Springfield, Ohio, was the locus of a false story about legal Haitian immigrant workers stealing and eating pets. Now Springfield is in the news again, because a sheriff’s patrol commander posted on Facebook that 911 callers must prove they voted for Trump before he’ll send deputies (rea[...]
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September 6th, 2024 - 5:34 pm § in Law and Courts
A police confession horror story
Tom Perez Sr. lived with his son, Tom Perez Jr., in Fontana, California. The father went out of town to visit relatives, and didn’t bother to tell his son. Not knowing where his father was, Tom Jr. reported him missing. The cops decided Tom Jr. must have killed his father, and badgered him to [...]
August 25th, 2024 - 6:19 pm § in Donald Trump, Law and Courts
Support the police, but not this cop
“Supporting the police” doesn’t mean giving a free pass to bad cops. Being against cops who murder black people, plant drugs in drivers’ cars, or throw smoke bombs at good cops while trying to overthrow our government doesn’t make you anti-police. Justin Lee (photo, lef[...]
June 26th, 2024 - 9:18 am § in Law and Courts
Seattle police owe BLM protesters $680,000 for chalk graffiti arrests
During the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matters protesters in Seattle wrote anti-police graffiti with chalk, which washes off. The unhappy cops retaliated by jailing the four protesters overnight in January 2021, despite a directive against holding nonviolent offenders in jail because of the C[...]
June 26th, 2024 - 2:50 am § in Donald Trump, News Media
Reporter at George Floyd protests is dying from police wounds
A reporter who covered the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020 is dying from her police-inflicted injuries. Linda Tirado (photo, left), then a 38-year-old photojournalist, drove from Tennessee “to cover the unrest” in Minneapolis after a rogue cop murdered George Floyd, an NPR s[...]
May 24th, 2024 - 7:07 pm § in Law and Courts
We need police, but not these cops
America has a policing crisis, and bad cops are only part of it, there’s also a cop shortage. But this article is about bad cops. Even though overall crime statistics are down, the inability of understaffed police departments to respond promptly (or at all) to 911 calls is leaving residents o[...]
May 14th, 2024 - 11:24 pm § in Misc.
Seattle police entry pay hits six figures
The Seattle City Council approved a contract with the Seattle police union on May 14, 2024, that bumps starting pay from $83,000 to $103,000, with a raise to $110,000 after six months, the Seattle Times reported (story here). Existing officers will get retroactive raises for 2021-23 as a lump sum pa[...]
May 11th, 2024 - 3:04 pm § in America
Are police killing more people?
To find out, I went looking for charts, and because I can’t cut-and-paste some of them, you’ll have to click through links to see them. Let’s start with this chart from Statistica that gives numbers for 2017-2023. While the number increased every year, the uptrend was slight until [...]
January 29th, 2023 - 2:29 pm § in Law and Courts, News Media
When police write news stories
Tyre Nichols was kicked and beaten to death on January 7, 2023, by five cops charged with murder. Memphis police issued the press release below the next day. Even making allowances for incomplete information, it’s a remarkable whitewash. By the way, the police chief has admitted there’s [...]
Loren Culp’s crappy police work in child sex case settled for $275,000
A story in the Spokane Spokesman-Review in July 2020 reported (here), “In a long-running lawsuit, a woman accuses police and deputies in Ferry County of failing to properly investigate when she reported a pattern of rape and molestation spanning 12 years of her childhood. Among the defendants[...]