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Cop Shoots Homeless Man Until He Collapses, Shoots Him Again on the Ground to Finish Him Off

Chilling video was released this week showing several officers surrounding a homeless man before one officer dumps seven rounds into him, continuing to shoot him even after he fell to the ground — ensuring his execution.

The incident unfolded on Jan. 3 as police responded to a 911 call from a resident claiming the man was on top of his fence. When officers arrived, they found the unnamed homeless man sitting on the ground, leaning back against the fence. Moments later, the man would be filled with bullet holes.

According to a press release from the Phoenix police department, the man was simply accused of looking over a resident’s fence.

This incident occurred in the area of 35th Avenue and Broadway Road when Phoenix Police received a call about a man trying to enter a residential back yard. The caller described a man on top of his backyard fence who became angry when the caller confronted him.

Multiple officers were dispatched to the area. After talking with the caller, the officers were directed to the alleyway behind the house. Three officers found a man in the alley matching the description given. The man had a pair of scissors in his right hand.

As the video shows, the officers interviewed the caller who informed them that the man merely looked over his fence and never entered his yard. No crime had been committed as ‘becoming angry’ is not illegal. Nevertheless, officers surrounded the man like he was wanted for murder.

When the first officer saw the scissors, he immediately brandished his pistol and began ordering the man to drop the scissors. The man, who was clearly in need of mental health care, did not respond to the commands.

The man then stood up as two officers deployed their tasers. Unfortunately, the tasers had little to no effect on the man who then took a step toward the officers only to be filled with bullet holes. The police statement described the incident as follows:

The officers order the man, in both English and Spanish, to drop the scissors. When the man did not respond to their commands, two officers deployed their tasers. The taser deployments had little effect. The man then advanced towards the officers with the scissors still in his hand. That is when the officer-involved shooting occurred.

It is important to note the difference in the level of the description given to the entire scenario versus the part where the officer killed the man. Nowhere in their statement did they mention that the officer shot the man six times as he collapsed to the ground. Nowhere in the police statement does it mention that another shot was fired into the man’s body a full 3 seconds after he had been lying on the ground.

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Pentagon can’t account for $220 billion in gov’t property, fails fifth audit

A Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the Department of Defense failed its fifth audit in a row after it could not account for at least $220 billion in government-furnished property, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

The DOD has been mandated by federal law to complete audits since 1994; however, the mandate was ignored for decades due to the agency’s massive size, according to Military.com. Since launching its first independent audit in 2017, the Pentagon has never passed.

The Pentagon failed its fifth audit in November after the agency could not prove expenditures for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. To perform this year’s overall audit of the DOD, which was expected to cost $218 million, the agency aggregated 27 separate audits conducted by approximately 1,600 auditors. According to Military.com, the auditors performed 220 in-person site visits and 750 virtual site visits.

The GAO’s study reported that auditors first alerted the DOD in 2001 that the agency failed to keep track of its government-furnished property.

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When Does an Ugly Facebook Message Qualify as an Illegal ‘True Threat’ of Violence? SCOTUS Will Decide.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment,” the U.S. Supreme Court said in Texas v Johnson (1989), “it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” What that principle means in practice is that all sorts of vile and despicable speech—including hate speech—are constitutionally protected.

But the Court has also said that the First Amendment has its limits. One of them involves “true threats” of violence, which the Court in Virginia v. Black (2003) defined as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” The First Amendment, the Court held, “permits” the government “to ban a ‘true threat.'”

Deciding what actually counts as a “true threat” is not such an easy task, however, as the Supreme Court seems to recognize. Last week, the Court agreed to hear arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, which asks, in the question presented to the Court, “whether, to establish that a statement is a ‘true threat’ unprotected by the First Amendment, the government must show that the speaker subjectively knew or intended the threatening nature of the statement, or whether it is enough to show that an objective ‘reasonable person’ would regard the statement as a threat of violence.”

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Two retired Met Police officers are charged with child porn offences after serving chief inspector was found dead before he could also be charged

Two retired Metropolitan Police officers have been charged with child sex offences as part of an investigation into a serving Met chief inspector who was found dead before he could also be charged.

In a statement, the Met said the charges followed a ‘lengthy and complex’ investigation into Richard Watkinson, 49, who was a serving Met Chief Inspector for neighbourhoods policing at the West Area Command Unit.

He was found dead in Buckinghamshire on Thursday, January 12, the same day he was due to answer bail to be charged with conspiracy to distribute or show indecent images of children, three counts of making indecent photos of a child, voyeurism and two counts of misconduct in public office.

The Crown Prosecution Service had authorised charges against him.

His death is being treated as unexplained but not suspicious and an inquest has opened and adjourned.

Met officers found Watkinson’s body having attended the address following welfare concerns.

He had been suspended from duty following his arrest in July 2021.

Jack Addis, 63, of no fixed address but from Perthshire, Scotland, and Jeremy Laxton, 62, from Lincolnshire, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday, February 9.

Addis has been charged with conspiracy to distribute or show indecent images of children. He was arrested in November 2021.

Laxton has been charged with conspiracy to distribute or show indecent images of children, three counts of making indecent photos of a child, possession of prohibited images of a child, possession of extreme pornographic images and intentionally encouraging or assisting an offence (misconduct in public office). He was arrested in September 2021.

They both left the force over a decade ago.

The alleged offences took place between January 1, 2018 and September 20, 2021.

Commander Jon Savell, said: ‘Chief Inspector Watkinson was facing extremely serious and concerning charges, as the result of a painstaking and thorough police investigation.

‘Before this matter came to light, we had no previous information about these allegations or to indicate the officer posed any risk to the public.

‘He had not faced any other criminal or conduct matters during his Met career.

‘He had been suspended from duty since his arrest.

‘Two other men were also arrested during the course of the investigation and have been charged, their matters will now progress through the courts.’

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US May Help Ukraine Launch An Offensive On Crimea

In a new article titled “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” the New York Times reports that the Biden administration now believes Kyiv may need to launch an offensive on the territory that Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since 2014, “even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”

Citing unnamed US officials, The New York Times says “the Biden administration does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea militarily,” but that “Russia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strengthen Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations.”

It’s hard to imagine a full-scale assault on geostrategically crucial territory long considered a part of the Russian homeland not causing a major escalation. And as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes, smaller attacks on Crimea have indeed seen significant escalations from Moscow, contrary to claims laid out in the NYT article:

The New York Times report quoted Dara Massicot, a researcher from the RAND Corporation, who claimed that “Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin.” But Massicot’s claim is false as Russia began launching missile strikes on vital Ukrainian infrastructure in response to the October truck bombing of the Crimean Bridge.

Before the bridge bombing, Russia didn’t launch large-scale attacks on infrastructure in Ukraine, but now such bombardments have become routine, and millions of Ukrainians are struggling to power and heat their homes.

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Inflation Used To Squeeze The Middle Class. Now It’s Hitting The Poor The Hardest

The primary burden of inflation has shifted from middle class to low-income households thanks to a shift in the spending categories hardest hit by price hikes, according to a study published Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

At the onset of rising inflation in the spring of 2021, middle-income households, defined as those earning between $50,000 and $150,000 per year, bore the brunt of inflation as they purchased more used cars and gasoline than other demographics, according to the New York Fed. However, as the cost of gas falls and the price of food and housing surges, lower-income households, defined as those earning less than $50,000, now face higher effective costs — roughly 0.3 percentage points higher than average — since they spend a larger portion of their income on food and housing than middle and high-income households.

“As of December 2022, the bottom 40 percent have the highest year-on-year inflation rate of the three groups, and the inflation rate of the middle-income group is below the national average,” the report reads. “It is likely the case that the same rate of inflation represents a greater welfare loss for lower-income than higher-income households because of the former’s lower capacity for substituting to less expensive goods, greater liquidity constraints, and larger marginal utility of real income.”

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After Approving Mass Mail-In Balloting, California Loses 10 Million Ballots In November Midterms

The 2022 midterms were the first major elections to occur in California after the Golden State approved all-mail voting in September 2021. Under the new system, all registered voters in the state are automatically mailed a ballot for each election cycle (Californians can still opt to vote in person if they wish). But during California’s first foray into mass mail-in balloting for the 2022 midterms, 226,250 mail ballots were rejected and more than 10 million remain unaccounted for, according to a new report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Per the report, the most common reason for rejection of mail ballots in the 2022 cycle was late arrival (48 percent of rejects). Under California law, mail ballots must be postmarked no later than Election Day and arrive at the tabulation center within seven days. For the state’s 2022 general elections, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after Nov. 15 (the seven-day mark). Largely as a result of the switch to mail-in balloting, more than 57,000 Californians were disenfranchised. Such voter disenfranchisement is sure to continue as long as the state keeps its vote-by-mail system. 

“Mail ballots disenfranchise,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count. No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late. California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”

Another concerning figure coming from California’s midterm election cycle is that 10 million ballots still remain unaccounted for, after processing all polling place votes and rejected ballots. The assumption by election officials is that the majority of these ballots were ignored or thrown out by recipients. But such an information gap increases the risk of fraud. As the report notes, “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”

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Antifa protesters in Atlanta are calling for ‘Night of Rage’ against cops after shooting near training facility dubbed ‘Cop City’ left one man dead and a state trooper injured

Violent Antifa protectors are calling for a ‘Night of Rage’ against police officers after a raid of ‘Cop City’ left an activist dead and a state trooper injured.

Georgia State Patrol troopers swooped on the autonomous zone at the site of the future $90million Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in a ‘clearing operation’ on Wednesday.

In a press conference, Georgia Bureau of Investigations director Michael Register confirmed that the shooting was in self-defense, with the protestor opening fire ‘without warning’ at the trooper.

But activists are now calling for a ‘Night of Rage’ and bloodshed against the police following the shooting – threatening to enact ‘reciprocal violence’ against the authorities.

In a statement posted on social media, the Scenes from the Atlanta Forest account said: ‘A call for retaliation. Consider this a call for reciprocal violence to be done to the police and their allies.

‘On Friday, January 20th, wherever you are, you are invited to participate in a night of rage in order to honor the memory of our fallen comrade.’

The protestors, who call themselves forest defenders, are claiming that the police have ‘murdered’ one of their own and are demanding ‘action’.

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First-of-its-kind ‘weapons detection system’ planned for Utah schools

The Salt Lake City School District in Utah plans to install the system at East, West and Highland High Schools. The Granite District is also planning a “pilot” system at Hunter High, which was stunned by the shooting deaths of two students near the school a year ago.

All of the new security measures could be in place in a matter of months, or possibly weeks.

“I think that’s a good start,“ said Joann Seybold, the grandmother of a student, adding the shootings are still on the minds of the school community. Last January, a teen shot and killed students and injured a third.

Deborah Servis, whose granddaughter attends Hunter, said it would be “wonderful” to have a new weapons detection system.

“We knew of one of the kids who was shot last year,” she said, “who is still recovering.”

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China proposes making “dissemination of false information” a crime in UN treaty

A new international convention on cybercrime is being negotiated at the United Nations (UN) meeting in Vienna, Austria, and China has proposed the criminalization of the “dissemination of false information.”

The proposal seems like an attempt by China to legitimize its internet controls and is likely going to be contested by Western countries, even though many of them have been copying parts of China’s playbook in recent times.

There is already an existing international convention on cybercrime that was signed in 2001. However, it was not a UN treaty and it has not been signed by Russia, China, Brazil, and India, which are some of the largest countries in the world.

In the ongoing negotiations on the new treaty, the proposals that have been suggested have been put into two categories; those with wide support and those that are contested. Proposals on controlling online content have generally fallen into the contested category and have not been part of immediate discussions.

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