A New York business owner was targeted by local police after they became suspicious of his store. As a result, they sent in an undercover informant on two separate occasions who ultimately hurt them a lot more than he helped.
On the second visit, the informant allegedly planted and photographed crack cocaine, which led to the arrest of store owner Donald Andrews Jr.
Andrews operates a “smoke shop” in Scotia that sells incense and other smoking paraphernalia that can easily be used for other illicit activities.
Andrews’ attorney, Kevin Luibrand, narrated a video that was shot by in-store surveillance cameras that appears to show the informant planting and photographing the crack.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-27 04:13:312016-04-11 11:18:16Undercover Informant Plants Crack Cocaine In Store of NY Businessman (+video)
Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe Massachusetts State Police photographer who may lose his job after leaking photos of accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is receiving an outpouring of support on social media, with thousands on Facebook calling for him to be reinstated.
A Facebook page called “Save Sgt. Sean Murphy” has received nearly 35,000 “likes,” with many commenting Murphy made the right decision in leaking the photos of Tsarnaev bloodied while surrendering to authorities, The Boston Herald reports.
“Sean Murphy should be commended not condemned … he and those who brought this to a conclusion should be honored and not harassed … kudos and thank you,” one user said according to the Boston Herald.
Murphy faces a hearing to determine if he will be suspended until an internal investigation is complete. He was relieved of duty for one day after he released the photos to Boston Magazine in response to a controversial image on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
The photos show a downcast, disheveled Tsarnaev with the red dot of a sniper’s rifle laser sight boring into his forehead. They were taken when Tsarnaev was captured April 19, bleeding and hiding in a dry-docked boat in a Watertown backyard.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-22 01:05:412016-04-11 11:18:43Thousands Rally to Support Police Photographer Who Leaked Alleged Bomber Photos to Media (+video)
Photo Credit: YouTubeBy Tom Dart. Police in Houston are investigating claims that four men have been held as long-term captives in dire conditions at a house in the city.
Officers received a call at about 8.25am local time Friday morning alleging that several men were being held against their will in a converted garage at a single-story home on Whitecastle Lane, 10 miles north of downtown.
Police arrived and found four men aged roughly from 50 to 80 living there. Three appeared to be malnourished and were taken to a local hospital. They had been at the house for varying lengths of time, with one claiming he had been kept there for about a decade. Officials are investigating whether the men are homeless invalids or military veterans who were forced to hand over their welfare money.
“All four said they had been enticed to that location with the promise of beer and cigarettes and not been allowed to leave,” a police department spokesman told the Guardian. Several women with apparent mental disabilities were also found to be living there, he added.
One man who does not live at the property was detained for questioning and has not been charged, pending further investigation, the spokesman said.
Photo Credit: Houston Police DepartmentGrandson, 31 of woman who owned Houston house where three starved and abused men were kept in ‘prison room’ for a DECADE is charged
By Jessica Jerreat. The grandson of the owner of a Houston house, where three malnourished men were discovered living in ‘deplorable’ conditions on Friday, has been charged.
Walter Jones has been charged with injury to the elderly by act, and injury to the elderly by omission.
Jones is suspected of keeping the men, including a military veteran, in a filthy garage while he claimed their disability welfare and veterans’ checks.
The alleged victims, who had to be taken from the house on stretchers because they were so malnourished, told police they had been lured to the house with the promise of cigarettes and food, according to CNN.
Once inside the house they were not allowed to leave, police spokesman Jodi Silva said. She added: ‘They were apparently given scraps to eat. Very little food was being provided to them.’ Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00newseditorhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngnewseditor2013-07-20 22:00:392016-04-11 11:18:48Houston Police Investigate Claims of Eight People Held Captive in ‘Dungeon’ For Up to Ten Years – UPDATED
Photo Credit: CNNBy Michael Martinez. Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.
The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.
The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it’s being stored — sometimes indefinitely — with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.
“The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance,” the ACLU said in a written statement.
Photo Credit: APHow the government is keeping track of EVERYWHERE you’re driving thanks to license plates and police scanners
By James Nye. Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems.
While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Robert Landau/CorbisAlarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans’ locations – not just government agencies
By Ed Pilkington. Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.
“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Crump said that the creeping growth of license plate scanners echoed the debate over the National Security Agency. “It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do – because that’s what’s being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.”
ACLU based their research on the results of freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwide that generated 26,000 pages of documents. The mountain of training materials, internal memos and policy statements retrieved by the group has opened a door on a previously little understood world. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters ACLU: We’re Increasingly Living in a Dragnet Society
“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU, which wants police departments to immediately delete records of cars not linked to a crime…
The ACLU study, based on 26,000 pages of responses from 293 police departments and state agencies across the country, also found that license plate scanners produced a small fraction of “hits,” or alerts to police that a suspicious vehicle has been found.
In Maryland, for example, the state reported reading about 29 million plates between January and May of last year. Of that amount, about 60,000 — or roughly 1 in every 500 license plates — were suspicious. The No. 1 crime? A suspended or revoked registration, or a violation of the state’s emissions inspection program accounted for 97 percent of all alerts. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:05:242016-04-11 11:18:58Moving Closer to Police State: Agencies Tracking Innocent Drivers by License Plate Scanners Everywhere (+video)
Photo Credit: Irish CentralWhen you get run over by a freight train, the cause of death is usually delivered by the locomotive…Not the caboose.
The rainy night of February 26, in Sanford Florida, Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, neighborhood watch captain for the Twin Lakes community. Zimmerman is the figurative caboose in the tragic tale in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
The Twin Lakes neighborhood that George Zimmerman became neighborhood watch captain had suffered eight burglaries plus other crimes, in the 15 months prior to Trayvon Martin’s shooting.
One of the burglaries was a brazen, horrific day time break in to the home of Olivia Bertalan who was alone with her infant as two men broke in and ransacked her home, while she and her baby huddled in terror in a bedroom. The two criminals left with her valuables before police arrived.
This was the final straw for citizens in the community and it was decided to organize a Neighborhood Watch because police were not preventing the crime being inflicted on them. So the community resorted to tactics to try to defend themselves.
Perhaps if the Sanford Police Department had more resources, it could have sent extra patrols to the Twin lakes community and focused on crime abatement…Rather than citizens taking it upon themselves to enhance their protection.
The saying when danger is seconds away, the police are just minutes away, could not have been any more evident as the Twin lakes community was assailed by crime. Time after time police came after the crime was committed; to take reports and statements….But this did nothing to prevent the crime in the first place.
The Zimmerman trial spotlighted detective work, forensic experts, medical examiners and skilled attorneys trying to persuade a jury of George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence in the death of Trayvon Martin.
Perhaps what should be on trial is how law enforcement failed to protect the Twin Lakes community from crime in the first place and why certain steps weren’t followed by law enforcement to help the community to protect itself…The legal system turned on this community and George Zimmerman for only trying to defend themselves from crime: Zimmerman is on trial for his freedom and the Twin Lakes community had to pay a one million dollar judgement
The freight train that killed Trayvon Martin that night was the legal systems failure to protect citizens from crime. George Zimmerman and the Twin Lakes community were only the caboose in that long train of events.
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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-14 01:49:152016-04-11 11:19:19Zimmerman Trial Exposes the Failure of Law Enforcement to Protect Us From Crime
More on the Attempted Carjackings from the Orlando Sentinel
By Jerriann Sullivan. Several Good Samaritans, including one with a gun, joined police in chasing down an Orlando man after he allegedly tried to carjack four different drivers at knifepoint Monday morning.
Eliud Martir Montalvo’s rampage started at 9:30 a.m. when he ran toward 80-year-old Joan Shedd and grabbed for her car keys in the Publix parking lot at 4402 Curry Ford Road, an Orlando Police Department arrest report said.
Shedd didn’t give up her keys, so 54-year-old Montalvo kicked her rear end, knocking her on the ground, police said.
A witness told police the Orlando man kept kicking the elderly woman before a man chased him away.
Montalvo ran from Shedd’s vehicle to Connie Sue Gooley’s truck and tried to carjack it, the report said. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-11 02:21:032016-04-11 11:19:32Police: Marine Corps Veteran Stops Carjacker Holding Knife to Girl’s Throat (+video)
Authorities are investigating a widespread sex scandal involving nearly a dozen police officers in one Florida city after a civilian crime analyst detailed trysts with the men in police and fire stations, patrol cars, motels and even in a parking lot after a memorial service for a slain officer.
Sue Eberle, 37, has told officials that she had consensual and sometimes coerced sex with the officers and a firefighter, and that she once was propositioned by a city worker in Lakeland. Eberle’s accounts of the liaisons were largely corroborated by her sexual partners and others within the police department, and published in a graphic, 59-page report written in an incredulous tone by the county’s top prosecutor. It said the department’s problems investigating crimes might be caused by some high-ranking officers being more interested in having sex with Eberle than doing their jobs.
“The investigation revealed an extraordinary amount of sexual conduct that was committed both on-duty and off-duty,” wrote Jerry Hill, Polk County’s state attorney, in the report dated June 25. “We find the conduct of a number of sworn officers, including some officers of rank, to be at best a waste of taxpayer dollars. At worst their actions indicate a moral bankruptcy that exists amongst some individuals within the ranks at the Lakeland Police Department.”
Eberle, who has retained an attorney, recounted for Hill how she had sex in police cars, cemeteries and motels with different officers – and in the parking lot outside a reception that followed the December 2011 funeral of Officer Arnulfo Crispin, who had been fatally shot on duty. She also said officers and some supervisors pressured her for sex, groped her while working and texted her photos of their genitalia.
Photo Credit: Highway Patrol ImagesA video affiliated with the Libertarian Party that involved Rutherford County Sheriff’s Deputy A.J. Ross went viral yesterday on social media sites.
“We’ve gotten worldwide response for this,” said Axl David, communications director for the Libertarian Party of Tennessee, a political party that encourages minimum government limited to following the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The video depicted a verbal altercation between Chris Kalbaugh, a 21-year-old junior at Middle Tennessee State University, and Ross at a DUI checkpoint Thursday night…
When Kalbaugh continued to challenge Ross’ demands on the basis of “constitutional rights,” Ross ordered him to pull his car over and step out of the vehicle.
“I broke no laws, and I made sure to be respectful the entire time while still exercising my constitutional freedom,” Kalbaugh said. “The officers would not let me leave, but they would not answer if I was being detained.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-09 02:31:112016-04-11 11:19:41Cops Violate Student’s Constitutional Rights at Roadblock, Video Goes Viral
Photo Credit: Carolyn Kaster/APA District police officer accused of threatening Michelle Obama has been cleared of administrative charges related to the first lady but was found guilty of posting a derogatory job description on social media and depicting the president as a communist, his attorney said Monday.
Members of a departmental review board ruled that Christopher Picciano, a 17-year veteran who was a member of the elite presidential motorcade detail, should be suspended without pay for 40 days for conduct unbecoming an officer. His attorney, James W. Pressler, said his client is weighing an appeal. The city had sought to have Picciano fired.
“We’re pleased that he was exonerated of all allegations that he made threats against the first lady,” Pressler said. “He has maintained from the beginning that it was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke.”
The U.S. attorney’s office had declined to file charges against the officer, agreeing with the Secret Service that Picciano was not serious with his comment about Michelle Obama. But during the investigation, detectives found troubling though unrelated postings on the officer’s LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.
Those included a communist emblem — a hammer and sickle — superimposed over a campaign poster of President Obama and Picciano’s self-described job description as “zoo keeper of the MPD.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-09 02:22:212016-04-11 11:19:42Officer Cleared of Threatening Michelle Obama But Guilty of Calling Barack a Commie
A Florida woman is jailed on a felony battery on a law enforcement officer charge after she allegedly kissed a cop on the nose.
Peggy Hill, 62, was arrested late Saturday evening outside her Bradenton residence by Manatee County Sheriff’s Office deputies who had arrived at the home in response to a call about a dispute between Hill and a neighbor about a fence between their properties.
As Hill was conversing with Sergeant Randy Lamb, “she approached him and kissed him on his nose against his will.” Lamb, an 18-year veteran, stepped away from Hill and “wiped off the saliva from his nose”…
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-02 02:49:042013-07-02 02:49:04Woman, 62, Jailed On Felony Battery Charge After Kissing Cop On The Nose
