Tag: police state

Tamale Police Lose Their Excuse To Restrict Homemade Meals

Neighbors can host backyard barbecues. Churches and schools can organize potlucks. And sports fans can have tailgate parties. But if anyone tries to sell homemade meals, code enforcers in most states will shut them down. 

Hypothetical worst-case scenarios scare lawmakers, so they block home chefs from using their own kitchens to make money selling anything that requires refrigeration. Homemade pizzas, puddings, and pumpkin pies are off-limits. Even lemonade stands are illegal in some jurisdictions. 

The rationale is simple: Better safe than sorry. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs used this excuse on April 18, 2023, when she vetoed a so-called “tamale bill” that would have created a new source of income for immigrants and other home-based chefs. “This bill would significantly increase the risk of food-borne illness,” Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.

It sounds scary. Yet new data from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, dismantles the narrative. States that allow home chefs to sell perishable foods report no confirmed cases of relevant foodborne illness. Zero. Zilch. Nada. 

To make sure, we inspected public records from states with the fewest restrictions on “cottage food,” which refers to homemade food prepared for sale. The list includes California, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. Most other states and Washington, D.C., limit the cottage food menu to shelf-stable items like cookies and jams. But these seven states go further.  

As champions of food freedom—the right to buy, sell, grow, and advertise locally sourced and prepared foods—they allow home cooks to sell perishable foods that require refrigeration. 

Critics gasp at the boldness, but doomsday predictions about foodborne illness have never materialized. Across the seven states, public records show only two instances of suspected foodborne illness from homemade meals sold under those states’ laws, and neither case was confirmed nor serious. 

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Federal Judge Blocks California Online Age-Checking Law as Unconstitutional

A federal judge has granted an injunction blocking a California law that would force online businesses and social media platforms to estimate the ages of people visiting their sites and protect children from seeing content that might cause harm, stating that the law likely violates the First Amendment and would likely lead to online government-fueled censorship.

The law in question, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), is one of the recent crop of bills seeking to “childproof” the internet by either demanding age verification checks of users or by locking away content. CAADCA, passed in 2022 unanimously by the state legislature and supported by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, requires every business in the state with an online component to create a report showing how any new good or service they provided would be accessed by children and investigate and account for any sort of “harms” children might face. Businesses that are not in compliance with the law face fines of up to $2,500 per violation.

NetChoice, a trade organization representing tech firms, sued earlier this year to try to block the law. In NetChoice v. Bonta, the trade organization argued that this overly broad law violates the Constitution by “enact[ing] a system of prior restraint over protected speech using undefined, vague terms, and creat[ing] a regime of proxy censorship, forcing online services to restrict speech in ways the State could never do directly.” In short, the end result of the law would lead to businesses and online platforms having to censor content in order to keep children from seeing it, even though a lot of this content is likely to be protected First Amendment speech.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, agreed and blocked the state from enacting the law, which was scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2024.

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NYPD “TRANSPARENCY” SITE LEAVES OUT MISCONDUCT LAWSUITS SETTLED FOR MILLIONS

LAST YEAR, a series of headlines in New York City buzzed with excitement about a cop with the street nickname of “Bullethead.” 

New York Police Department Sgt. David Grieco — his actual name — had reached a milestone: Police misconduct lawsuits naming him as a defendant had exceeded $1 million in settlement payouts. Since the raft of news stories, Grieco has been named in at least two additional suits, according to publicly available information as of July, and payouts in complaints naming him have now reached $1,099,825. 

In the 13 years it took for Grieco to be named in 48 suits alleging police misconduct, he’s been promoted twice. In 2016, he was elevated from officer to detective and, a year later, to sergeant. 

The New York Police Department’s officer profile database, meanwhile, lists no applicable entries for disciplinary history in Grieco’s profile. 

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Charges filed against Broken Arrow police officer over dog attack caught on camera

Officer William Roy Golden is charged with cruelty to animals and acts resulting in gross injury/outraging public decency. 

An arrest warrant was issued Friday along with the charges.

The charges are related to an incident caught on camera Aug. 28 where an officer is seen following a dog around before using pepper spray on it.

The video was shared thousands of times before an investigation was launched.

The arrest report claims that Golden tazed the dog 8 times, pepper-sprayed the dog, and hit it in its head.

He is also accused of unholstering his gun.

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FBI Hit With Lawsuits After Allegedly Losing Hundreds of Thousands in Rare Coins During Raid

A pair of Americans, who had their property taken following a raid by the FBI, are now alleging that the organization lost or stole their property.

In March 2021, the FBI raided U.S. Private Vaults, a company based in Beverly Hills, seizing property from at least two people, Don Mellein and Jeni Pearsons.

After they prevailed in court the first time, the FBI agreed to return their property, but both clients discovered that some of their property was missing, and suspected that some of their valuables were either stolen by the FBI or lost in the chaos of the raid. 

This has prompted yet another pair of lawsuits, launched on Friday by the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice. 

“All we know is that their property was in a box and safe before the FBI broke into the box,” Joe Gay, an attorney with Institute for Justice, told Fox News. “Once the FBI broke into the box, we honestly don’t know exactly what happened.”

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Department of Defense Signs Contract With Social Media Monitoring Company

Fresh revelations regarding a $2.5 million contractual agreement between the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) at Fort George G. Meade and social media scrutinizer Dataminr have emerged. These claims, unveiled by a US government notice, imply a new era of digital monitoring rests on the horizon, increasingly unsettling in its reinforcement of sweeping surveillance, and potentially having implications on free speech and privacy protection.

Fort Meade, also known as the steering wheel of the US Government’s paramount signals intelligence organization, the National Security Agency, has seemingly struck a discreet deal to expand its espionage services.

DISA, commodiously located at Fort Meade, is now purported to have voluminous exposure to public posts from assorted social media platforms, including X, formerly Twitter.

Dataminr is a company specializing in AI-driven real-time information discovery and is known for detecting, classifying, and determining the significance of public information in real time. It’s plausible that government entities, including the Department of Defense, may leverage services like Dataminr to monitor social media and other public data sources to maintain situational awareness and respond to emerging events or threats more rapidly.

When privacy buffs and free speech advocates look at governmental use of tools like Dataminr, it’s met with a hefty dose of suspicion, and rightfully so. The potential implications for personal freedom, civil rights, and the pillars of democracy are considerable. There’s this looming worry about the government, potentially with too loose a leash, exploiting these tools to spy on lawful activities and on people living their everyday lives with no criminal intentions.

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UK Quietly Passes “Online Safety Bill” Into Law

Buried behind the Brand-related headlines yesterday, the British House of Lords voted to pass the controversial “Online Safety Bill” into law. All that’s needed now is Royal assent, which Charles will obviously provide.

The bill’s (very catchy) long-form title is…

A Bill to make provision for and in connection with the regulation by OFCOM of certain internet services; for and in connection with communications offences; and for connected purposes.

…and that’s essentially it, it hands the duty of “regulating” certain online content to the UK’s Office of Communications (OfCom).

Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes could barely contain her excitement in a statement to the press:

“Today is a major milestone in the mission to create a safer life online for children and adults in the UK. Everyone at Ofcom feels privileged to be entrusted with this important role, and we’re ready to start implementing these new laws.”

As always with these things, the bill’s text is a challenging and rather dull read, deliberately obscure in its language and difficult to navigate.

Of some note is the “information offenses” clause, which empowers OfCom to demand “information” from users, companies and employees, and makes it a crime to withhold it. The nature of this “information” is never specified, nor does it appear to be qualified. Meaning it could be anything, and will most likely be used to get private account information about users from social media platforms.

In one of the more worrying clauses, the Bill outlines what they call “communications offenses”. Section 10 details crimes of transmitting “Harmful, false and threatening communications”.

It should be noted that sending threats is already illegal in the UK, so the only new ground covered here is “harmful” and/or “false” information, and the fact they feel the need to differentiate between those two things should worry you.

After all, the truth can definitely be “harmful”…Especially to a power-hungry elite barely controlling an angry populace through dishonest propaganda.

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Ohio Secretary Of State Forces County To Allow Local Marijuana Vote Despite Prosecutor’s Objection

Ohio’s secretary of state has ordered a county election board to certify a local marijuana decriminalization initiative for the November ballot—meaning that three Ohio localities will be deciding on the reform at the same time voters across the state will have the chance to pass a full legalization measure.

Early voting for military and overseas voters began on Friday. And, on top of statewide legalization on the ballot, voters in the villages of Harbor View, Risingsun and Sugar Grove will also see local initiatives to decriminalize possession of up to 200 grams of cannabis for personal use. That’s a higher possession limit than what would be permitted under the statewide legalization initiative, which would allow adults to have up to 2.5 ounces (about 70 grams).

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) intervened to ensure that Harbor View would see decriminalization on the ballot after the Lucas County Board of Elections voted not to certify the activist-led cannabis measure in light of a local prosecutor’s concerns. After a review, he ordered the board to reverse its decision and qualify what is titled “The OG Wild Bill Marihuana Ordinance.”

Chad Thompson, executive director of the Sensible Movement Coalition (SMC) that has worked to qualify local decriminalization measures in dozens of Ohio cities over recent election cycles, told Marijuana Moment that the board’s initial vote “caught us by complete surprise and we didn’t see it coming.”

Lucas County has historically had a “very supportive” election board that “followed the law,” he said. “Thankfully [LaRose] stepped in and corrected them.”

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Federal Judge Blocks California ‘High-Capacity’ Magazine Ban for Second Time

U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez blocked California’s ban on ammunition magazines holding more than ten rounds on Friday.

This is the second time Benitez has issued a decision against the ban.

On June 29, 2017, Breitbart News reported that Benitez blocked the ban to prevent “otherwise law-abiding” citizens from being criminalized.

He noted that the ban takes away Second Amendment rights “and amounts to the government taking people’s private property without compensation.”

On Friday, Benitez issued a decision against the ban again by following the Bruen (2022) framework, which requires tradition to be on the side of the gun control in question.

KQED quoted Benitez noting, “There is no American tradition of limiting ammunition capacity.”

He noted that, historically speaking, detachable magazines “solved a problem with historic firearms: running out of ammunition and having to slowly reload a gun.”

He added, “There have been, and there will be, times where many more than 10 rounds are needed to stop attackers,” Benitez wrote. “Yet, under this statute, the State says ‘too bad.’”

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Houston Police Arrested an Animal Rights Protester and Detained Him for 16 Hours, Lawsuit Says

Animal rights activists Daraius Dubash and Faraz Harsini were peacefully demonstrating in a Houston, Texas, public park when park employees demanded they leave. When Dubash insisted that the pair had a First Amendment right to protest, officials called the police, who arrested Dubash and charged him with criminal trespass. 

While Dubash’s charge was eventually dismissed, the pair have now filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the city, arguing that city police clearly violated their Constitutional rights.

“No one should be handcuffed and detained for exercising his First Amendment rights,” said JT Morris, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit group. “We’re suing because public parks belong to all Americans and their expressive rights, not the personal views of a few.” 

From April to July 2022, Dubash and Harsini demonstrated several times in Discovery Green, a Houston public park. According to their lawsuit, the pair—keeping in practice with Anonymous for the Voiceless, the animal-rights activist group the two pertained to—wore Guy Fawkes masks while playing clips from Dominion, a documentary showing the gruesome mistreatment of animals in factory farms. 

On three separate occasions, park employees asked the pair to leave the park, claiming that the park was private property. (Discovery Green is public property, though it is managed by a private company.) According to the complaint, the pair complied, fearing retaliation.

On July 23, 2022, Dubash and Harsini were approached again. This time, they refused to leave, and Dubash calmly told park employees that he had a right to demonstrate peacefully. However, a park security guard told Dubash that protests were allowed on a “case by case” basis, adding that his “manager is going to come and come look at it.”

According to the lawsuit, when the manager, Floyd Willis, arrived, Dubash informed him that, while the park was managed by a private conservancy, the park was still public property, meaning that the First Amendment applied.

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