Hutto police Sergent Chris Kelly was was killed in the line of duty today after being run over by a suspect during a traffic stop. (The suspect is in custody.) Kelly was a USAF veteran, and left behind a wife and two children.
Police work is deeply necessary for civilized society, and occasi0onally very dangerous…
There’s a Joe R. Lansdale story called “The Pit” where two prisoners are forced to fight each other to death in a pit for sport. The story details suggest it takes place somewhere in the deep south. Who could have imagined that a real-life version of the story (thankfully minus the “to death” part) would take place in San Francisco?
San Francisco sheriff’s deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.
Neu serves at County Jail No. 4 at 850 Bryant St despite having settled claims that he raped a woman prisoner and two transgendered prisoners while working at the jail. He sports a tattoo reading “850 Mob,” believed to describe the name used by the corrupt deputies to describe themselves. At least four other deputies are implicated in the program of sexualized torture.
Snip.
Neu and his co-conspirators gambled on the outcome of fights. One fight pitted the smallest inmate in the jail against the largest, and the fighters say they were threatened with rape and beatings by the guards if they didn’t spar. Neu is also said to have coerced prisoners into training for the fights with threats of rape and violence. Neu has a reputation for sadistic practices overall, including making prisoners gamble to receive their food, clothes and comfort items. Even when prisoners won the games Neu forced on them with the red dice and the deck of cards he carried, he would sometimes take away their “winnings” and give them to other prisoners.
Well, just sounds like a lovely fellow all around, doesn’t he?
Of course, these are just accusations, and Mr. Neu has not yet been proven guilty in a court of law. Maybe his attorney will offer up evidence of his innocence.
The Deputies’ Union attorney Harry Stern claims the Public Defender is making a big deal out of nothing. He says that the prisoners were encouraged to “wrestle to settle disputes about who was stronger,” and were “encouraged” to work out. He dismissed the entire affair as “little more than horseplay.”
Holy crap! When a guy’s defense attorney starts out essentially admitting the basic charge against him but dismissing it as “horseplay,” you’ve got to think the guy is guilty as sin.
And he doesn’t even have the excuse of being in a “high stress, low pay” job since this is, after all, California. According to public records, Scott Neu pulled down a cool $150,912 in the 2012-2013 timeframe (and I’d bet more last year).
Evidently paying unionized public employees more than the market demands doesn’t lead to a higher quality of employee…
There’s been much talk about how State Rep. Jason Villalba’s House Bill 2918 criminalizes bloggers filming police officers, especially if they’re CHL holders who happen to be lawfully carrying at the time. Worse yet, it takes the “some animals are more equal than others” approach to First Amendment rights, declaring MSM employees as “real journalists” and bloggers, citizens journalists and everyone else as second class citizens.
Texas State Representative Jason Villalba (R-Texas) has found himself at the center of controversy after filing a bill that would make it a crime for bloggers and independent journalists — as well as regular citizens — to film police officers. Despite the backlash from free speech advocates, Villalba is insisting that his bill “does not infringe on constitutional rights” or “limit liberty in any way.”
The current law, Section 38.15(1) of the Texas Penal Code, makes it a crime if anyone “interrupts, disrupts, impedes, or otherwise interferes with a peace officer while the peace officer is performing a duty or exercising authority imposed or granted by law.”
The bill, HB 2918, adds to the definition of what constitutes “interfering” with an officer’s duties, and would make it a Class B Misdemeanor to film, record, photograph, or document the officer within 25 feet while that officer is performing his official duties. That distance is extended to 100 feet if the person is carrying a concealed handgun. There is an exception for news media, but the current language of the bill does not include bloggers, independent journalists, or private citizens, and it is not clear whether online media outlets would be included in the exception either.
The fact that CHL holders are statistically among the most lawful citizens, having already passed an extensive background check, seems lost on Rep. Villalba (who seems to be trying very hard to win the title of worst Republican state representative).
The bill would also prevent people from recording their own encounters with police, which adds a due process violation cherry on top of Villalba’s disdain for the first and second amendment.
However, the unconstitutional stupidity doesn’t stop there. If you read the actual text of the bill, there’s no allowance made for private property. So if I’m filing a police officer arrest someone in the street 15 feet in front of my house, Villalba’s proposed law says I’m committing a crime.
Being a police officer is a difficult and necessary job, but ordinary citizens filming them aren’t endangering their lives. Rep. Villalba seems to have no understanding that the right retained by the people themselves are part of our Constitution’s series of checks and balances.
Villalba’s bill addresses no demonstrable abuse and attempts to limit the rights of citizens for no clear gain. It’s almost certainly headed for the dustbin of legislative neglect, but one wonders why Rep. Villalba felt the need to introduce it at all…
The classic saying is that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Judging from how many liberals have been saying how much they hate cops, I would guess that very few have been mugged in recent years. Chalk that up to falling crime rates, which in turn was helped along by aggressive “broken windows” policing like that which helped bring crime under control in Guliani-era New York City.
Given how many on the identity politics left were chanting “Dead Cops” in recent weeks, it looks like they’ve forgotten (or simply don’t care) what it took to bring those crime rates down. Which brings us to the recent police shootings.
Former NY Police Commissioner Howard Safir noted: “Michael Brown and Eric Garner died resisting arrest. Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu died doing their job. It is a very important distinction.” Further:
The national dialogue on proper and effective policing has been totally distorted. Activists purporting to represent the majority of the black community have been bolstered by a 24 hour news cycle that gives them unwarranted credibility. I do not believe for one minute that Al Sharpton represents the feelings of most hardworking, law abiding black American families. I know through dozens of community meetings during my time as NYC Police Commissioner that what the black community wants most is what we all want—a safe environment in which to live their lives.
Snip.
Does that mean that there are not serious incidents of police abuse or misjudgment? Of course there are. When they take place we should investigate them thoroughly and prosecute and punish those who committed the wrong doing. We should not burn down buildings and murder police officers.
When Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley brutally executed Officers Ramos and Liu he did so in an atmosphere of permissiveness and anti-police rhetoric unlike any that I have seen in 45 years in law enforcement. The rhetoric this time is not from the usual suspects, but from the Mayor of New York City, the Attorney General of the United States, and even the President. It emboldens criminals and sends a message that every encounter a black person has with a police officer is one to be feared. Nothing could be further from the truth. We will never know what was in the mind of Brinsley when he shot officers Ramos and Liu. However we do know that he has seen nothing but police bashing from some of the highest officials in the land.
You could chalk some of that bashing up to the usual Democratic hostility to working class men, but this goes much deeper. The radicals who now make up the ideological core of of the Democratic Party never got over their hatred of the police, still viewing them as agents of oppression and “The Man”–even though, with Obama and Holder in office, they are in fact “The Man” themselves these days. But who could have possibly imagined that the same activists who chanted “Free Mumia!” would one day chant that they wanted “dead cops,” or that the members of Occupy would delight in publicly defecating on cop cars? Also remember that Obama’s pals in the Weather Underground were always far more adept at killing policemen like Brian McDonnell and Waverly Brown than they ever were at effecting political change.
The likes of Obama, Holder and Sharpton have continually inflamed racial tensions by hyping otherwise nationally insignificant stories like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in order to continue milking minority grievances and keep them voting Democratic. When it comes to standing with grievance-mongering Social Justice Warriors, or standing with cops, the Democratic Party elite has chosen to stand with the Al Sharptons of the world.
If Democrats want a rerun of the sixties and early seventies, they shouldn’t be surprised when voters in 2016 treat them the same way they treated George McGovern in 1972.
From the Austin legal beat, Antonio Buehler was found not guilty of refusing to obey a police officer’s instructions while filming an arrest on January 1st, 2012.
Chalk up another small but real win for the right to monitor government employees doing their work in public.
Been a while since I did a roundup on gun news and examples of criminal stupidity, so here it is:
In an encouraging follow-up to the previous story about a cop who shot a dog in a dog park, the office in question has actually been charged.