Tag: police

German Army had to help the police tidy up an illegal collection of weapons of war in this basement

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For decades, a German man has stockpiled Nazi weapons of war in his basement, including a 45-ton Panzer-V (Panther) tank and an 88-millimeter anti-aircraft gun. Now, a German court has given him a 14-month suspended sentence and fine of about $300,000 for the arsenal, which was seized in a raid in 2015.

While it takes some effort for German citizens to legally buy and carry loaded firearms, it’s entirely prohibited to own any weapons of war. According to Insider, the man violated the Weapons Control Act by possessing military-grade weapons. His lawyers, however, argued that because most of his collection was non-functioning, he could not be charged.

The man, identified in court documents as Klaus-Dieter F. from Heikendorf, had also amassed a torpedo, 70 rifles and machine guns, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and an unspecified number of semi and fully automatic pistols…

According to locals, the tank was an open secret, and the man even used it as a snowplow once during a particularly harsh winter shortly after acquiring it from an English junkyard.

He got a suspended sentence and paid a hefty fine. I’m not certain why he didn’t make the effort to become a licensed collector. That is perfectly legal in Germany and, in fact, legal collectors are now buying the collection of armaments from the police department which confiscated them. I hope he gets a piece of it to cover his $300,000 fine for breaking the law.

One year since George Floyd murdered by Minneapolis police

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Brandon Bell/Getty

Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday for the rally in front of the courthouse in downtown Minneapolis where a month ago former policeman Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering the black man by kneeling on his neck…

Amid chants of “no justice, no peace!” and “Say his name,” Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey and St Paul mayor Melvin Carter watched alongside a dozen of Floyd’s family members as speakers called for justice for families of black men slain by police.

Tuesday will mark one year since Floyd’s death sparked worldwide protests and calls for change in policing in the U.S….

Since Floyd’s killing, at least 17 states, including Minnesota, have enacted legislation to ban or restrict the use of chokeholds and neck restraints by police officers, according to data provided to the Associated Press by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Before then, only two states, Tennessee and Illinois, had bans on such police hold techniques. A majority of the bans enacted over the past year are in states controlled politically by Democrats.

No surprise, there. No one expects any political body controlled by the Republican Party to support freedom, democracy or an end to racism in the United States.

New Coppers often teamed with crap coppers. Guess what they learn?

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YOU GUESSED IT! HOW TO BE CRAP COPPERS.

Police in the United States receive less initial training than their counterparts in other rich countries—about five months in a classroom and another three or so months in the field, on average. Many European nations, meanwhile, have something more akin to police universities, which can take three or four years to complete. European countries also have national standards for various elements of a police officer’s job—such as how to search a car and when to use a baton. The U.S. does not.

The 18,000 police departments in the U.S. each have their own rules and requirements. But although police reform is a contentious subject, the inadequacy of the current training provides a rare point of relative consensus: “Police officers, police chiefs, and everyone agree that we do not get enough training in a myriad of fields,” Dennis Slocumb, the legislative director of the International Union of Police Associations, told me…

…Few American officers receive much education about the history of policing or the role of police in a democratic society. “The officer coming out of one of the European training programs, he’s much more likely to have a much broader perspective on what the job is, what your role is, what your society is like, how do you fit into it,” says David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “Those things are just not really part of what’s going on in most American police-training programs.”…

New officers are often paired with field-training officers, but many of those officers learned the wrong techniques themselves, and are passing them along to their trainees. Derek Chauvin, who was convicted on Tuesday of murder, was acting as a field-training officer when he killed George Floyd. Kim Potter, who shouted “Taser! Taser! Taser!” before fatally shooting Daunte Wright with her pistol last week, was also acting as a field-training officer at the time.

I think you get the idea. It makes a great deal of sense [to me] that folks who are actually trained to be professionals, meeting recognized standards of behavior…will turn out to be police professionals more often than not. That might even be a more useful place to spend tax dollars than urban assault tanks. Or picking up the tab for defending cops who murder civilians.

Indianapolis gunman bought rifles even though shotgun previously confiscated by police

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Brandon Hole’s mother called police last March and told them she feared her son might try to commit “death by cop”, Paul Keenan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office, said.

Officers arrested him and took away his shotgun, records quoted by the Indianapolis Star newspaper show … The FBI then interviewed him a month later but did not find evidence of a crime and did not identify Hole as following extremist ideology, Agent Keenan said…

He was subsequently able to buy two assault rifles in July and September … Hole used both assault rifles in the attack, police said.

Local police were aware of this wannabe killer. The FBI was aware of this wannabe killer. Apparently, not fitting perfectly into the catalog of popular crimes both policing outfits cared about … just left him adrift in the winds of anger, defiance and, preventable, deadly results.

“Stranger Fruit”

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Unchanging, perpetual, the American Pietá

There is a demand put upon you with “Stranger Fruit.” That much is clear. The photographs of mothers and sons, of Black bodies—whole and unpierced, yet still Christ-like in death—do not gently plead with viewers any more than street protesters merely invite police to change. These are Black mothers, sitting, standing, kneeling with their lifeless sons, staring straight at the camera, straight at the viewer, straight at the nation, commanding your attention, and it costs you dearly to see them. But it costs more to look away.

“What we’re experiencing now is just this series of reliving these traumas as far as the African-American community,” says Brooklyn-based visual artist Jon Henry. His “Stranger Fruit” exhibition is based on police killings of Black people. It draws on the song “Strange Fruit,” Nina Simone’s interpretation of the Billie Holiday requiem for lynched bodies “swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” It compels you to consider the grief of families and communities left on their own and trying to move on. “It’s difficult to keep living these over and over again, sort of like a perverse Groundhog Day where these murders just keep on happening,” Henry says.

So say we all!

[Click on the photograph up top for Lady Day’s original]

Indian Coppers Arrest Pakistani Pigeon On Charges Of Espionage

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The pigeon was wearing an anklet inscribed with a series of numbers when it was captured on the Indian side of the India-Pakistan border…Because of the anklet and the sensitive area in which the bird was recovered, authorities are taking the incident very seriously. However, they have yet to decipher the message.

A Pakistani villager has since come forward as the bird’s owner. He claimed to have simply flown his pigeons to celebrate this year’s Eid-al-Fitr festival, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. He also explained that the numbers inscribed on the pigeon’s metal ring were not a code but rather his phone number.

Pakistani newspaper Dawn has since identified the man as Habibullah and confirmed that he does, indeed, own a dozen pigeons. The man told the publication that the bird was a “symbol of peace,” and that India should “refrain from victimizing innocent birds.”

Cops behaving like cops aren’t unusual anywhere. The greater the paranoia in whichever nation, the more likely is stupid or silly behavior by defenders of faith and Fatherland.

Coppers using Tasers for Torture

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Police Sergeant using taser on handcuffed prisoner

❝ Corporal Matthew Stice pointed his Taser at Martini Smith’s bare chest.

Smith was 20 years old, pregnant and stripped nearly naked, standing in a cell in the Franklin County jail in Columbus, Ohio. She had been detained on charges of stabbing a boyfriend she’d accused of beating her. Stice and a deputy had ordered her to disrobe, take off all jewelry and don a prison gown. But she hadn’t been able to obey one command – remove the silver stud from her tongue.

❝ “Take the tongue ring out,” Deputy Shawnda Arnold said. Smith continued struggling to unscrew the ring, inserting fingers from both hands into her mouth. No luck. Her fingers were numb, she protested: She had been cuffed for six hours with her hands behind her back.

“I will Tase you,” Stice said. The ring was slippery, Smith said, asking for a paper towel. The deputies refused. “I just want to go to sleep,” Smith cried.

Stice warned her again, then fired. The Taser’s electrified darts struck Smith’s chest; she collapsed against the concrete wall and slid to the floor, gasping, arms over her breasts.

❝ “Why did you Tase me?” she moaned. “I wasn’t harming nobody. I can’t just take it out.”

Five days later, Smith had a miscarriage…

❝ Reuters identified 104 deaths involving Tasers behind bars, nearly all since 2000 – 10 percent of a larger universe of more than 1,000 fatal law enforcement encounters in which the weapons were used. Some of the in-custody deaths were deemed “multi-factorial,” with no distinct cause, and some were attributed to pre-existing health problems. But the Taser was listed as a cause or contributing factor in more than a quarter of the 84 inmate deaths in which the news agency obtained autopsy findings.

RTFA and begin to understand why most poor or non-white or just ordinary workingclass folks consider our police departments to be something other than institutions chartered to “serve and protect”.

100,000 dead, 30,000 missing — Mexico’s war on drugs turns 10 years old

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❝ Ten years after Mexico declared a war on drugs, the offensive has left some major drug cartels splintered and many old-line kingpins like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in jail, but done little to reduce crime or violence in the nation’s roughest regions.

❝ Some say the war has been a crucial, but flawed, effort. Others argue the offensive begun by then-President Felipe Calderon on Dec. 11, 2006, unleashed an unnecessary tragedy with more than 100,000 people dead and about 30,000 missing – a toll comparable to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.

In some places, homicide rates have lessened. In others, the killings continue unabated. The drawn-out conflict has also had a profound effect on those close to the cross-hairs of suffering: youths inured to extreme violence; adults so fed-up with poor and corrupt policing that they took up arms as vigilantes; and families who banded together in the face of authorities’ inability to find their vanished loved ones…

❝ Mexico’s armed forces have increasingly been pulled into the conflict because police forces are often corrupt or unreliable. That has had its own toll on the troops, who are frequently ambushed and accused of illegally executing detained cartel suspects in some cases.

Defense Secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos noted that the army’s involvement was only supposed to be temporary while policing was reformed.

“Ten years ago it was decided that the police should be rebuilt, and we still haven’t seen that reconstruction,” Cienfuegos said. “This isn’t something that can be solved with bullets. It requires other measures, and there has not been decisive action on budgets to make that happen.”…

❝ “Things are the same as far as crime,” said Hipolito Mora, the founder of one of the first “self-defense” militias. “The government has to do more to combat the corruption in itself. If they don’t do that, nothing is going to work. It is the corruption within the government that creates tolerance for organized crime.”…

Corruption, large and small, flourishes because it continues as part of the culture of the political rulers of Mexico. Public efforts to clean up even local government generally are little more than window dressing. There are exceptions. They are in spite of the national government – not because of aid from the government.