Tag: crime

Lori Lightfoot Blames Robbery Victims, Tells Them to Stop Carrying Cash

LGBT-BLM Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot blamed robbery victims for the crimes of their attackers, telling citizens of Chicago that her solution for curtailing crime in the rabidly dangerous city is for people to stop carrying cash. Lightfoot is currently seeking re-election to another term as Mayor of Chicago, with a 9-candidate election slated for February 28th. Every single one of them is a Democrat.

Candidates for Mayor of Chicago gathered last night for a debate, sponsored by ABC7 News, which largely became focused on the city’s out-of-control crime, which makes regular headlines not just in the United States, but all over the globe, despite an intensely-enforced gun control program. Lately, property crimes and muggings have skyrocketed, as those walking down the street, or operating food trucks are being targeted on a regular basis.

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How Effective Are Police?

A 2020 paper published in the Alabama Law Review and written by Shima Baughman, professor of law at the University of Utah, puts paid to the illusion that cops solve crimes.

TV cops solve crimes. Real cops, not so much.

From the Abstract (emphasis added):

In recent years, the national conversation in criminal justice has centered on police. Are police using excessive force? Should they be monitored more closely? … The implied core question across these national debates is whether police are effective at their jobs. Yet we have not explored how effective police are or determined how best to measure police effectiveness.

This article endeavors to measure how effectively police perform at their core function — solving crime. The metric most commonly used to measure police effectiveness at crime solving is a “clearance rate”: the proportion of reported crimes for which police arrest a person and refer them for prosecution. But clearance rates are inadequate for many reasons, including the fact that they are highly manipulable. 

This Article therefore provides a set of new metrics that have never been used systematically to study police effectiveness — referred to as “criminal accountability” metrics. Criminal accountability examines the full course of a crime to determine whether police detect and ultimately resolve committed crime. Taking into account the prevalence and the number of crimes police solve, the proportion of crimes solved in America is dramatically lower than we realize. Only with a clearer conversation, rooted in accurate data about the effectiveness of the American police system, can we attempt a path toward increased criminal accountability and public safety.

She goes on to note that “the scholarly discussion has focused on how police are doing crime solving: With too much force? With the right monitoring? With proper technology? These discussions assume that police are solving crimes. The prior scholarship has also tackled police performance in specific arenas but has not examined how to measure whether police are effective at their jobs.”

The goal of the paper, then, is to answer the question, “What is the best way to determine police effectiveness?”

As the Abstract notes, using “clearance rates” is misleading. Clearance rate is defined as “the proportion of reported crime for which police arrest a person and refer them for prosecution.” Part of the problem with this metric is the amount of data it misses. For example:

How many individuals are victims of a crime but failed to report it to police? How often do police arrest the right people? Which crimes are police most likely to make arrests for? How many police clearances result in a conviction? How many crimes did police not make arrests for but resolved in other ways? None of this information is tracked [by the “clearance rate” metric].

The paper concludes that police, indeed, are remarkably ineffective at solving crime, their supposed primary function.

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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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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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Failed New Mexico GOP candidate arrested for allegedly paying gunmen to fire shots at several Democrats’ homes

An unsuccessful Republican candidate was arrested in connection to several gunshot incidents at Democrats’ homes in New Mexico.

Solomon Peña was arrested on Monday by Albuquerque police at his residence after a SWAT standoff.

The 39-year-old is accused of paying four other men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators, all Democrats. The shootings were made between Dec. 4 and Jan. 5. In one incident from Dec. 11, twelve bullets were fired at the North Valley home of County Commissioner Debbie O’Malley.

“This type of radicalism is a threat to our nation, and it has made its way to our doorstep right here in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” said Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, a Democrat, in a media briefing.

Peña ran for a seat in the New Mexico House of Representatives as a Republican despite having been previously convicted in 2008 of smash and grab robberies and having served five years in prison. He lost in 2022 by a large margin, but on Twitter, he claimed that election fraud had stolen the contest from him.

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Ex-FBI Agent Says Idaho Murders Suspect Bryan Kohberger Had an ‘Incel Complex’ That Drove Him to Kill

University of Idaho murder suspect Bryan Kohberger may have been driven to kill by his history of social issues and a possible “incel complex,” a former FBI investigator told The Post.

“The murders may have been… an effort to assert some type of dominance,” former FBI agent and security expert Pete Yachmetz explained to The Post this week.

Kohberger, 28, was arrested late last month for the Nov. 13 stabbing deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, at an off-campus residence in Moscow, Idaho. Yachmetz believes the brutality of the crime and Kohberger’s history of social challenges may offer some hints to his possible motive.

“I believe a continued stabbing of a victim indicates…an uncontrollable rage and extreme anger,” Yachmetz said, noting that Kohberger has been described as “socially awkward with a long history of interpersonal problems.”

“I think he may have developed a sort of incel complex,” he surmised.

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Panic grips Special Forces community amid investigation into drugs, human trafficking

Panic and fear spread throughout the special operations community at Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina as CID and FBI agents investigated members of 3rd Special Forces Group and Delta Force who allegedly were involved in drug and in one instance human trafficking, according to nearly a dozen current and former military sources.

The arrests began Thursday, Jan. 5 and culminated with a 100% recall and accountability formation for 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group yesterday.

It is unknown when the investigation into drug and human trafficking in the Fort Bragg area began, but it is known that the FBI became involved in investigating the deaths of Timothy Dumas and Delta Force operator Billy Lavigne in 2020 when both were found shot to death at a training site on Bragg.

Last week’s arrests began with investigators receiving more evidence after an undercover law enforcement officer posing as an underage girl helped arrest a member of 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group back in December. That individual was known to moonlight as a bouncer at a bar in Southern Pines frequented by the Special Forces community, a military source close to the situation explained to Connecting Vets. The Green Beret is alleged to have been pimping underaged girls to the Special Forces community at drug-fueled parties in Southern Pines.

“This is what happens when there is no war, no direction, and an 18-month red cycle with no mission,” a Special Forces soldier said. “So dudes are fucking around with young kids and the craziest drugs. All these lives ruined because people are just bored.”

Whether the individual rolled on his accomplices or law enforcement ripped the data from his cell phone, it quickly led to the arrest of another Green Beret involved in drug trafficking in 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group.

With the information of additional suspects in hand, CID and military police set up shop at one of the main bottlenecks to entering or exiting Fort Bragg: the Longstreet gate between the post and Southern Pines.

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The dark web’s criminal minds see Internet of Things as next big hacking prize

John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, likens his job to studying criminal minds through a soda straw. He monitors cyberthreat groups in real time on the dark web, watching what amounts to a free market of criminal innovation ebb and flow.

Groups buy and sell services, and one hot idea — a business model for a crime — can take off quickly when people realize that it works to do damage or to get people to pay. Last year, it was ransomware, as criminal hacking groups figured out how to shut down servers through what’s called directed denial of service attacks. But 2022, say experts, may have marked an inflection point due to the rapid proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Attacks are evolving from those that shut down computers or stole data, to include those that could more directly wreak havoc on everyday life. IoT devices can be the entry points for attacks on parts of countries’ critical infrastructure, like electrical grids or pipelines, or they can be the specific targets of criminals, as in the case of cars or medical devices that contain software.

“What I wish is that the vulnerabilities of cybersecurity could never negatively affect human life and infrastructure,” says Meredith Schnur, cyber brokerage leader for US & Canada at Marsh & McLennan, which insures large companies against cyberattacks. “Everything else is just business.”

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Satanic child abuse ring shut victims in oven, forced them to kill animals and filmed themselves gang raping them, court hears

A satanic child abuse ring tortured children by putting them in an oven, forcing them to kill animals and gang raping them, a court has heard.

Seven men and four women are accused of abusing three young children over the course of 10 years in Glasgow which saw them attempt to ‘call on spirits and demons’. 

Two girls – one of whom was allegedly shut in a microwave, fridge, oven and freezer in an attempted to kill her – and one boy were forced to kill animals as well as being sexually abused by the group, it is claimed.

Members of the group have been charged with 43 offences with among the most serious being attempted murder and rape of young children.

Iain Owens, 44, Elaine Lannery, 38, Lesley Williams, 41, Paul Brannan, 40, Marianne Gallagher, 38, Scott Forbes, 49, Barry Watson, 46, Mark Carr, 49, Richard Gachagan, 45, Leona Laing, 50, and John Clark, 46, all deny the offences.

Four other people alleged to have been involved in the ring –  Maureen Goudie, Steven McHendrie, Robert Brown, James McLean and Douglas Gachagan – have since died, according to court papers.

The High Court in Glasgow was told on Friday that the offences took place between January 2010 and March 2020 at a number of addresses in the city.

The group are alleged to have run a wheelchair over the legs of one of the girls, as well as putting a plastic bag over her head.

It’s claimed she was made to eat cat food, as well as take drugs and alcohol, with the other girl also made to eat pet food.

The second girl was allegedly chased by an adult wearing a devil mask and hung by her jumper from a nail on the wall. 

This culminated with her being pushed into and trapped inside a microwave, an oven, a fridge freezer and various cupboards, the court heard.

It is claimed one of the girls was threatened with being sent to Turkey with a male stranger, while the boy was put in a bath which they said was filled with blood. 

The boy and older girl are alleged to have been made to take part in ‘seances (and) use a Ouija board…to call on spirits and demons’.

The children were also involved in ‘witchcraft’ leading them to believe that they themselves had ‘metamorphosed into animals’.

The 11 are further said to have worn cloaks and devil horns as well making the young boy stab a budgie to death.

The group are also accused of killing a number of dogs including getting the children to attack the animals.

It is claimed that all three children were raped and sexually assaulted by members of the ring, with some cheering and clapping while recording the offences.

Prosecutors allege that some members of the group paid for ‘sexual services’ from three of the children.

The court heard that when the older girl called the police she was threatened by members of the group and had her call disconnected. 

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The way you walk is apparently as unique as your fingerprint and the UAE wants to use it to track criminals

According to reports out of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), biometrics are gaining an ever more prominent place in local law enforcement’s activities, and the type of technology involved is also getting ever more fine-grained.

Accuracy aside – but apparently, the way you walk – as interpreted by mass surveillance technology – can now be used as an incriminating piece of evidence against you in this country.

As always with these stories, one wonders how in the world the police ever managed to do their job for centuries (as they have done) without relying on invasive and controversial technologies like this – but that is not the question most media outlets are willing to “bother” with just now.

Instead, we’re hearing from one of the Emirates, Dubai, that the thing with biometric surveillance of the population – handily justified as something positive, when there’s a criminal case that can be attached to the practice – has now gone well beyond fingerprinting, facial recognition, and such.

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