IGX

A Vallejo family expressed outrage Thursday that police shot and killed one of their dogs after it ran toward an officer coming to their home to take a report.

Police said the officer had no choice but to shoot when the family's two dogs charged at him at the home near the corner of Kentucky and Trinity streets.

The incident began at 12:10 p.m. Wednesday when Officer Chase Calhoun went to Erika Gregory's home to investigate a case of identity theft she had reported, said police Lt. Ken Weaver. Calhoun approached the front gate and opened it after seeing there were no dogs in the yard, Weaver said.

But as the officer opened the gate, two dogs came around the corner and "started snarling," Weaver said. Calhoun tried to back up, but "they closed the gap on him almost immediately," Weaver said.

"They were aggressive," the lieutenant said. "He felt they were trying to attack him and, in his defense, he fired two rounds, striking the closest dog."

The dog, Belle, an 11-year-old Labrador mix, died on the spot.

Gregory, 49, said police had never told her that an officer was coming to take the report, and that she would have kept the dogs inside had she known. Although her dogs are friendly with visitors who are familiar to them, they are protective and will bark at strangers, she said.

However, the dogs have never attacked anyone, Gregory said.

"There was no reason that his first recourse would have been to use deadly force," Gregory said of Calhoun. Belle was the "sweetest family dog you could ever hope to have, who is also a really good watchdog."

The other dog, Flicka, a 14-year-old Australian shepherd mix, was not hurt.

Calhoun told the family he was an animal lover and was sorry about what happened, Gregory said.

She stressed that she and her family are "big fans of the police. I feel a lot of compassion for the police officer who shot my dog."

Gregory's son Jack Mollner, 7, came home from school and burst into tears when told Belle had been shot.

"I'm really upset, because she's dead now and she can't come back," Jack said. "I'm mad at the police officer and sad because Belle is gone."

Weaver said, "No one likes to use deadly force on a person or a dog. It's unfortunate circumstances, and we feel for the family. We do feel bad."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... z1vFDO9fyd

Ed Zachary wrote:A smart cop would have rattled the fucking gate before just walking into the fucking yard.

This kind of shit is what scares me. I've caught the fucking police in my yard at night with no fucking knock on my door. I could have been letting my dogs out and my big dog is a prime target for a jumpy fucking pig.

Ed Zachary wrote:He's my baby and I'd fuck any nigger up who fucked with him.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:
I know this about you. You have priors, nomesayin?

forgive me if that was deeply unclassy to point that out, given the thread and all....just felt it was worth noting, EZ will do what is necessary.

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.

She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer's wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer's bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. "The police specifically told us to bring cash," Greer says. "Not a cashier's check or a credit card. They said cash."

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she'd be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers' cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills -- and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

But in all states, police agencies can contact the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), making the case federal, and under federal law, local police departments can keep up to 80 percent of forfeiture proceeds, with the rest going to the Department of Justice. The institute reports that between 2000 and 2008, police agencies in Wisconsin took in $50 million from this "equitable sharing" program with the federal government. According to Williams, the DEA recently filed a claim on Zamora's money in federal court, to take possession of the money through federal civil asset forfeiture laws.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Officer Friendly says all your bail money are belong to us....

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.

She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer's wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer's bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. "The police specifically told us to bring cash," Greer says. "Not a cashier's check or a credit card. They said cash."

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she'd be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers' cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills -- and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/2 ... 22328.html

George Will wrote:Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.

This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million. The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what is antiseptically called the “equitable sharing” of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery.

The Merrimack River Valley near the New Hampshire border has had more downs than ups since the 19th century, when the nearby towns of Lowell and Lawrence were centers of America’s textile industry. In the 1960s the area briefly enjoyed a high-tech boom. Caswell’s “budget” motel, too, has seen better days, as when the touring Annette Funicello and the Mouseketeers checked in. In its sixth decade the motel hosts tourists, some workers on extended stays and some elderly people who call it home. The 56 rooms rent for $56 a night or $285 a week.

Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on drug-dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate — the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate — these 30 episodes involved less than 5/100ths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days. Yet this is the government’s excuse for impoverishing the Caswells by seizing this property, which is their only significant source of income and all of their retirement security.

The government says the rooms were used to “facilitate” a crime. It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to prove their innocence — to prove they did everything possible to prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What counts as possible remains vague. The Caswells voluntarily installed security cameras, they photocopy customers’ identifications and record their license plates, and they turn the information over to the police, who have never asked the Caswells to do more.

The Caswells are represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm. IJ explains that civil forfeiture is a proceeding in which property is said to have acted wrongly. This was useful long ago against pirates, who might be out of reach but whose ill-gotten gains could be seized. The Caswells, however, are not pirates.

Rather, they are victims of two piratical governments that, IJ argues, are violating the U.S. Constitution twice. They are violating the Eighth Amendment, which has been construed to forbid “excessive fines” that deprive individuals of their livelihoods. And the federal “equitable sharing” program violates the 10th Amendment by vitiating state law, thereby enabling Congress to compel the states to adopt Congress’s policies where states possess a reserved power and primary authority — in the definition and enforcement of the criminal law.

A federal drug agent operating in this region roots around in public records in search of targets — property with at least $50,000 equity. Caswell thinks that if his motel “had a big mortgage, this would not be happening.”

“Equitable sharing” — the consensual splitting of ill-gotten loot by the looters — reeks of the moral hazard that exists in situations in which incentives are for perverse behavior. To see where this leads, read IJ’s scalding report “Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture” (http://ow.ly/aYME1), a sickening litany of law enforcement agencies padding their budgets and financing boondoggles by, for example, smelling, or imagining to smell, or pretending to smell, marijuana in cars they covet.

None of this is surprising to Madisonians, which all sensible Americans are. James Madison warned (in Federalist 48) that government power “is of an encroaching nature.” If unresisted, it produces iniquitous sharing of other people’s property.

At 5:30 a.m. on May 10, armed men broke into the bedroom of Kirk Kyle Farrar’s 12 year-old daughter and shook her awake. The men led her downstairs at gunpoint and forced her to lie on the floor next to her mother and father, with her hands behind her head. Another armed man took Farrar’s two-year-old son from his crib, and would not let his parents hold him. “My son screamed for his mother for what seemed like an eternity,” Farrar wrote in an email to friends, obtained by Reason. “I will never forget the hopeless feeling of not being able to comfort my son or daughter.”

The armed men who broke into Farrar’s home were officers with the Meridian, Idaho, Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were executing a federal warrant for Farrar’s arrest for the crime of selling bongs.

baffled wrote:http://reason.com/blog/2012/05/20/a-rep ... ar-my#fold

At 5:30 a.m. on May 10, armed men broke into the bedroom of Kirk Kyle Farrar’s 12 year-old daughter and shook her awake. The men led her downstairs at gunpoint and forced her to lie on the floor next to her mother and father, with her hands behind her head. Another armed man took Farrar’s two-year-old son from his crib, and would not let his parents hold him. “My son screamed for his mother for what seemed like an eternity,” Farrar wrote in an email to friends, obtained by Reason. “I will never forget the hopeless feeling of not being able to comfort my son or daughter.”

The armed men who broke into Farrar’s home were officers with the Meridian, Idaho, Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were executing a federal warrant for Farrar’s arrest for the crime of selling bongs.

NYPD Sgt. Lesly Charles wants Brooklyn men to know his dick is bigger than theirs, and he’s not afraid to use it to get them to stop parking their cars illegally.

A rant by Charles back in April was captured by cellphone video and provided to the New York Post by the target of the sergeant’s ire:

The footage includes Charles berating a young man in the roadway near a silver BMW, telling him: “This is my street. All right? If you got to play tough, that’s your problem . . . I do whatever the f--k I want.”

A short time later, Charles followed the group into the nearby No. 1 Chinese Food restaurant, flanked by two plainclothes cops.

“I have the long d--k. You don’t,” the cop bragged.

“Your pretty face — I like it very much. My d--k will go in your mouth and come out your ear. Don’t f--k with me. All right?”

The unidentified 21-year-old who shot the video was arrested later and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to leave. According to the Post, the man with the pretty face Charles would like to fuck has been arrested more than 20 times for petty larceny, weapons, and marijuana charges (though there’s no information whether he was convicted or pleaded guilty to any of them).

Charles is now under investigation by the City’s Civilian Complaint Board. Reached by the Post, Charles said only, “I’m just doing God’s work. You know I can’t comment ... Have a blessed day.”

The officer asked him to control his dogs, Mark Boling said. He urged the officer not to advance, but he did.

"I asked him to stay where he was," Boling, 52, an electronics technician with a defense contractor, recalled saying. Then he told the officer: "My dogs don't bite, They're not going to hurt you. They're just going to run up to you."

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/28 ... rylink=cpy

Boling said he had gained control of one of the dogs by the time the officer raised his gun. "Then I hear my wife yelling, 'Don't shoot my baby, please don't hurt my baby!'"

The officer fired once, striking the dog in the back. It dashed to the back yard, where it bled to death within three minutes.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/28 ... rylink=cpy

"Why are you on my property? I didn't call you," Mark Boling recalls asking.

"Copper theft," he said the officer replied.

According to Criado, the reported theft had occurred two blocks up the street, near 4900 Norma.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/28 ... rylink=cpy

Ed Zachary wrote:I'd hate to think what I'd do to a cop if he shot my dog(s).

Two Sacramento deputies face federal charges for selling guns that officers and active military members are allowed to own, but not us dumb, hapless non-uniformed folks. According to KTVU in San Francisco, at least two of the guns ended up in the hands of criminals and one was used in a police standoff:

U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagoner said the deputies were charged with serving as straw buyers by purchasing the restricted handguns. They then sold the handguns at a profit to unqualified buyers through licensed dealers, prosecutors said.

California law bars citizens from buying handguns that have not been deemed safe by the state Department of Justice, but the law exempts peace officers. The deputies are accused of using their peace officer exemption to buy dozens of weapons over more than a year then selling them to others for a profit.