Tag: police state

The family of a pregnant Colorado woman fatally shot by police sues the officers

The family of a pregnant Colorado woman fatally shot by an Arvada police officer after she was mistaken for a shoplifter said in a lawsuit that the killing was “patently unreasonable.”

The family of Destinee Thompson, 27, of Denver, is seeking unspecified damages in the suit filed against four officers and a sergeant Tuesday, two years after Thompson was killed as she tried to drive away from officers who had surrounded her car.

She was leaving an Arvada motel on Aug. 17, 2021, when several officers approached her, saying they were looking for a Latina who had brandished a knife as she was stealing a cart full of merchandise from a Target store, according to the suit, filed in District Court in Denver County.

The actual suspect, who also had stolen items from the store two days previously, had a chest tattoo, she was wearing a white tank top, and she allegedly had gone to the motel, the suit says.

Thompson, who was wearing a white tank top but did not have a chest tattoo, was leaving the motel to eat lunch as officers arrived, the document says.

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Magic mushroom dispensaries multiplying in southwestern Ontario, with no cap in sight

Flying in the face of local law enforcement, a chain of illegal brick-and-mortar magic mushroom dispensaries with locations in London, Windsor, and across the province is expanding to more local municipalities, strengthening a trend reminiscent of the pre-legalization cannabis market.

A recently opened storefront in St. Thomas is the latest move for FunGuyz, the entity that runs at least 13 dispensaries in Canada and one in Detroit, with a spokesperson suggesting other nearby small towns may be next.

“We’re looking at Sarnia, Strathroy, smaller cities surrounding London,” said a spokesperson who identified themselves only as Edgar and said the St. Thomas store opened last week.

In the past, different spokespeople for the company have all identified themselves as Edgar, or Edgars Gorbans. When asked if the name was real by CBC Windsor in early August, one spokesperson claiming to be named Edgar Gorbans said  “could be,” and “of course not.”

The latest expansion comes despite recent police raids at FunGuyz stores. London Police raided the local store in early July, whereas Windsor Police have raided their local store multiple times, and issued an arrest warrant for the store’s owner, who they identified as Edward Gorbans. 

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It’s Time to Decriminalize Personal Possession of All Drugs. Yes, All of Them 

Drug addiction is a chronic disease. It alters the way the brain works, stripping people of self-control and their ability to resist further drug consumption. Yet unlike responses to other diseases, in the United States, arrests and incarceration serve as the primary treatment for drug addiction.

This approach has been a failure. It’s time to treat drug addiction as a public health matter and not a criminal law one. This begins by investing in a treatment infrastructure and decriminalizing the personal possession of drugs.

Police in the United States make 1.16 million arrests a year for drugs. The vast majority of these arrests, 87 percent, are for personal possession or use of drugs, meaning that police arrest a person for drug possession, not drug selling, every 32 seconds. Drug arrests represent the number one activity that police engage in, at nearly 2.5 times the volume of arrests for all FBI-classified violent offenses combined (homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). Despite people of all races using drugs at similar rates, Black people comprise 27 percent of all drug-related arrests—even though they make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population. There are about 350,000 people incarcerated in jails and prisons for drugs.

Yet for all these arrests and incarceration, we have little to show for it, other than more people in handcuffs and jail cells. New data released just last month revealed that nearly 110,000 people in the United States died from drug-involved overdoses in 2022, compared to fewer than 20,000 in 1999. The CATO Institute estimates that taxpayers spend approximately $47 billion a year on drug prohibition. In the 23 years that drug overdoses rose from 20,000 to 110,000 a year, taxpayers spent more than $1 trillion.

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Ex-NYPD cop charged with tipping off gangbanger boyfriend about federal probe

An NYPD cop tipped off her Bronx gangbanger boyfriend about a federal probe — even giving up the name of a key witness and helping him try to dodge a murder rap, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday.

Gina Mestre, 33, who was with the department until last year, “shamelessly” fed confidential information to the “Shooting Boys” gang after getting into “an intimate relationship” with the crew’s leader, Manhattan federal prosecutors alleged.

The disgraced officer even tipped off her alleged beau, Andrew “Caballo” Done, about a police manhunt for him following the September 2020 shooting of a rival gang member, the four-count indictment claims.

“Gina Mestre shamelessly exploited her position of public trust to assist gang members in her own NYPD precinct that were terrorizing the Bronx by committing robbery, murders, drug trafficking and other acts of violence,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

“The indictment unsealed today alleges that the defendant abused her position as an NYPD police officer by, among other things, obstructing a federal grand jury investigation into the gang and assisting the gang’s leader in evading capture for a cold-blooded murder committed in broad daylight,” Williams said.

Mestre, of Mohegan Lake in Westchester County, joined New York’s Finest in 2013 and was assigned to the Public Safety Unit at the 52nd Precinct in the Bronx.

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BOLSANARO’S BUTCHERY: CIA FINGERPRINTS ARE ALL OVER BRAZIL’S INDIGENOUS GENOCIDE

From April 1964 to March 1985, a military junta ruled Brazil with an iron fist. Its crimes against humanity throughout this period were extensive, including institutionalized torture, imprisonment, forced disappearances and mass murder. Typically, the victims were political opponents of the regime, although the country’s indigenous population was a specific, dedicated target.

In most cases, their crime was objecting to economic “reform” projects that destroyed their homes or simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the backing and direction of the World Bank, the junta forcibly displaced indigenous people and desecrated their lands to extract valuable natural resources for Western capital. Along the way, these communities routinely endured brutal repression, pogroms, and massacres.

Much of this barbarity was doled out by the Rural Indigenous Guard, a lethal elite police force covertly created by the CIA. The Agency also constructed a system of indigenous prisons, which played a pivotal and horrifying role in the junta’s policies of indigenous cleansing.

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People Who Use Marijuana Are Half As Likely To Develop Type 2 Diabetes, New Meta-Analysis Finds

People who use marijuana are about half as likely to develop type 2 diabetes, according to a new meta-analysis of scientific studies.

Researchers at the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran published the study in the journal Phytotherapy Research this month, expanding on the scientific literature examining the effects of cannabis on glucose regulation and insulin secretion that are tied to the chronic disease.

To investigate the relationship, the researchers analyzed 11 relevant surveys and four epidemiological cohort studies that were published in scientific databases such as PubMed up through July 1, 2022.

They found that the incidence of type 2 diabetes among people who consume marijuana “was 0.48 times lower than in those without cannabis exposure.”

“A protective effect of cannabis consumption on the odds of diabetes mellitus type 2 development has been suggested,” the paper says. “Yet given the considerable interstudy heterogeneity, the upward trend of cannabis consumption and cannabis legalization is recommended to conduct studies with higher levels of evidence.”

Prior studies have similarly linked marijuana to lower rates of type 2 diabetes, which is the version of the disease where patients produce low amounts of insulin and can become resistant to the hormone.

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Researchers find deliberate backdoor in police radio encryption algorithm

For more than 25 years, a technology used for critical data and voice radio communications around the world has been shrouded in secrecy to prevent anyone from closely scrutinizing its security properties for vulnerabilities. But now it’s finally getting a public airing thanks to a small group of researchers in the Netherlands who got their hands on its viscera and found serious flaws, including a deliberate backdoor.

The backdoor, known for years by vendors that sold the technology but not necessarily by customers, exists in an encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure. It’s used to transmit encrypted data and commands in pipelines, railways, the electric grid, mass transit, and freight trains. It would allow someone to snoop on communications to learn how a system works, then potentially send commands to the radios that could trigger blackouts, halt gas pipeline flows, or reroute trains.

Researchers found a second vulnerability in a different part of the same radio technology that is used in more specialized systems sold exclusively to police forces, prison personnel, military, intelligence agencies, and emergency services, such as the C2000 communication system used by Dutch police, fire brigades, ambulance services, and Ministry of Defense for mission-critical voice and data communications. The flaw would let someone decrypt encrypted voice and data communications and send fraudulent messages to spread misinformation or redirect personnel and forces during critical times.

Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities—five in total—in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but the flaws remained unknown because encryption algorithms used in TETRA were kept secret until now.

The technology is not widely used in the US, where other radio standards are more commonly deployed. But Caleb Mathis, a consultant with Ampere Industrial Security, conducted open source research for WIRED and uncovered contracts, press releases, and other documentation showing TETRA-based radios are used in at least two dozen critical infrastructures in the US. Because TETRA is embedded in radios supplied through resellers and system integrators like PowerTrunk, it’s difficult to identify who might be using them and for what. But Mathis helped WIRED identify several electric utilities, a state border control agency, an oil refinery, chemical plants, a major mass transit system on the East Coast, three international airports that use them for communications among security and ground crew personnel, and a US Army training base.

Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of Midnight Blue in the Netherlands discovered the TETRA vulnerabilities—which they’re calling TETRA:Burst—in 2021 but agreed not to disclose them publicly until radio manufacturers could create patches and mitigations. Not all of the issues can be fixed with a patch, however, and it’s not clear which manufacturers have prepared them for customers. Motorola—one of the largest radio vendors—didn’t respond to repeated inquiries from WIRED.

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Denver Cop Kills Man Holding a Marker

From Denver, another tragic story about cops shooting and killing someone holding a “weapon” that turned out to actually be a harmless object. In this case, an officer with the Denver Police Department (DPD) shot and killed a man armed with a marker. The officer (whose name has not been released) said she believed that 36-year-old Brandon Cole had been holding a knife when she shot him on the evening of August 5.

Now, the DPD has admitted that Cole was not holding a weapon after all.

“Through the investigation, it was determined that the object Mr. Cole had in his hand during the interaction with the officers was a black marker,” Denver Police Commander Matt Clark said at a Monday press conference.

According to Clark, police were responding to a 911 caller who said they thought they saw a man push his wife out of a wheelchair. When two police officers—one male and one female—arrived on the residential street where this had allegedly taken place, they found a woman sitting on the street nearby an empty wheelchair and observed a man “reaching into the driver’s area of a vehicle.”

The female officer then noticed Cole holding “an object that she believed to be a knife,” said Clark. Cole began moving toward her, prompting the male officer to use his Taser on him. But it “did not have an effect,” said Clark, and Cole continued moving toward the female officer, making it within “several feet” of her.

She fired twice, hitting Cole. Cole was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Body cam footage shows a small child standing just behind Cole on the sidewalk when the officer shoots.

“There just wasn’t an opportunity to transition to a Taser,” said Police Chief Ron Thomas. “When she finally deploys her duty weapon, the person is so close to her that her view of that young child and [another person behind Cole] are not even clear to her.”

The officer who shot Cole seems to face little repercussion for killing a man for holding a marker and endangering a small child. She will now “complete the department’s reintegration program before returning to a patrol assignment,” said Clark on Monday.

Cole leaves behind three children, according to NBC News.

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Six former Mississippi cops known as ‘The Goon Squad’ plead guilty to torturing and abusing two black men during raid on their home

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers have pleaded guilty to charges accusing them of torturing and abusing two black men during a raid.

Members of the self-called ‘Goon Squad’ each carried a coin with the name emblazoned on one side and the other with Rankin County Sheriff’s Office’s badge. 

Lieutenant Jeffrey Middleton appeared to be the ringleader of the group, with his coin embossed with ‘Lt Middleton’s Goon Squad’. 

Five other deputies for the Sheriff’s Office, and one from the Richland Police Department, have been charged with conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.

Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, and ex-police officer Joshua Hartfield, were all charged in relation to the assault of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in January. 

Elward was charged with home invasion and aggravated assault for shoving a gun in the mouth of Jenkins and pulling the trigger – in what prosecutors called a ‘mock execution’.

They are accused of assaulting them with sex toys, firearms, stun guns, milk, eggs, alcohol and chocolate syrup on January 24. 

The cops are potentially facing a maximum combined sentence of 641 years and two life sentences in prison for state and federal charges, as well as a combined $12.25 million in fines. 

Dedmon was charged with home invasion after kicking in a door, with McAlpin, Middleton, Opdyke and Hartfield each facing an additional charge of first-degree obstruction of justice.

Middleton admitted in court that he was convicted of vehicular manslaughter in 2007 for hitting/killing a man. 

The victims stared down their attackers after arriving together in court, sitting in the front row just feet away from their attackers’ families.  

Prosecutors say that some of the officers nicknamed themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover it up.

They were targeted after a white neighbor complained that two black men were staying at the home with a white woman. 

Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who has been paralyzed since she was 15 – and he was helping to care for her.  

All of the officers have pleaded guilty to the state charges on Monday, and previously pleaded in a connected federal civil rights case. 

In January, the officers entered a property in Mississippi without a warrant, and handcuffed Jenkins and Parker before assaulting them. 

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Dash cam footage shows Delaware cops conspiring to drum up bogus charge against motorist who flipped them off

A Delaware man is suing the state police, saying they destroyed a sign he made to warn people about their speed trap and they created a bogus reason to charge him with an infraction because he gave them the finger, Delaware Online reported.

Jonathan Guessford had launched a mini-protest by holding a hand-made sign that read, “Radar ahead.” Body cam footage shows Cpl. Stephen Douglas and Officer Nicholas Gallo approach Guessford and incorrectly tell him he could not stand on the side of the road with the sign. Gallo eventually pulled the sign from Guessford’s grasp and ripped it up.

As he was leaving, Guessford gave the officers the finger, prompting them to follow him. When they pulled him over, Master Cpl. Raiford Box arrived on the scene and told Guessford that he was going to be locked up for disorderly conduct and have his child taken away. The officers issued him a citation “under a law that governs hand signals for non-motorized vehicles like bicycles,” Delaware Online’s report stated.

New dash cam footage that was recently released shows officers conspiring to drum up a bogus charge against Guessford. Douglas was warned by Box that the hand-gesture charge was bogus, but that didn’t stop him of issuing it.

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