Tag: crime

New ‘Antilynching’ Federal Law Could Let Prosecutors Imprison You For A Crime You Never Committed

Touted as an overdue (if duplicative) law that no one could disagree with, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act signed by President Biden last week includes a subtle provision that could boost the Biden administration’s war on wrongthink.

The bill sailed through the U.S. Senate and the House with ease. The tactful naming made the bill radioactive to oppose, which is why 422 congressmen voted in favor while only three opposed.

Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the three who voted against the bill, expressed a handful of concerns, including that there are a limited number of constitutionally specified federal crimes, that lynching is already criminalized, and that “Adding enhanced penalties for ‘hate’ [on top of existing criminal punishments] tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech.”

He also highlighted another potential pitfall of the legislation: “The bill creates another federal crime of ‘conspiracy,’ which I’m concerned could be enforced overbroadly on people who are not perpetrators of a crime.” Here’s the section Massie is referring to:

Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, or if the offense includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.

The bill amends the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed in 2009, which defines and criminalizes hate crimes. The minimum qualification is an attempt “to cause bodily injury” due to the victim’s race, sexual orientation, nationality, gender, religion, or disability. 

Bodily injury can be defined as “physical pain” or “any other injury to the body, no matter how temporary.” Sensibly, the 2009 law requires an attempt at violence to be made, which is a crime itself regardless of prejudiced motives. The new “antilynching” law takes this a step further by criminalizing “conspiracy” to commit certain hate crimes.

I’m sure someone will retort: conspiracy to commit a federal crime is already a federal crime. This is not a universally accepted interpretation of conspiracy law, nor does the law’s language or historical precedent justify such a broad interpretation — hence the ostensible necessity for the new antilynching law. Criminalized conspiracies are those plotting “against the United States” – like the Volkswagen executives who attempted to defraud the Environmental Protection Agency by faking emission results and, more recently, the leader of the Oath Keepers who plead guilty to seditious conspiracy for his part in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot. 

So as of last Tuesday, it is illegal to simply “agree” to participate in an act if it falls under the categories highlighted above. One can imagine dark political humor venturing into these categories (a comment such as “I hate so-and-so so much I could kill him,” for example) being interpreted as “conspiring to lynch.”

The key issue here is that intent should not be the sole subject of a court case. The purpose of courts is for a neutral arbiter to determine whether someone’s rights were violated during an encounter between two parties. Conspiracy, if no action is taken in pursuit of it, involves only one party: the conspirators. Therefore, it alone constitutes no crime as it couldn’t have possibly violated someone else’s rights. 

With this new law, the U.S. government has further expanded into the realm of policing thought crimes. Ominously, this law comes on the heels of the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to broaden the “domestic terrorism” category and expand methods for identifying “threats.”

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Why the FBI Won’t Release Quarterly Crime Stats for 2021

Every year, the FBI releases its annual year-end crime report, which is based on data provided voluntarily by police departments across the country. This report typically comes out near the end of the following year. (The 2020 report, for example, came out in September of 2021.) Quarterly reports were actually a relatively new innovation, having been introduced in 2020.

To track the numbers that police departments report, the FBI for decades used a system called the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) to collect data. But in 2021, the Bureau switched to a different system, called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which provides more details on crimes that are reported. Though the change is meant to improve tracking, this week’s announcement from the FBI highlights what experts say are serious concerns about its impact on crime statistics for years to come.

The problem is that a large portion of police departments do not have the NIBRS system, which is expensive and can be difficult to implement into a department. According to the Bureau of Statistics, it could cost up to $377,000 for a department to switch over to NIBRS and over $53,000 for annual maintenance. According to the FBI, 63% of all police agencies in the country are using the NIBRS system; however, many of the big cities, like New York and Los Angeles, don’t use NIBRS, which means their crime trends will be completely left out of the FBI’s data analysis for 2021, including the annual reports.

“The absence of the two largest cities in the country begs the question as to what kind of confidence the public should have in the numbers produced by the FBI,” Rick Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says. “This is a time period in which we really want to know what’s happening with respect to the most serious crimes. The uncertainties around the data are going to make definitive conclusions very difficult to draw.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment on the criticism of their collecting process and releasing the information.

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Chicago Mayor Lightfoot Has 71-Person Police Unit To Protect Her, Blames Trump For Being In Danger

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat who proposed cutting a huge $80 million from the Chicago Police Department budget in 2020, has a personal police unit consisting of a whopping 71 officers to protect her, and blamed some of her personal need for protection on former President Trump, telling the Chicago Sun-Times, “When the president of the United States uses the world’s largest megaphone and platform to target you personally, terrible things happen. And he not only blew a dog whistle, he pointed really evil and dangerous people right at my doorstep.”

The special unit, named Unit 544, now is comprised of 65 officers, five sergeants and a lieutenant, but that’s not all; “Lightfoot also has a separate personal bodyguard detail, which includes about 20 officers, the records show,” The Sun-Times noted.

On July 7, 2020, the police department issued a memo to officers who had served for at least five years; it stated:

The unit’s mission will be to provide physical security for City Hall, the mayor’s residence and the mayor’s detail command post. … Through the coordination of intelligence and resources, officers will respond to all threats related to the mayor’s physical properties to ensure its protection.

“Around the same time the unit was being formed in the summer of 2020, residents of Humboldt Park and Logan Square were complaining that the Shakespeare district, which covers their neighborhoods, was getting stretched thin because so many patrol officers there were being assigned to keep protesters from gathering outside Lightfoot’s house in Logan Square,” The Sun-Times added.

John Catanzara, president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, commented, “While murders are soaring, while districts are barebones for manpower, all that matters is protecting her castle.”

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Rep. Ayanna Pressley says black and Latinx commuters ‘are disproportionately criminalized by fare evasion policies’

Rep. Ayanna Pressley popped up on Twitter Saturday to urge Congress to pass her Freedom to Move Act, which would “grant Black and brown riders the freedom to navigate their community without fear.” Apparently, black and Latinx commuters are hardest hit by “fare evasion policies.” It was back in 2019 when fellow squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a similar point, tweeting that “arresting people who can’t afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community.” We suspect no one was arrested for not being able to afford subway fare; our suspicion is that the arrests had more to do with not paying one’s subway fare.

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Eric Adams considering using drones to fight NYC crime, sources say

Mayor Eric Adams is mulling a mini-army of drones to fight surging crime in the Big Apple — possibly deploying the high-flying robocops from rooftops as watchful guardians of Gotham, sources told The Post.

Tel Aviv-based Blue White Robotics and Easy Aerial of Brooklyn were two drone manufacturers featured earlier this month at an event to launch a NYC-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Adams attended the gathering in the Williamsburg Hotel, and sources said the mayor was so impressed with the joint presentation that he suggested his chief technology officer Matthew Fraser and the firms’ honchos begin talks about the city potentially buying drones and expanding the NYPD’s use of them.

“Eric is a big booster of drones and how they can be used to streamline government function, but obviously whatever he would try to roll out would be constrained” under existing laws limiting drone use, said a source familiar with the mayor’s thinking.

The drone makers – whose clients include the US Department of Defense, Air Force and Customs and Border Protection – say they’ve dubbed the plan the “Soteria Project,” derived from a Greek word meaning “deliverance from a crisis.”

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How a serial killer family got away with murdering seven men and a baby

On a Kansas evening in 1872, Julia Hestler immediately regretted her visit to the Bender family. The stagecoach that dropped her off was already racing away, leaving her alone on the prairie in front of a solitary, decrepit cabin.   

When the self-proclaimed “spiritualist” Kate Bender invited Julia inside for their scheduled séance, she was revolted by a strong stench and buzzing flies. She sat across from Kate and held hands to begin, not wanting to insult her hostess. 

But with her eyes closed, Julia felt doom. She looked up to see three Bender family members suddenly standing silently behind Kate. Pa Bender held a heavy tool that shone in the candlelight. Terrified, Julia leapt up and fled. She tumbled down the cabin’s front steps before scrambling to her feet and running for her life across the darkened plains. 

Julia was lucky to survive, as Susan Jonusas writes in “Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier” (Viking), out now. The neighbors she told found the incident more creepy than criminal, but the following spring her fears were validated when eight corpses were found buried beneath the Benders’ apple trees. The Benders would go down in American history as the most infamous family of serial killers.

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As Los Angeles Comes Apart From Soaring Crime, Demand For Safe Rooms Skyrockets

As Los Angeles comes apart with soaring crime, wealthy homeowners have surged in their demand for “safe rooms” so they can be protected from potential invaders of their homes.

Dean Cryer, the vice-president of international operations at Building Consensus/Panic Room Builders, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Our influx of inquiries has increased more than 1,000 percent over the past three months. … It’s gone insane.”  He added, “Hidden rooms are definitely trending right now.”

“Building Consensus/Panic Room (which consulted on the 2002 movie Panic Room) builds various safe spaces ranging in security levels from one through eight. Safe rooms at level three may be protected with Kevlar, while a level eight is encased in thick steel,” The Hollywood Reporter noted. Cryer explained, “Just the doors can be 2,000 to 3,000 pounds. And then we’re installing steel within the room. So, we’re generating up to 10,000 pounds in a room. … You could kit out a small closet for about $100,000, $150,000. And then it’s north of there. We’ve done one in London that had two rooms, full suites … and that was over a million dollars.”

To enter the rooms, biometrics such as a finger or retina scan are primarily utilized; they can be hidden behind a bookcase or hidden wall and include panic buttons that automatically call security services.

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