Tag: police state

Berkeley Police Department in turmoil over leaked texts about arrest quotas

The Berkeley Police Department was in turmoil Thursday following the leak of text messages that allegedly show the president of the police officers union making racially charged remarks and calling for arrest quotas.

The growing scandal resulted in the union president, Sgt. Darren Kacalek, being placed on administrative leave Wednesday, city officials confirmed. He also stepped down from his position as union head. It also put on pause the City Council’s pending appointment of a new police chief, Jennifer Louis, the Berkeley Scanner reported.

The texts were exposed last week by a city police officer who was fired last year, Corey Shedoudy. He claimed he obtained the messages during the arbitration process to get back his job.

“Evidence was uncovered that exposed the unethical and illegal practice of arrest quotas of downtown unhoused ordered by Sgt. Darren Kacalek,” Shedoudy wrote in an email to the mayor and City Council. The officer was reportedly fired for intentionally crashing his bike into a car.

As a member of the Downtown Task Force and BPD Bike Force in 2020, Shedoudy claimed that Kacalek — a sergeant in the Police Department at the time — required him and other officers to make 100 arrests per month, “which was at the time more than the rest of the police department combined,” Shedoudy wrote in the email.

The quotas continued after Louis was named interim chief, Shedoudy said.

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Biden reaches for his pen — and undermines separation of powers

Faced with a Congress that would not endorse his expansive regulatory agenda, President Obama famously remarked, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.” Almost 10 years later, governing by executive fiat continues.

The latest round of policymaking by pen and phone came when President Biden designated 53,804 acres of land in north-central Colorado as the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument. That designation will have significant consequences, because the entire area is now withdrawn from a host of future resource extraction and other productive land use activities.

This is not the first attempt to reserve the area. It was one of the central objectives of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy (CORE) Act. Yet the CORE Act failed several times to secure the necessary votes in the Senate to become law. 

A casual observer might wonder how Biden could unilaterally set aside tens of thousands of acres of land with the stroke of a pen, even after Congress made clear that it will not endorse such a policy. The answer lies in presidential abuse of power under the Antiquities Act.

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 with a narrow focus in mind: to protect Native American archeological sites from looting and destruction. To accomplish this goal, the law permits the president to designate landmarks, structures and objects of historic or scientific interest situated on lands owned or controlled by the federal government as “national monuments.” It also permits the president to reserve surrounding public lands. But such lands must be confined to the smallest area compatible with the protection of the object. Presidents typically designate monuments under the act through “presidential proclamations,” which do not require public notice or an opportunity for the public to comment on the designations.   

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Saudi Arabia Executes 15 People in 12 Days For Non-Violent Drug Offences

Saudi Arabia has executed 15 people for non-violent drug offences – some thought to be beheaded by sword – in the last 12 days, despite promising to end them. 

In January 2021 the country announced a moratorium on drug-related executions. It came in the wake of the gruesome murder and dismembering of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in 2018 by a Saudi death squad, a hit the CIA said was ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  

But legal NGO Reprieve said that in the last fortnight the regime had quietly resumed secret executions for drug offences. Ten of those executed are foreign nationals, from Pakistan, Syria and Jordan. Five of them – including a man executed on Monday morning – are Saudi nationals. Because executions are carried out behind closed doors and bodies are not returned to families, methods of execution cannot be confirmed. However experts believe people are killed by a mixture of beheading by sword and by shooting.  

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New York cannabis farms have nowhere to sell a combined 300,000 pounds of weed, valued at $750 million, as delays continue for dispensaries in the state

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana are currently sitting idly on New York cannabis farms without a single legal recreational dispensary in the state open and ready to sell the product.

An estimated 300,000 pounds of weed are becoming a growing concern for farmers who planted the crop in spring 2021 in hopes of cashing in on the drug’s legalization in New York state. The lot is valued at about $750 million based on the average wholesale value of $2,500 per pound, according to Bloomberg.

Today, the legal recreational cannabis market is stalled as applicants for the first 150 individual retail licenses and 25 nonprofit licenses are still waiting to hear back from the Office of Cannabis Management, per Bloomberg.

Although players in the industry are waiting for the green light from the state, Melany Dobson — CEO of New York-based Hudson Cannabis — told Bloomberg it’s not the only thing holding her and others back.

“It’s an unclear path to market,” Dobson said. “We’ve been told again and again that dispensaries will open before the end of the year. I’ve acted as though that’s our single source of proof, so we’re prepared for that.”

The clock is ticking for the freshly harvested pounds of pot as farmers work to extend its shelf life in preparation for the still-to-come legal dispensaries.

“Old cannabis starts to have a brownish glow,” Dobson said. 

She continued: “We’re trying to retain as much quality as possible. And rushing it into the finished product bags is not the way to do that.”

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CIA Caught Covering Up Rampant Child Sex Crimes Inside Agency and NO ONE Has Gone to Jail

Imagine an agency so secretive and so corrupt that they can literally get away with criminal sexual abuse of children. Then imagine you are forced to pay for this agency and despite knowing that their agents are abusing children — even admitting to it — they are avoiding any kind of legal ramifications. Well, there is no need to imagine because that and more, is happening within the CIA and no one is doing anything about it.

Last December, through multiple FOIA lawsuits, Buzzfeed News obtained hundreds of internal CIA reports that detailed the rampant abuse. According to the reports, despite multiple agents and contractors, at least 10, being caught in child sex abuse situations, federal prosecutors have brought no charges. The abusers remain protected by the agency.

It’s been nearly a year since this information became public yet there has been no investigation and essentially no interest by anyone in D.C. or the political establishment to hold them accountable.

Buzzfeed reports that most of the cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution but in an apparent quid pro quo scenario, the US attorneys send the cases back to the CIA to “handle them internally.” As a result of this scenario, these child-abusing monsters face no legal ramifications. At most, according to the report, they may lose their job or security clearance.

As Buzzfeed points out, some of these crimes are utterly horrifying and involve toddlers.

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Canadian Doctor Says College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario Suggests Unvaccinated Patients are Mentally Ill and Should be Put on Psychiatric Medication 

Doctors in Ontario are reportedly being advised to consider using psychiatric medicines on patients who refuse the vaccine.

During an interview at ‘Let Freedom Reign Tour,’ Physician and Cancer Researcher Dr. William Makis claimed that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario sent out a note to doctors implying that their unvaccinated patients may be suffering from a mental illness and should be prescribed psychiatric medicine.

“So this has come out recently out of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. The college sent out a letter or a memo to all the doctors in Ontario suggesting to them now, so far, they’re not mandating it, they’re just suggesting it, that any of their unvaccinated patients, that they should consider that they have a mental problem and that they should be put on psychiatric medication. So far, it’s just a suggestion,” Dr. Makis told Lynn Tyler Thompson.

“But the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario should not be making these kinds of suggestions. This is extremely unethical and this is a very, very slippery slope. If they’re suggesting that people who wish to have bodily autonomy and don’t want an experimental vaccine, that there may be something mentally wrong with them, that is a very, very dangerous, slippery slope that we’re on,” he continued.

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Why Is The Government Arming More Federal Bureaucrats Than US Marines?

When Congress authorized $80 billion this year to beef up Internal Revenue Service enforcement and staffing, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy warned that “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”

A video quickly went viral racking up millions of views, purporting to show a bunch of clumsy bureaucrats receiving firearms training, prompting alarm that the IRS would be engaged in military-style raids of taxpayers. The GOP claims were widely attacked as exaggerations — since the video, though from the IRS, didn’t show official agent training — but the criticism has shed light on a growing trend: the rapid arming of the federal government.

A report issued last year by the watchdog group Open The Books, “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies,” found that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats now have been granted the authority to carry guns and make arrests — more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. “One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation adjusted),” notes the report. “Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.”

The watchdog reports that the Department of Health and Human Services has 1,300 guns including one shotgun, five submachine guns, and 189 automatic firearms. NASA has its own fully outfitted SWAT team, with all the attendant weaponry, including armored vehicles, submachine guns, and breeching shotguns. The Environmental Protection Agency has purchased drones, GPS trackers, radar equipment, and night vision goggles, and stockpiled firearms.

A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that the IRS had 4,487 guns and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in inventory at the end of 2017 — before the enforcement funding boost this year. The IRS did not respond to requests for information, though the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division does put out an annual report detailing basic information such as how many warrants the agency is executing in a given year.

More than a hundred executive agencies have armed investigators, and apparently no independent authority is monitoring or tracking the use of force across the federal government. Agencies contacted by RealClearInvestigations from HHS to EPA declined to provide, or said they did not have, comprehensive statistics on how often their firearms are used, or details on how they conduct armed operations.

“I would be amazed if that data exists in any way,” said Trevor Burrus, a research fellow in constitutional and criminal law at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Over the years of working on this, it’s quite shocking how much they try to not have their stuff tracked on any level.”

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