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.
Tag: crime
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.”
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.
Thomas Jefferson on enemies of the people…
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.
Mark Twain on congress…
Wisconsin Special Counsel Finds Facebook’s Zuckerberg Violated Wisconsin Election Bribery Laws
After roughly six months of investigation into Facebook’s role in the 2020 election, a special counsel appointed by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos last August submitted a report Tuesday. That report finds that Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg’s grant funds violated Wisconsin’s bribery laws. And while the report found a plethora of areas of concern, it pulls up short of questioning the outcome of the election.
During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg funneled nearly $9 million in grant funds “solely to five Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin,” reports the Federalist. Last August, the Office of Special Counsel was created to investigate concerns about election integrity and the 2020 election. Retired state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman was appointed as special counsel to head the investigation. An interim report was delivered to the state assembly on November 10, 2021. Tuesday’s report was the follow-up to that report and noted that this report “is final in the sense that it provides a list of recommendations with time for the Legislature to act before the close of its session in March.”
And while the report addresses “the numerous questionable and unlawful actions of various actors in the 2020 election,” it dances around the elephant in the living room, with Gableman stating early on that the report does not call for another look at the re-count that occurred in late 2020 or to challenge the contentious certification of the 2020 presidential election. And to drive that point home, the report ends by saying that even if Wisconsin were to “decertify the certified electors in the 2020 presidential election” — which the report explains as an arduous process — “this action would not, on its own, have any other legal consequence under state or federal law,” adding, “It would not, for example, change who the current President is.”
But if the 2020 election were found to be rife with fraud or tampering, then either the certification deserves another look or “election integrity” is a meaningless word combo. And according to Gableman’s report, Zuckerberg broke the law and played a $9 million role in election fraud and tampering.
It hurts my brain…
BLM, Antifa activists convicted of arson after attempting to frame Proud Boys for their own crimes
A group of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters were convicted on federal charges after attempting to frame the Proud Boys for a series of vandalism and arson attacks the far-left extremists carried out on Atlanta police vehicles and United States Postal Service property during the lead up to the 2020 presidential election.
John Wesley Wade, 35, Ellie Melvin Brett, 37, and Vida Jones, 19, were arrested in late October 2020 on federal charges in connection to the string of incidents.
The suspects tried to frame the Proud Boys by leaving notes near the sites of vandalism that read “Stand By,” a reference to when former President Donald Trump told the right-wing group to “stand back and stand by” after he was asked to condemn white supremacist militias during the first 2020 presidential debate.
At around 12:50 am on Oct. 2, 2020, several fires were set at the West End Post Office located at 848 Oglethorpe Avenue. One fire was set within a bin of mail on the loading dock of the Post Office building itself, destroying much of the mail and damaging other property in the possession of the US Postal Service. The other fires damaged five USPS vehicles that were parked in the secure, enclosed parking area.
The attack was one of at least seven related arson and vandalism incidents directed at law enforcement, a bank, and other government entities that occurred around the Atlanta metropolitan area between Sept. 30, 2020, and Oct. 2, 2020.
Thousands of confidential ethics and juvenile records are published online
A website called judyrecords.com has published thousands of confidential court records from across the nation, including private ethics records in California and juvenile court records from several states, according to reporting by Law360.
The State Bar of California said judyrecords.com apparently obtained nonpublic information on about 260,000 attorney ethics cases as a result of a “previously unknown security vulnerability” in its case management portal. The bar uses Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey system, which was also used by affected court systems that spoke with Law360 about the problem.
Judyrecords.com describes itself as “a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits.”
Law360 said it searched judyrecords.com “and uncovered dockets with detailed information about minors that, in some affected jurisdictions, is normally restricted or confidential. The information included the names of defendants. In several cases, it also listed their birth dates, criminal charges and sentencing information.”
Hellbound and Down 
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