Archive for the 'Police' Category

A Stand-off it is, in Wyoming.

SUNDANCE — All 23 of Wyoming’s sheriffs have registered alarm at the damage a bill under consideration by the Legislature could do to policing in this state. Though the Second Amendment Preservation Act (House Bill 124/Senate File 81) is intended to be pro-Second Amendment, says Crook County Sheriff Jeff Hodge, its implications are strongly anti-law enforcement.

“It’s not intended to be anti-law enforcement, but it is,” he says. “The intention was good but they need to talk to peace officers and prosecutors.”

If this legislation is passed, the sheriff says, it could turn an ordinary arrest into a career-ending decision for a peace officer. While it does little to protect the average citizen and removes a protection that peace officers rely on, he says it only provides protection for one particular group: criminals.

The intent of the Second Amendment Preservation Act is to prevent firearms from being confiscated by federal entities due to federal laws that may be passed in the future, and it does this by holding state law enforcement officers accountable. However, while the sheriffs may have no issue with this as a concept, they feel the wording is extremely flawed.

The first section of concern states that no person, including a peace officer, shall have the authority to enforce any federal law or ordinance that infringes on a person’s right to keep and bear arms. Anyone who knowingly violates this or knowingly deprives a resident of Wyoming of their Second Amendment rights shall be liable for this action.

The second concerning section states that anyone who does so shall be “permanently ineligible to serve as a law enforcement officer” and immediately terminated from their position. The bill removes “qualified immunity,” a legal principle by which an officer is immune from civil suits unless the plaintiff can show they violated statutory or constitutional rights a reasonable person would have known.

According to Hodge, Wyoming’s sheriffs were not consulted about this wording. Those involved in law enforcement on the ground could quickly have explained the problematic implications.

In a real-life situation where a crime has been committed, Hodge explains that a peace officer may seize a firearm, as evidence or to prevent further harm from being inflicted, for example. However, if the case becomes federal and the gun owner is ultimately not convicted of any crime and thus remains a law-abiding citizen, that decision would lead to the officer losing his job.

What a shame the cops weren’t “consulted.”

And the excuse is just rubbish.  It simply requires that police arrest criminals guilty of violation of state laws, not federal firearms laws.  In other words, state and local police cannot enforce federal firearms laws.

In my opinion this is still weak tea.  They should be ordered to arrest agents of the federal government trying to enforce federal firearms laws, but that’s not in the bill.

It should be easy enough to seize the firearms of people guilty of murder, or kidnapping, or rape, or robbery, or violation of any state law, while also refraining from arrests of people guilty of having 14.5″ barrels with stocks on their guns.

This all comes down to one thing: the Sheriff departments want to enforce federal firearms laws.  It’s that simple, and if you think not, explain in full detail how this assessment is wrong.  Do your homework.  You’ll be graded.

News from Houston.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A mother who pulled into a southwest Houston gas station overnight could never have imagined what happened next. Her 1-year-old baby in the backseat of her car was shot. The pair was caught in the middle as police confronted a chase suspect.

The shooting happened around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday at a Chevron gas station near the Southwest Freeway and Beechnut.

Police say the officer who opened fire didn’t know the baby was in the back seat.

The baby’s mother was parked at the gas station at pump 4. She was outside her car getting gas, and her baby was in the back seat.

Suddenly, a suspect in a black Mercedes crashed at the gas station, jumped out of the Mercedes, and got into her car, according to police.

Houston police had been chasing the man for about three miles. They say the black Mercedes he was driving was possibly linked to two aggravated robberies.

Officers thought he was about to steal the woman’s car.

Police say the man had a gun, so officers told him to drop it.

According to police, the man didn’t drop the gun, and that’s when the officer fired, hitting not only the suspect, but also the 1-year-old child in the backseat.

Your life is never in more danger than when the police are around.

The only thing left is for Art Acevedo to go in front of the cameras and tell everybody how great his officers are and how he has confidence in them.

Reddit/firearms.

My family and I had a pretty wild encounter with a deputy sheriff last year. The legal case has ended and I guess I can share the story with people now.

Every year my father in law sets up a legal dove hunt on opening weekend. This is private land in an extremely rural county. While the field last year was setup only about 1/2 mile from a road, the land is part of a fairly large cattle farm and we were over a mile away from the nearest neighbor.

We didn’t have that many birds coming in, but we were having a good time when at about 7:30AM a deputy sheriff pulled into the field with his lights on. He rolled down his window and said the hunt was over and we needed to pack up and leave.

My father in law said that we wouldn’t be doing that and asked if he was lost. The deputy went on to be a smart ass and then said that he would take everyone to jail if we didn’t leave. A few more words were exchanged and by this time myself and my husband had walked up to his window. The deputy proceeded to get out of his car and ordered my father in law to put his gun on the ground (it was a o/u with the beach open). When my father in law refused the deputy reached for his pistol. The sound of the safety clicking off on my husband’s Citori stopped the deputies hand immediately and my stomach knotted up.

My father in law knew his son would pull the trigger if the deputy threatened his life. I knew he would, and I’m pretty sure the deputy figured that out as well. To de-escalate a extremely tense situation my father in law wisely said we would leave.

Later, a game warden became involved.  Visit the reddit/firearms link to see what happened.  Also check out the comments.

One thing is for sure.  At number one on my list of people I don’t want as enemies is game wardens.

Forbes.

The 4th Amendment right against warrantless searches of a person’s home is a pillar of Americans’ constitutional liberties. Before a police officer, or any other government official, can enter your home, they must show a judge that they have probable cause that they will discover specific evidence of a crime.

There are some limited exceptions to this right. There is an “exigent circumstances” exception. If a police officer looks through a home’s window and sees a person about to stab another person, the officer can burst through the door to prevent the attack. There is also the “emergency aid” exception. If the officer looked through the same window and saw the resident collapsing from an apparent heart attack, the officer could run into the house to administer aid. Neither of these cases violates the 4th Amendment and few would argue that it should be otherwise.

However, there is a broader cousin to these amendments called the “community caretaking” exception. It originally derives from a case in which the police took a gun out of the trunk of an impounded vehicle without first obtaining a warrant. The Supreme Court held that there is a community caretaking exception to the 4th Amendment’s warrant requirement because police perform “community caretaking functions, totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.” The Court held that police activity in furtherance of these functions does not violate the 4th Amendment as long as it is executed in a “reasonable” manner.

Note that, unlike the first two exceptions, this exception is not limited to immediate emergencies. In the Supreme Court case just described there was only a general concern that vandals might eventually break into the impounded car and steal any weapons that were in the trunk. So the community care exception is far broader than the other two.

Also, all three exceptions allow warrantless searches so long as the police officer acted “reasonably”. That is one of the easiest constitutional standards to meet and is a significantly lower standard than “probable cause”, which is required for a warrant. As long as an officer might reasonably think that a warrantless search will alleviate a danger to the community, the search is considered constitutional.

There is a vigorous debate about whether the community care exception can apply to searches of a person’s home as well as of their car. Vehicles have always had less 4th Amendment protection than homes, which are considered a person’s most private sphere. Federal courts have been divided on this question and the Supreme Court has not ruled on it until now.

The Court has just announced that it will hear arguments next month on a case that presents this issue: Caniglia v. Strom. In this case, Mr. Caniglia was arguing with his wife and melodramatically put an unloaded gun on the table and said “shoot me now and get it over with.” His wife called a non-emergency number for the police who arrived shortly thereafter. The police disagreed about whether Mr. Caniglia was acting “normal” or “agitated” but they convinced him to take an ambulance to the local hospital for evaluation. The police did not accompany him.

While he was on his way to the hospital, Mrs. Caniglia told the police that her husband kept two handguns in the home. The police decided to search his home for the guns without obtaining a warrant. (Mrs. Caniglia’s consent to have the police search their home was legally negated because the police untruthfully told her that her husband had consented to the seizure of any guns.) The police located and seized the two guns. Mr. Caniglia sued for the violation of his 4th Amendment right to privacy and his 2nd Amendment right to keep handguns in the home for self-protection.

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals (which is the federal court just below the Supreme Court in Caniglia’s jurisdiction) sided with the police. The court wrote: “At its core, the community caretaking doctrine is designed to give police elbow room to take appropriate action when unforeseen circumstances present some transient hazard that requires immediate attention. Understanding the core purpose of the doctrine leads inexorably to the conclusion that it should not be limited to the motor vehicle context. Threats to individual and community safety are not confined to the highways.”

The author ends with this.  “The Supreme Court is going to take a very close look at this case and there is a good chance that they will overrule the lower court’s decision.”

I’m not so sure.  The communists (the leftist wing of the court, including Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Roberts) will certainly decide to keep the ruling of the circuit.  The law and order statists (Alito and Kavanaugh) will likely decide with the leftists, I’m afraid, even if it’s a concurring ruling disagreeing with the majority but still vote to keep the circuit ruling.

The only ones who will vote to strike down the circuit ruling will be Thomas and Gorsuch (maybe), and Barrett is a wild card, but it won’t matter what she does anyway.  This is one of those cases where you wish the supreme court would decline to take it because the damage they do is worse than the other outcome, where this ruling is only valid in the 1st Circuit.

To say that America has become a Stasi state is a grotesque understatement.

Via WiscoDave.

What do you see? pic.twitter.com/tfpRsTBFM5

— Bob Darin (@BobDarrin) February 5, 2021

Via reader Ned, watch every second of this video.

No Walmart employee was scared, for if they were, they would have been running for cover.  The man was a customer seeking a part, not a mass shooter.  He carried the gun in that he had previously purchased from Walmart.

To be sure, he could have cased the firearm, and I probably would have, but there was still no law violated.  Just a “Karen Call” to the police.  In defense of the 911 operator, he tried to ask the right questions, and also simply recommended that the manager go talk to him and ask him to leave.

No one ever did that – not Walmart employees, not the police.  Like the civil rights lawyer said, “If there’s going to be drama, it’s going to be in Walmart.”  I do not go to Walmart.  The sell cheap Chinese crap, and their employees are awful.

Watch until the end.  While the 911 operator tried to settle things down, the cops barged in carrying a patrol rifle and tased him, having to figure out what the charges were after the fact, charges beaten in court.  Still, he lost his job because Walmart, and Karens.

Finally, look at the screen shot of the local news.  Be reminded again just how awful, inaccurate, terrible, dishonest, underhanded, perfidious, and untrustworthy the media is.  They … are … just .. atrocious.  To find the truth, go anywhere but the legacy media.  Literally, whatever they say is false.  This is a good rule of thumb.

Via Wirecutter.  This ridiculous report.

Okay, first of all, I don’t want cops to have dogs.  I see absolutely no need for it.  I don’t agree with their “war on drugs,” and most cops don’t have the temperament or training to handle dogs, horses, farm animals or any other living creature.

Second, this isn’t the way to train a dog.  I know how to train dogs, whether positive or negative reinforcement.  This isn’t training.  This is just abuse.

Third, I’d say with certainty that the cop isn’t suitable for law enforcement work.  I don’t know about the dog, but the cop must go.  The jury is still out on the dog, but most dogs are a reflection of their handler.  If the cop wants to understand why the dog did what he did, he needs to look in the mirror.

Fourth, the chief is a moron.  Both the cop and the chief need to be fired.

That about covers it.

Watch.  Short video.  Note well his answer.  Notions of right and wrong, what it means to be loyal and true to your oaths and vows, and rights before God, come not from the Almighty, but the supreme court, that gaggle of black robed Druids who ignore everything good and want to stay in the martini circles inside the beltway.

He’s not at all hesitant or embarrassed at his answer.

As if we needed volume XVII of this, via David Codrea comes news from Florida.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — He had just stepped from the shower and was settling in for the night when he caught a glimpse of a figure outside his window.

Seventy-year-old Bill Norkunas, a childhood polio survivor, headed over to the light and flicked it on hoping to scare away whoever was there. Instead, the light was a beacon drawing a young man to his front door, a door made of glass.

And then for the next 15 minutes, Norkunas stood there, barefoot and unclothed, with his crutches, on one side of the glass pane trying to steady a gun in his trembling hand while the stranger stood on the other side, pounding on the door, banging it with his hip or gnawing at the thick hurricane-grade glass with a garden paver.

Norkunas, who suffered minor injuries from the glass digging into his foot, has no idea why the man, later identified as 23-year-old Timothy Johnson of Fort Lauderdale, tried to break down his door on Nov. 7.

And as bewildering, and just as terrifying to him, is the knowledge that a squad of Broward sheriff’s deputies responded to his Tamarac neighborhood, but none came close to his home to stop the man. Instead, they waited down the street until he walked over to them and surrendered, witnesses told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

The result is a palpable sense of outrage toward the Sheriff’s Office with many in the neighborhood questioning why deputies would leave a terrified, disabled man to fend for himself for as long as they did.

[ … ]

“If he opens the door can I shoot him?” Norkunas asks the 911 dispatcher about two minutes into his phone call for help.

By the third minute, Norkunas is telling the dispatcher that the stranger is trying to kick the door in, according to recording of the call. While still on the phone with the dispatcher, Norkunas can be heard warning the stranger that he better leave or he is going to get shot. Until this point in his life, Norkunas had never pointed a gun at anyone before.

“Get the cops here quick,” he barks into the phone at minute four.

Three minutes later, Norkunas’ voice is weary: “Sheriff, hurry up please.”

Three more minutes pass. “Where the hell are the cruisers? … They are still not here. Jesus Christ. There’s still no cruisers. Come to my house, please please.”

He tells the dispatcher his glass door is smashed in and he doesn’t know what to do. The dispatcher tells him the deputies are canvassing the area to “make sure no one else gets hurt.”

While law enforcement officers take an oath to serve and protect, they are not bound to do so legally, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

“The law doesn’t require law enforcement officers to protect you from other people,” said Rodney Jacobs, assistant director of the Civil Investigative Panel, a police oversight committee for the city of Miami.

As a reminder to regular readers, and a brief primer for new readers, the police are under no legal obligation to protect anyone.  If you doubt this, read the following decisions.

Castle Rock v. Gonzalez

Warren v. District of Columbia

DeShaney v. Winnebago County

As for talking to the dispatcher, this in my estimation is a very unwise move.  Calling to report the incident may have been necessary (although as I’ve pointed out before, if you think things can’t get any more dangerous for you, just wait until the police arrive), but sticking around over the phone was a distraction for him, and consuming of time and energy.

Do not ever, ever, ever, ask permission from a dispatcher to shoot an intruder.  When the police do finally arrive, if you have had to discharge your firearm, do not talk to them.  Let your attorney do the talking.

Bottom line.  The police are not obligated to protect you.  You are obligated under God to protect yourself and your family.  I think with the recent flurry of gun-buying in America, many people grok that notion now who didn’t just weeks or months ago.

News from Arkansas.

An Arkansas family was left devastated after an investigator who allegedly mistook their address for a sex offender’s shot and killed their pet dog.

The deadly incident involving the Coiner family’s beloved pooch named Clide unfolded last week in the city of Greenbrier.

Video footage posted to Facebook by Chris Coiner shows the aftermath of the shooting as the canine lay dead on the ground.

“You shot and killed my goddamn dog, you motherf—-r!” a shattered Coiner screams to the investigator, identified by local reports as James Freeman of the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office, the video shows.

“Get off my property, motherf—-r!” Coiner shouts at Freeman. “You are a motherf—-r, you piece of motherf—–ing sh-t… shoot my goddamn dog, you p—y.”

The Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office said Freeman was at the property for a sex offender compliance check, but mistakenly went to Coiner’s house instead of a nearby home, FOX 16 News reported.

Freeman had first gone to the address 72 Autumn Hills for the check, but was allegedly told the sex offender lived at the next address – Coiner’s home, the news outlet said.

Coiner claims Freeman then shot his dog in his yard because the animal barked at him.

“I was livid, I was livid with feelings and he didn’t care one bit,” Coiner told FOX 16 News.

Coiner added, “He did not make any attempt to get away from it, he didn’t make any attempt to get back in his vehicle, all he did was shoot the dog because he was barking at him.”

The distraught dad said Clide was his 3-year-old son’s “buddy” and described the pooch as a “family member.”

Take a look at him.  He’s a fat-ass abuser and dog killer.

Look, I’ve recommended before that cops who are so cowardly that they’re scared of dogs go do volunteer work on farms or ranches working with animals, breeding them, feeding them, cleaning their stalls, doing basic doctoring of the animals, learning the necessities of tone, inflection and timbre of voice commands, and so on, until they become less than cowardly.

The problem is that they don’t care enough to do something like this when they can get away with shooting, without any accountability at all.

Kill a dog?  Sure.  On to the next house.  Maybe they have a dog I can kill too.  Hey honey, what’s for dinner?  I’m hungry!