Month: September 2008

Still No Good News for the West Memphis Three. The long, sad case of the West Memphis Three took yet another turn last week as Crittendon County Circuit Judge David Burnett rejected death row inmate Damien Echols’ motion for a new trial based on new DNA evidence. Echols, who was 18 at the time, was convicted in 1994 of the brutal murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Two other teens, 17-year-old Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and 16-year-old Jason Baldwin, were also convicted, though only Echols was sentenced to death. Misskelley and Baldwin’s motions were denied last week as well.

It’s a shocking and thoroughly depressing story from start to finish. Local officials maintained that the murders were "Satanic" in nature and then used the three teens’ fondness for black clothes and heavy metal music as evidence against them. There was no physical evidence linking the three teens in any way to the crime, only the factually impossible "confession" of Jessie Misskelley, a special education dropout with an IQ of 72. To appreciate just how ugly the whole sham was, consider that Misskelley’s statement was wrong about virtually every significant aspect of the crime, from the nature of the victims’ injuries, to the manner in which they were restrained, to the timeframe where the killings occurred. He gave vague and contradictory information, most of which was preceded by prompts from the police. As Mara Leveritt notes in Devil’s Knot, her excellent book on the case, "Every detective in the room knew, even if Jessie did not, that the statement was absurd."

More here. My review of Leveritt’s book here. [Hit and Run]

In other words, these three young men had their lives destroyed because they were heavy metal fans in the Bible Belt towards the end of Satan worship hysteria. Meanwhile, the actual murderer is probably still out there somewhere.

Battered by Ike. There’s a popular stereotype, fed by films and other media, that says that natural disasters are almost invariably followed by looting. But in the real U.S., theft and violence are extremely rare in such situations. In Texas right now, as Hurricane Ike moves northwards, you’ll find reports of people fretting about looters as they refuse to leave their homes. Yet when you look at how neighbors in the storm’s path are actually behaving, you see cooperation instead:

The water was rising at the Summerset Apartments in Galveston at 5:30 a.m., according to residents, who said they had been through a long night with little sleep, like many who stayed in the area to meet Hurricane Ike.

After the ceiling caved in on her mother’s bedroom in their second floor apartment, Vee Thrasher moved into the bathroom and took in some neighbors from the first floor, which had already flooded.

And then there’s this intriguing report from Houston:

The Black Panther Party says it deployed 17 of its members to area gasoline station convenience stores to protect them from theft in the hours before and after Hurricane Ike makes landfall.

Owners asked the group to provide private security for their property, said Major Kenyha Shabazz, chairman of Peoples Party No. 3, the Houston affiliate of the Black Panther Party.

"These are the places that service our communities with food, water and fuel," Shabazz said. "We don’t want these places torn up."

During the daylight hours, Panthers were standing guard at boarded-up convenience stores in the East End, North Houston and Third, Fourth and Fifth wards. They planned to spend the night in the stores and be back out front at dawn.

"We hired these Black Panther people to take care of our two stores, one here on Dowling and the other one on Elgin," said Nabi Chowdhury, manager of a Mobil station on Dowling Street.

"We have confidence in them because for a long time we have known them, and their attitude and everything, we like," Chowdhury said.

That isn’t the Black Panther Party, of course — that group disbanded three decades ago. But whoever the new Panthers are, they’re apparently more interested in keeping the peace than offing the pigs.

Also revived: the rumor mill. Yesterday afternoon, at a Circle K in southeast Michigan, an employee told me confidently that gas was going to go up to $6 this morning. He was wrong, though it did hit an impressive $4.05. That’s higher than fuel costs in Houston right now. (In Galveston, on the other hand, TexasGasPrices.com gives me this message: "No gas prices found. Please choose another area." Note: If you’re trying to drive in Galveston today, the lack of gas will be the least of your worries.)
[Hit and Run]

A couple of the websites I read regularly have lots of survivalists, and I’ve noticed that they’re generally rather obsessed with the possibility of looting. Although to be fair, many survivalists seem obsessed with any really unlikely disaster (one prominent survivalist author has made repeated mentions to avoiding fallout in the event of nuclear war) while completely ignoring far more likely disasters (such as having their isolated cabins in the wilderness destroyed by forest fire).

Neo-America. Writes a friend: “Please don’t use my name because, as you know, i am a news reporter for [a certain TV station], and it could get me in trouble.

“I am outraged at what I have seen about the horrific train wreck that killed about 20 people. It is almost 11 p.m. now. They have been pulling dead bodies out since 5. They now have pulled out the body of an LAPD officer who was evidently commuting home and was killed along with everyone else.

“When the corpses of the peones were pulled out, they laid their bodies on the dirt, and covered them with white plastic. You should see what they did with this saint/guy from the LAPD, however. They made a long, double line from the wreck, dozens of officers and firemen at rigid attention and saluting as an honor guard of about ten firemen carried his already flag-draped coffin straight to a waiting ambulance. Of course, there were plenty of pauses for silence and prayer. You’d think it was the body of Mother Teresa.

“So why was this man more special than the other unfortunate train-riders? Disgusting and apalling. Just because he is a union-menber and a jackbooted government employee, his remains get special treatment, while the office lady’s carcass lays in the dirt. So sad.” [LewRockwell.com Blog]

Giving credit where it’s due, the Los Angeles Times coverage did at least mention that this happened.

So, the President Can Just Kill Anybody He Pleases, Right? U.S. forces have also used the Predator actively in Afghanistan and, most recently, in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. Today, I read an account of a drone attack near the town of Miramshah in North Waziristan that is reported to have “killed at least 14 people and injured 12 others,” including “at least six women and children.”

[…]

What leads me to remark on this matter, however, is not its technological nuts and bolts or its connection with master-puppet relations in southwest Asia, but rather the complete insouciance with which the American public greets reports of deaths by drone. I do not exaggerate if I say that the general reaction is “ho-hum.” Well, the average American says, that disposes nicely of another “bad guy.” The gratuitous murder of the bad guy’s family members, neighbors, and other innocent persons in the vicinity appears to create no blip on the average American’s moral radar screen. Perhaps Americans do not consider Yemenis, Afghanis, and Pakistanis to be real human beings whose right to life we are obliged to respect? [History News Network]

I think recent events (and, for that matter, not so recent events) make it abundantly clear that they do not.

Two cheers for police corruption.

So there are a lot of cops who are involved, somehow or another, in the drug trade. Sometimes they sling the drugs themselves; often, they just protect drug dealers from arrest. Like any form of Prohibition, government Drug Prohibition creates a condition in which there are lots of black market operators who are willing to pay bribes, and lots of cops who are willing to take them, in order to keep the drug trade running without police interference. The cost of the bribe is a drain, but the profits from a well-run drug dealing outfit make up for it, and the cost of the bribe is less than the cost of getting locked up in prison for several years. In fact, the Drug War Chronicle runs a regular feature called This Week’s Corrupt Cop Stories, which I guess is intended to show how the conditions fostered by Drug Prohibition inevitably produce police corruption. A point which is pretty well conveyed just by the fact that they have plenty of stories to run every single week, as much as by any of the individual stories that they run.

But there’s a problem with the word corrupt. To become corrupt is to become impure, damaged, or worse. To be corrupt is to be doing something wrong — and when we apply it to people, it usually means that someone is bribed into doing something depraved in exchange for some form of material reward — most commonly violating personal or professional ethics in exchange for money. But protecting a drug dealer from arrest is only unethical if you have an ethical obligation to arrest drug dealers. If, on the other hand, Drug Prohibition is unjust — if enforcing drug laws means violating the rights and the freedoms of innocent people, often by locking nonviolent offenders in a cage for years at a time even though they violated nobody else’s rights — then cops have no ethical obligation to arrest drug dealers, because nobody has an ethical obligation to do an injustice to innocent people. Then a lot of what commonly gets called police corruption is really nothing of the sort; so-called corrupt cops may be turncoats in the Drug War, but they are turning from the wrong side to the right side. Those who protect drug dealers from arrest are no more dirty than cops in antebellum America who refused to turn fugitive slaves over to the slave-catchers, or cops in Nazi Germany who refused to turn hiding Jews over to the Gestapo.

Of course, someone who has to be bribed into doing the right thing may not deserve blame for what she does; but she probably doesn’t deserve praise either. And so-called corrupt cops may in fact do other things that do deserve blame. (Many, if not most, of the narcs or patrol cops who get involved in the drug trade do end up acting much like Terrence Richardson in Houston — that is, as thieves, thugs, or shake-down artists, using their police power or threats of violence in order to intimidate and coerce competing drug dealers who don’t have the same connections to the Gangsters in Blue. But here the problem isn’t that the cop is slinging drugs. The problem is that the cop is cracking skulls of other people who sling drugs, and getting the drugs he slings by stealing them from other drug dealers.) Hence the two cheers, rather than three. But then consider a case like that of Keenan Colson, a cop in Lake Wales, Florida:

Lake Wales police officer Keenan Colson, 50, was arrested Wednesday by the Polk
County Sheriff’s Department on multiple charges stemming from information he leaked to
25-year-old Clayton Hoerler, a known criminal offender, including blowing the cover of an
undercover cop, said LWPD Chief Herbert Gillis.

[…] Colson faces one count of conspiracy to engage in a pattern of racketeering action,
five counts unlawful use of two-way communications device, and four counts unlawful
use of computer access after he was tied to an investigation that ultimately netted 18
people arrested in conjunction with what was described by county law enforcers as a
violent marijuana distribution ring.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd agreed with Gillis, noting in a phone interview Thursday that the blame rests solely on Colson and his actions.

It’s important to point out we don’t in any way suspect anyone other than Keenan Colson. We don’t want to leave any impression of that being anything other than an ethical police department. They run a great shop there. The men and women there are very dedicated. This is just one crooked cop, he said.

But it was one cop nobody seems to have expected to compromise the integrity and safety of his fellow police officers.

Colson’s actions sent shock waves throughout the LWPD.

Captain Patrick Quinn said he was hurt and shocked because he regarded Colson as the rock, a man who was always there, went to his calls, took his reports, was dependable.

Quinn, who was not involved in the investigation, was briefed about the situation on Tuesday.

Several people fall from grace, he said. That stinks, that hurts. We hire people, unfortunately people are going to do stupid things sometimes.

Quinn said Colson made a bad choice and was going to have to answer for his bad choice, but added that everyone in the department was upset.

We have lost a member of our family for his bad choice, he said.

What frustrated the chief so much is the concept that the lives of other officers were put in danger. Undercover work presents challenges of it own, he noted, calling it one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement because of its vulnerability.

And for Keenan Colson to identify to criminal offenders, this undercover officer, this undercover deputy, could have caused him to be killed, and could have caused the deputies that were working with him, the undercover officers to be injured, he said. That is something that will never be forgiven.

Gillis said Colson’s arrest was about justice for the police officers that are doing a good job every day. And it is those who trusted Colson that wonder what went awry with him.

Having had no prior indications to believe that Colson was capable of betraying his fellow officers, the chief described Colson as a very likable guy, very respectful, very quiet, very courteous.

How he got hooked up with a known criminal offender still stumps investigators, Gillis said.

Judd said he isn’t sure of the connection either, but said investigators did believe there was a prior relationship. In the late 1990s, Colson was an officer in Lake Hamilton, and Clayton Hoerler, identified as being one of the alleged ring leaders, apparently lived in Lake Hamilton at that time as well. Hoerler, 25, was identified this week by the county sheriff’s office as being a Lake Alfred resident.

We know from the investigation that they were good friends, Judd said. We know they discussed criminal activity freely, and that Colson give him intricate instructions in how to avoid arrest and how to protect himself from covert investigation. He was certainly the consultant for Hoerler.

—Kathy Leigh Berkowitz, The Polk County Democrat (2008-08-18): Lake Wales Police Officer Arrested for Leaking Information

If that’s what Keenan Colson did, then good for Keenan Colson.

The Drug War is an aggressive war by the government against innocent people. Neither using marijuana, nor selling marijuana violates anybody else’s rights. Like all so-called victimless crimes, it is in fact not a crime at all in any moral sense; crimes have identifiable victims, and consensual exchanges between willing parties have none. Cops who use force to shut down drug dealing outfits — and that is the only way that cops shut anything down, by beating people, tasering them, pepper-spraying them, pulling guns on them, restraining them, handcuffing them, confining them in police cars and holding cells, and ultimately by having them locked up in cages for years at a time, all of it backed up by the threat of inflicting pain, injuring you, or killing you if you should resist their orders — those cops, I say, are using violence against peaceful people; they are hurting, restraining, and imprisoning people who have never violated the rights of any identifiable victim. If they come after your friends on the basis of these unjust drug laws, then, morally speaking, they are the criminals, and using your connections and your knowledge of the system in order to defend your friend and his livelihood from their aggression — by telling him how to avoid detection, by telling him how to keep from getting unjustly arrested, and by exposing the undercover police spies who have been sent to infiltrate his circle and facilitate the narcs’ efforts to seize innocent people and locking them in cages for the next several years, is not corrupt. It’s certainly not an unforgivable sin. That’s protecting the innocent, and doing so while putting yourself at considerable personal risk from the same uniformed gang that you are trying to protect your friend from. It is, in fact heroic, and Keenan Colson deserves the title of hero far more than the vast majority of the arrogant, preening, entitled cops who never stop hollering about their own heroics and the protection they inflict on unwilling recipients every day.

Meanwhile, the police chief in Lake Wales has decided to engage in a low form of farce:

If your officers do commit criminal acts, they need to be arrested just like anyone else, the chief said. A lot of times things may be handled where people may be just terminated or let go. That’s not the way you are supposed to do things, that’s why I told the officers around here hold your heads up. We’ve been through a lot, we’ve been in the paper a lot with our officers who have done stuff wrong.

We are going to hold offenders accountable, because we hold our people accountable. To me that is a good thing because we hold ourselves accountable first, we hold offenders accountable second. And that’s a position you want to be in law enforcement, that’s accountability, that’s integrity, he added.

—Kathy Leigh Berkowitz, The Polk County Democrat (2008-08-18): Lake Wales Police Officer Arrested for Leaking Information

That’s bullshit, is what that is.

When cops harass, unjustly imprison, beat, hurt, torture, rape, or kill the people that they contemptuously dismiss as civilians, there isn’t a damn bit of accountability. They may be transferred to another precinct; they may be given a paid vacation for a few months before fellow cops exonerate them in administrative hearing for a few months; in really extraordinary circumstances, where evidence of guilt is undeniable and has also, by the way, been reeased to the public, someone might actually lose their job over it. But they will almost certainly never face jail time, or any criminal responsibility whatsoever, for what they do. As the victim, you might, if you are very lucky, get an Oops, our bad; realistically, what you’re more likely to get is Fuck you, civilian.

The reason that Keenan Colson has been arrested and is now threatened with jail has exactly nothing to do with any general commitment by the police force to accountability or integrity. The unforgivable sin for which he is being arrested and prosecuted is the fact that he gave out information that messed with the game of the other cops who were coming after his friend. Cops protect their power, and they’ll do just about anything to anybody who endangers that by valuing the safety of a friend over the ability of his gang brothers to go on with their activities unimpeded. Keenan Colson is only the latest to get the long knife treatment for the unforgivable sin of acting like a responsible human being at the expense of gang loyalty. He won’t be the last.

(Via Drug War Chronicle 2008-08-29 and Drug War Chronicle 2008-08-22.)

[Rad Geek People’s Daily]

Every so often I read a story about a good cop. Of course such stories inevitably have bad endings for the good cop.

M 7.2, Hokkaido, Japan region. September 11, 2008 00:20:55 GMT [USGS M>2.5 Earthquakes]

That’s big enough to be a problem if it was in a populated area. Fortunately, Hokkaido isn’t exactly heavily populated. It looks like the epicenter was in the vicinity of Cape Erimo, where (as far as I know) there are just a handful of very small towns.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a CNN interview with Vladimir Putin on the Georgia war. Well, it turns out that he had a great deal more to say, all of it far to sensible to be allowed on American television. Exiled Online has the story, including quotes from the full interview.