Category Archives: Law Enforcement

Messing With the Wrong City – NYTimes.com

Great editorial from Boston Native Dennis Lehane in the NY Times today….

He explains how Boston will deal with the terrorist attack in all the right ways, unlike how the Bush administration  and some people reacted to 9/11….

Here is a brief excerpt, emphasis in the second paragraph is mine.

I encourage you to click the link and read his entire column:

But I do love this city. I love its atrocious accent, its inferiority complex in terms of New York, its nut-job drivers, the insane logic of its street system. I get a perverse pleasure every time I take the T in the winter and the air-conditioning is on in the subway car, or when I take it in the summer and the heat is blasting. Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things — blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?”

Trust me, we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this. We won’t cancel next year’s marathon. We won’t drive to New Hampshire and stockpile weapons. When the authorities find the weak and terminally maladjusted culprit or culprits, we’ll roll our eyes at whatever backward ideology they embrace and move on with our lives.

via Messing With the Wrong City – NYTimes.com.

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Penis Stolen By Thieves

Well, this will teach him to be more careful where he puts it!

Oh, I guess it’s too late for that lesson…

Today’s strange news from the Huffington Post:

Thieves stole a man’s penis while he slept, according to police.

Fei Lin, 41, of the Niqiao village near Wenling City, in east China’s Zhejiang province, told police he was asleep when the thieves burst into his room and put a bag over his head, according to CEN/EUROPICS and as reported in the Daily Star.

“They put something over my head and pulled down my trousers and then they ran off,” Lin said. “I was so shocked I didn’t feel a thing – then I saw I was bleeding and my penis was gone.”

Police believe the attackers were jealous lovers of several local women whom Lin was having affairs with, the Austrian Times reported. Lin denied taking part in any infidelity.

Emergency workers and police searched for Lin’s anatomy but turned up nothing, according to TNT Magazine. The penis thieves are nowhere to be found, but police said they’re looking for the jealous lovers.

via Fei Lin’s Penis Stolen By Thieves.

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Judge: Stripping Naked to Protest TSA is Protected Speech

Well, seeing this type of protest would certainly liven up my travel experiences!

And for those who know I do travel a lot, don’t worry.  I realize I’m several years past making this particular type of political protest statement and having “The Ruins” on display in the papers and on TV!  Talk about losing credibility….

From RawStory.Com

A circuit court judge has ruled that a man who stripped down to his birthday suit to protest against airport security was not guilty of indecent exposure, according to the Associated Press.

Fifty-year-old John Brennan of Oregon took off his all clothes while going through an airport screening at Portland International Airport in April. He was arrested after refusing requests from Transportation Security Administration officers to put his clothes back on. Brennan was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure.

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge David Rees ruled Wednesday that Brennan’s airport strip show was an act of protest and therefore protected speech under the First Amendment.

via Judge: Stripping naked to protest TSA is protected speech | The Raw Story.

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Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Mayor Bloomberg and Occupy Wall Street

Priceless….

He says just what I was thinking:  Michael Bloomberg is now in the same league as George Wallace, Senator Joseph McCarthy and others of that ilk….

I’ll let Keith say it as only Keith can:

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Why Do the Police Have Tanks? The Strange and Dangerous Militarization of the US Police Force

This is the type of thing people ought to be focusing on instead of the Casey Anthony case…

Very disturbing article from AlterNet.com:

Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl’s family.

The shooting death of Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones sounds like it happened in a war zone. But the tragic SWAT team raid took place in Detroit.

Shockingly, paramilitary raids that mirror the tactics of US soldiers in combat are not uncommon in America. According to an investigation carried out by the Huffington Post’s Radley Balko, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 30 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work. In fact, the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

Some 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. And as demonstrated by the case of Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones, these raids have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries.

via Why Do the Police Have Tanks? The Strange and Dangerous Militarization of the US Police Force | | AlterNet.

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