Tag: police state

New Jersey cop rushed to help Bob Menendez’s wife after Mercedes crash despite being retired and convinced patrolman on duty to let her go without a sobriety test or having to hand over her phone

A top New Jersey cop rushed to be by Bob Menendez’s wife’s side after she killed a man with her Mercedes in a 2018 crash, and quizzed the patrolmen on scene until she was allowed to walk away without a sobriety test or having to hand over her phone. 

Menendez’s wife Nadine Arslanian fatally struck 49-year-old Richard Koop in Bogota, New Jersey, on December 12, 2018. She was dating the New Jersey Democratic Senator at the time but they were not yet married. They are now both charged with felony bribery and corruption crimes. 

After the 2018 crash, Bogota Police rushed to the scene of the crash to quiz Arslanian. 

She told them Hoop had been jaywalking and put himself in the path of her car. 

Also there was Michael Mordaga, the former director of Hackensack Police and an ex-chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, according to The New York Post. 

Mordaga is the man who can be heard asking the patrolmen if they took a statement from Arslanian.

‘That’s my buddy’s wife who’s friends with her. 

He said could you do me a favor and take her up there because her friend just got in a car accident,’ he said, explaining why he’d shown up, before asking: ‘Are you guys getting a statement that you’re going to give to the prosecutor’s office?’ 

The cops let Arslanian walk away from the scene without a sobriety test or giving over her phone records. 

She was never charged, and was later gifted a new convertible Mercedes to replace the vehicle that was damaged in the crash. 

According to federal charging documents, about a month after the crash, Arslanian texted Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessman also indicted in the bribery scheme, lamenting her lack of a car.

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Seattle Pays Family $2M After Man Dies of Heart Attack At Address Wrongly on 911 Blacklist

The city of Seattle has agreed to provide $1.86 million in compensation to the family of a man who suffered a fatal heart attack. The incident occurred after a caution note attached to his address caused a delay in the response of medical professionals.

In 2021, William Yurek, 48, passed away in his townhouse. When his son called 911, Seattle Fire Department medics initially held back, waiting for law enforcement to arrive before entering the premises, as reported by The Seattle Times.

The family contended that Yurek was mistakenly placed on a blacklist of individuals deemed hostile to police and fire crews. Yurek had been residing in the unit for a couple of years prior to his death, and the previous tenant had been listed on this outdated registry, according to a lawsuit filed the previous year.

According to the lawsuit, medics were instructed to wait for a law enforcement escort. As Yurek’s condition deteriorated, his then 13-year-old son made another 911 call and was informed that assistance was on its way, even though the medics had already arrived.

Subsequently, the medics decided to enter the home without waiting for the police. Despite their best efforts, Yurek died.

“Once inside, medics did everything they could to save Will’s life,” Mark Lindquist, the family’s attorney said. “The family has always been grateful to the medics who broke protocol to go in and do their best.”

The city has since made adjustments to its operational protocols concerning caution notes. According to Seattle city attorney’s office spokesperson Tim Robinson, these notes now expire after 365 days in the system or undergo review and renewal. Notes indicating the need for assistance from the Seattle Police Department due to alleged violent or threatening behavior are to be validated after each dispatch to the address, as per Robinson.

Furthermore, in August, Seattle agreed to compensate a former 911 call center manager with $162,500. This individual had filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful punishment for raising concerns about workplace issues, including the practice of maintaining a blacklist in dispatch procedures.

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Pennsylvania Police Charge Metaphysical Shop Owner With Practicing Witchcraft and No, We Aren’t Kidding

We have become accustomed in modern times to the term “witch-hunt” being metaphorical but a practicing witch with a retail shop has become an actual target of the police for “suspicions of witchcraft” charges, despite the fact that this is the year 2023. Her crime? Fortune-telling, in the form of tarot readings. The state has a history of persecuting witches though, back to the very founder William Penn who participated in hearings against two women accused of bewitching livestock to not produce and appearing in spectral form. Basically, in the years between 1683 and right now nobody has bothered to ask if this law is useful, so it remains there to be enforced whenever the police feel like some good ol’ fashioned religious persecution.

The shop owner, @thestitchingwitch, received an email from the Borough Manager alerting her that a recent article about her business had alerted the Chief of Police himself to her allegedly illegal activities. Social media became instantly outraged on her behalf because Americans expect to have religious freedom to practice whatever they choose. It’s also very specifically targeted from the perspective of those at all familiar with the Keystone State, famous for having a groundhog predict the future weather every February 2nd. 

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County agrees to $12.2M settlement with man who was jailed for drunken driving, then lost his hands

 A Minnesota county agreed to pay a $12.2 million settlement to a man who was jailed on suspicion of drunken driving but ended up losing both his hands and suffering a heart attack, a stroke and skin lesions all over his body, allegedly due to the inaction of officials in the county jail, attorneys said Wednesday.

Terrance Dwayne Winborn spent about four months in hospitals, including two months on a ventilator, because Scott County jail officials failed during the 39 hours he was incarcerated to ensure he got the prompt treatment he needed, his lawyers said at a news conference.

It’s a case that highlights the vulnerability of prisoners who are dependent on authorities for medical care.

The attorneys said the settlement will cover the more than $2 million in medical bills Winborn has already incurred — a sum which they said the county didn’t cover — as well as the millions he’ll need for ongoing care. The county’s insurance plan will cover the settlement.

“That deliberate indifference allowed a bacterial infection to run rampant within his body, leading to a heart attack … and a host of other devastating and permanent injuries,” attorney Katie Bennett told reporters.

Jason Hiveley, an outside lawyer who handled the case for Scott County, said in a brief statement that the county and its insurer, the Minnesota Counties Intergovernmental Trust, agreed to the settlement in exchange for dismissal of Winborn’s lawsuit and a release from his claims. The statement did not say whether the county still denies any wrongdoing.

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Feds Threaten To Make It Harder For Medical Marijuana Patients To Get State Gun Permits In Arkansas

Arkansas’s recently enacted law permitting medical cannabis patients to obtain concealed carry gun licenses “creates an unacceptable risk,” and could jeopardize the state’s federally approved alternative firearm licensing policy, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) says.

The Arkansas law took effect in August, clarifying that a person’s status as a qualified patient in the state cannot be used “in determining whether an applicant is eligible to be issued a license to carry a concealed handgun.”

The policy change has apparently attracted the critical attention of federal officials at the Justice Department, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette first reported. A letter sent by Marianna Mitchem, chief of ATF’s Firearms and Explosives Industry Division, to the operations director for the Division of Arkansas Crime Information this week said there are “public safety concerns” with the law.

Mitchem advised the state official that Arkansas has been previously notified that a condition of its alternative gun licensing scheme, which allows gun buyers to receive approval by the state without going through a federal background check, is that firearms cannot be purchased by a “controlled substance user.” In the eyes of the federal government, that includes medical cannabis patients.

The letter contained a veiled threat, stating that if the state department did not answer two specific questions, it would warrant a reevaluation of Arkansas’s alternative gun permit policy.

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Fascism Is Actually a Merger of State and Corporate Power, Stamping Out Dissent

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

While this was originally written by Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Benito Mussolini took this statement and made it his own

The word “fascism” gets tossed around a lot, but let’s look at the history behind it so we can better understand this political movement. Mussolini used to confidently declare that the 20th century would be the century of fascism.  And while he was roundly defeated in World War II, his ideology may have been the winner in the long run.

Fascism was never a well-developed school of thought, in the way Marxism and Leninism were.  It emerged as a response to socialism in the aftermath of the First World War.

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FBI Creates ‘MAGA’ Extremist Category, Targets Trump Supporters Ahead Of 2024 Election

The Biden FBI has ‘quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers’ ahead of the 2024 election, according to prolific (and well connected) anti-war journalist and political commentator, William Arkin, who has previously reported on the FBI’s efforts to “Fight MAGA Terrorism.”

In a Wednesday Newsweek article, Arkin reveals that the vast majority of FBI investigations into “anti-government” activities are of Trump supporters.

“The FBI is in an almost impossible position,” a current FBI official told Arkin, who added that the agency’s stated intent is stopping a repeat of January 6th type incidents (which was riddled with feds), while balancing the Constitutional right of Americans to protest the government “Especially at a time when the White House is facing Congressional Republican opposition claiming that the Biden administration has ‘weaponized’ the Bureau against the right wing, it has to tread very carefully,” the official continued.

Newsweek spoke to over a dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism in a three-month investigation to understand the current domestic-security landscape and to evaluate what President Joe Biden‘s administration is doing about what it calls domestic terrorism. Most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly, were reluctant to stray into partisan politics or feared the repercussions of speaking frankly.

Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.

We would note that an FBI whistleblower in March claimed that the agency pressured him to inflate domestic terrorism figures against conservatives, and that the agency created a specific threat tag for pro-lifers “THREATSCOTUS2022” following the leaked Supreme Court opinion on abortion (and not a threat tag for the violent leftists who threatened SCOTUS justices?).

The FBI told Newsweek in a statement that: “The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI’s goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence. Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI’s top threat priorities,” adding “We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person’s political beliefs or affiliations.”

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Weed Is Legal in Illinois. Police Searched His Car Anyway.

In June 2022, police in Illinois pulled over Prentiss Jackson for driving without his lights on. An officer with the Urbana Police Department subsequently claimed he could smell “a little bit of weed” coming from the car, leveraging that to search Jackson’s vehicle and ultimately kicking off a legal odyssey that would result in an 84-month sentence in federal prison.

At the officer’s request, Jackson handed over two grams of unburnt cannabis he kept in a baggie in his glove box. Possessing up to 30 grams is permissible under Illinois law. 

But when the officer demanded Jackson exit the vehicle, he ran—dropping a gun in the process. Prentiss was charged with possessing a firearm as a felon. Although Jackson sought to suppress the evidence from that search—invoking Illinois’ legal cannabis threshold and alleging that the officer lacked probable cause—Judge James E. Shadid of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois came down in favor of police, ruling that Jackson had run afoul of the state requirement to keep marijuana in an odor-proof container.

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California cop who won award for ‘most DUI arrests’ is arrested for DUI

A Sacramento police officer arrested for driving under the influence had previously been given an award for arresting drunk drivers, KCRA 3 reported Wednesday.

Raymond Barrantes was arrested last weekend after California Highway Patrol pulled him over. He has since been bailed out of the San Joaquin County Jail.

According to the report, the West Sacramento Police Department confirmed that in 2015, Barrantes was given an award by the national organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), along with a Facebook post with the caption that Barrantes and another officer had “the most DUI arrests for our Agency in 2014.”

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Fifth Circuit Expands Injunction Against Government Online Censorship To Include CISA

A ruling on Tuesday by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit marks a leap for the safeguarding of free speech within the social media arena. This decision sees the addition of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to a preliminary injunction in the ongoing legal contest of Missouri v. Biden.

Initially, a host of prominent agencies, including the White House, US Surgeon General’s office, CDC, and the FBI were barred from manipulating social media platforms in a manner that obstructs constitutional freedoms of speech.

The fight against censorship is far from novel, with the tale of Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty, and Ms. Jill Hines circulating in the public domain for several years. Their experiences of being censored and throttled on social media platforms form an integral part of a broader governmental agenda to curb free speech for independent thinkers and intellectuals.

This latest ruling by the Fifth Circuit punctuates a series of preceding actions, including its September 8 ruling upholding an earlier order by District Judge Terry Doughty. Doughty’s order on Independence Day caused shockwaves by banning government officials from using their offices to manipulate social media companies into surrendering the First Amendment rights of citizens.

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