A San Francisco deputy public defender was handcuffed and arrested at the Hall of Justice after she objected to city police officers questioning her client outside a courtroom…
Category: Police
FBI Defuses Another Of Its Own Terrorist Plots; John Boehner Pretends It’s Evidence That We Need To Renew The PATRIOT Act
Last week, as you may have heard, the Justice Department breathlessly announced that it had uncovered and broken up a terrorist plot against the government, leading to the arrest of a 20 year-old man, Christopher Lee Cornell, in Ohio. According to the FBI, Cornell was planning to go to the US Capitol and kill government officials. As often happens with these kinds of announcements, the press was quick to jump in and fuel the narrative of some big terror plot that the FBI was able to miraculously disrupt at the last minute.
For years now, we’ve pointed out a pattern of how nearly every big headline about the US disrupting a domestic terrorist attack was almost always about the FBI creating its very own plot, and then pressuring and cajoling some vulnerable, poverty-stricken, desperate Muslim (almost always Muslim) young men into “joining” this plot. This happens despite those individuals rarely having expressed direct interest in any sort of terrorist activity, or having any connections or means to carry out such activity. But with continued pressure from “FBI informants” (who tend to either by paid by the FBI or are trying to reduce punishment for other crimes they’ve been charged with — or both), eventually these men agree to take part in a “plot” that was entirely designed by the FBI and had no chance of ever happening.
It’s EASY to make you GRASS YOURSELF UP for crimes you never did
New research has found that people are often surprisingly willing to confess to having committed crimes – even when they’re innocent, or when the crimes never actually took place.
According to psychboffins Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire, UK and Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia, Canada, interviewers need only seed their questions with a few “wrong details” to cause false memories to form in subjects’ minds.
“Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” Shaw said in a statement.
To prove the point, the researchers gave a questionnaire to the primary caregivers of 60 university students, asking then to describe events that the students experienced between the ages of 11 and 14. The boffins then brought the students in to their lab for a series of three 40-minute interviews about their past histories.
The twist? Although the scientists asked each student about two different life events, only one of the events mentioned in the questioning actually happened. The other event was pure fiction, but a surprising number of test subjects came to believe it happened anyway, even when it involved them committing a crime.
Latest FBI Claim of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny and Skepticism
The Justice Department on Wednesday issued a press release trumpeting its latest success in disrupting a domestic terrorism plot, announcing that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force has arrested a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” The alleged would-be terrorist is 20-year-old Christopher Cornell (above), who is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as “Mommy” and regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as “a typical student” and “quiet but not overly reserved” by the principal of the local high school he graduated in 2012.
The affidavit filed by an FBI investigative agent alleges Cornell had “posted comments and information supportive of [ISIS] through Twitter accounts.” The FBI learned about Cornell from an unnamed informant who, as the FBI put it, “began cooperating with the FBI in order to obtain favorable treatment with respect to his criminal exposure on an unrelated case.” Acting under the FBI’s direction, the informant arranged two in-person meetings with Cornell where they allegedly discussed an attack on the Capitol, and the FBI says it arrested Cornell to prevent him from carrying out the attack.
Family members say Cornell converted to Islam just six months ago and claimed he began attending a small local mosque. Yet The Cincinnati Enquirer could not find a single person at that mosque who had ever seen him before, and noted that a young, white, recent convert would have been quite conspicuous at a mosque largely populated by “immigrants from West Africa,” many of whom “speak little or no English.”
DA Charges Albuquerque Cops With Murder, Gets Locked Out Of New Police Shooting Investigation
A top prosecutor for District Attorney Kari Brandenburg’s office was shut out of a briefing after a fatal police shooting near San Mateo and Constitution NE on Tuesday evening, Brandenburg told KRQE News 13.
Police officials and others were gathering to discuss the most recent developments in the investigation a few hours after the shooting, Brandenburg said. Chief Deputy DA Sylvia Martinez attempted to join the briefing, but Deputy City Attorney Kathryn Levy would not let Martinez attend.
Eric Goldman calls our attention to a rather astounding story out of Florida, involving how various Florida police departments are engaging in what appears to be basically sham “sting” operations online to arrest and shame men as child sexual predators, then steal their cars (sometimes offering to sell them back), and then doing everything possible to hide the records. The whole thing is quite crazy, and I recommend reading the entire thing. It also comes as little surprise that one of the sheriffs deeply involved in this is Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd — who we’ve written about a few times before. Back in 2009 we wrote about Judd using Craigslist to find and arrest prostitutes… and then blaming Craigslist, the very tool he used to track down the lawbreakers. A year ago, Judd got a lot more attention for his plan to arrest parents of some girls who were accused of bullying another girl into committing suicide (though, eventually charges were dropped and almost no evidence of any bullying was found).
NYPD Pouts And Refuses To Do Their Duty; Residents Split Between Applauding And Failing To Notice
As you may be aware, things have gotten weird with the NYPD over the past several weeks. In what amounts to the police force in our nation’s largest city throwing a temper tantrum over either the brutal murder of 2 officers or the sudden attention being paid to how police officers treat the city’s minority residents in the wake of the stop and frisk scandals and the death of Eric Garner, the NYPD’s numbers are all down. Arrests are down somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%, and citations appear to have plummeted to a fraction of the norm, resulting in arraignment numbers dropping by nearly a third. While the NYPD has denied that this is any kind of coordinated lack-of-effort, that claim is laughable and it’s obvious that the police officers have banded together to show us how much New York City needs them and how horrible life will be when they stop performing the duties they swore to perform.
Too bad most people are barely noticing and that those who have noticed are thrilled.
Few managers in the court system expect the current downturn to last. Many public defenders, however, said they hope the steep decline in minor arrests will become permanent. They noted felonies did not rise over the last three weeks as arrests for low-level crimes plummeted.
“This proves to us is what we all knew as defenders: You can end broken-windows policing without ending public safety,” said Justine M. Luongo, the deputy attorney-in-charge of criminal practice for the Legal Aid Society.