Tag: police state

Chicago police investigating whether cops had improper sexual contact with immigrants, including teen who was allegedly impregnated

Chicago police are investigating accusations that a group of officers had improper sexual contact with newly arrived immigrants.

One of the officers, assigned to the Ogden District, covering Lawndale and Little Village, has been accused of impregnating a teenage girl, law enforcement sources said Thursday.

Multiple other officers are accused of engaging in sexual acts with immigrants.

A police spokesperson said the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability are investigating. 

As the city has struggled to accommodate an influx of new arrivals being sent from the southern U.S. border, controversy has brewed over the decision to temporarily house many of them at police stations.

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Police Officer Sparks Outrage, Investigation After Shooting Family’s Dog

The owners of a “lovable” 3-year-old dog named Dixie, who was fatally shot by a local police officer, opened up to Newsweek about the confusion and heartbreak their family is facing following the pet’s death.

The officer said he had no choice but to shoot the dog to “stop the threat” as he feared for his safety in the July 2 incident.

Tammie Kerns, 52, of Lorain, Ohio, and her 25-year-old daughter Mellenie told Newsweek in an interview over Facebook Messenger that their dog Dixie was “lovable, playful, sneaky, and mischievous” golden Labrador mix. The Kernses said they had to watch their beloved pet bleed to death on the sidewalk in front of their home on Sunday after Dixie was shot multiple times by a Lorain Police Department (LPD) officer.

Just a few months ago, a CBS poll showed that “large bipartisan majorities believe at least some policing changes are necessary”, including 61 percent of Democrats, 47 percent of independents, and 29 percent of Republicans, who all say that it should be a “high priority.” It’s a trend shown in polls by ABC News and Pew Research as well, dating back to 2020.

Tammie said Dixie and three other dogs rushed out the door when she was leaving the house that afternoon. As she was wrangling the pups with her daughter, a police officer pulled up in front of her house in the Northeast Ohio suburb.

Lorain police Lieutenant Jacob Morris told Newsweek in an email that the department’s office of professional standards is currently investigating the shooting.

At roughly 1 p.m. on July 2, LPD Officer Elliot Palmer was on patrol when he saw several large dogs roaming “at large” near a home on the corner of Eighth Street and Oberlin Avenue, according to the incident report provided to Newsweek by Morris.

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Police will be allowed to spy on suspects by remotely activating their phones’ camera, microphone and GPS under new French laws dubbed a ‘snoopers’ charter’

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late Wednesday.

Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only ‘dozens of cases a year’.

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail.

Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organised crime.

The provisions ‘raise serious concerns over infringements of fundamental liberties,’ digital rights group La Quadrature du Net wrote in a May statement.

It cited the ‘right to security, right to a private life and to private correspondence’ and ‘the right to come and go freely’, calling the proposal part of a ‘slide into heavy-handed security’.

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Eric Adams’s Fallen Cop Photo Is a Fake

Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly shown off a picture of a murdered police officer, saying he has kept the picture in his wallet for decades. In reality, the picture was a Google printout that Adams aides altered last year to make it look like “the mayor had been carrying it for some time,” the New York Times reported Thursday.

Adams has used the picture to tout his image as tough on crime, saying last year that the killings of two police officers “reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable,” according to the Times report. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet,” Adams said. One week later, the mayor posed for a picture in which he held up the photo of Venable. He has “repeated the moving anecdote”—and held up the Venable photo—multiple times since.

But the photo “had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet,” the Times reported. Adams had, in fact, instructed City Hall employees to print out a Google image of the fallen officer and make it look older, “including by splashing some coffee on it.” Two former City Hall aides confirmed that “they were informed about the manipulated photo last year, not long after it was created.”

This is far from the first time Adams has faced accusations of manipulating the truth. The mayor, who claims to be a vegan, was caught ordering fish only days after he ordered New York City schools to serve only vegan food on Fridays, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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A Post-Clemency Prosecution Shines a Light on a Broken System

A month before he left office, then-President Donald Trump freed Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home operator who had served nearly five years of a 20-year sentence for bilking Medicare and Medicaid. Despite that commutation, the Justice Department plans to retry Esformes for the same conduct that sent him to prison in the first place.

Critics of that unprecedented move say it undermines the pardon power and violates the Fifth Amendment’s ban on double jeopardy. As witnesses at a recent congressional hearing emphasized, the case also illustrates the sorry state of the federal clemency system, which in recent decades has become increasingly stingy, inefficient, and haphazard.

Esformes was arrested in 2016 and charged with numerous crimes related to a scheme that prosecutors said involved bribes, kickbacks, and medically unnecessary treatments, all of which helped fund a “lavish lifestyle.” After an eight-week trial in 2019, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. directed the jury to acquit Esformes of six charges, including two counts of health care fraud, deeming the evidence underlying them insufficient as a matter of law.

The jury convicted Esformes of 20 other charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, payment and receipt of kickbacks, and obstruction of justice. But it failed to reach verdicts on six counts, including the central charge of conspiring to commit health care fraud.

Based on the 20 convictions, Right on Crime Executive Director Brett Tolman noted in his congressional testimony, “Mr. Esformes was facing 5 years in prison.” But prosecutors successfully urged Scola to sentence Esformes as if he had been convicted of health care fraud, which “increased Mr. Esformes’ sentence by 15 years.”

Although it defies conventional notions of justice, federal judges are allowed to punish defendants for crimes that have not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In this case, Scola explicitly said he considered the six undecided counts in determining Esformes’ sentence.

The Justice Department nevertheless wants to take another stab at convicting Esformes of those crimes. It argues that the commutation Esformes received does not preclude another prosecution, because it says nothing about the unresolved counts.

Trump explicitly left in place three years of post-release supervision, plus restitution and forfeiture totaling about $44 million. But it is hard to believe he thought he was leaving the door open to a trial that could send Esformes back to prison. That prospect instead seems to be the result of a mistake that could have been avoided if Trump had been better advised.

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Circle the Wagons: The Government Is On The Warpath

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”—Harry S. Truman

How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)?

Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or politician translate them for you—and you will be under no illusion about where to draw the line when it comes to speaking your mind, criticizing your government, defending what is yours, doing whatever you want on your own property, and keeping the government’s nose out of your private affairs.

In an age of overcriminalization, where the average citizen unknowingly commits three crimes a day, and even the most mundane activities such as fishing and gardening are regulated, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do.

Yet it was not always this way.

It used to be “we the people” giving the orders, telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the government are “no,” “not” and “nor.”

Compare the following list of “don’ts” the government is prohibited from doing with the growing list of abuses to which “we the people” are subjected on a daily basis, and you will find that we have reached a state of crisis wherein the government is routinely breaking the law and violating its contractual obligations.

For instance, the government is NOT allowed to restrict free speech, press, assembly or the citizenry’s ability to protest and correct government wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the government continues to prosecute whistleblowers, persecute journalists, criminalize expressive activities, crack down on large gatherings of citizens mobilizing to voice their discontent with government policies, and insulate itself and its agents from any charges of wrongdoing (or what the courts refer to as “qualified immunity”).

The government may NOT infringe on a citizen’s right to defend himself. Nevertheless, in many states, it’s against the law to carry a concealed weapon (gun, knife or even pepper spray), and the average citizen is permitted little self-defense against militarized police officers who shoot first and ask questions later.

The government may NOT enter or occupy a citizen’s house without his consent (the quartering of soldiers). Nevertheless, government soldiers (i.e., militarized police) carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids on private homes every year, while maiming children, killing dogs and shooting citizens.

The government may NOT carry out unreasonable searches and seizures on the citizenry or their possessions, NOR can government officials issue warrants without some evidence of wrongdoing (probable cause). Unfortunately, what is unreasonable to the average American is completely reasonable to a government agent, for whom the ends justify the means. In such a climate, we have no protection against roadside strip searches, blood draws, DNA collection, SWAT team raids, surveillance or any other privacy-stripping indignity to which the government chooses to subject us.

The government is NOT to deprive anyone of life, liberty or property without due process. Nevertheless, the government continues to incarcerate tens of thousands of Americans whose greatest crime is being poor and not white. The same goes for those who are put to death, some erroneously, by a system weighted in favor of class and wealth.

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Drug Busts Are Linked to More Overdoses and Deaths

As the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) celebrates its 50th birthday, new research highlights how counterproductive its mission is. Published in the American Journal of Public Health, the research links drug busts to a spike in overdoses in nearby areas.

The cross-university team of researchers started out with this hypothesis: “Law enforcement efforts to disrupt local drug markets by seizing opioids or stimulants are associated with increased spatiotemporal clustering of overdose events in the surrounding geographic area.”

To test this hypothesis, they looked at data from Marion County, Indiana, on drug seizures and overdoses—including fatal overdoses, emergency medical calls for nonfatal overdoses, and naloxone administration—in 2020 and 2021. Marion County is the largest county in Indiana and contains the state capital, Indianapolis.

They found a significant association between “opioid-related law enforcement drug seizures” and an increase in drug overdoses in surrounding areas (that is, within 100, 250, and 500 meters). This association held at one week, two weeks, and three weeks from the drug bust data.

“For example, the expected number of fatal overdoses within 500 meters and 21 days of opioid-related drug seizures ranged from 18.0 to 22.7 per 100 drug seizures, so the observed rate of 23.6 was higher than expected,” the paper states.

Stimulant-related drug seizures were also associated with an increase in drug overdoses, albeit to a lesser extent than with opioid-related drug seizures. The significant association here only held “at a distance of 100 meters within 7 days,” and was stronger for nonfatal overdoses.

During the two-year study period, there were 2,110 opioid-related and 3,039 stimulant-related seizures—an average of seven per day. There were 1,171 overdose deaths recorded during that period (an average of 1.6 per day) and 12,590 nonfatal overdoses (an average of 17.2 per day).

“Supply-side enforcement interventions and drug policies should be further explored to determine whether they exacerbate an ongoing overdose epidemic and negatively affect the nation’s life expectancy,” the researchers suggest.

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French government could cut off social media during unrest, says Macron

Emmanuel Macron has said the French government should consider controlling and cutting off social media networks “when things get out of hand” in the country.

The president’s comments came as ministers blamed young people using platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting last week of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb.

“We need to think about how young people use social networks … when things get out of hand, we may have to regulate them or cut them off.

“Above all, we shouldn’t do this in the heat of the moment and I’m pleased we didn’t have to,” Macron told a meeting of more than 200 mayors whose municipalities were hit by the violence.

“I think it’s a real debate that we need to have in the cold light of day,” Macron told the mayors in a video obtained by BFM television.

Critics said it would put France alongside authoritarian countries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in considering such measures.

Olivier Faure, the leader of the Socialist party, tweeted: “The country of the rights of man and citizens cannot align itself with those great democracies of China, Russia and Iran.”

Olivier Marleix, from the centre-right Les Républicains, added: “Cut social media? Like China, Iran, North Korea? Even if it’s a provocation to distract attention, it’s in very bad taste.”

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 Building the Global Police State

During our investigation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the disingenuous use of language to sell SDGs to an unsuspecting public has emerged as a common theme.

The United Nations (UN) claims the purpose of SDG16 is to:

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

If we accept the supposition that “sustainable development” is global development that meets the needs of the world’s poor, then a reasonable person is unlikely to disagree with this stated objective.

But helping the poor is not the purpose of SDG16.

The real purpose of SDG16 is threefold: (1) empower a global governance regime, (2) exploit threats, both real and imagined, to advance regime objectives; and (3) force an unwarranted, unwelcome, centrally controlled global system of digital identity (digital ID) upon humanity.

We find the UN’s digital ID objective tucked away in its SDG Target 16.9:

By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.

While SDG16 doesn’t allude specifically to “digital” ID, that is what it means.

As we shall see, the SDG16 target indicators don’t reveal the truth, either. For example, the only “indicator” to measure SDG16.9 progress (16.9.1) is:

[The] proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age.

You might therefore think the task of “providing legal identity” would primarily fall to said “civil authorities.” That is not the case.

Within the UN system, all governments (whether local, county, provincial, state, federal) are “stakeholder partners” in a global network comprised of a wide-ranging gamut of public and private organisations. Many of these are explicitly backed by or housed at the UN, and all of them are pushing digital ID as the key mechanism to achieve SDG16.

This aspect of SDG16 will be more fully explored in Part 2.

There is a term that this worldwide amalgam of organisations often uses to describe itself: it is a global public-private partnership—G3P, for short.

The G3P is toiling tirelessly to create the conditions necessary to justify the imposition of both global governance “with teeth” and its prerequisite digital ID system. In doing so, the G3P is inverting the nature of our rights. It manufactures and exploits crises in order to claim legitimacy for its offered “solutions.”

The G3P comprises virtually all of the world’s intergovernmental organisations, governments, global corporations, major philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups. Collectively, these form the “stakeholders” implementing sustainable development, including SDG16.

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Burning Books In A Brave New 1984 World

“Those who don’t build must burn.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” ― George Orwell, 1984

The Venn diagram above perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our current dystopian world better than any academic drivel disguised as a scientific study or any regime media produced propaganda disguised as journalism. In fact, these three novels capture everything that has gone terribly wrong in our world, and I put the blame at the feet of totalitarian governments and an apathetic fearful populace who went along because it was the easiest path to follow.

These three novels, considered among the top 100 novels ever written, were penned between 1931 and 1953, during three distinct periods, which are reflected in the themes and story lines of their dystopian worlds. They were supposed to be works of fiction, providing warnings of what could happen if we made the wrong choices and trusted the wrong people. Sadly, they became user manuals for today’s authoritarian dictators in how to control, condition and cow a population of indoctrinated sheep, as displayed during the covid pandemic exercise.

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