Ok it was mentioned there is not a thread for Law Enforcement Officers (LEO for short)and other similar jobs for discussion.
This is for discussing the actual jobs, ranks, training, culture, relations to military bodies that exist, and any other variety of topics that can arise pertaining to the World of Policing.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Fourth Spartan: You might be sadly surprised. Some of the reports indicate attempts to infiltrate police, some aspects of government, and especially the military. The Military Reports on Extremists and Gang members infiltrating the military has been a high-risk warning going on for over two decades at this point. The reports keep getting deliberately ignored and sometimes attempts at burying them.
The elements in the police are in part protected and emboldened by the actions or in this case lack of action and deliberate obstruction of the government. Their efforts result in them not being rooted out when they should be. It also results in contamination of the military.
Who watches the watchmen?
I will point out that I said law enforcement and thus when I said that Federal law enforcement is generally better I wasn't thinking of the military.
But yes I agree that White Supremacist subversion is a serious threat and is at every level of government and society.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 26th 2018 at 8:20:01 AM
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
All those bodies regularly cross pollenate personnel and share communities to varying degrees. They even tend to draw from some of the same recruitment pools. Typically from the military to the other two but because of the reserves and national guard that can swing the other way as well.
Who watches the watchmen?
With the exception of the Coast Guard, I'd comfortably say that DHS is kind of a shit show, if you'll excuse the government lingo.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Yeah DHS has been a huge letdown but I am not surprised at that. Sadly they do offer good jobs with good pay and benefits.
Who watches the watchmen?
I wouldn’t say a huge letdown, more just a disappointment. They’re certainly doing a better job than the agencies that came before them, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear.
They should have sent a poet.
The Mod with the Migraine
Speaking of law enforcement efforts, Trump closed the small department
dedicated to trying to counter extremism and stop people from becoming terrorists - because they dared to look at white supremacists, not just Muslims.
In the waning days of Barack Obama’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a set of grants to organizations working to counter violent extremism, including among white supremacists. One of the grantees was Life After Hate, which The Hill has called “one of the only programs in the U.S. devoted to helping people leave neo-Nazi and other white supremacy groups.” Another grant went to researchers at the University of North Carolina who were helping young people develop media campaigns aimed at preventing their peers from embracing white supremacy and other violent ideologies. But soon after Trump took office, his administration canceled both of these grants. In its first budget, it requested no funding for any grants in this field.
It’s part of a pattern of neglect. The grants were administered by the Office of Community Partnerships, which works intimately with local governments and community organizations to prevent jihadist and white-nationalist radicalization. In Obama’s last year, according to the former director, George Selim, the office boasted 16 full-time employees, roughly 25 contractors, and a budget of more than $21 million. The Trump administration has renamed it the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships, and cut its staff to eight full-time employees and its budget to less than $3 million.
Under Obama, the Office of Community Partnerships housed an interagency task force on Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE, that included officials detailed from the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services. Today the task force exists in name only. Its staff members have all returned to their home agencies and departments. “Under this administration,” says Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, “there’s been a precipitous decline in the dedicated staff and program funding devoted to combatting ideologically motivated violence.”
This decline can’t be chalked up to general budget cuts. Although Trump has slashed funding for many domestic departments, he increased Department of Homeland Security spending by more than 7 percent in his first budget and another 4 percent in his second. The cuts stem instead from two biases. First, in keeping with their law-and-order mentality, Trump officials would rather empower the police to arrest suspected terrorists than work with local communities to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place, as the Office of Community Partnerships did. Second, they believe the primary terrorist threat to Americans is jihadism, not white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnerships committed the sin of working on both.
From a public-policy perspective, that’s exactly what the government should be doing. In 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than “any other domestic extremist movement.” But Trump advisers have shrugged off these inconvenient facts. In an interview in 2017, White House Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared that there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot [in the United States] that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaeda.” When critics cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.”
Gorka’s wife, and frequent co-author, Katharine Gorka, shares his Islamo-centric view of terrorism. She has proposed that the U.S. close “radical mosques” and bar Al Jazeera from broadcasting in the United States. “American and Western leaders,” she’s declared, “have preemptively shut down any debate within Islam by declaring that Islam is the religion of peace.” These views matter because although Sebastian has left the Trump White House, Katharine still serves as an adviser to the secretary of Homeland Security. In the months following Trump’s election, according to The Forward, she asked for the names of employees working on CVE. She led a team that proposed changing the mission from countering violent extremism to countering radical Islamist extremism. That didn’t happen. But Eric Rosand, a former senior State Department official, told Buzz Feed that Gorka “played a significant role in denying CVE grant funding to groups that work to de-radicalize neo-Nazis and other far right extremists.”
When Trump supporters insist that he’s a steadfast foe of white supremacy, his critics often cite his history of ambivalent responses—or nonresponses—to anti-Semitism. But Trump’s words aren’t anomalous; he’s put his money where his mouth is.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
When the cops showed up in force, 28-year-old Andrew Finch opened his front door to see what the commotion was about; seconds later he was dead, shot by a police sniper across the street. It was the first time this sort of vile prank—commonly known as swatting—had resulted in a death, and Barriss was charged with a litany of crimes in state and federal court, including involuntary manslaughter. He was extradited to Kansas, where he’s currently being held.
Now Barriss’ considerable legal troubles have become even more complex. Late yesterday, federal prosecutors in the Central District of California filed a criminal information document that accuses Barriss of a vast new array of crimes. The earliest date back to September and October of 2015, when prosecutors allege that Barriss phoned in a series of bomb threats to schools in Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Illinois. (Barriss told me that he “evacuated” these schools because his online Halo friends were students there, and he wanted to give them a day off class.)
But the bulk of the 46 crimes detailed in the document occurred during the last four months of 2017, shortly after Barriss was released from Los Angeles County Jail after having served nearly two years behind bars. (He had pleaded no contest to two separate crimes: Making bomb threats against an ABC affiliate in October 2015 and violating a protective order that had been taken out by his grandmother in January 2017.) Those crimes run the gamut from bomb threats to swattings to bank fraud, and several involve unindicted coconspirators who are identified only by their Twitter handles: @Internetlord, @Tragic, @Throw, and @Spared.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
... I'm not usually one for life-time sentences, but...
That record suggests he won't calm down even by his fifties. :/
The Wanderer
Boston gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger killed in West Virginia prison a day after transfer:
His life apparently ended the way he lived it — violently. The FBI is investigating the death, which occurred a day after his transfer to the facility in West Virginia, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Bulger, 89, was found unresponsive at 8:20 a.m., according to a statement from the prisons bureau. He was pronounced dead by the Preston County medical examiner after failed life-saving measures.
"Hopefully the seven years he spent in prison as well as his recent death brings some closure to the families of his many victims," Brian Kelly, one of the former federal prosecutors who tried Bulger, said in a statement.
Bulger, who eluded federal authorities for more than 16 years before his arrest in June 2011, was serving the rest of his life in prison for a litany of crimes that included his role in 11 murders.
He was sentenced in November 2013 to two life terms plus five years for his role as architect of a criminal enterprise that, in the words of a federal judge, committed "unfathomable" acts that terrorized a city.
A federal jury convicted Bulger that year of 31 counts, including racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug dealing and weapons possession. The jury found him culpable in 11 killings from 1973 through 1985.
His death marks a final chapter in the life of one of the country's most infamous criminals and fugitives.
Looks like another suicide of a gendarme made the news in France after he offed himself in the Prime Minister's residence.
Luckily, said official was away.
El Chapo is now on trial:
Opening statements finally got underway after two jurors were dismissed from the lineup, forcing lawyers and the judge to re-interview potential candidates before the full panel could be sworn in.
One woman was struck after complaining that the trial was causing her health problems, along with a man who said he would not be able to support himself financially during the trial. Two replacements were subsequently found.
Guzman, one of the world's most notorious criminals, is on trial in New York after twice escaping from prison in Mexico. He faces 11 trafficking, firearms and money laundering charges in what is expected to be a more than four-month trial.
He is accused of leading the Sinaloa cartel and turning it into the largest criminal organization on the planet. He is considered the world's largest drug trafficker since the death of Colombia's Pablo Escobar.
But in opening statements, the defense alleged that Guzman's co-defendant who remains at large, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, was the real culprit.
"The truth is he (Guzman) controlled nothing, Mayo Zambada did," Jeffrey Lichtman told the US federal court in Brooklyn.
Zambada, he alleged, bribed everybody, "including the very top, the current president of Mexico and the former," he added in reference to Mexico's outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto and his predecessor, Felipe Calderon.
Both Calderon and Pena Nieto swiftly denied taking any bribes from the Sinaloa cartel, the former calling the allegation "absolutely false and reckless" and the latter saying it was "completely false and defamatory."
- Gold-plated Ak-47 -
"Mayo can get people arrested and get the Mexican army and police kill who he wants," Lichtman added.
Instead, Guzman, who has been in solitary confinement in America and whose trial is accompanied by massive security, is a "scapegoat," the lawyer claimed.
"Why does the Mexican government need a scapegoat? Because they're making too much money being bribed by the leaders of drug cartels."
The 12 jurors who will determine the 61-year-old defendant's guilt or innocence have an enormous and onerous task before them.
During jury selection last week, several potential jurors were dismissed because they feared for their lives, as was another who suffered a panic attack.
Their names will be kept anonymous. They will be partially sequestered, escorted to and from court every day by armed US Marshals.
Prosecutors contend that Guzman spent a quarter of a century smuggling cocaine into the United States.
They say that from 1989 to 2014, the Sinaloa smuggled 340,892 pounds (154,626 kilograms) of cocaine into the United States, as well as heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana, raking in $14 billion.
"Money, drugs, murder; a vast global narcotics trafficking organization. That is what this trial is about and that is what the evidence in this case will prove," Assistant US Attorney Adam Fels told the court.
Guzman, he alleged in his opening statements, had his "own private army" of hundreds of men armed with assault rifles, as well as his own diamond-encrusted pistol branded with his initials and a gold-plated AK-47.
- 'In his own words' -
US prosecutors have spent years piecing together a case that they hope will end with Guzman spending the rest of his life behind bars in a maximum-security US prison, accumulating more than 300,000 pages and at least 117,000 recordings in evidence against Guzman.
While he is not on trial for murder, They contend that he ordered or committed at least 33 homicides. "You'll see how Guzman pulls the trigger," the prosecutor told jurors.
Prosecutors promised to discuss "this global narco empire in his own words" and from witnesses detailing how he would receive $10 million from a single shipment of cocaine.
More than a dozen of the several hundred witnesses expected to testify are in witness protection programs or are already in jail, housed in special wings to protect them from reprisals.
"You'll have the chance to read his text messages, evidence of drug deals, killings, corruption," Fels said.
"He was indeed the boss of his organization," the prosecutor added, saying Guzman "used planes, trains, automobiles, fishing vessels, trucks, even submarines," to traffic drugs to the United States.
Guzman arrived in New York in January 2017. He twice escaped from prison in Mexico, once hidden in a laundry cart and the second time slipping down a tunnel that reached his prison shower.
In New York, he spends 23 hours a day in his cell. The only visitors he is allowed are his lawyers and daughters, from whom he is separated by thick glass.
News is from AFP.
Edited by Ominae on Nov 13th 2018 at 4:21:24 AM
Old one, but first time I saw SPVM officers use the taser.
Edited by Ominae on Nov 14th 2018 at 6:19:10 AM
The Mexican Supreme Court has formally declared the deployment of Mexican military forces against the drug cartels has totally illegal:
The Mexican government deployed the army in 2006 to crack down on the country's powerful drug cartels, and Congress passed the security bill last year in a bid to regularize the situation.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed the bill into law, but after widespread outcry, decided not to apply it until the Supreme Court had ruled on its constitutionality.
In a 9-1 decision, the court ruled the law was unconstitutional because Congress did not have the authority to give the military a role in domestic security.
"This is clearly a constitutional fraud," said justice Arturo Zaldivar.
Congress "is saying it's regulating one thing when in reality it's regulating another, taking as a starting point the fact that there is no authority for the armed forces to intervene in public security."
However, the ruling has little impact on the ground. The law never entered into effect, and the military has continued anti-crime operations as before.
The army, seen as less corrupt than the federal, state and local police, has helped catch a string of high-profile drug lords since former president Felipe Calderon sent it into the streets to fight crime 12 years ago.
But Mexico has seen a sharp rise in violence since the drug war began — more than 200,000 murders, including a record 28,711 last year.
Critics also accuse the army of committing human rights violations, and warned the security law only perpetuated the situation and delayed needed reforms of the under-trained and corruption-tainted police.
Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, long a critic of the military deployment, said Wednesday he would nevertheless continue using troops for internal security after he takes office on December 1, saying it was the only option.
He proposed eventually creating a national guard that would integrate the military, naval and federal police — though that would require a constitutional reform.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
The FBI’s 2018 designation of the self-confessed “western chauvinist group” as extremist has not been previously made public.
The Proud Boys was founded by the Vice Media co-founder Gavin Mc Innes. Mc Innes has insisted that his group is not white nationalist or “alt-right” but the Proud Boys have a history of misogyny and glorifying violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists them as a hate group.
The document also says: “The FBI has warned local law enforcement agencies that the Proud Boys are actively recruiting in the Pacific north-west”, and: “Proud Boys members have contributed to the recent escalation of violence at political rallies held on college campuses, and in cities like Charlottesville, Virginia, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington.”
There is plenty more in the article to read on the subject including hotlinks to sources in article.
Who watches the watchmen?
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
A police officer responding to a call about black kids flashing around a gun on the street. Turns out it was another one of those realistic looking bb/pellet guns. He doesn't shoot them, but reprimands them for being careless and takes the offending child home to his mother and explains what happened. The child's mother scolds him for being reckless as well because she understands the problem.
Interpol is to be lead by a Russian. Kiss a good chunk of Interpol's credibility and reliability goodbye.
Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Nov 21st 2018 at 6:21:34 AM
Who watches the watchmen?
The law in the night
Honestly, that officer's conduct is exactly what being a cop is about.
Well, I know who should be getting a death by chocolate surprise muffin in the precinct, if there is any justice in this world. At the very least.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
He initially drew on them supposedly but he also didn't start blazing away and things calmed down quickly after he figured out it was just a BB gun. I can't imagine how much oh shit left his system at that point.
Who watches the watchmen?
Oh, bother.
That op-ed is outdated. Turns out they elected acting head South Korean Kim Jong Yang as its new president instead.
Interpol elects South Korean Kim Jong Yang President over Russian front-runner
Edited by M84 on Nov 21st 2018 at 10:04:29 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Thanks for the correction. That is also refreshing news.
Who watches the watchmen?
It’s a mark of a well trained officer that he was able to pull himself back from that adrenaline rush and realize what was going on.
Over the course of training for most police officers you’re shown thousands of videos of officers being shot and killed and it’s made very clear just how unbelievably dangerous guns are. That he was put in what he believed was a situation that could mean instant death for him at any second but kept his composure is a hell of a thing.
They should have sent a poet.
Russian representatives are crying foul over the South Korean candidate being voted to head Interpol.
Interpol mentioned in a statement that they're accepting the outcome that Meng is not coming back due to China not being that clear on what happened to him aside from being detained on corruption charges.
CNN aired a recent interview with Grace as of last month that (implied) that she has to keep her kids in the dark about what happened to her husband and has signs of PTSD over him going missing.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/09/asia/grace-meng-interpol-china-intl/index.html
Edited by Ominae on Nov 21st 2018 at 6:52:51 AM
The law in the night
It comes down to get a call over man with a gun seriously, but he instead chose the de-escalation path, instead of the escalation or preemptive action against the would be perpetrator.
The police officer having a gun in hand isn't the issue, it is deciding to use it before you can gauge what is happening that is.
There is a great feel of irony to hear Russians complain about cheating and unfair play.
Edited by AngelusNox on Nov 21st 2018 at 1:02:34 PM
Inter arma enim silent leges
DHS went above and beyond, they gutted nearly all domestic terror efforts, and shuttered the detailed database he had put together.
Interesting, though I will point out that when I was talking about law enforcement sympathizers I was more thinking of local and state law enforcement. I'm fairly sure that the FBI and other Federal law enforcement are better.
Sadly it's a major problem amongst police departments
.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 26th 2018 at 7:56:04 AM
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn