Tag: police state

Gorgon Stare: A “Persistent Eye in the Sky” May Be Coming to a City Near You

Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything. That same persistent eye in the sky may soon be deployed over U.S. cities.

At the time he made that comment about surveillance drones over Afghanistan, Maj. General James Poss was the Air Force’s top intelligence officer. He was preparing to leave the Pentagon, and move over to the Federal Aviation Administration. His job was to begin executing the plan to allow those same surveillance drones to fly over American cities.

This plan was ordered by Congress in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. It directed the Departments of Defense and Transportation to “develop a plan for providing expanded access to the national airspace for unmanned aircraft systems of the Department of Defense.” Gen. Poss was one of nearly two dozen ex-military officers who, starting in 2010, were put into positions at the FAA to oversee drone integration research. With little public scrutiny, the plan has been moving forward ever since.

If you’re thinking that this is a partisan issue, think again. This plan has been enacted and expanded under Presidents and Congresses of both parties. If you’re uncomfortable with a President Biden having the ability to track the movements of every Tea Party or Q-Anon supporter, you should be. Just as we should all be concerned about a President Trump tracking…well, everybody else.

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Victorian Government Pushes New Bill to Detain ‘Conspiracy Theorists,’ Anti-Lockdown Protesters, and Families

The Victorian government will debate a new bill in the State Parliament this week which would hand authorities the power to forcibly detain “conspiracy theorists” and people suspected to likely spread coronavirus, such as anti-lockdown protesters and their close contacts.

If passed, the Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill will allow the state to detain anyone they suspect of being “high risk” or likely to negligently spread COVID-19, either if they have the virus or have been in contact with an infected person.

According to The Age, a state government spokesman said the rule could be applied to “conspiracy theorists who refuse to self-isolate or severely drug-affected or mentally impaired people who do not have the capacity to quarantine.”

Those detained could then be placed in quarantine facilities, such as hotels, where they can be monitored by authorities.

On Sunday police fined 200 people and made 74 arrests during an anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne. Could this bill lead to the mass-forced quarantining of similar anti-lockdown protesters?

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Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report

When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.

That’s the primary theme of a new report, “Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent,” released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.

This new report drills into all of the exonerations they’ve archived up until February 2019. That’s 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.

In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.

Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.

The most common type of misconduct involved concealing exculpatory evidence, which is evidence that suggests the defendant is not guilty. The National Registry of Exonerations found that evidence was deliberately concealed in 44 percent of the cases that ultimately resulted in exonerations. The 218-page report documents the many ways that police and prosecutors break the rules in order to get convictions, from fabricating evidence and manipulative conduct during interrogations to fraudulent forensics and flat-out lying in court.

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Chief of Police Arrested on Shocking Charges of ‘Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Child’

Weekly or more, TFTP reports on police officers who get arrested by fellow cops on charges of everything from trafficking in child pornography to child rape to running child sex trafficking rings. Some of these officers are low-level cops like Avo Marzwanian, 34, of LaPlace, Louisiana who was charged earlier this month with 10 counts of distribution and 20 counts of possession of child pornography involving juveniles under the age of 13 along with 15 counts of sex abuse against animals.

Other child predators fill the top position in their department like Anthony “Tony” Yocham, who is the police chief in Hamilton, Texas, a town about 100 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

“Detectives with the Somervell County Sheriff’s Office asked the Texas Rangers to investigate the allegations,” said Texas DPS Lt. Lonny Haschel to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Yocham was arrested over the weekend on charges of continuous sexual abuse of a child. According to the Texas Rangers, they took Yocham into custody Saturday after their investigation found enough probable cause to charge him with a crime.

Yocham, who lost the Republican nomination for Somervell County Sheriff in April, was taken to the Johnson County Jail in Cleburne, Texas where he quickly posted the massive $500,000 bond and walked out.

The department has yet to release a statement regarding their police chief’s arrest. Nor have they said whether or not Yocham has been placed on leave. Our efforts to contact the chief or anyone else in the department have fallen on deaf ears.

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