capable of convincing government entities to buy its tech.

That’s where the DHS comes in. It offers grant money to law enforcement agencies — funding that can be used to purchase acoustic gunshot detection tech. The biggest brand in the business is SoundThinking, so naturally that’s where most of this funding goes.

In Massachusetts alone, “UASI [Urban Area Security Initiative] has funded almost a decade of contracts for gunshot detection technology with ShotSpotter in Cambridge, Chelsea, Somerville, and Boston.” Since 2012, according to city records, Boston has spent more than $4 million on ShotSpotter. Elsewhere, municipalities across the country have used UASI funds for the ShotSpotter system. One study found that “[t]hrough an analysis of UASI funding in Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Chicago . . . cities spend millions of UASI dollars on contracts with surveillance corporations” such as ShotSpotter.

And what are we getting in return for this combination of federal and local spending? Not much.

The ShotSpotter system’s ineffectiveness has consequences for law enforcement, community response, and the prevention of gun violence. A 2021 study from the Journal of Public Health found “that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes” and that “[p]olicy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence.” Another study from the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University concluded “that more than 90% of ShotSpotter alerts lead police to find no evidence to corroborate gunfire when police arrive at the location ShotSpotter sent them: no shooting, no shell casings, no victims, no witnesses, no guns recovered.

Not great. More bad stuff from studies and reports: 70% of people in neighborhoods with ShotSpotter systems are either black or Latino. 75% of those neighborhoods had annual incomes well below the national median.

As I stated above, this is a cop problem: the long-held biases that subject the same people to any new surveillance option. The rest of it is a ShotSpotter problem: it doesn’t spot shots and it doesn’t stop crime. And yet, millions are being spent on it every year, with some of the funding flowing directly from the DHS.

The main point of this letter, however, is to nudge DHS oversight to take a close look at the end result of this funding in terms of purchasing ShotSpotter tech. The federal government is forbidden from spending money on anything that violates federal laws. And this funding might be doing that. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Does planting most of your shot-spotting mics in predominately non-white neighborhoods violate the Civil Rights Act?

Well, that’s what these lawmakers hope to find out.

For all the preceding reasons, we respectfully request that you open an investigation in DHS’s funding of the ShotSpotter system to determine whether it is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars, including the critical question of whether such funding may lead to Title VI violations.

It will likely be awhile before we hear back on this. But given what’s already been discovered via studies, public records requests, and investigative journalism, it certainly looks as though cops with this tech are violating the law. And one would expect another investigation into ShotSpotter use is going to turn up more of the same biased policing. If that’s the case, it won’t stop cops from being racist. But it will mean they’ll have to spend local funds to keep minorities under their tech-enhanced thumbs.

Every cop with a dog swears it can detect all sorts of contraband. Literally swears. In court. On the stand.

But are drug dogs miraculous wonders of law enforcement due to their training? Or is it due to the domesticated dog’s innate desire to please, especially when it knows it will be rewarded for doing the thing? Or is it simply responding to cues delivered by its handler, some of which may be subconscious?

Well, it’s probably a combination of all these things. Training does get dogs to respond to certain scents. But the training also turns them into an extension of their handler. And then the dog wants what the cop wants: a reason to perform a warrantless search. Both handler and dog are rewarded in their own way. The dog gets a treat. And the cop gets to perform a trick that allows the officer to bypass the Fourth Amendment. (There’s a reason cops hate actually scientific testing of officers and drug dogs, because once the pair is separated, tons of false positives and negatives tend to be generated.)

For a long time, courts were mostly receptive to the assertions made by officers handling drug dogs. If they said in court that the dog “alerted,” the court generally couldn’t find a good reason to consider this testimony flawed.

But now there are cameras in cop cars and cameras on cops’ chests and cameras in the phones pretty much every driver and passenger possesses. Consequently, these assertions about “alerting” are receiving more scrutiny, as are the dogs themselves, who have shown their ability to reliably detect contraband isn’t all that different than allowing cops to flip a coin to determine whether or not they can pursue a warrantless search.

This case, brought to us by FourthAmendment.com, has a court calling bullshit on a supposed “alert.” A pretextual traffic stop that resulted in the discovery of an illegally possessed weapon relied on a search of a car — a search supposedly prompted by the cop dog on the scene.

The defendant, David Edmonds, was hit with a felony in possession charge following this search. He moved to suppress the evidence, claiming the search of his car wasn’t supported by probable cause or reasonable suspicion, the latter of which is the minimum that officers need to search a vehicle on public roads.

On the way to this warrantless search, the dashcam video submitted as evidence by the government appears to show a bunch of cops breaking traffic laws en route to violating the Fourth Amendment. From the decision [PDF]:

It was daylight. A white sedan traveling on Fifth Street crossed Broadway in front of Trooper Gabriel, proceeding from the trooper’s right to his left. The first unobstructed view of the sedan appears about six seconds into the video. The sedan’s windows are tinted. On the dashcam footage, nothing is visible inside the car. The car is in view for about four seconds before it travels out of the camera’s range.

A pickup truck followed behind the sedan on Fifth Street also traveling in front of Trooper Gabriel. Trooper Gabriel testified at the hearing that the truck was driven by a law enforcement officer. After the truck passed, Trooper Gabriel ran the red light on Broadway and turned left on Fifth Street following the path of the truck and the sedan, cutting off another car going through the intersection. Trooper Gabriel testified on cross-examination that the car he cut off was driven by another law enforcement officer who he had warned by radio.

The area of Fifth Street is a residential area. Trooper Gabriel picked up speed on Fifth Street. He passed a sign stating that the speed limit is 25. He appeared to be traveling well above that. He testified at the hearing that he was traveling about 40-45 miles per hour.

At this point, there were at least three state troopers, driving three different vehicles in pursuit of a white sedan that had not been observed breaking any traffic laws. Trooper Gabriel, however, had not only run a red light, but was driving 20 mph over the posted speed limit.

If this was a pursuit, there was no indication of that. There is nothing on the record that indicates sirens or lights had been activated, which meant all the officers involved were endangering other drivers for the sole purpose of catching up to a car whose driver hadn’t actually broken any laws himself.

The mayhem continued:

The pickup truck traveling behind the sedan pulled over to the side of the road, and Trooper Gabriel passed it. Trooper Gabriel testified on cross examination that the truck was also a law enforcement officer who he had radioed ahead to pull over. At that point, nothing was between the sedan and Trooper Gabriel, who was still speeding down the residential road. As Trooper Gabriel’s vehicle approached closer, the sedan veered slightly to the right toward the curb and stopped on Fifth Street at an intersection with another street. Trooper Gabriel stopped behind the sedan.

Somehow, every car on the road other than the one this trooper was pursuing was another cop. What a coincidence! I’m surprised the court didn’t demand testimony from all the other alleged “officers” Trooper Gabriel endangered while focused on this white sedan.

Trooper Gabriel followed up his lawbreaking and endangerment of other drivers (some who might have been cops!) by doing whatever the fuck this is:

Trooper Gabriel yelled to the sedan driver to turn the car off. The driver, who was defendant Edmonds, stuck his head slightly out of the driver’s side window, looked back at Trooper Gabriel and apparently asked why he was being asked to turn the car off. Trooper Gabriel stated, “because you just whipped over like crazy.” He again instructed Edmonds to turn the car off. Edmonds apparently again asked why, and Trooper Gabriel responded, “Because I said so.”

About 13 seconds after Trooper Gabriel first instructed Edmonds to turn the car off, Edmonds’ brake lights went off. Trooper Gabriel instructed Edmonds multiple times to get out of the car. About eight seconds after Trooper Gabriel first instructed him to, Edmonds got out of the car. Trooper Gabriel instructed Edmonds to walk toward him. Edmonds complied. Another trooper appears on camera at this point walking toward Edmonds’ car.

Those quoted paragraphs immediately follow the previous quoted paragraphs. All of this was captured by the trooper’s dashcam. The court: “the sedan veered slightly to the right.” Trooper Gabriel: “You whipped like crazy.” Hmm.

Already off to a bad start, but apparently surrounded by other troopers with nothing better to do but violate traffic laws en route to performing a traffic stop, Trooper Gabriel then proceeded to claim he “caught” Edmonds “with no seat belt” and again reiterated his claim (one not supported by his dashcam footage) that Edmonds has “freakin’ just like dipped over.” Let’s go back to the court’s earlier depiction of the dashcam recording to see what it has to say about Trooper Gabriel’s assertion that he saw the man driving without a seat belt.

The first unobstructed view of the sedan appears about six seconds into the video. The sedan’s windows are tinted. On the dashcam footage, nothing is visible inside the car.

Folks, this man is a liar. He lied about seeing the seat belt (or lack thereof) and he lied about the whipping/dipping he claimed to have witnessed.

Having apparently traveled as far he could on this particular line of bullshit, the trooper began insinuating that the thing HE DEFINITELY HAD NOT WITNESSED were indicative of a nervous driver seeking to avoid a traffic stop and/or cover up their possession of contraband.

Since the trooper really had nothing to work with here, he decided to bring in a dog to give him the probable cause he couldn’t possibly hope to obtain on his own. Trooper Gabriel took the dog from his vehicle and walked it around Edmond’s car.

This is what happened:

The dog, whose name is Dragon, appears to follow Trooper Gabriel’s hand. When Trooper Gabriel places his hand in the open driver’s side window, the dog jumps onto the driver’s side door and sticks his head in the window.

Trooper Gabriel then led Dragon all the way around the vehicle until the trooper and the dog returned to the driver’s side door again. At the driver’s side door, Trooper Gabriel told Dragon, “I’m not going to give you your ball . . . You’re going to have to . . . .” Trooper Gabriel then walked back to the state police vehicle, with Dragon leading the way. Trooper Gabriel returned to Edmonds and explained that Dragon does “a passive alert on a vehicle.” Trooper Gabriel stated, “That means he will either sit, or stare, or freeze if he has an indication that there is an odor of narcotics in the vehicle.” Trooper Gabriel stated that Dragon is “right on your driver’s side door handle.”

Edmonds stated, “I didn’t see him do nothing. . . what do they do?” Trooper Gabriel responded, “I just told you.”

Oh, so it’s a new type of alert: the one where the dog doesn’t do much, even when encouraged to do something, anything by its handler. My dog smelled drugs, said the lying state trooper.

Here’s what actually happened:

The officers then searched Edmonds’ car. They found no narcotics…

But they found a gun! And Edmonds was not allowed to have one. The trooper lucked into this discovery by lying about what he had observed prior to the stop, and what the dog had actually done when it performed its sniff.

As for all the whipping and dipping, this is what the court observed thanks to the dashcam footage supplied by the government:

As to his driving, Edmonds’ pulling off to the side of the road seemed a rational response for a driver when a marked law enforcement vehicle is approaching the driver’s vehicle from the rear at a high rate of speed in a residential area, and the vehicle behind the driver has already pulled to the side of the road so that the law enforcement officer could pass him. And, on the dashcam footage, Edmonds appeared to pull over to the side of the road in a reasonable manner…

The government’s response to the suppression motion claimed Trooper Gabriel was “concerned” about Edmonds’ “driving pattern.” Then it claimed the stop was supported by Gabriel’s claim he witnessed Edmonds driving without a seat belt.

Fine, says the court. Have it your way. If the driving wasn’t unlawful, let’s make this all about a seat belt violation. The court goes on to criticize everything about the government’s arguments, as well as everything about the trooper’s actions. And that includes the dog that supposedly gave him permission for a warrantless search of the car.

It first notes that no real traffic stop was performed. Edmonds was not pulled over. Trooper Gabriel never activated his lights or siren. Instead, he just started yelling at Edmonds after he had voluntarily stopped and then began the string of rights violations by ordering him to turn off his car and exit his vehicle.

Even then, it was all bullshit. The court notes that Trooper Gabriel maintained the seal belt violation pretense until redirect under cross examination by Edmonds’ lawyer. At that point, he admitted he had seen the car pass through a “high narcotics” area he was surveilling. Everything was pretext and the trooper obviously hoped to net a drug bust.

Which would explain why he brought out the dog and pretended it had alerted to the scent of narcotics. The court has some things to say about the performance of “Dragon” and the even less-believable performance of Trooper Gabriel.

Going back to what Trooper Gabriel told Edmonds about the supposed alert before he began his constitutional search:

Trooper Gabriel returned to Edmonds and explained that Dragon does “a passive alert on a vehicle.” Trooper Gabriel stated, “That means he will either sit, or stare, or freeze if he has an indication that there is an odor of narcotics in the vehicle.”

The trooper either lied to Edmonds or lied to the court. Actually, it’s not an “either” situation. He lied to both parties. Here’s what happened when the trooper was subjected to cross-examination while testifying:

At the hearing, Trooper Gabriel conceded that Dragon did not sit, stare, or freeze while sniffing Edmonds’ car. He testified, however, that is not actually how Dragon alerts. Instead, Trooper Gabriel testified, the dog alerts by changing his posture and increasing his respiration. He testified the dog’s actions of sitting, staring, or freezing are not an “alert” but rather a “final indication.”

lolwut

The dog alerts by breathing or moving, if it isn’t alerting by sitting, staring, or [re-reads testimony] not moving.

The court isn’t having this. If the court gave this testimony credence, the fact that the dog was present on the scene of any traffic stop and did literally anything (including sitting passively in the trooper’s cruiser), it would be “alerting,” thus “justifying” a warrantless search.

Rather than give this ridiculous cop more leash than he gives his dog, the court shuts this all down, referring to nothing more than the evidence submitted by the government in support (lol!) of this search and arrest.

The Court has viewed the dashcam and bodycam footage numerous times. The Court can discern no difference in the dog’s posture or respiration when he arrives at the driver’s side of the car for the second time, which is when he allegedly alerted. There is no visible change in his rate of respiration. Throughout the sniff of the car, Dragon followed Trooper Gabriel’s hand. He does not ever attempt to walk past Trooper Gabriel. When Trooper Gabriel moves, Dragon follows. When Trooper Gabriel stops, Dragon stops. This is Dragon’s conduct throughout the dog sniff. The only time Dragon walked ahead of Trooper Gabriel was when Dragon walked to the curb after first being released from his crate and then after Dragon completed the drug sniff and headed back to the state trooper vehicle.

The evidence is suppressed. The search was unjustified. Trooper Gabriel is a liar.

The strange thing is the government felt this was worth pursuing in court. Its actions exposed the trooper’s unconstitutional behavior, which began before the traffic stop (that wasn’t even a real traffic stop) was initiated (by the sedan’s driver, rather than the officer). The government had access to the dashcam footage and somehow decided it could get this suppression motion rejected.

That’s the saddest thing of all. When Trooper Gabriel’s employers should have been putting together paperwork to get him drummed out the law enforcement business, it was instead putting its efforts behind an effort that embarrassed everyone involved, including the dog that wanted nothing more than make sure Trooper Gabriel approved of its performance.

Sole source contracting is the sort of thing government agencies should seek to avoid. In some cases, it’s impossible, but most spending should be open to bidding to help ensure the government isn’t spending more than it has to — or worse, hooking up contractor buddies Mob-style.

There’s a whiff of impropriety in all of this, but it may be imaginary. However, it’s still worth examining more closely, as the Associated Press has done here. School shootings just aren’t going to go away here in the United States, so it’s understandable that legislators and educators are exploring their options. But what’s detailed in this article suggests several things, most of which aren’t exactly great.

Kansas could soon offer up to $5 million in grants for schools to outfit surveillance cameras with artificial intelligence systems that can spot people carrying guns. But the governor needs to approve the expenditures and the schools must meet some very specific criteria.

The AI software must be patented, “designated as qualified anti-terrorism technology,” in compliance with certain security industry standards, already in use in at least 30 states and capable of detecting “three broad firearm classifications with a minimum of 300 subclassifications” and “at least 2,000 permutations,” among other things.

Only one company currently meets all those criteria: the same organization that touted them to Kansas lawmakers crafting the state budget. That company, ZeroEyes, is a rapidly growing firm founded by military veterans after the fatal shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

The first thing worth closer observation is this part of the AP’s reporting: “Only one company currently meets all those criteria.” That company would be ZeroEyes, which has benefited from similar legislation and similar grants across the country.

Again, it’s understandable that if the goal is protecting children, legislators and schools are going to want the best product. At this point, that would appear to be ZeroEyes. It does have competitors but almost none of them are able to meet the very specific criteria that keep showing up in new gun detection tech grant legislation.

ZeroEyes also appears to be the only firm qualified for state firearms detection programs under laws enacted last year in Michigan and Utah, bills passed earlier this year in Florida and Iowa and legislation proposed in Colorado, Louisiana and Wisconsin.

On Friday, Missouri became the latest state to pass legislation geared toward ZeroEyes, offering $2.5 million in matching grants for schools to buy firearms detection software designated as “qualified anti-terrorism technology.”

This sort of thing would appear to be outside the boundary of normal coincidence. And yet, the co-founder of ZeroEyes told AP “We’re not paying legislators to write us into their bills.” That’s probably true. The days of garishly showing up at a lawmaker’s office with a briefcase full of money are (mostly) behind us. But the ability to influence not just the direction of legislation, but the creation of legislation is something industries and their lobbyists have been capable of accomplishing without having to actually “pay” anyone to do anything.

Now, it could be that ZeroEyes just got out in front of its competitors to meet a bunch of requirements that its competitors couldn’t. Or it could be that it chose to approach regulators, rather than legislators, to help ensure the specifications and requirements more closely matched its product than any of its rivals.

Or, it’s just a coincidence ZeroEyes is seemingly the sole beneficiary of recently crafted legislation that provides funding to schools to buy tech from a single source.

Given all of this, it would seem most likely ZeroEyes is persuading legislators these laws need to be written and these funds need to be available to protect children from school shootings. That only its product meets the requirements is a happy coincidence, rather than the result of loutishly dangling campaign contributions over malleable legislators’ heads.

America is a business more than it’s a country. These new laws are now forcing taxpayers to fund tech that hasn’t exactly shown it can handle the responsibilities expected of it. Given the numerous options available to legislators, law enforcement, and a small army of government agencies (including social services and mental health professionals), is it really the best idea to start throwing money at the shiniest option, especially when only a single provider meets the criteria… which means it doesn’t need to be all that shiny to begin with?

Here’s what the chairperson of the National Council of School Safety Directors (Jason Stoddard) had to say about ZeroEyes and its legislation-enabled takeover of the AI gun detection market:

The super-specific Kansas bill — particularly the requirement that a company have its product in at least 30 states — is “probably the most egregious thing that I have ever read” in legislation…

[…]

When states allot millions of dollars for certain products, it often leaves less money for other important school safety efforts, such as electronic door locks, shatter-resistant windows, communication systems and security staff, he said.

“The artificial-intelligence-driven weapons detection is absolutely wonderful,” Stoddard said. “But it’s probably not the priority that 95% of the schools in the United States need right now.”

That’s probably the most salient point, whether or not ZeroEyes’ hands are completely clean. Most AI in use today is still a bit wonky. Facial recognition tech has been around for years, but most products still suffer from the same issues, even though they’ve had plenty of time to address things like built-in bias or, you know, just assuming any images they find laying around the ‘net are free for the taking (and training).

And as for the co-founder’s claims it does not buy legislators or legislation, it hardly seems to matter. Purchased or not, legislators are willing to make ZeroEyes a sole source for in-school gun detection tech. As the AP reports, the company put on a presentation for state legislators earlier this year. Whatever else went on between ZeroEyes and Kansas legislators, this was (almost!) the end result:

Kansas state Rep. Adam Thomas, a Republican, initially proposed to specifically name ZeroEyes in the funding legislation. The final version removed the company’s name but kept the criteria that essentially limits it to ZeroEyes.

Yeah, that’s not a great look, even if ZeroEyes stayed out of the law-crafting process. Sadly, another Republican on the K-12 budget committee was even more voracious in the defense of ZeroEyes as a sole source provider, telling her fellow legislators the state “couldn’t afford the delays of a standard bidding process.” Whew.

All of this may just be coincidence. But given the reach of ZeroEyes and the number of states that have passed similar legislation that solely benefits the only company that (equally coincidentally!) can match specific criteria enumerated in these bills, there’s reason to doubt every bit of this is on the up-and-up.

No matter how you might feel about constitutional rights or which ones are your favorites, the fact remains that it’s often people with the least amount of cultural cachet and/or the most to lose who make the best case law.

And so it is here, where we’re dealing with a sex offender who tried to follow both the letter and spirit of the law just to find himself arrested by the same people who defined the letter of the law for him.

However you may feel about sex offenders (and keep in mind this list includes teens who sexted other teens), there’s no denying they’re subject to some very extreme restrictions. These restrictions make it almost impossible for them to find housing. They certainly make it impossible for them to find anything but the worst forms of employment. And, in many states, paying for your crimes with jail time means nothing. Offenders (and not even those suspected to be prone to re-offending) are saddled with years — if not decades — of work/life restrictions that far surpass those handed to people convicted of violent crimes.

But, as long as offenders comply with these restrictions, they can continue whatever’s left of their lives in (very restricted) freedom. But the rules are complex, subject to change, and subject to broad interpretation by the government employees tasked with enforcing them.

This decision [PDF], issued by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court, calls out cops for actions one usually expects from corrupt government employees doing the bidding of their totalitarian masters. The US is — at least until the next presidential election — still a democratic republic. The sorts of things detailed here simply should not be happening. (h/t Short Circuit)

North Carolina resident David Thurston sued after he was pretty much railroaded by local law enforcement officers who arrested him for (supposedly) violating his sex offender registration requirements. Thurston pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a minor charges in 1992. He served his time in Montana. He moved to North Carolina more than thirty years later, in 2015. He contacted Sheriff Kevin Frye and Deputy Lee Buchanan to make sure he complied with his new home’s offender registration requirements.

He complied with the state’s restrictions. A year after moving to North Carolina, Thurston contacted the sheriff to inform him he was planning to attend his nephew’s wedding in Spokane, Washington the following month. He asked for guidance on how to handle this temporary exit from the state, as well as what he needed to do to ensure compliance during this visit as well as after his return from the wedding.

Sheriff Frye was understanding, even if he wasn’t all that much help.

After they exchanged texts, Sheriff Frye told Thurston on August 11 that he could “[g]o on” because the Sheriff’s Office was “working on it.” All Thurston needed to do, Sheriff Frye explained, was email a copy of Thurston’s Washington visitor-registration form within ten days of his arrival.

Having seemingly been given permission to attend this wedding and stay in Washington until he decided to return to North Carolina, Thurston left town. But his trip was immediately interrupted by Sheriff Frye, who now seemed a bit more concerned with keeping tabs on Thurston’s whereabouts. He asked Thurston for the address where he would be staying and to contact him after he arrived in Washington. Thurston immediately provided the address and promised to reach out after his arrival.

Once in Washington, Thurston contacted local law enforcement to register as a “visitor” in order to remain in compliance with his sex offender obligations. Thurston stayed in Spokane for the next month, during which he made a couple of trips to Seattle to visit a friend.

The sheriff and his office should have known Thurston was still in Washington. But they either forgot about the trip he had informed them about or simply didn’t care. Either way, the deputy charged with handling sex offenders began making things worse for Thurston, who was still in full compliance with the Sheriff’s demands and North Carolina law.

On September 9, while Thurston was away, the Sheriff’s Office mailed his verification form. Thurston’s sister, who lived with him in North Carolina, told him about the form, prompting Thurston to contact Sheriff Frye for guidance. But Sheriff Frye never responded, so Thurston decided to “let it lie,” given their prior interactions.

The Sheriff’s Office, however, did not “let it lie.” Instead, Deputy Buchanan began investigating Thurston. Three times after Thurston’s September 12 verification deadline, Deputy Buchanan stopped by Thurston’s residence. Of course, Thurston was not there.

Roughly six weeks after his arrival in Spokane, the Spokane Sheriff’s Department contacted Thurston to inform him that (North Carolina) deputy Lee Buchanan was “looking for him.” Thurston called Deputy Buchanan, who told him his “absence” was “causing problems back home.” The deputy also (incorrectly) informed Thurston that it was “illegal” for him to be out of the state for more than 30 days. Then the deputy said this:

[I]n the same breath, [Deputy Buchanan] also said that he had spoken with Sheriff Frye and had decided that, as long as Thurston was back in North Carolina by October 19, “there would be no problem.”

Thurston returned on October 19th. It didn’t matter, at least not to Deputy Buchanan.

Even so, Deputy Buchanan discussed potential criminal liability with an assistant district attorney, who recommended that Deputy Buchanan pursue charges against Thurston. And on October 19—knowing that he and Sheriff Frye had given Thurston until that day to return to the state—Deputy Buchanan obtained a warrant from a local magistrate alleging three different criminal violations committed from September 19 to October 18: (1) “being out of state for thirty (30) + days,” (2) willfully failing to return his verification, and (3) willfully failing to report in person to the Sheriff’s Office.

And the trap was set. Thurston went to the Avery County Sheriff’s Office (completely unprompted by law enforcement visits or calls) to deliver his verification form. In return for this, he was arrested. The charges were later dropped, with the prosecutor explaining it away as “a misunderstanding with regard to how to comply with technical requirements.”

Well, the only “misunderstanding” was on the part of Deputy Buchanan, who managed to “misunderstand” direct communications with his sheriff so poorly (whether deliberately or not) that he had a man arrested for doing exactly what he had been instructed to do both by Sheriff Frye and Deputy Buchanan.

That dog won’t hunt, says the Fourth Circuit. It cites the lower court’s findings, which it upholds here:

Deputy Buchanan and Sheriff Frye therefore needed some reason to believe that Thurston either purposefully violated the law or acted with some other improper purpose. But the district court’s order forecloses any argument that they believed this. Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Thurston, the district court accepted that both defendants “definitely knew that . . . Thurston was eager to comply with the law.” And the district court accepted that the officers knew that Sheriff Frye gave Thurston permission to travel and that Thurston followed every instruction the Sheriff’s Office gave him. In so concluding, the district court not only accepted the facts alleged about Thurston’s actions but also accepted that the officers had concluded, based on those actions, that Thurston was eager to comply with the law throughout his sojourn.

This sort of ruling means nothing if it’s not followed by a denial of qualified immunity. After all, officers are free to violate rights so long as they can credibly (lol) argue their clear violations of established rights were different enough from standing case law they could not have possibly known their actions were unconstitutional (even if it’s immediately obvious to everyone else). That doesn’t work here because (1) the rights violation is pretty fucking obvious and (2) the circuit has some precedent that aligns with the current case.

In this case, it’s the Fourth Circuit’s 2012 Merchant v. Bauer decision, which involved an officer seeking a search warrant to arrest someone for impersonating an officer. The court held then that the warrant was void and unconstitutional because the officer applying for it was in possession of knowledge that would have exonerated the suspect of the proposed criminal charge.

It’s the same thing here:

In other words, we held that knowledge of sufficiently exculpatory information trumps the inculpatory evidence of the warrant. So too here. The district court found that Sheriff Frye and Deputy Buchanan knew that Thurston was not acting willfully and thus could not satisfy each element of the relevant crimes, yet they sought a warrant and arrested him anyway. After Merchant, no reasonable officer could believe that an arrest in such circumstances was lawful.

If it’s not “reasonable,” it’s not constitutional. And since the standard is “reasonable officer” rather than “regular American,” reasonableness is the operative factor, even when most reasonable non-cops would clearly understand that arresting someone for following specific instructions issued by law enforcement officers is a violation of that person’s rights. There’s no new precedent here. But at least there’s another affirmation that trying to arrest someone for following the law is so far out of the range of “reasonable,” no officer can expect to be immunized for their blatant constitutional violations.

This didn’t go the way anyone (other than cops and their unions) wanted it to, but first let’s acknowledge the fact that the city of Denver is actually trying to make things better for both cops and the people they serve.

Here’s how that’s going:

In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls — only a very small percentage of 911 calls. But the immediate developments appeared positive. A supposed indecent exposure call handled by STAR turned out to be a homeless woman changing clothes in an alley. A trespassing call turned out to be another homeless person setting up a tent near some homes. Suicidal persons were helped and taken to care centers. Homeless residents were taken to shelters. No one was arrested. No one was beaten, tased, or shot.

The zero arrests streak continues. STAR has released its six-month report [PDF] and the calls it has handled have yet to result in an arrest, strongly suggesting police officers aren’t the best personnel to handle crises like these — unless the desired result is more people in holding cells.

Denver decided to try what (far too few) other cities are trying: routing mental health/social services calls to professionals in those fields, rather than hand them off to police officers. And for good reason! Police officers aren’t trained to handle these sorts of issues. That lack of training tends to result in arrests, violence, and even the killing of people police have been asked to help.

Denver’s STAR (Support Team Assistance Response) has been able to handle many calls normally routed to cops without deploying cop tactics: you know, the command-and-control aggression that often manages to make these situations worse, if not actually deadly for those requiring mental health assistance.

So, there’s that. A limited test has shown consistently good results, which should be all the argument Denver legislators need to provide funding to expand STAR assistance to a round-the-clock effort.

But that’s just Denver. Even though it’s the state’s most populous city, its success story has been overlooked by state legislators who apparently feel the best thing for cops is the same lack of accountability they’ve enjoyed for years.

Legislators had a chance to impose greater accountability, but decided to go the other way, as Marissa Ventrelli reports for the Denver Gazette.

A bill that would have required law enforcement agencies to investigate all allegations of officer misconduct died in the House last week following significant revisions.

Sponsors said the measure would increase protections for officers who report alleged misconduct by their peers. Critics, notably law enforcement agencies and organizations, argued the sponsors did not include them in discussions for such an important measure.

Under House Bill 1460 as introduced, the failure to investigate reports of misconduct would have constituted workplace discrimination, for which civil action may be initiated.

The bill’s origin story is one of cop-on-cop harassment. Former Edgewater police officer McKinzie Rees helped craft the bill after being sexually assaulted twice by a fellow officer. Reporting it to supervisors did nothing but force Rees to resign, along with being placed on the state’s Brady list, ensuring she’d never be used as a witness in court, no matter what law enforcement agency employed her.

But it had obvious benefits for regular people, too. It strengthened whistleblower protections for cops reporting on other cops, but also would have benefited citizens who’ve filed complaints by forcing law enforcement agencies to instigate investigations, rather than just ignore the complaints of the policed.

The main opposition was none other than the state’s largest police union. Police unions routinely oppose efforts that might result in more scrutiny of officers. In this case, though, the union opposed any additional scrutiny being applied to cops who attacked, harassed, or sexually assaulted other cops.

The Fraternal Order of Police requested sponsors withdraw the bill and to instead convene a working group during the interim to discuss a multitude of issues related to whistleblowing, such as officer obligation to report misconduct, due process for officers facing allegations by whistleblowers, and protections for the whistleblowers themselves.

“We hope that you will accept this offer to engage in research and dialogue over the summer and fall so that all interested parties can feel assured that any future legislation on these topics in the upcoming session is founded in fact, necessity, and effective collaboration,” the group said. 

This makes it clear police unions are there to protect the worst cops — the ones willing to cross the “thin blue line” to harm other police officers. While everyone expects cops to treat citizens like punching bags and doormats, the “thin blue line” illusion is supposed to trick everyone into believing cops stand together united against evil. But if it’s internal evil, the police union wants nothing to do with any efforts to root it out. That’s just fucking disgusting.

And that’s how a bill dies, with the approval of people who think cops shouldn’t be scrutinized — much less punished — for any misconduct they commit, even if the targets of their wrongdoing are their fellow officers. These are the words of a legislator who seems more willing to provide gratis car washes for officers’ personal cars than serve any member of his constituency that can’t be bothered to get a badge-wearing job.

Rep. Ryan Armagost, R-Berthoud, a former law enforcement officer and member of the committee that heard the bill, said he was “offended” that law enforcement agencies had not been involved in discussions about the bill to the extent they wanted to be. 

Here’s an idea, Rep. Armagost: fuck ’em. If these agencies want to be involved, they’re sure to be involved. All this statement means is this rep is offended someone didn’t ask the kind of cops he likes (which would be the kind that sexually assault fellow officers) what kind of legislation they wanted and instead tried to right some wrongs by offering the state’s sexual assault victims (well… at least those in uniform) some form of protection, redress, and deterrence.

And it was state reps like Armagost who got what they wanted by stripping the bill of anything meaningful and parking it on blocks out in the front yard. For those of you who still think there’s nothing partisan about full-throated support of the worst cops this nation employs, please re-read the second quoted paragraph until the truth sinks in.

By the time the bill reached the floor for its third and final reading, all of its major provisions had been amended out, save for the creation of a working group. 

Ultimately, the bill died, 31-33. All of the Republicans, except Soper, voted in opposition, though it’s possible he would’ve asked for a recount and switched his vote if the bill had passed.

To add insult to the injuries suffered by former officer McKinzie Rees, the union added this statement after the bill was carved up by bootlickers and left to die on the House floor:

“We appreciate that the majority of House members shared our concerns about the need for a robust stakeholder process before passing legislation of this importance. Ensuring law enforcement employees have due process protection and a safe and healthy work environment are serious, complex issues that warrant responsible and thoughtful solutions.”

It pretty much makes you want to vomit. The union cheered on “due process” and “a safe and healthy work environment.” But it really doesn’t care much about the first (the bill only required an investigation to be opened, which means plenty of due process was still available to officers) and obviously gives zero shits about the latter, since it means officers attacked/assaulted by other officers will continue to be frozen out by the worst in their ranks and expected to leave the force, rather than see their grievances adequately addressed by the government agencies that hired them.

No matter how you might feel about constitutional rights or which ones are your favorites, the fact remains that it’s often people with the least amount of cultural cachet and/or the most to lose who make the best case law.

And so it is here, where we’re dealing with a sex offender who tried to follow both the letter and spirit of the law just to find himself arrested by the same people who defined the letter of the law for him.

However you may feel about sex offenders (and keep in mind this list includes teens who sexted other teens), there’s no denying they’re subject to some very extreme restrictions. These restrictions make it almost impossible for them to find housing. They certainly make it impossible for them to find anything but the worst forms of employment. And, in many states, paying for your crimes with jail time means nothing. Offenders (and not even those suspected to be prone to re-offending) are saddled with years — if not decades — of work/life restrictions that far surpass those handed to people convicted of violent crimes.

But, as long as offenders comply with these restrictions, they can continue whatever’s left of their lives in (very restricted) freedom. But the rules are complex, subject to change, and subject to broad interpretation by the government employees tasked with enforcing them.

This decision [PDF], issued by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court, calls out cops for actions one usually expects from corrupt government employees doing the bidding of their totalitarian masters. The US is — at least until the next presidential election — still a democratic republic. The sorts of things detailed here simply should not be happening. (h/t Short Circuit)

North Carolina resident David Thurston sued after he was pretty much railroaded by local law enforcement officers who arrested him for (supposedly) violating his sex offender registration requirements. Thurston pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a minor charges in 1992. He served his time in Montana. He moved to North Carolina more than thirty years later, in 2015. He contacted Sheriff Kevin Frye and Deputy Lee Buchanan to make sure he complied with his new home’s offender registration requirements.

He complied with the state’s restrictions. A year after moving to North Carolina, Thurston contacted the sheriff to inform him he was planning to attend his nephew’s wedding in Spokane, Washington the following month. He asked for guidance on how to handle this temporary exit from the state, as well as what he needed to do to ensure compliance during this visit as well as after his return from the wedding.

Sheriff Frye was understanding, even if he wasn’t all that much help.

After they exchanged texts, Sheriff Frye told Thurston on August 11 that he could “[g]o on” because the Sheriff’s Office was “working on it.” All Thurston needed to do, Sheriff Frye explained, was email a copy of Thurston’s Washington visitor-registration form within ten days of his arrival.

Having seemingly been given permission to attend this wedding and stay in Washington until he decided to return to North Carolina, Thurston left town. But his trip was immediately interrupted by Sheriff Frye, who now seemed a bit more concerned with keeping tabs on Thurston’s whereabouts. He asked Thurston for the address where he would be staying and to contact him after he arrived in Washington. Thurston immediately provided the address and promised to reach out after his arrival.

Once in Washington, Thurston contacted local law enforcement to register as a “visitor” in order to remain in compliance with his sex offender obligations. Thurston stayed in Spokane for the next month, during which he made a couple of trips to Seattle to visit a friend.

The sheriff and his office should have known Thurston was still in Washington. But they either forgot about the trip he had informed them about or simply didn’t care. Either way, the deputy charged with handling sex offenders began making things worse for Thurston, who was still in full compliance with the Sheriff’s demands and North Carolina law.

On September 9, while Thurston was away, the Sheriff’s Office mailed his verification form. Thurston’s sister, who lived with him in North Carolina, told him about the form, prompting Thurston to contact Sheriff Frye for guidance. But Sheriff Frye never responded, so Thurston decided to “let it lie,” given their prior interactions.

The Sheriff’s Office, however, did not “let it lie.” Instead, Deputy Buchanan began investigating Thurston. Three times after Thurston’s September 12 verification deadline, Deputy Buchanan stopped by Thurston’s residence. Of course, Thurston was not there.

Roughly six weeks after his arrival in Spokane, the Spokane Sheriff’s Department contacted Thurston to inform him that (North Carolina) deputy Lee Buchanan was “looking for him.” Thurston called Deputy Buchanan, who told him his “absence” was “causing problems back home.” The deputy also (incorrectly) informed Thurston that it was “illegal” for him to be out of the state for more than 30 days. Then the deputy said this:

[I]n the same breath, [Deputy Buchanan] also said that he had spoken with Sheriff Frye and had decided that, as long as Thurston was back in North Carolina by October 19, “there would be no problem.”

Thurston returned on October 19th. It didn’t matter, at least not to Deputy Buchanan.

Even so, Deputy Buchanan discussed potential criminal liability with an assistant district attorney, who recommended that Deputy Buchanan pursue charges against Thurston. And on October 19—knowing that he and Sheriff Frye had given Thurston until that day to return to the state—Deputy Buchanan obtained a warrant from a local magistrate alleging three different criminal violations committed from September 19 to October 18: (1) “being out of state for thirty (30) + days,” (2) willfully failing to return his verification, and (3) willfully failing to report in person to the Sheriff’s Office.

And the trap was set. Thurston went to the Avery County Sheriff’s Office (completely unprompted by law enforcement visits or calls) to deliver his verification form. In return for this, he was arrested. The charges were later dropped, with the prosecutor explaining it away as “a misunderstanding with regard to how to comply with technical requirements.”

Well, the only “misunderstanding” was on the part of Deputy Buchanan, who managed to “misunderstand” direct communications with his sheriff so poorly (whether deliberately or not) that he had a man arrested for doing exactly what he had been instructed to do both by Sheriff Frye and Deputy Buchanan.

That dog won’t hunt, says the Fourth Circuit. It cites the lower court’s findings, which it upholds here:

Deputy Buchanan and Sheriff Frye therefore needed some reason to believe that Thurston either purposefully violated the law or acted with some other improper purpose. But the district court’s order forecloses any argument that they believed this. Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Thurston, the district court accepted that both defendants “definitely knew that . . . Thurston was eager to comply with the law.” And the district court accepted that the officers knew that Sheriff Frye gave Thurston permission to travel and that Thurston followed every instruction the Sheriff’s Office gave him. In so concluding, the district court not only accepted the facts alleged about Thurston’s actions but also accepted that the officers had concluded, based on those actions, that Thurston was eager to comply with the law throughout his sojourn.

This sort of ruling means nothing if it’s not followed by a denial of qualified immunity. After all, officers are free to violate rights so long as they can credibly (lol) argue their clear violations of established rights were different enough from standing case law they could not have possibly known their actions were unconstitutional (even if it’s immediately obvious to everyone else). That doesn’t work here because (1) the rights violation is pretty fucking obvious and (2) the circuit has some precedent that aligns with the current case.

In this case, it’s the Fourth Circuit’s 2012 Merchant v. Bauer decision, which involved an officer seeking a search warrant to arrest someone for impersonating an officer. The court held then that the warrant was void and unconstitutional because the officer applying for it was in possession of knowledge that would have exonerated the suspect of the proposed criminal charge.

It’s the same thing here:

In other words, we held that knowledge of sufficiently exculpatory information trumps the inculpatory evidence of the warrant. So too here. The district court found that Sheriff Frye and Deputy Buchanan knew that Thurston was not acting willfully and thus could not satisfy each element of the relevant crimes, yet they sought a warrant and arrested him anyway. After Merchant, no reasonable officer could believe that an arrest in such circumstances was lawful.

If it’s not “reasonable,” it’s not constitutional. And since the standard is “reasonable officer” rather than “regular American,” reasonableness is the operative factor, even when most reasonable non-cops would clearly understand that arresting someone for following specific instructions issued by law enforcement officers is a violation of that person’s rights. There’s no new precedent here. But at least there’s another affirmation that trying to arrest someone for following the law is so far out of the range of “reasonable,” no officer can expect to be immunized for their blatant constitutional violations.

This didn’t go the way anyone (other than cops and their unions) wanted it to, but first let’s acknowledge the fact that the city of Denver is actually trying to make things better for both cops and the people they serve.

Here’s how that’s going:

In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls — only a very small percentage of 911 calls. But the immediate developments appeared positive. A supposed indecent exposure call handled by STAR turned out to be a homeless woman changing clothes in an alley. A trespassing call turned out to be another homeless person setting up a tent near some homes. Suicidal persons were helped and taken to care centers. Homeless residents were taken to shelters. No one was arrested. No one was beaten, tased, or shot.

The zero arrests streak continues. STAR has released its six-month report [PDF] and the calls it has handled have yet to result in an arrest, strongly suggesting police officers aren’t the best personnel to handle crises like these — unless the desired result is more people in holding cells.

Denver decided to try what (far too few) other cities are trying: routing mental health/social services calls to professionals in those fields, rather than hand them off to police officers. And for good reason! Police officers aren’t trained to handle these sorts of issues. That lack of training tends to result in arrests, violence, and even the killing of people police have been asked to help.

Denver’s STAR (Support Team Assistance Response) has been able to handle many calls normally routed to cops without deploying cop tactics: you know, the command-and-control aggression that often manages to make these situations worse, if not actually deadly for those requiring mental health assistance.

So, there’s that. A limited test has shown consistently good results, which should be all the argument Denver legislators need to provide funding to expand STAR assistance to a round-the-clock effort.

But that’s just Denver. Even though it’s the state’s most populous city, its success story has been overlooked by state legislators who apparently feel the best thing for cops is the same lack of accountability they’ve enjoyed for years.

Legislators had a chance to impose greater accountability, but decided to go the other way, as Marissa Ventrelli reports for the Denver Gazette.

A bill that would have required law enforcement agencies to investigate all allegations of officer misconduct died in the House last week following significant revisions.

Sponsors said the measure would increase protections for officers who report alleged misconduct by their peers. Critics, notably law enforcement agencies and organizations, argued the sponsors did not include them in discussions for such an important measure.

Under House Bill 1460 as introduced, the failure to investigate reports of misconduct would have constituted workplace discrimination, for which civil action may be initiated.

The bill’s origin story is one of cop-on-cop harassment. Former Edgewater police officer McKinzie Rees helped craft the bill after being sexually assaulted twice by a fellow officer. Reporting it to supervisors did nothing but force Rees to resign, along with being placed on the state’s Brady list, ensuring she’d never be used as a witness in court, no matter what law enforcement agency employed her.

But it had obvious benefits for regular people, too. It strengthened whistleblower protections for cops reporting on other cops, but also would have benefited citizens who’ve filed complaints by forcing law enforcement agencies to instigate investigations, rather than just ignore the complaints of the policed.

The main opposition was none other than the state’s largest police union. Police unions routinely oppose efforts that might result in more scrutiny of officers. In this case, though, the union opposed any additional scrutiny being applied to cops who attacked, harassed, or sexually assaulted other cops.

The Fraternal Order of Police requested sponsors withdraw the bill and to instead convene a working group during the interim to discuss a multitude of issues related to whistleblowing, such as officer obligation to report misconduct, due process for officers facing allegations by whistleblowers, and protections for the whistleblowers themselves.

“We hope that you will accept this offer to engage in research and dialogue over the summer and fall so that all interested parties can feel assured that any future legislation on these topics in the upcoming session is founded in fact, necessity, and effective collaboration,” the group said. 

This makes it clear police unions are there to protect the worst cops — the ones willing to cross the “thin blue line” to harm other police officers. While everyone expects cops to treat citizens like punching bags and doormats, the “thin blue line” illusion is supposed to trick everyone into believing cops stand together united against evil. But if it’s internal evil, the police union wants nothing to do with any efforts to root it out. That’s just fucking disgusting.

And that’s how a bill dies, with the approval of people who think cops shouldn’t be scrutinized — much less punished — for any misconduct they commit, even if the targets of their wrongdoing are their fellow officers. These are the words of a legislator who seems more willing to provide gratis car washes for officers’ personal cars than serve any member of his constituency that can’t be bothered to get a badge-wearing job.

Rep. Ryan Armagost, R-Berthoud, a former law enforcement officer and member of the committee that heard the bill, said he was “offended” that law enforcement agencies had not been involved in discussions about the bill to the extent they wanted to be. 

Here’s an idea, Rep. Armagost: fuck ’em. If these agencies want to be involved, they’re sure to be involved. All this statement means is this rep is offended someone didn’t ask the kind of cops he likes (which would be the kind that sexually assault fellow officers) what kind of legislation they wanted and instead tried to right some wrongs by offering the state’s sexual assault victims (well… at least those in uniform) some form of protection, redress, and deterrence.

And it was state reps like Armagost who got what they wanted by stripping the bill of anything meaningful and parking it on blocks out in the front yard. For those of you who still think there’s nothing partisan about full-throated support of the worst cops this nation employs, please re-read the second quoted paragraph until the truth sinks in.

By the time the bill reached the floor for its third and final reading, all of its major provisions had been amended out, save for the creation of a working group. 

Ultimately, the bill died, 31-33. All of the Republicans, except Soper, voted in opposition, though it’s possible he would’ve asked for a recount and switched his vote if the bill had passed.

To add insult to the injuries suffered by former officer McKinzie Rees, the union added this statement after the bill was carved up by bootlickers and left to die on the House floor:

“We appreciate that the majority of House members shared our concerns about the need for a robust stakeholder process before passing legislation of this importance. Ensuring law enforcement employees have due process protection and a safe and healthy work environment are serious, complex issues that warrant responsible and thoughtful solutions.”

It pretty much makes you want to vomit. The union cheered on “due process” and “a safe and healthy work environment.” But it really doesn’t care much about the first (the bill only required an investigation to be opened, which means plenty of due process was still available to officers) and obviously gives zero shits about the latter, since it means officers attacked/assaulted by other officers will continue to be frozen out by the worst in their ranks and expected to leave the force, rather than see their grievances adequately addressed by the government agencies that hired them.

No matter how you might feel about constitutional rights or which ones are your favorites, the fact remains that it’s often people with the least amount of cultural cachet and/or the most to lose who make the best case law.

And so it is here, where we’re dealing with a sex offender who tried to follow both the letter and spirit of the law just to find himself arrested by the same people who defined the letter of the law for him.

However you may feel about sex offenders (and keep in mind this list includes teens who sexted other teens), there’s no denying they’re subject to some very extreme restrictions. These restrictions make it almost impossible for them to find housing. They certainly make it impossible for them to find anything but the worst forms of employment. And, in many states, paying for your crimes with jail time means nothing. Offenders (and not even those suspected to be prone to re-offending) are saddled with years — if not decades — of work/life restrictions that far surpass those handed to people convicted of violent crimes.

But, as long as offenders comply with these restrictions, they can continue whatever’s left of their lives in (very restricted) freedom. But the rules are complex, subject to change, and subject to broad interpretation by the government employees tasked with enforcing them.

This decision [PDF], issued by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court, calls out cops for actions one usually expects from corrupt government employees doing the bidding of their totalitarian masters. The US is — at least until the next presidential election — still a democratic republic. The sorts of things detailed here simply should not be happening. (h/t Short Circuit)

North Carolina resident David Thurston sued after he was pretty much railroaded by local law enforcement officers who arrested him for (supposedly) violating his sex offender registration requirements. Thurston pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a minor charges in 1992. He served his time in Montana. He moved to North Carolina more than thirty years later, in 2015. He contacted Sheriff Kevin Frye and Deputy Lee Buchanan to make sure he complied with his new home’s offender registration requirements.

He complied with the state’s restrictions. A year after moving to North Carolina, Thurston contacted the sheriff to inform him he was planning to attend his nephew’s wedding in Spokane, Washington the following month. He asked for guidance on how to handle this temporary exit from the state, as well as what he needed to do to ensure compliance during this visit as well as after his return from the wedding.

Sheriff Frye was understanding, even if he wasn’t all that much help.

After they exchanged texts, Sheriff Frye told Thurston on August 11 that he could “[g]o on” because the Sheriff’s Office was “working on it.” All Thurston needed to do, Sheriff Frye explained, was email a copy of Thurston’s Washington visitor-registration form within ten days of his arrival.

Having seemingly been given permission to attend this wedding and stay in Washington until he decided to return to North Carolina, Thurston left town. But his trip was immediately interrupted by Sheriff Frye, who now seemed a bit more concerned with keeping tabs on Thurston’s whereabouts. He asked Thurston for the address where he would be staying and to contact him after he arrived in Washington. Thurston immediately provided the address and promised to reach out after his arrival.

Once in Washington, Thurston contacted local law enforcement to register as a “visitor” in order to remain in compliance with his sex offender obligations. Thurston stayed in Spokane for the next month, during which he made a couple of trips to Seattle to visit a friend.

The sheriff and his office should have known Thurston was still in Washington. But they either forgot about the trip he had informed them about or simply didn’t care. Either way, the deputy charged with handling sex offenders began making things worse for Thurston, who was still in full compliance with the Sheriff’s demands and North Carolina law.

On September 9, while Thurston was away, the Sheriff’s Office mailed his verification form. Thurston’s sister, who lived with him in North Carolina, told him about the form, prompting Thurston to contact Sheriff Frye for guidance. But Sheriff Frye never responded, so Thurston decided to “let it lie,” given their prior interactions.

The Sheriff’s Office, however, did not “let it lie.” Instead, Deputy Buchanan began investigating Thurston. Three times after Thurston’s September 12 verification deadline, Deputy Buchanan stopped by Thurston’s residence. Of course, Thurston was not there.

Roughly six weeks after his arrival in Spokane, the Spokane Sheriff’s Department contacted Thurston to inform him that (North Carolina) deputy Lee Buchanan was “looking for him.” Thurston called Deputy Buchanan, who told him his “absence” was “causing problems back home.” The deputy also (incorrectly) informed Thurston that it was “illegal” for him to be out of the state for more than 30 days. Then the deputy said this:

[I]n the same breath, [Deputy Buchanan] also said that he had spoken with Sheriff Frye and had decided that, as long as Thurston was back in North Carolina by October 19, “there would be no problem.”

Thurston returned on October 19th. It didn’t matter, at least not to Deputy Buchanan.

Even so, Deputy Buchanan discussed potential criminal liability with an assistant district attorney, who recommended that Deputy Buchanan pursue charges against Thurston. And on October 19—knowing that he and Sheriff Frye had given Thurston until that day to return to the state—Deputy Buchanan obtained a warrant from a local magistrate alleging three different criminal violations committed from September 19 to October 18: (1) “being out of state for thirty (30) + days,” (2) willfully failing to return his verification, and (3) willfully failing to report in person to the Sheriff’s Office.

And the trap was set. Thurston went to the Avery County Sheriff’s Office (completely unprompted by law enforcement visits or calls) to deliver his verification form. In return for this, he was arrested. The charges were later dropped, with the prosecutor explaining it away as “a misunderstanding with regard to how to comply with technical requirements.”

Well, the only “misunderstanding” was on the part of Deputy Buchanan, who managed to “misunderstand” direct communications with his sheriff so poorly (whether deliberately or not) that he had a man arrested for doing exactly what he had been instructed to do both by Sheriff Frye and Deputy Buchanan.

That dog won’t hunt, says the Fourth Circuit. It cites the lower court’s findings, which it upholds here:

Deputy Buchanan and Sheriff Frye therefore needed some reason to believe that Thurston either purposefully violated the law or acted with some other improper purpose. But the district court’s order forecloses any argument that they believed this. Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Thurston, the district court accepted that both defendants “definitely knew that . . . Thurston was eager to comply with the law.” And the district court accepted that the officers knew that Sheriff Frye gave Thurston permission to travel and that Thurston followed every instruction the Sheriff’s Office gave him. In so concluding, the district court not only accepted the facts alleged about Thurston’s actions but also accepted that the officers had concluded, based on those actions, that Thurston was eager to comply with the law throughout his sojourn.

This sort of ruling means nothing if it’s not followed by a denial of qualified immunity. After all, officers are free to violate rights so long as they can credibly (lol) argue their clear violations of established rights were different enough from standing case law they could not have possibly known their actions were unconstitutional (even if it’s immediately obvious to everyone else). That doesn’t work here because (1) the rights violation is pretty fucking obvious and (2) the circuit has some precedent that aligns with the current case.

In this case, it’s the Fourth Circuit’s 2012 Merchant v. Bauer decision, which involved an officer seeking a search warrant to arrest someone for impersonating an officer. The court held then that the warrant was void and unconstitutional because the officer applying for it was in possession of knowledge that would have exonerated the suspect of the proposed criminal charge.

It’s the same thing here:

In other words, we held that knowledge of sufficiently exculpatory information trumps the inculpatory evidence of the warrant. So too here. The district court found that Sheriff Frye and Deputy Buchanan knew that Thurston was not acting willfully and thus could not satisfy each element of the relevant crimes, yet they sought a warrant and arrested him anyway. After Merchant, no reasonable officer could believe that an arrest in such circumstances was lawful.

If it’s not “reasonable,” it’s not constitutional. And since the standard is “reasonable officer” rather than “regular American,” reasonableness is the operative factor, even when most reasonable non-cops would clearly understand that arresting someone for following specific instructions issued by law enforcement officers is a violation of that person’s rights. There’s no new precedent here. But at least there’s another affirmation that trying to arrest someone for following the law is so far out of the range of “reasonable,” no officer can expect to be immunized for their blatant constitutional violations.

This didn’t go the way anyone (other than cops and their unions) wanted it to, but first let’s acknowledge the fact that the city of Denver is actually trying to make things better for both cops and the people they serve.

Here’s how that’s going:

In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls — only a very small percentage of 911 calls. But the immediate developments appeared positive. A supposed indecent exposure call handled by STAR turned out to be a homeless woman changing clothes in an alley. A trespassing call turned out to be another homeless person setting up a tent near some homes. Suicidal persons were helped and taken to care centers. Homeless residents were taken to shelters. No one was arrested. No one was beaten, tased, or shot.

The zero arrests streak continues. STAR has released its six-month report [PDF] and the calls it has handled have yet to result in an arrest, strongly suggesting police officers aren’t the best personnel to handle crises like these — unless the desired result is more people in holding cells.

Denver decided to try what (far too few) other cities are trying: routing mental health/social services calls to professionals in those fields, rather than hand them off to police officers. And for good reason! Police officers aren’t trained to handle these sorts of issues. That lack of training tends to result in arrests, violence, and even the killing of people police have been asked to help.

Denver’s STAR (Support Team Assistance Response) has been able to handle many calls normally routed to cops without deploying cop tactics: you know, the command-and-control aggression that often manages to make these situations worse, if not actually deadly for those requiring mental health assistance.

So, there’s that. A limited test has shown consistently good results, which should be all the argument Denver legislators need to provide funding to expand STAR assistance to a round-the-clock effort.

But that’s just Denver. Even though it’s the state’s most populous city, its success story has been overlooked by state legislators who apparently feel the best thing for cops is the same lack of accountability they’ve enjoyed for years.

Legislators had a chance to impose greater accountability, but decided to go the other way, as Marissa Ventrelli reports for the Denver Gazette.

A bill that would have required law enforcement agencies to investigate all allegations of officer misconduct died in the House last week following significant revisions.

Sponsors said the measure would increase protections for officers who report alleged misconduct by their peers. Critics, notably law enforcement agencies and organizations, argued the sponsors did not include them in discussions for such an important measure.

Under House Bill 1460 as introduced, the failure to investigate reports of misconduct would have constituted workplace discrimination, for which civil action may be initiated.

The bill’s origin story is one of cop-on-cop harassment. Former Edgewater police officer McKinzie Rees helped craft the bill after being sexually assaulted twice by a fellow officer. Reporting it to supervisors did nothing but force Rees to resign, along with being placed on the state’s Brady list, ensuring she’d never be used as a witness in court, no matter what law enforcement agency employed her.

But it had obvious benefits for regular people, too. It strengthened whistleblower protections for cops reporting on other cops, but also would have benefited citizens who’ve filed complaints by forcing law enforcement agencies to instigate investigations, rather than just ignore the complaints of the policed.

The main opposition was none other than the state’s largest police union. Police unions routinely oppose efforts that might result in more scrutiny of officers. In this case, though, the union opposed any additional scrutiny being applied to cops who attacked, harassed, or sexually assaulted other cops.

The Fraternal Order of Police requested sponsors withdraw the bill and to instead convene a working group during the interim to discuss a multitude of issues related to whistleblowing, such as officer obligation to report misconduct, due process for officers facing allegations by whistleblowers, and protections for the whistleblowers themselves.

“We hope that you will accept this offer to engage in research and dialogue over the summer and fall so that all interested parties can feel assured that any future legislation on these topics in the upcoming session is founded in fact, necessity, and effective collaboration,” the group said. 

This makes it clear police unions are there to protect the worst cops — the ones willing to cross the “thin blue line” to harm other police officers. While everyone expects cops to treat citizens like punching bags and doormats, the “thin blue line” illusion is supposed to trick everyone into believing cops stand together united against evil. But if it’s internal evil, the police union wants nothing to do with any efforts to root it out. That’s just fucking disgusting.

And that’s how a bill dies, with the approval of people who think cops shouldn’t be scrutinized — much less punished — for any misconduct they commit, even if the targets of their wrongdoing are their fellow officers. These are the words of a legislator who seems more willing to provide gratis car washes for officers’ personal cars than serve any member of his constituency that can’t be bothered to get a badge-wearing job.

Rep. Ryan Armagost, R-Berthoud, a former law enforcement officer and member of the committee that heard the bill, said he was “offended” that law enforcement agencies had not been involved in discussions about the bill to the extent they wanted to be. 

Here’s an idea, Rep. Armagost: fuck ’em. If these agencies want to be involved, they’re sure to be involved. All this statement means is this rep is offended someone didn’t ask the kind of cops he likes (which would be the kind that sexually assault fellow officers) what kind of legislation they wanted and instead tried to right some wrongs by offering the state’s sexual assault victims (well… at least those in uniform) some form of protection, redress, and deterrence.

And it was state reps like Armagost who got what they wanted by stripping the bill of anything meaningful and parking it on blocks out in the front yard. For those of you who still think there’s nothing partisan about full-throated support of the worst cops this nation employs, please re-read the second quoted paragraph until the truth sinks in.

By the time the bill reached the floor for its third and final reading, all of its major provisions had been amended out, save for the creation of a working group. 

Ultimately, the bill died, 31-33. All of the Republicans, except Soper, voted in opposition, though it’s possible he would’ve asked for a recount and switched his vote if the bill had passed.

To add insult to the injuries suffered by former officer McKinzie Rees, the union added this statement after the bill was carved up by bootlickers and left to die on the House floor:

“We appreciate that the majority of House members shared our concerns about the need for a robust stakeholder process before passing legislation of this importance. Ensuring law enforcement employees have due process protection and a safe and healthy work environment are serious, complex issues that warrant responsible and thoughtful solutions.”

It pretty much makes you want to vomit. The union cheered on “due process” and “a safe and healthy work environment.” But it really doesn’t care much about the first (the bill only required an investigation to be opened, which means plenty of due process was still available to officers) and obviously gives zero shits about the latter, since it means officers attacked/assaulted by other officers will continue to be frozen out by the worst in their ranks and expected to leave the force, rather than see their grievances adequately addressed by the government agencies that hired them.

Because it sells so very well to a certain percentage of the population, ridiculous people are saying ridiculous things about crime rates in the United States. And, of course, the first place to post this so-called “news” is Fox News.

An independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts claim violent crime rates are much higher than figures reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its 2023 violent crime statistics.

The Coalition for Law Order and Safety released its April 2024 report called “Assessing America’s Crime Crises: Trends, Causes, and Consequences,” and identified four potential causes for the increase in crime in most major cities across the U.S.: de-policing, de-carceration, de-prosecution and politicization of the criminal justice system. 

This plays well with the Fox News audience, many of whom are very sure there needs to be a whole lot more law and order, just so long as it doesn’t affect people who literally RAID THE CAPITOL BUILDING IN ORDER TO PREVENT A PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER FROM HAPPENING.

These people like to hear the nation is in the midst of a criminal apocalypse because it allows them to be even nastier to minorities and even friendlier to cops (I mean, right up until they physically assault them for daring to stand between them and the inner halls of the Capitol buildings).

It’s not an “independent group.” In fact, it’s a stretch to claim there’s anything approaching actual “analysis” in this “report.” This is pro-cop propaganda pretending to be an actual study — one that expects everyone to be impressed by the sheer number of footnotes.

Here’s the thing about the Coalition for Law Order and Safety. Actually, here’s a few things. First off, the name is bad and its creators should feel bad. The fuck does “Law Order” actually mean, with or without the context of the alleged coalition’s entire name?

Second, this “coalition” has no web presence. Perhaps someone with stronger Googling skills may manage to run across a site run by this “coalition,” but multiple searches using multiple parameters have failed to turn up anything that would suggest this coalition exists anywhere outside of the title page of its report [PDF].

Here’s what we do know about this “coalition:” it contains, at most, two coalitioners (sp?). Those would be Mark Morgan, former assistant FBI director and, most recently, the acting commissioner of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) during Trump’s four-year stretch of abject Oval Office failure. (He’s also hooked up with The Federalist and The Heritage Foundation.) The other person is Sean Kennedy, who is apparently an attorney for the “Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.” (He also writes for The Federalist.)

At least that entity maintains a web presence. And, as can be assumed by its name, it spends a lot of its time and money ensuring bad cops keep their jobs and fighting against anything that might resemble transparency or accountability. (The press releases even contain exclamation points!)

This is what greets visitors to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund website:

Yep, it’s yet another “George Soros is behind whatever we disagree with” sales pitch. Gotta love a pro-cop site that chooses to lead off with a little of the ol’ anti-antisemitism. This follows shortly after:

Well, duh. But maybe the LELDF should start asking the cops it represents and defends why they’re not doing their jobs. And let’s ask ourselves why we’re paying so much for a public service these so-called public servants have decided they’re just not going to do anymore, even though they’re still willing to collect the paychecks.

We could probably spend hours just discussing these two screenshots and their combination of dog whistles, but maybe we should just get to the report — written by a supposed “coalition,” but reading more like an angry blog post by the only two people actually willing to be named in the PDF.

There are only two aspects of this report that I agree with. First, the “coalition” (lol) is correct in the fact that the FBI’s reported crime rates are, at best, incomplete. The FBI recently changed the way it handles crime reporting, which has introduced plenty of clerical issues that numerous law enforcement agencies are still adjusting to.

Participation has been extremely low due to the learning curve, as well as a general reluctance to share pretty much anything with the public. On top of that, the coding of crimes has changed, which means the FBI is still receiving a blend of old reporting and adding that to new reporting that follows the new nomenclature. As a result, there’s a blend of old and new that potentially muddies crime stats and may result in an inaccurate picture of crime rates across the nation.

The other thing I agree with is the “coalition’s” assertion that criminal activity is under-reported. What I don’t agree with is the cause of this issue, which the copagandists chalk up to “progressive prosecutors” being unwilling to prosecute some crimes and/or bail reform programs making crime consequence-free. I think the real issue is that the public knows how cops will respond to most reported crimes and realizes it’s a waste of their time to report crimes to entities that have gotten progressively worse at solving crime, even as their budget demands and tech uptake continue to increase.

Law enforcement is a job and an extension of government bureaucracy. Things that aren’t easy or flashy just aren’t going to get done. It’s not just a cop problem. It persists anywhere people are employed and (perhaps especially) where people are employed to provide public services to taxpayers.

Those agreements aside, the rest of the report is pure bullshit. It cherry-picks stats, selectively quotes other studies that agree with its assertions, and delivers a bunch of conclusory statements that simply aren’t supported by the report’s contents.

And it engages in the sort tactics no serious report or study would attempt to do. It places its conclusions at the beginning of the report, surrounded by black boxes to highlight the author’s claims, and tagged (hilariously) as “facts.”

Here’s what the authors claim to be facts:

FACT #1: America faces a public safety crisis beset by high crime and an increasingly dysfunctional justice system.

First off, the “public safety crisis” does not exist. Neither does “high crime.” Even if we agree with the authors’ assertions, the crime rates in this country are only slightly above the historical lows we’ve enjoyed for most of the 21st century. It is nowhere near what it used to be, even if (and I’m ceding this ground for the sake of my argument) we’re seeing spikes in certain locations around the country. (I’ll also grant them the “dysfunctional justice system” argument, even though my definition of dysfunction isn’t aligned with theirs. The system is broken and has been for a long time.)

FACT #2: Crime has risen dramatically over the past few years and may be worse than some official statistics claim.

“Dramatically” possibly as in year-over-year in specific areas. “Dramatically” over the course of the past decades? It’s actually still in decline, even given the occasional uptick.

FACT #3: Although preliminary 2023 data shows a decline in many offenses, violent and serious crime remains at highly elevated levels compared to 2019.

Wow, that sounds furious! I wonder what it signifies…? First, the authors admit crime is down, but then they insist crime is actually up, especially when compared to one specific waypoint on the continuum of crime statistics. Man, I’ve been known to cherry-pick stats to back up my assertions, but at least I’ve never (1) limited my cherry-picking to a single year, or (2) pretended my assertions were some sort of study or report backed by a “coalition” of “professionals” and “analysts.” Also: this assertion is pretty much, “This thing that just happened to me once yesterday is a disturbing trend!”

There’s more:

FACT #4: Less than 42% of violent crime and 33% of property crime victims reported the crime to law enforcement.

Even if true (and it probably isn’t), this says more about cops than it says about criminals. When people decide they’re not going to report these crimes, it’s not because they think the criminal justice system as a whole will fail them. It’s because they think the first responders (cops) will fail them. The most likely reason for less crime reporting is the fact that cops are objectively terrible at solving crimes, even the most violent ones.

FACT #5: The American people feel less safe than they did prior to 2020.

First, it depends on who you ask. And second, even if the public does feel this way, it’s largely because of “studies” like this one and “reporting” performed by Fox News and others who love to stoke the “crime is everywhere” fires because it makes it easier to sell anti-immigrant and anti-minority hatred. It has little, if anything, to do with actual crime rates. We’re twice as safe (at least!) as a nation than we were in the 1990s and yet most people are still convinced things are worse than they’ve ever been — a belief they carry from year to year like reverse amortization.

Then we get to the supposed “causes” of all the supposed “facts.” And that’s where it gets somehow stupider. The “coalition” claims this is the direct result of cops doing less cop work due to decreased morale, “political hostility” [cops aren’t a political party, yo], and “policy changes.” All I can say is: suck it up. Sorry the job isn’t the glorious joyride it used to be. Do your job or GTFO. Stop collecting paychecks while harming public safety just because the people you’ve alienated for years are pushing back. Even if this assertion is true (it isn’t), the problem is cops, not society or “politics.”

The authors also claim “decarceration” and “de-prosecution” are part of the problem. Bail reform efforts and prosecutorial discretion has led to fewer people being charged or held without bail. These are good things that are better for society in the long run. Destroying people’s lives simply because they’re suspected of committing a crime creates a destructive cycle that tends to encourage more criminal activity because non-criminal means of income are now that much farther out of reach.

You can tell this argument is bullshit because of who it cites in support of this so-called “finding.” It points to a study released by Paul Cassell and Richard Fowles entitled “Does Bail Reform Increase Crime?” According to the authors it does and that conclusion is supposedly supported by the data pulled from Cook County, Illinois, where bail reform efforts were implemented in 2019.

But the stats don’t back up the paper’s claims. The authors take issue with the county’s “community safety rate” calculations:

The Bail Reform Study reported figures for the number of defendants who “remained crime-free” in both the fifteen months before G.O. 18.8A and the fifteen months after—i.e., the number of defendants who were not charged in Cook County for another crime after their initial bail hearing date. Based on these data, the Study concluded that “considerable stability” existed in “community safety rates” comparing the pre- and post-implementation periods. Indeed, the Study highlighted “community safety rates” that were about the same (or even better) following G.O. 18.8A’s implementation. The Study reported, for example, that the “community safety rate” for male defendants who were released improved from 81.2% before to 82.5% after; and for female defendants, the community safety rate improved from 85.7% to 86.5%.66 Combining the male and female figures produces the result that the overall community safety rate improved from 81.8% before implementation of the changes to 83.0% after.

The authors say this rate is wrong. They argue that releasing more accused criminals resulted in more crime.

[T]he number of defendants released pretrial increased from 20,435 in the “before” period to 24,504 in the “after” period—about a 20% increase. So even though the “community safety rate” remained roughly stable (and even improved very slightly), the total number of crimes committed by pretrial releasees increased after G.O. 18.8A. In the fifteen months before G.O.18.8A, 20,435 defendants were released and 16,720 remained “crime-free”—and, thus, arithmetically (although this number is not directly disclosed in the Study), 3,715 defendants were charged with committing new crimes while they were released. In the fifteen months after G.O. 18.8A, 24,504 defendants were released, and 20,340 remained “crimefree”—and, thus, arithmetically, 4,164 defendants were charged with committing new crimes while they were released. Directly comparing the before and after numbers shows a clear increase from 3,715 defendants who were charged with committing new crimes before to 4,164 after—a 12% increase.

Even if, as the authors point out, more total crimes were committed after more total people were released (bailed out or with no bail set), the County’s assessment isn’t wrong. More people were released and the recidivism rate fell. Prior to G.O. 18.8A’s passage, the “crime-free” rate (as a percentage) was 79.6%. After the implementation of bail reform, it was 83.0%. If we follow the authors to the conclusion they seem to feel is logical, the only way to prevent recidivism is to keep every arrestee locked up until their trial, no matter how minor the crime triggering the arrest.

But that’s not how the criminal justice system is supposed to work. The authors apparently believe thousands of people who are still — in the eyes of the law — innocent (until proven guilty) should stay behind bars because the more people cut loose on bail (or freed without bail being set) increases the total number of criminal acts perpetrated.

Of course, we should expect nothing less. Especially not from Paul Cassell. Cassell presents himself as a “victim’s rights” hero. And while he has a lot to say about giving crime victims more rights than Americans who haven’t had the misfortune of being on the resulting end of a criminal act, he doesn’t have much to say about the frequent abuse of these laws by police officers who’ve committed violence against arrestees.

Not only that, but he’s the author of perhaps the worst paper ever written on the intersection of civil rights and American law enforcement. The title should give you a pretty good idea what you’re in for, but go ahead and give it a read if you feel like voluntarily angrying up your blood:

Still Handcuffing the Cops? A Review of Fifty Years of Empirical Evidence of Miranda’s Harmful Effects on Law Enforcement

Yep, that’s Cassell arguing that the Supreme Court forcing the government to respect Fifth Amendment rights is somehow a net loss for society and the beginning of a five-decade losing streak for law enforcement crime clearance rates.

So, you can see why an apparently imaginary “coalition” that supports “law order” would look to Cassell to provide back-up for piss poor assertions and even worse logic.

There’s plenty more that’s terrible in this so-called study from this so-called coalition. And I encourage you to give it a read because I’m sure there are things I missed that absolutely should be named and shamed in the comments.

But let’s take a look at one of my favorite things in this terrible waste of bits and bytes:

Concomitant with de-prosecution is a shift toward politicization of prosecutorial priorities at the cost of focusing on tackling rising crime and violent repeat offenders. Both local, state, and federal prosecutors have increasingly devoted a greater share of their finite, and often strained, resources to ideologically preferred or politically expedient cases. This approach has two primary and deleterious impacts – on public safety and on public faith in the impartiality of the justice system.

Under the tranche of recently elected progressive district attorneys, prosecutions of police officers have climbed dramatically and well before the death of George Floyd in May 2020, though they have since substantially accelerated.

Yep, that’s how cops see this: getting prosecuted is a “political” thing, as though being a cop was the same thing as being part of a political party. Cops like to imagine themselves as a group worthy of more rights. Unfortunately, lots of legislators agree with them. But trying to hold cops accountable is not an act of partisanship… or at least it shouldn’t be. It should just be the sort of thing all levels of law enforcement oversight strive for. But one would expect nothing more than this sort of disingenuousness from a couple of dudes who want to blame everyone but cops for the shit state the nation’s in (even if it actually isn’t.)

Taser long ago locked down the market for “less than lethal” (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition “excited delirium” as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its “less than lethal” Taser.

These days Taser does business as Axon. In addition to separating itself from its troubled (and somewhat mythical) past, Axon’s focus has shifted to body cameras and data storage. The cameras are the printer and the data storage is the ink. The real money is in data management, and that appears to be where Axon is headed next. And, of course, like pretty much everyone at this point, the company believes AI can take a lot of the work out of police work. Here’s Thomas Brewster and Richard Nieva with the details for Forbes.

On Tuesday, Axon, the $22 billion police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time to be back out policing,” Smith said.

If you don’t spend too much time thinking about it, it sounds like a good idea. Doing paperwork consumes a large amounts of officers’ time and a tool that automates at least part of the process would, theoretically, allow officers to spend more time doing stuff that actually matters, like trying to make a dent in violent crime — the sort of thing cops on TV are always doing but is a comparative rarity in real life.

It’s well-documented that officers spend a large part of their day performing the less-than-glamorous function of being an all-purpose response to a variety of issues entirely unrelated to the type of crimes that make headlines and fodder for tough-on-crime politicians.

On the other hand, when officers are given discretion to handle crime-fighting in a way they best see fit, they almost always do the same thing: perform a bunch of pretextual stops in hopes of lucking into something more criminal than the minor violation that triggered the stop. A 2022 study of law enforcement time use by California agencies provided these depressing results:

Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out.

In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.

In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion.

So, the first uncomfortable question automated report writing poses is this: what are cops actually going to do with all this free time? If it’s just more of this, we really don’t need it. All AI will do is allow problematic agencies and officers to engage in more of the biased policing they already engage in. Getting more of this isn’t going to make American policing better and it’s certainly not going to address the plethora of long-standing issues American law enforcement agencies have spent decades trying to ignore.

Then there’s the AI itself. Everything at use at this point is still very much in the experimental stage. Auto-generated reports might turn into completely unusable evidence, thanks to the wholly expected failings of the underlying software.

These reports, though, are often used as evidence in criminal trials, and critics are concerned that relying on AI could put people at risk by depending on language models that are known to “hallucinate,” or make things up, as well as display racial bias, either blatantly or unconsciously.

That’s a huge problem. Also problematic is the expected workflow, which will basically allow cops to grade their own papers by letting the AI handle the basics before they step in and clean up anything that doesn’t agree with the narrative an officer is trying to push. This kind of follow-up won’t be optional, which also might mean some agencies will have to allow officers to review their own body cam footage — something they may have previously forbidden for exactly this reason.

On top of that, there’s the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. AI trained on narratives provided by officers may take it upon themselves to “correct” narratives that seem to indicate an officer may have done something wrong. It’s also going to lend itself to biased policing by tech-washing BS stops by racist cops, portraying these as essential contributions to public safety.

Of course, plenty of officers do these sorts of things already, so there’s a possibility it won’t make anything worse. But if the process Axon is pitching makes things faster, there’s no reason to believe what’s already wrong with American policing won’t get worse in future. And, as the tech improves (so to speak), the exacerbation of existing problems and the problems introduced by the addition of AI will steadily accelerate.

That’s not to say there’s no utility in processes that reduce the amount of time spent on paperwork. But it seems splitting off a clerical division might be a better solution — a part of the police force that handles the paperwork and vets camera footage, but is performed by people who are not the same ones who captured the recordings and participated in the traffic stop, investigation, or dispatch call response.

And I will say this for Axon: at least its CEO recognizes the problems this could introduce and suggests agencies limit automated report creation to things like misdemeanors and never in cases where deadly force is deployed. But, like any product, it will be the end users who decide how it’s used. And so far, the expected end users are more than willing to streamline things they view as inessential, but are far less interested in curtailing abuse by those using these systems. Waiting to see how things play out just isn’t an acceptable option — not when there are actual lives and liberties on the line.

The government had a few years to sort this out, but as usual, the final call came down to the last minute. Shortly after Section 702 expired at midnight, April 19, the Senate pushed through a two-year reauthorization — one pretty much free of any reforms.

This happened despite there being a large and vocal portion of the Republican party seeking to curb the FBI’s access to these collections because some of their own had been subjected to the sort of abuse that has become synonymous with the FBI’s interaction with this particular surveillance program.

The reauthorization passed to the Senate from the House had been stripped of a proposed warrant requirement and saddled with an especially expansive definition of the term “electronic communication service provider.” Here’s how Senator Ron Wyden explained it while speaking out against the amendment:

Now, if you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, a phone, or a computer. Think about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. These people are not just the engineers who install, maintain and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government could deputize any one of these people against their will, and force them to become an agent for Big Brother.

For example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight. The FISA Court won’t know about it. Congress won’t know about it. The Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. And unless they can afford high priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.

So, instead of reform, we’re getting an even worse version of what’s already been problematic, especially when the FBI’s involved. As the clock ticked down on this vote (but not really: the FISA court had already granted the Biden administration’s request to keep the program operable as-is until 2025), attempts were made to strip the bill of this dangerous addition and add back in the warrant requirement amendment that had failed in the House.

None of this worked, as Gaby Del Valle reports for The Verge:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced an amendment that would have struck language in the House bill that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider.” Under the House’s new provision, anyone “who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.” The expansion, Wyden has claimed, would force “ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying.” The Wyden-Hawley amendment failed 34-58, meaning that the next iteration of the FISA surveillance program will be more expansive than before.

Both Sens. Paul and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced separate amendments imposing warrant requirements on surveilling Americans. A similar amendment failed in the House on a 212-212 vote. Durbin’s narrower warrant requirement wouldn’t require intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to query for those communications, though it requires one to access them.

The version headed to the president’s desk is the worst version. The rush to push this version of the bill through possibly gained a little urgency when two unnamed service providers informed the government they would stop complying with FISA orders pretty much immediately if the Senate didn’t renew the program.

One communications provider informed the National Security Agency that it would stop complying on Monday with orders under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables U.S. intelligence agencies to gather without a warrant the digital communications of foreigners overseas — including when they text or email people inside the United States.

Another provider suggested that it would cease complying at midnight Friday unless the law is reauthorized, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

We’ll never know how empty these threats might have been or if the Intelligence Community would have even noticed the brief interruption in the flow of communications. Section 702 has been given a two-year extension in the form approved by the Senate, superseding the FISA Court’s blessing of one more year of uninterrupted spying if discussions over renewal blew past the April 19, 2024 deadline.

If you’re a fan of bipartisan efforts — no matter the outcome — well… enjoy your victory, I guess. But there’s nothing about this renewal debacle that can actually be called a win. Unless you’re the FBI, of course. Then it’s all gravy.

Cops hate being watched, no matter where they’re located.

In the United States, we’ve seen several arrests and prosecutions of journalists and citizens for daring to record public officials performing their public duties. The case law isn’t completely settled in the United States, but in most parts of the country, it’s understood the First Amendment covers these activities.

That fact hasn’t stopped cops and prosecutors from pursuing everything from obstruction charges to alleged violations of state wiretapping laws against people who hold cops accountable simply by documenting the things they do.

There’s no First Amendment in the UK. But that doesn’t mean UK law enforcement officers are free to arrest people who do nothing more than document their actions. Given this lack of built-in protection, it’s extremely surprising to see UK prosecutors admit they’re in the wrong when it comes to shielding cops from accountability efforts that don’t involve government employees.

A journalist who did nothing more than try to document a criminal investigation taking place in full view of the public has received an apology of sorts from the UK government, as Steven Morris reports for The Guardian.

The Crown Prosecution Service has admitted it was wrong to press on with a case against a news photographer arrested as he tried to lawfully take pictures at a crime scene.

Judge Walters at Swansea crown court described the case against Dimitris Legakis, which was dropped on the eve of his trial, as “disturbing” and said it seemed “the high point” of the prosecution was that a police officer “took offence” against someone whose job was to take photographs.

The journalist did nothing more than show up at the scene of a car fire last year. He attempted to document the police response, only to get arrested by UK police officers, apparently because he was the only one in the crowd operating a camera. That this later turned out to be a murder investigation (allegedly a man beat his wife to death with a hammer before setting fire to the car with her in it) doesn’t really matter. At that point, it was just a normal police response to a potentially dangerous situation.

At some point during the police response, an “altercation” between some members of the crowd began. For whatever reason, officers decided to single out the journalist as the problem. He was arrested “with considerable force” and detained for 15 hours, supposedly for assaulting a first responder and “obstructing” a police officer, despite the fact no obstruction or assault was captured by any cameras operated by responding officers. The lack of evidence was admitted by the prosecution prior to its dropping of the charges.

The trial was due to start on Tuesday but at a hearing on Monday prosecution barrister Alycia Carpanini said no evidence would be offered in the case. The barrister said it had also been decided that it was not in the public interest to pursue the obstructing a constable matter, a summary-only offence.

Asked by Judge Geraint Walters why the decision to offer no evidence had been taken on the eve of the trial, the barrister said the original statement taken from the police officer “does not coincide” with what he later said in his victim personal statement, and she said the alleged assault itself was not captured on bodycam. The judge said having read the papers in the case it seemed to him “the high point of the prosecution case” was that somebody employed as a photographer was taking pictures and a police officer “took offence” to it.

When faced with taking this case to trial, the CPS finally admitted it had no evidence. But it took a court calling this out as a bullshit “contempt of cop” prosecution for that to happen.

And while there’s a very rare apology here, it comes couched in exculpatory language that suggests the CPS was completely in the right until it was forced to admit it was completely in the wrong.

A spokeswoman said: “We take assaults on emergency workers incredibly seriously. In all cases, including those resulting from police charge, we have a duty to continually review the evidence. In a review prior to the recent hearing, we decided that there was no longer sufficient evidence to continue with the prosecution and it should be stopped. We acknowledge this should have been done sooner.”

Maybe the CPS should divert some of its resources to investigating police officers who cook up bogus charges for the sole purpose of deterring public accountability. And, very definitely, the agency employing the officers who arrested the journalist and concocted a host of criminal charges should act quickly to punish the officers involved in this potential miscarriage of justice. It shouldn’t take 15 hours of detention and the run-up to a criminal case to finally have the truth come out. Because if that’s what it takes for the government to finally admit it’s in the wrong, the harm has already been done and the chilling effect on public accountability remains intact.

That being said, it’s still a step ahead of the status quo here in the United States. Even when governments pay out settlements to people whose rights have been violated, the payments are almost always attached to legal verbiage in which the government refuses to admit any wrongdoing. At least in the case above, the government acknowledged it was at fault. And that’s something, even if the lack of consequences means CPS and the cops that provide it with cases to prosecute are free to make the same “mistakes” over and over again.

Just imagine how petty and vindictive you have to be to change someone with murder just because they weren’t arrested easily. Imagine how self-centered you have to be to present someone as an assailant just because they were unable to comprehend your instructions. Imagine just how inhumane you have to be to present a false narrative about a weapon wielded against officers just so you can charge a migrant with no English skills with aggravated murder, just because an officer died of natural causes after being involved with this arrest.

That’s what happened to Virgilio Mendez. Mendez, a native of Guatemala, was standing near a hotel room (where he was staying with other migrants employed in the area) when he was accosted by St. Johns County officer Michael Kunovich.

Dispatch had alerted officers to a “suspicious Hispanic male,” a vague description that allowed Kunovich (and other officers who arrived later) to justify their violent actions. Mendez did not speak English or Spanish. Instead, he spoke Mam, a derivative of the Mayan dialect spoken by a half-million Guatemalans.

It took a bit of time to subdue Mendez, someone who likely had no idea what was happening or why this was happening to him. Shouted instructions in English and Spanish did nothing to clarify what was happening. He was thrown to the ground. Although he continued to struggle, Mendez — at 5’4″ and 115 lbs. — was easily outclassed by his law enforcement opponents. In addition, he was tased six times in a little over 120 seconds.

This was all caught on (body) camera by Sergeant Kunovich. The post-arrest narrative presented by the sheriff’s office claimed Mendez “pulled a knife” on the officers. The recording makes it clear this never happened. Following the struggle, Kunovich began experiencing pain and shortness of breath. He was rushed to a hospital and expired shortly thereafter.

The coroner’s report makes it clear this was not a result of anything Mendez did. (And, indeed, the video shows Kunovich removed himself from the struggle long before it was over.)

“These cardiac changes, while recent, predate the struggle with the subject,” the report said. “The circumstances do not fully meet the criteria for a homicide manner of death.”

The coroner said no homicide. The St. John’s Sheriffs Office (along with the local prosecutor) said something else entirely:

[T]he St. John’s County Sheriff’s Office and the Office of the State Attorney for the 7th Judicial Circuit of Florida charged Aguilar Méndez with aggravated murder, which is punishable by life in prison.

For the moment, that’s how it went for Mendez. His lawyer told the court Mendez shouldn’t be charged with this and noted that he possibly couldn’t even be tried for this, due to his inability to understand commonly-used languages like English or Spanish, not to mention his unfamiliarity with the US legal system.

The court agreed at first, although that did not result in the release of Mendez, who was held without bail for eight months, despite being found incompetent to stand trial.

After having Mendez held even longer while taking time to “mull the complicated issues,” prosecutors have decided to dismiss the charges against Mendez.

The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the charges against Aguilar Mendez were dismissed “based on concerns about the intellectual capacity of Vergilio Aguilar Mendez and the recent ruling finding him to be incompetent.”

Not that Mendez is free to go. The same article notes Mendez is still detained while he awaits the outcome of deportation proceedings initiated by the federal government.

This dismissal is welcome. So is the statement issued by Mendez’s attorney, Jose Baez, who went after the sheriff’s office for its abuse of the justice process to bring these charges against someone who had the misfortune of interacting with officers employed by the sheriff.

“Culture that starts and ends with the sheriff, who not only doubled down and tripled down by creating a false narrative that this young man, who came in at 17, was someone who failed to follow instructions,” Baez said in a press conference following Aguilar Mendez’s dismissal.

“He says if he only followed instructions Kunovich would still be alive,” Baez said. “I want to one day see him comply to orders given to him in Mam or Spanish and I would guarantee you that he would not comply. Then claim Vergilio Aguilar Mendez was going to use a knife, knowing that was a lie,” Baez said.

He’s not wrong. Law enforcement officers routinely claim failure to comply with orders is a criminal act — something that often happens when subjects don’t understand the language being spoke or (as is equally often the case) when officers shout contradictory orders simultaneously, forcing arrestees to ignore at least one officer’s orders so they can comply with another officer’s shouted commands, thus giving all officers on the scene permission to start brutalizing the arrestee.

This last minute dismissal was likely provoked by Mendez’s civil rights lawsuit, which was filed less than 10 days before the charges were dropped. But, as anyone browsing American jurisprudence can tell you, dropping charges doesn’t make rights violations disappear. Trying to moot the case by pressing eject on prosecution isn’t the “EASY” button the St. James government appears to think it is.

Finally, there’s this defensive statement by the St. John’s Sheriff’s Office, which tries to cover itself in the reflected glory of a dead officer by (once again) invoking things that didn’t happen as a defense for its own actions.

“There have been attempts by some to portray Aguilar Mendez as a victim and vilify Sergeant Kunovich. I continue to stand behind Sergeant Kunovich’s actions on the night of May 19, 2023,” St. Johns County Sheriff Rob Hardwick said in a statement. “The danger associated with law enforcement is a risk we assume when we enter this profession. Sergeant Kunovich died a hero protecting the citizens of St. Johns County and there is nothing more noble than that. Please continue to hold our agency and Sergeant Kunovich’s family in your thoughts and prayers.”

Let’s be perfectly fucking clear, Sheriff Rob Hardwick, since it’s been clear from the start you and your office are willing to be deliberately obtuse when not actively lying about what happened in this case. No one “vilified” the dead officer. They vilified your department and local prosecutors for deciding to charge someone just because an officer happened to die (but probably not a “hero”) shortly after affecting an arrest. He was dead. He had zero say in the determination of criminal charges.

Sheriff, your willingness to transfer your own vilification to the corpse of your former employee speaks volumes about your willingness to take responsibility for your own actions or the actions of your officers. And what it says it that you will pass the buck the moment it crosses you desk while taking credit for anything these officers achieve with or without your (lol) leadership. Get fucked, buddy. You suck.

Say what you will about the general politeness of Canadians and the genteel nature of their secondhand Britishness, but never forget their cops can be just as petty and vindictive as our cops.

Law enforcement entities everywhere have a massive sense of entitlement. Officers and officials tend to think that people should comply with whatever they say, never question any assertions they make, and give them whatever they ask for without providing the proper paperwork.

The fact is that people aren’t obliged to give cops things they’re only supposed to be able to obtain with warrants. Voluntary consent eliminates this obligation, and that’s fine as long as it’s actual informed consent.

But cops tend to get all shitty when they’re unable to obtain stuff without warrants. Rejected requests for consent are often treated as inherently suspicious. Reluctance to cooperate (without the existence of court orders compelling more) is viewed as obstruction and, sometimes, results in criminal charges (or at least an arrest) even when the person being badgered by cops is completely in the right.

This report of a Canadian bar’s refusal to voluntarily relinquish its parking lot recordings contains plenty of statements from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and others in the law enforcement field. And every single statement makes it clear Canadian law enforcement believes they’re owed whatever evidence might be available and should never be inconvenienced (even momentarily) by demands officers go get a warrant they could easily obtain within minutes.

A shooting happened outside of the Cactus Club Cafe and the RCMP asked anyone in the area to come forward with any recordings they might have of the area the shooting took place in. The RCMP approached the club and was told it needed to obtain a warrant if it wanted copies of the club’s parking lot footage.

As the owners of the restaurant chain pointed out in its statement to Canada’s Global News, this is standard operating procedure for the company.

“The process of requesting a production order before releasing surveillance footage is a standard practice put in place across all of our locations. This protects privacy and ensures we’re following the law.”

Which is, of course, the way it should be. The company should comply with court orders but it should not feel obligated to hand over footage obtained by its cameras without one.

Everyone else — including the national association representing bars and restaurants — appears to feel the Cactus Club is in the wrong.

“The general protocol is for people to give up, not just restaurants, but people to give up video to help and assist the police in a manner that’s fairly quick,” said president and CEO Ian Tostenson.

Totenson heads up British Columbia’s Restaurant and Food Service Association. But rather than advocate for the rights of the private companies he represents, he has chosen to present the Cactus Club as some sort of scofflaw, even if all it did was ask to see a warrant before handing over recordings that can only be obtained with a warrant or consent.

That demand for the proper paperwork was apparently a first for the RCMP, which seemingly feels it shouldn’t need to seek warrants when there’s [checks article again] suspected criminal activity occurring. Here’s just one of the statements made by British Columbia’s “visibly upset” public safety minister.

“It’s the first time it’s crossed my desk that there has been a refusal to initially comply with police request for video,” Mike Farnworth told Global News in an interview Tuesday.

Well, that’s a shame. Too many private entities are being far too compliant. There’s no legal obligation to consent to warrantless searches of any private property, including recordings created with privately-owned cameras. Just because most people turn over footage voluntarily doesn’t make the Cactus Club wrong. It just means most people don’t care about their rights, much less the precedent they’re inadvertently setting — the sort of low bar that ensures law enforcement officers will be easily offended (and pettily vindictive) the moment anyone provides the least bit of (explicitly legal!) resistance.

And it’s not just the RCMP. It’s also the mayor of Coquitlam, where this particular club is located.

“For a local business to insist that the RCMP get a warrant for information that they might have that could lead to an arrest is outrageous…” 

It definitely is not “outrageous.” It’s exactly within their well-established rights. The RCMP has an obligation to obtain consent or a warrant. It failed to get consent. It did, as the article notes, secure a warrant and the footage investigators were seeking. Everything worked out. And one would logically assume it didn’t take much to secure the warrant, considering the strong likelihood the restaurant’s cameras captured footage of the shooting.

So, why all the shouting? Well, it appears that everyone from the RCMP official to the mayor to the head of a private retail association believes cops should never have to get a warrant when investigating crimes. Holy shit, what a statement to make, even implicitly.

And somehow, it gets even worse. The club’s decision to exercise its rights has been met with explicit retaliation by the BC government. Here’s more from the BC public safety minister, who apparently sees nothing wrong with punishing a company for asking to see a warrant:

In the most recent case, Farnworth said the province has since amended the terms and conditions of the Barnet Highway Cactus Club’s liquor licence.

“They must have video surveillance and they must provide it to the police or a liquor inspector upon request,” said the public safety minister.

A warrant is a “request,” you fool. And yet, this entity has decided to “amend” a liquor license of this one club to force it to comply with warrantless demands for private camera footage — something that clearly falls outside of its legal obligations. But now, it’s the law of land — a law that now explicitly singles out a single business with a compelled compliance mandate.

Hopefully, the Cactus Club will sue. This is clearly retaliatory. It’s now subject to mandates that don’t apply to other liquor license holders in British Columbia… just the one that did nothing more than ask the RCMP to respect its rights as a private business.

Axon, most famous for producing Tasers, is again making the sort of headlines it really shouldn’t make.

Everyone knows Taser. The company produces the most-used “less lethal” weapons cops deploy. “Less” is the key word here. It’s basically a cattle prod for humans but one that’s routinely deployed with less care than a cattle prod, even if its manufacturer instructs cops to limit the number of uses per minute or cautions against over-use of drive stun mode. People with heart conditions shouldn’t be tased, but no one’s consulting medical files before affecting arrests. People who’ve just doused themselves with gasoline definitely shouldn’t be tased, but you go to war with the army you have.

Axon is now more interested in selling body cams to cops. It will still sell you all the Tasers you want, but the real money is in the data storage and access market. It’s the inkjet printer plan, but for cops. The body cams are the loss leaders. Record all you want, but storing and accessing recordings will cost you, much in the same way your $29.99 printer won’t function until you buy a $70 3-color ink refill.

This shift in focus has allowed Axon to make more money while distancing itself from Tasers and the damage done — something it definitely needed to do as medical association after medical association refused to recognize “excited delirium” as an actual health condition.

For some reason, Axon seems to have a problem with accepting rejection, despite being the most-recognized name in the lucrative body cam field. A little more than four years ago, Axon generated negative headlines for refusing to gracefully accept the termination of a contract. The Fontana, California police department discontinued its use of Axon body cameras, making its $4,000/year contract with Axon’s Evidence.com completely useless.

Axon refused to take the L. It responded to the Fontana PD’s suggestion it would not continue to pay the bill for services it wasn’t using with this:

The only cancellation term is Termination for Non-Appropriations or lack of funding. There is a negative effect, however, as it can affect the credit rating of the City. Since we are looking at about nine months it would probably make more sense to ride out the rest of the contract…

In other words, Axon suggested it would report each month of non-payment to credit agencies, dragging down the city’s credit rating simply because it didn’t want to pay for something it wasn’t using.

While some might defend Axon by saying “the city signed a contract!,” that argument doesn’t hold up. The contract (contractually!) gave the city this option: “termination for convenience.” That clause meant the city could cancel the contract for exactly the reasons stated: it no longer required Axon’s storage and access services because it was no longer using the company’s body cameras.

Axon is doing this shit again, albeit for much different reasons. As Sam Kmack reports for AZCentral, Axon is again behaving in an extremely petty fashion because it didn’t get what it wanted.

Scottsdale’s city attorney confirmed in a sharply worded letter that an Axon employee had contacted a city planning commissioner’s boss about the official’s opposition to a controversial project.

“This type of action tends to raise public concern about the integrity of the city’s public hearing process,” City Attorney Sherry Scott wrote in a letter dated Friday. “It can also have a chilling effect on … public officials’ willingness to serve in their volunteer capacity.”

Here’s the thing about city and town commissioners. Being a commissioner isn’t their only job. Most commissioner positions don’t pay enough to be anyone’s only job. On top of that, their work for the locales they represent doesn’t consume 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.

So, when Axon pitched the city of Scottsdale a plan to build 2,000 apartment units near its proposed headquarters, it assumed the city would choose to ignore the fact that the location it had chosen wasn’t actually zoned for apartment construction.

Axon reps attended a city meeting in January, hoping to convince commissioners that rezoning the area to give Axon what it wanted would be a win for all Scottsdale residents. The commissioners disagreed, with Planning Commissioner Christian Serena being the most vocal in his objections.

Last month, Serena informed the city attorney a member of “Axon’s leadership” had contacted his day job, allegedly telling his employer (Merrill Lynch), presumably insinuating that his day job presented some form of conflict of interest since Merrill Lynch has also made overtures to Axon in an attempt to secure its (still-undefined) business.

Scott confirmed in the letter, addressed to Axon’s lawyer, an Axon employee did contact Serena’s employer, Merrill Lynch.

“It is apparent to me that an Axon employee did contact Commissioner Serena’s employer to discuss dissatisfaction with Commissioner Serena’s public hearing comments,” Scott wrote.

This “dissatisfaction” was explained more explicitly in Axon CEO Rick Smith’s response to the city attorney’s letter.

“Your March 1st letter was in the hands of multiple media outlets within hours of receipt. Up to this time, we limited our correspondence with media out of respect for the integrity of the process,” Smith’s letter read. “Unfortunately, it appears some within the City are more focused on prioritizing political theater.”

Smith’s letter contends Serena may have had a conflict of interest in deciding on Axon’s project because “Merrill Lynch (and its parent company) Bank of America have been unsuccessful in winning Axon’s business” despite approaching the company on “several occasions.”

Whew. That’s not even a denial. That’s pretty much an admission someone pretty far up the org chart tried to convince the commissioner’s employer that Serena was supposedly rejecting Axon’s request for re-zoning solely because Merrill Lynch’s courtship of Axon had been unsuccessful.

Even if this were true (and there’s not a whole lot of reason to believe it is), the proper way to handle this would be to take it up with the city’s commissioners, rather than approach a commissioner’s day job and try to get them reprimanded, if not fired, simply because Axon failed to convince a city government to alter the regulatory landscape to indulge one company’s wishes.

It’s not a good look, especially for a company that relies almost solely on contracts with government agencies to make ends meet. And it’s definitely not a good look for a company that’s done this sort of thing before. Sure, this may seem like two unrelated instances, but if it’s been caught doing this twice, there’s a good chance it’s gone a bit thuggish in the past, but has managed to escape being called out publicly.

There are a variety of reasons to alter, if not actually end, the Section 702 collection. Whatever value it may have in terms of national security, the very real fact is that it has been endlessly abused by the FBI since its inception.

It’s a foreign-facing collection, which means it harvests communications and data involving foreign targets of US surveillance. But there’s a massive backdoor built into this collection. Collecting foreign communications often means collecting US persons’ communications with foreign persons or entities.

That’s where the FBI has gone interloping with alarming frequency. US persons’ communications are supposed to be masked, preventing the FBI from engaging in warrantless surveillance of US-based communications. This simply hasn’t happened. And the FBI has not only performed second-hand abuse of this collection regularly, but it has equally regularly refused to be honest with the FISA court about its activities.

The latest rejection of a clean reauthorization of Section 702 has nothing to do with the FBI’s continuous refusal to play by the rules. Instead, it has to do with the few times it decided to engage in some backdoor action that targeted the party in power or people temporarily involved with inflicting four years of Donald Trump on a nation that was definitely greater before someone started promising to make it great again.

However, the FBI — despite having abused its access for years — continues to insist the program should not be ended or altered. It has actually admitted its backdoor searches would otherwise be illegal without this program and its side benefits — something that should have hastened legislators on both sides of the political aisle to shut the whole thing down until these critical flaws were patched.

Instead, the whole thing have devolved into the expected in-fighting. Some legislators proposed meaningful reforms to the program, which were soundly rejected by a lot of Republicans simply because some Democrats were involved. The Republicans heading up the House Intelligence Committee proposed their own reforms, but the only thing they really wanted to change was the FBI’s ability to place Republicans under surveillance.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has decided the FBI is right, no matter how often it’s been wrong. Ignoring years of casual abuse, the Biden team has pushed for a clean reauthorization — something it may not have done if it weren’t for all the Republicans demanding (mostly for self-serving reasons) the program be ended or altered.

Unfortunately, Section 702 continues to live on, even if it’s in an unresponsive coma at the moment. Rather than let the surveillance authority expire, a bi-partisan effort did the country dirty by extending it until April 2024 where it could be further disagreed about following the return of Congressional reps to Capitol Hill.

April just isn’t good enough, apparently. The Biden Administration wants to buy even more time without any termination or authorization, presumably in hopes that the current furor will die down and this executive power will be granted a clean re-authorization. (Of course, by that point, there may be an actual Fuhrer in play, given Donald Trump’s early sweeps of critical primaries.)

Here’s Charlie Savage with more details for the New York Times:

The Biden administration is moving to extend a disputed warrantless surveillance program into April 2025, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The decision by the administration, which requires asking for court approval, seemed likely to roil an already turbulent debate in Congress over its fate. The program has scrambled the usual partisan lines, with members of both parties on each side of seeing the program as potentially abusive of civil liberties or as necessary for protecting national security.

This is probably preferable to holding a budget bill hostage in an executive office display of “I’ll hold my breath until I get my way.” And it’s preferable to Republican efforts to alter Section 702 simply to protect themselves from illegal surveillance. But it’s definitely not preferable to actually engaging with the inherent problems of this surveillance program, all of which seem to lead back to the FBI and its insistence on abusing its access.

This throws these problems on the back burner for another year. And it will be yet another year where the FBI abuses its access. We can make this assumption because there’s never been a year where the FBI hasn’t abused this surveillance power. Refusing to address an issue that’s been publicly acknowledged for several years now just to ensure the NSA doesn’t lose this surveillance program is irresponsible. The Biden Administration’s apparently tactic agreement with assertions made by an agency that has proven it can’t be trusted doesn’t bode well for anyone.

And, if this yearlong reprieve results in a clean reauthorization, the Biden Administration will quite possibly be handing this renewed power to Republicans now allowed to engage in their worst excesses, thanks to the re-election of Dumpster Fire Grover Cleveland.

The best thing the current administration could do at this point is allow the authority to die, which would force Republicans who love power (but hate to see it wielded against them) try to reconcile their desire for a surveillance state with the inevitable reality they will sometimes be on the receiving end of this surveillance. The worst thing it can do is what it’s doing now: pressing the pause button because it doesn’t have the desire or willingness to go head-to-head with an agency that claims — without facts in evidence — the only way it can keep this country secure from foreign threats is by warrantlessly spying on Americans.

Very rarely do you see anyone prevail in court when any form of forfeiture is in play. The forfeiture litigation deck is firmly stacked in favor of the government, which rarely needs anything approaching actual proof to walk off with someone’s property.

It’s even more rare to see someone awarded damages in a civil lawsuit against law enforcement officers. In most cases, qualified immunity terminates the lawsuit. If qualified immunity is not awarded, agencies and governments are often swift to offer plaintiffs no-fault settlements that allow the accused to walk away from the lawsuit without having to admit any wrongdoing, much less pay out of their own pockets for their misdeeds.

This case contains both rarities. Not only does it involve regular people securing some sort of justice for their violated rights, but the underlying set of rights violations included officers walking out the home they’d raided without a warrant with all the valuables they could get their hands on, including $4,000 in cash.

Here’s how the raid went down, as recounted by C.J. Ciaramella for Reason back in 2019.

On January 31, 2018, a Randolph County sheriff’s deputy showed up at the home of Greg and Teresa Almond in Woodland, Alabama, to serve Greg court papers in a civil matter.

Greg, 50, wasn’t home, but his wife Teresa told the deputy he would be back before long. About two hours later, after Greg had returned home, he heard loud knocking on the door. He remembers shouting “hang on” and walking toward the door when it suddenly flew open. The next thing he knew he was on the floor—ears ringing, dazed, wondering if he’d just been shot.

Several deputies from the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department had kicked in his front door and thrown a flashbang grenade at his feet. The officers handcuffed and detained the couple at gunpoint, then started searching their house. The deputy from earlier had reportedly smelled marijuana, and so a county drug task force was descending on the Almonds’ home, looking for illegal drugs.

The supposed odor of marijuana eventually led the deputies to a small marijuana plant, a few scattered leaves, and a single prescription pill that was not located in its bottle. The home invasion also led deputies to other stuff they wanted, but had no legitimate reason to take. They took the cash they found in the house, a wedding ring, some guns, a coin collection, and a couple guitars.

To the Sheriff’s Office, the $4,000 probably seemed insignificant. But it was pretty much all they had. They were in the middle of refinancing an agricultural loan to ensure their chicken farm remained solvent. Thanks to being forced to spend most of two days in jail, they missed their refinancing deadline. That ultimately resulted in the couple losing their house. They were residing in an insulated shed by the time the court took up their lawsuit.

More than four years after the raid, the couple has finally secured some form of justice. The $1 million in damages awarded by the jury will likely be appealed by the sheriff’s department, but for now, that’s what a jury has said the couple is entitled to.

The judge overseeing the case issued an order [PDF] along with the directed verdict, stating that the “rarity” of a directed verdict in a civil rights lawsuit necessitates some explanation.

The explanation reveals just how much of a blatant violation of rights this raid was. Deputy Kevin Walker had no excuse for his actions.

During trial, Judge Amy Newsome testified that she never issued a telephonic warrant to Defendant Walker, or to the drug task force, on January 31, 2018, for a search of the Plaintiffs’ home. She also testified that she did not tell Walker that he had a warrant. In addition, Defendant Walker testified that Judge Newsome did not tell him that he had a telephonic search warrant, although she did tell him that he probably had enough for a warrant.

He also acknowledged that the requirements for a telephonic warrant were not satisfied, that he did not have a search warrant, and that it was a warrantless search. Given this undisputed testimony, even when considered in the light most favorable to Defendant Walker, the search of the Plaintiffs’ home was without a warrant, even a defective one, and therefore violated the Fourth Amendment. No reasonable jury could have concluded otherwise as there was no question of fact on this issue.

Yeah. That’s inexcusable. And yet, Walker had an excuse: good faith. He attempted to avail himself of the good faith warrant exception. But, as the judge points out, good faith relies on someone believing a valid warrant has actually been issued, not just thinking they could probably obtain one at some point in the future. On top of that, the good faith exception invoked by the deputy only applies in criminal trials, not civil trials. Even if it did apply in this content, Walker would still lose. (Emphasis in the original.)

But even if the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule can apply in the civil context, the good faith exception still would not apply in the circumstances of this case. First, per Judge Newsome and Defendant Walker, there was no warrant, telephonic or written, and thus there was nothing upon which Walker could rely in good faith. In other words, because Defendant Walker knew that he did not have a warrant at the time of the incident, the good faith exception does not apply.

And the cases Walker cites are inapplicable to the facts here: Taylor, Moorehead, Henderson,
and Ganzer all involved situations where written warrants were issued, not situations where a warrant was never issued in the first place. And secondly, as a matter of law, given the undisputed facts concerning the non-existence of a warrant, it was objectively unreasonable for an experienced law enforcement officer to believe that he could search an occupied home when no warrant existed, when no judge told him that he had a warrant, when he was merely told that he had enough for a warrant, and when none of the formalities or requirements associated with a telephonic or written warrant were followed.

As the court notes in this order, it fully expects Walker to raise the other form of good faith in a future motion, indicating that while a jury has already said the couple is owed $1 million in damages, the court has yet to issue an order blessing that payout. Hopefully, if nothing else, this utter failure to salvage a blatantly unconstitutional search will urge Walker’s employers to cut a check, rather than continue to embarrass itself in court.

Man. I have seen some shit since taking up a regular post at this fine website. I have had my mind blown with an alarming frequency. I have been sent into waves of mocking laughter more times than anyone writing for a respected website should admit. I have, in other words, been ruined by the internet.

Despite all of this unaddressed trauma, I continue to write for this site. Why? Well… several reasons. First and foremost, I enjoy writing. This site has an amazing group of regular readers. Some days, the hate is as enjoyable as the love. And, if nothing else, I’m provided constant opportunities to see things I’ve never seen before, even considering my many trips around the internet block. In other words, I need help but still prefer the company of others in my same position.

We’re seeing some amazing stuff right now. Fentanyl does indeed have the power to kill. People unfamiliar with its power are at risk of overdosing.

But fentanyl is, at its base, just another opiate. These have always presented this sort of risk, especially because getting high is almost indistinguishable from getting dead, which tends to result in a higher number of overdoses.

Meanwhile, everyone on one side of the drug experience (the DEA, FBI, and the local media) portrays this drug as capable of killing people who aren’t even ingesting it. Every drug bust is broken down to the minimum lethal level — 2 milligrams — by government spokespersons or journalists willing to push the government’s narrative forward.

While it’s likely true two milligrams can kill someone, that dosage would most likely only be able to end the life of an infant forced to ingest this dosage while having its mouth and nose held shut by DEA agents or entirely-too-credulous reporters.

Then there’s the DEA’s insistence drug cartels are not just seeking to addict children but kill them by offering up multi-colored variations of fentanyl products. While it’s undeniably true the drug trade often involves death, very few drug dealers actually want their customers to die. If kids are uniquely susceptible to a product, it makes little sense to market to them, especially when their funds are limited to allowances and birthday cards.

So, it’s unlikely cartels are marketing to children. But that hasn’t stopped the DEA from claiming otherwise. The real reason for multi-colored pills isn’t to make them attractive to children (who are capable of ending their own lives using any number of OTC and prescription medicines that are also multi-colored). It’s marketing. It’s brand differentiation and an indicator to buyers what product they’re getting and what its potency is.

While the government is busy claiming drug cartels are turning deadly drugs into candy, the government is also seeking to obtain deadly drugs in the form of candy. I am not making this up. Here’s Julia Ainsley with the details for NBC News.

The chief medical officer for Customs and Border Protection pressured his staff to order fentanyl lollipops for him to take to the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in September, according to a whistleblower report sent to Congress on Friday. 

The whistleblowers said Dr. Alexander Eastman’s staff raised questions about why he would need to order fentanyl lollipops to take with him, and he answered that it was part of his duties to make sure that any injured CBP operators were cared for, making the argument that the lollipops would be necessary for pain management should an emergency occur.

lololololollipop

This sounds like the actions of a person with a drug problem. This sounds exactly like Dr. Eastman wanted a personal stash of fentanyl edibles to get him through the day(s). What this doesn’t sound like is an actual medical need for these products.

Dr. Eastman claimed he was concerned about those flying him to his UN appointment via a Marine helicopter. He also claimed they might be useful in case he or the others on his flight “encountered a patient in need.”

The real reason can only be imagined. But there are some eye-opening things here:

Eastman’s staff initially responded to his request by explaining that Narcan, which can save the lives of those who overdose on fentanyl, has been requested for CBP operations in the past, but not fentanyl itself. The whistleblowers say staff members raised questions about how he would store the lollipops and what he would do with unused fentanyl at the end of the operation, according to the report. 

Eastman responded by writing his own policy regarding procurement of Schedule II narcotics, which omitted any mention of how narcotics were to be stored and disposed of, the whistleblowers allege.

Absolutely on the up and up here. Definitely not the actions of an opiate addict. I mean, we all know the saying: a thief will steal your stuff; a junkie will help you look for it.

On top of this, the whistleblowers pointed out the doctor was an uninvited guest. The chief medical officer is rarely, if ever, asked to attend UN general assemblies. But Eastman inserted himself (and his desire for opioid lollipops) into this equation by insisting his presence was necessary because [squints at report] the CBP was assisting the Secret Service with event security. The addition of a doctor with fentanyl lollipops would apparently make this security even more secure.

While it’s nice the whistle was blown, it appears Dr. Nick Eastman still retains his position as the chief medical officer for the CBP. I guess that’s good news for the boys in green, who will be able to indulge their opiate sweet tooth without fear of reprisal. On top of that, we’re now assured it’s safe to bring opioid edibles on board a government aircraft without having to worry about killing everyone on board with these airborne contaminants. Let’s hope Dr. Eastman continues to maintain his position while simultaneously undercutting the federal government’s “every milligram is a killer” narrative. The more he destroys his own reputation, the more he dismantles anti-drug hysteria that makes people stupider, rather than safer.

Well… this is an unexpected (and fun!) turn of events. The EU Commission has spent most of the last couple of years trying to talk EU members into voting in favor of weakened encryption, if not actual encryption backdoors. You know, for the children.

On the table are things ranging from mandated client-side content scanning to the compelled breaking of encryption whenever law enforcement wants access to communications. These plans — including parallel efforts by the UK government (which is no longer an EU member) — have attracted more opposition than support, but that hasn’t stopped the commission from moving forward with these efforts, even when its own legal counsel has stated these mandates would violate EU laws.

While it’s possible (but extremely unwise) to blow off your own internal legal guidance to get with the encryption breaking, it’s much more difficult to ignore overriding external legal guidance that says what you’re trying to do is blatantly illegal. You can always hire more subservient lawyers if you don’t like what’s being said by the ones you have. But you can’t blow off the European Court of Human Rights quite as easily.

As Thomas Claburn reports for The Register, a long-running case involving (of all things) the Russian government’s attempt to force Telegram to decrypt communications has resulted in a loss that will be felt by all of the EU’s anti-encryption lawmakers.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights – a decision that may derail European data surveillance legislation known as Chat Control.

The court issued a decision on Tuesday stating that “the contested legislation providing for the retention of all internet communications of all users, the security services’ direct access to the data stored without adequate safeguards against abuse and the requirement to decrypt encrypted communications, as applied to end-to-end encrypted communications, cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society.”

Ouch. Good luck pushing anti-encryption mandates when the court has declared them unnecessary in a democratic society. And, somehow, we have the Russian government to thank for this turn of events.

The case dates back to 2017, which is when Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB) tried to force Telegram to engage in compelled decryption of Anton Podchasov’s communications. Podchasov challenged the order in Russia but the Russian court dismissed it. So, Podchasov brought the matter to the ECHR because — prior to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine — Russia was still part of the Council of Europe and (at least theoretically) subject to ECHR rulings.

Well, Russia may have exited the Council with its illegal invasion, but the courtroom challenge was still active. The final ruling — which will have zero effect on how Russia handles compelled decryption — is throwing a considerably sized wrench into the mechanations of anti-encryption legislators in the EU government.

The court concluded that the Russian law requiring Telegram “to decrypt end-to-end encrypted communications risks amounting to a requirement that providers of such services weaken the encryption mechanism for all users.” As such, the court considers that requirement disproportionate to legitimate law enforcement goals.

The EU Commission dropped its anti-encryption demands last summer following considerable pushback from EU member governments. But that doesn’t mean those desires aren’t still there, even if they’re dormant at the moment.

But this ruling will make it almost impossible to resurrect most of the EU Commission’s anti-encryption efforts. The court’s ruling makes it clear there’s no legally justifiable reason for breaking end-to-end encryption. And the ancillary stuff — like client-side scanning and extensive logging demands — is far less likely to receive a warm welcome from member states, not to mention EU courts, following this ruling (even as the European Court of Human Right is not a part of the EU, its judgments cover the EU members as well as other members in the Council of Europe).

Most of the stuff the EU Commission has been trying to enact over the past few years has been declared illegal. If it wants to do these things, it will have to change several other laws first. And that effort is far less likely to succeed, since changing these laws means breaking the law. You can always write illegal laws. You just can’t enforce them.

So, unless the EU Commission has the power to talk its members into backing its preferred brand of friendly fascism, it will just have to dial back its expectations. Sure, those who think any means can be justified by the ends will throw up their hands in despair and proclaim this is the beginning of a new criminal apocalypse. But for everyone else, this ruling means their communications will remain secure — both from EU government agencies as well as entities far more malicious.

I’m normally not a “ends justifies the means” sort of guy, but ever since some House Republicans started getting shitty about Section 702 surveillance after some of their own got swept up in the dragnet, I’ve become a bit more pragmatic. Section 702 is long overdue for reform. If it takes a bunch of conveniently angry legislators to do it, so be it.

The NSA uses this executive authorization to sweep up millions of “foreign” communications. But if one side of these communications involves a US person, the NSA is supposed to keep its eyes off of it. The same thing goes for the FBI. But the FBI has spent literal decades ignoring these restraints, preferring to dip into the NSA’s data pool as often as possible for the sole reason of converting a foreign-facing surveillance program into a handy means for domestic surveillance.

The FBI’s constant abuse of this program has seen it scolded by FISA judges, excoriated by legislators actually willing to stand up for their constituents’ rights, and habitually abused verbally at internet sites like this one.

Not that it has mattered. For years, the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) has been given a blanket blessing of their spy programs by legislators who have been convinced nothing but a clean re-authorization is acceptable in terrorist times like these.

Fortunately for all of us, the future of Section 702 remains in a particularly hellish limbo. As Dell Cameron reports for Wired, Republicans are going to war against other Republicans, limiting the chances of Section 702 moving forward without significant alteration.

The latest botched effort at salvaging a controversial US surveillance program collapsed this week thanks to a sabotage campaign by the United States House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI), crushing any hope of unraveling the program’s fate before Congress pivots to prevent a government shutdown in March.

An agreement struck between rival House committees fell apart on Wednesday after one side of the dispute—represented by HPSCI—ghosted fellow colleagues at a crucial hearing while working to poison a predetermined plan to usher a “compromise bill” to the floor.

This makes it sound like this is a bad thing. It isn’t, even if those thwarting a clean re-auth have extremely dirty hands. Legislators should definitely take a long look at this surveillance power, especially when it’s been abused routinely by the FBI to engage in surveillance of US persons who are supposed to be beyond the reach of this foreign-facing dragnet.

Some in the House want the FBI to pay for what it did to Trump loyalists. Some in the House want the FBI to do whatever it wants, so long as it can claim it’s doing (our?) God’s work in its counterterrorism efforts. Excluded from the current infighting are people who actually give a damn about limiting surveillance abuses, shunted to the side by political opportunists, loudmouths, and far too many legislators who refuse to hold the FBI accountable.

What’s odd about this scuttling is the reason it happened. It had nothing to do with Section 702 and everything to do with the government’s predilection for buying data from brokers to avoid warrant requirements erected by Supreme Court rulings.

The impetus for killing the deal, WIRED has learned, was an amendment that would end the government’s ability to pay US companies for information rather than serving them with a warrant. This includes location data collected from cell phones that are capable in many cases of tracking people’s physical whereabouts almost constantly. The data is purportedly gathered for advertising purposes but is collected by data brokers and frequently sold to US spies and police agencies instead.

Senior aides say the HPSCI chair, Mike Turner, personally exploded the deal while refusing to appear for a hearing on Wednesday in which lawmakers were meant to decide the rules surrounding the vote. A congressional website shows that HPSCI staff had not filed one of the amendments meant to be discussed before the Rules Committee, suggesting that at no point in the day did Turner plan to attend.

And that’s where we are now: legislators refusing to authorize one form of domestic surveillance because it would rather give the feds a pass on a much more prevalent form of domestic surveillance. The former once ensnared some of Trump’s buddies. The latter has yet to do so.

The infighting continues, with one side being rallied by none of than Fox News, which prefers to cater to its base, rather than provide any reporting or analysis that might accurately portray current events. The spin being pushed by Fox claims the alterations added to the bill would somehow prevent the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) from surveilling foreign terrorists.

A Fox News report published Thursday morning, while accurately noting that it was Turner’s threat that forced Johnson to cancel the vote, goes on to cite “sources close to the Intelligence Committee” who offered analysis of the events. The sources claimed that Turner was compelled to abandon the deal because the “compromise bill” had been sneakily altered in a manner that “totally screws FISA in terms of its ability to be a national security tool.”

While redirecting blame away from Turner and his cohorts, the claim is both false and deceptive, relying on assertions that, while farcical perhaps to legal experts, would be impossible for the public at large (and most of the press) to parse alone.

Section 702 still has a good chance to survive intact. This infighting actually makes it much less likely any true reform will take place. Grandstanding has replaced oversight. But, at least for now, we can be assured the surveillance program will remain one step away from being ditched until House Republicans can reconcile their desire to protect people like Carter Page with their desire to treat everyone a little bit on the brown side as a potential terrorist.