Police State

LA cops plant drugs on black suspect – unaware their body cams were on

"The body cam of a fellow officer showed one officer picking up the small packet from the ground and placing it in the suspect’s wallet — before making a show of discovering it multiple times for the camera. According Shields’ attorney, Steve Levine, officer Lee seemed stunned when he was shown the video while on the witness stand, saying the officer, 'Looked dumbstruck to me. Period. He had really no answer.' According to an expert discussing how the body cams work, the officer may not have realized that the camera was running 30 seconds before he believed he activated it."

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Privacy fears over artificial intelligence as crimestopper

"Police in the US state of Delaware are poised to deploy 'smart' cameras in cruisers to help authorities detect a vehicle carrying a fugitive, missing child or straying senior. The program is part of a growing trend to use vision-based AI to thwart crime and improve public safety, a trend which has stirred concerns among privacy and civil liberties activists who fear the technology could lead to secret 'profiling' and misuse of data."

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John Whitehead: The Anatomy of a National Nervous Breakdown

"This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long."

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Prosecutors aren’t obligated to believe the evidence they present at trial

"I was surprised to learn that most state bars have no requirement that prosecutors believe that the evidence they present is truthful. Courts have ruled that even if prosecutors knowingly break the law — such as detaining defense witnesses in order to prevent them from testifying at trial — those who were harmed by the prosecutors’ behavior have no recourse."

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Martin Luther King and Lee Harvey Oswald

"The records that the National Archives just released included a secret FBI analysis on civil-rights leader Martin Luther King. The thrust of the analysis is that King was a communist, and an immoral communist at that. Does the FBI analysis on King have any bearing on the Kennedy assassination? Actually, yes. That’s where critical thinking, circumstantial evidence, inferential thinking, and common sense come into play."

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Texas Police, Looking for More Military Hardware, Tout Its Use In Harvey Relief

"With military-grade equipment available for the cost of pick-up, police forces have been stocking up. While some of that equipment appears actually to have been used in post-hurricane relief work, most of it is better suited for SWAT raids, intimidating protesters, and killing people."

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Two NYPD Cops Charged with Raping Teen After Busting Her for Marijuana

"They didn't find any drugs on her, but handcuffed the teen anyway before coercing her into sex, her attorney, Michael David, told the New York Post. The detectives, from NYPD's Brooklyn South narcotics squad, have not denied that they engaged in sex acts with the alleged victim, but claimed they were consensual."

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Trick or Treat: Is Trump a Blessing or a Curse to the Deep State?

"Trump has done nothing to wrest control of the government from the Deep State, that shadowy elite group of powerbrokers and corporations who call the shots in Washington. Trump has done nothing to prevent the government from continuing to plunder and steal from the American taxpayer. In fact, his administration has paved the way for even more theft in the form of civil asset forfeiture. Trump has failed to end the government’s endless wars. To the contrary, he has fallen in line with the military industrial complex. Most of all, Trump has proven to be as deaf, dumb and blind as every president before him when it comes to the plight of the citizenry."

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$500,000 settlement for nurse arrested for opposing forced blood draw

Body cam footage from the scene shows University Hospital nurse Alex Wubbels calmly telling the officer, who was trained for the task of blood withdrawal, that he cannot take a blood sample because the patient, who was involved in a vehicle crash, had neither been arrested nor gave consent. Then the cop lunges and grabs the nurse as she was fearfully backing away. He rushes her outside the hospital, and handcuffs her. All the while, she's screaming that there's no reason for her detainment.

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NSA wanted to use the Espionage Act to prosecute a journalist for using FOIA

"The declassified memos and briefings from NSA confirm that this was more than just an intimidation tactic or a passing thought - the NSA had truly wanted to jail a journalist for his use of public records. When the Agency determined that this was unlikely to happen, they moved on to exploring other legal avenues which could be used to punish Bamford for his FOIA work."

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