Category: Grumpy’s hall of Shame
(I guess that I am Lucky as all the Cops that I have been around are some pretty good folks. But all it takes is one asshole & guess what happens next. – Grumpy)
Small town cops: big fish in a small pond who will F#$k you up for disrespecting their authority. An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.
And it wasn’t 1 cop having a bad day. The chief lied about the video of the incident. The DA charged the guy who was abused. It went on for 16 months before they FINALLY released the video. The officer in question resigned during those 16 months.
But the lessons would keep coming. Finley and his wife later went to the Walnut Ridge Police Department to file a complaint. Instead of taking the complaint, Police Chief Chris Kirksey and Sgt. Matt Cook interrogated and scolded Finley. Cook then wrote Finley two citations for “refusal to submit” and “obstructing governmental operations.” Note that Mercado didn’t feel compelled to cite Finley. It was only after Finley attempted to file a complaint about Mercado’s behavior that Mercado’s supervisors hit him with two misdemeanors.
Oh, the cop in question, had been in two OTHER forces in 3 months. And he was on the force in question for 11 days when this incident happened.
A local reporter started investigating and the guy in question started a lawsuit. Between open-records-requests from both parties, eventually the story was coming out.
At one point, Morris [the reporter] said, Kirksey called him in to his office and pleaded with him not to publish anything about the incident. “He had Mercado in there with him,” Morris said in a telephone interview. “Mercado said he made a mistake by using the f-word and apologized. But they also told me that the video would show that Finley was wrong” — just as Kirksey had done with Finley’s wife.
When Morris finally saw the video, he felt deceived. “It definitely helped me understand what that meeting was really about,” he said. “I think they knew that this would be a big problem for them, and they tried to mislead me.”
They cost the guy his marriage. They did EVERYTHING they could to destroy his life, and they pretty much succeeded. Because one cop was an asshole and the system jumped to defend him. (Hat tip to A Geek with Guns.)
Stolen from 357 Magnum
Fire and movement? Maybe some take advantage of the Terrain? Get a squad Leader who knows WTF to do?
Nah! Grumpy
Least-Educated State: California No. 1 in Percentage of Residents 25 and Older Who Never Finished 9th Grade; No. 50 in High School Graduates
California Gov. Jerry Brown and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) outside the U.S. Capitol, March 22, 2017. (Getty Images/Alex Wong)
(CNSNews.com) – California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau.
Texas ranks No. 2 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 49th for the percentage who have graduated from high school.
9.7 percent of California residents 25 and older, the Census Bureau says, never completed ninth grade. Only 82.5 percent graduated from high school.
8.7 percent of Texas residents 25 and older never completed ninth grade, and only 82.8 percent graduated from high school.
California and Texas—while having the highest percentages of residents 25 and older who never finished ninth grade and the lowest percentages who graduated from high school—are the nation’s two most populous states.
In fact, the 2,510,370 California residents 25 and older who, according to the Census Bureau, never finished ninth grade outnumber the entire populations of 15 other states.
In California, children are required to attend school from six years of age until they are 18. “California’s compulsory education laws require children between six and eighteen years of age to attend school, with a limited number of exceptions,” says the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, an agency of the California state government.
(The National Center for Education Statistics also indicates that children in California are compelled by law to attend school from 6 to 18 years of age.)
Massachusetts ranks No. 1 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older—42.1 percent–who have earned at least a bachelor’s degree.
These rankings are based on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 5-year estimates, which were released this month.
In the survey, the Census Bureau asks respondents to specify the level of educational attainment for each individual in their household. The question is: “What is the highest degree or level of school this person has COMPLETED. Mark (X) ONE box. If currently enrolled, mark the previous grade or highest degree received.”
The survey form then offers the respondent multiple options ranging from “no schooling completed” to “professional degree” or “doctorate degree.” If an individual has not earned a high school degree, the respondent is asked to specify the highest grade the individual actually completed—ranging from “nursery school” through “12th grade—NO DIPLOMA.”
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey queries a random sample of more than 3.5 million U.S. households each year and publishes a one-year estimate for each year. The five-year estimate, the bureau says, “is a weighted average of the five one-year estimates.” The newly released five-year estimates are for the period from 2013 through 2017.
Nationwide, 5.4 percent of residents 25 and older have never finished ninth grade, according to the latest five-year estimates.
Ten states exceeded the nationwide level of residents 25 and older who have never finished ninth grade. These include: California (9.7 percent), Texas (8.7 percent), New York (6.5 percent), New Mexico (6.5 percent), Kentucky (6.1 percent), Nevada (5.9 percent), Arizona (5.9 percent), Mississippi (5.6 percent), Rhode Island (5.5 percent), and Louisiana (5.4 percent).
Wyoming—with 1.8 percent—had nation’s smallest percentage of residents 25 and older who never finished ninth grade.
In seventeen states, the percentage of residents 25 and older who at least graduated from high school was less than the nationwide percentage of 87.3 percent.
These seventeen states included: California (82.5 percent), Texas (82.8 percent), Mississippi (83.4 percent), Louisiana (84.3 percent), New Mexico (85 percent), Kentucky (85.2 percent), Alabama (85.3 percent), Arkansas (85.6 percent), Nevada (85.8 percent), West Virginia (85.9 percent), New York (86.1 percent), Georgia (86.3 percent), Tennessee (86.5 percent), South Carolina (86.5 percent), Arizona (86.5 percent), North Carolina (86.9 percent), and Rhode Island (87.3 percent).
Nationwide, 30.9 percent of residents 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
In nineteen states, the percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher exceeds the national percentage. These nineteen states include both No. 14 California (32.6) and No. 9 New York (35.3), which respectively ranked No.1 and No. 3 for the percentage of residents 25 and older who never finished ninth grade.
The ten states with the highest percentage of residents 25 and older who earned a bachelor’s degree or higher are: Massachusetts (42.1 percent), Colorado (39.4 percent), Maryland (39 percent), Connecticut (38.4 percent), New Jersey (38.1 percent), Virginia (37.6 percent), Vermont (36.8 percent), New Hampshire (36 percent), New York (35.3 percent), and Minnesota (34.8 percent).
West Virginia—at 19.9 percent—has the lowest percentage of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
In another seven states, the percentage of residents who have a bachelor’s degree or higher is less than 25 percent. They are: Mississippi (21.3 percent), Arkansas (22 percent), Kentucky (23.2 percent), Louisiana (23.4 percent), Nevada (23.7 percent), Alabama (24.5 percent) and Oklahoma (24.8 percent).
In California, according to the Census Bureau’s five-year estimates, the resident population 25 and older was 25,950,818. Of those individuals, 2,510,370—or 9.7 percent–never completed ninth grade.
Another 2,033,160 California residents 25 and older completed the ninth, tenth, eleventh or twelfth grade—but did not earn a high school diploma. Thus, a total of 4,543,530 California residents 25 and older—or a nation-leading 17.5 percent–have never graduated from high school.
Those 2,510,370 individuals 25 and older in California who never finished 9th grade outnumber the entire populations of 15 other states, according to the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates. These include: Alaska (737,438), Delaware (967,171), Hawaii (1,420,491), Idaho (1,754,208), Maine (1,338,404), Montana (1,062,305), Nebraska (1,929,268), New Hampshire (1,356,458), New Mexico (2,095,428), North Dakota (760,077), Rhode Island (1,057,315), South Dakota (882,235), Vermont (626,299), West Virginia (1,805,832), and Wyoming (577,737).
In Texas, the resident population 25 and older was 17,454,431. Of those individuals, 1,513,995—or 8.7 percent—never completed ninth grade. That outnumbers the populations of 11 states.
Syracuse Cops Force Doctors to Probe a Man’s Rectum for Drugs, Then Bill the Man For It
Similar cases have resulted in huge lawsuits against hospitals and police departments.
Mathayward | Dreamstime.comSyracuse
police obtained a search warrant from a judge to compel doctors to perform an invasive rectal probe of a man they suspected of hiding drugs, even after an x-ray showed nothing out of the ordinary.
And after the scope likewise turned up no drugs, the man was billed more than $4,000 for the procedure.
Syracuse.com reports that Syracuse police, a city judge, and St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center “collaborated to sedate” Torrence Jackson after he was arrested following a traffic stop “and thread an 8-inch flexible tube into his rectum in a search for illegal drugs.”
The suspect, who police said had taunted them that he’d hidden drugs there, refused consent for the procedure.
At least two doctors resisted the police request. An X-ray already had indicated no drugs. They saw no medical need to perform an invasive procedure on someone against his will.
The notes from police and doctors suggest some tension, a standoff. At one point, eight police officers were at the hospital. A doctor remembers telling officers: “We would not be doing that.”
The hospital’s top lawyer got pulled in. He talked by with the judge who signed the search warrant, which was written by police and signed at the judge’s home. When they were done, the hospital lawyer overruled the doctors. The lawyer told his doctors that a search warrant required the doctors to use “any means” to retrieve the drugs, records show.
Jackson was then hooked up to an IV against his will and put under general anesthesia while doctors performed a sigmoidoscopy. No drugs were found.
According to the story, Jackson was arrested after a pretextual traffic stop where officers found a baggie of marijuana and detected cocaine residue on his car seat.
Jackson has a long rap sheet and was combative with police in jail, but the encounter crossed into dubious ethical and legal territory when police compelled doctors to perform a medical procedure they saw as unnecessary.
Previous cases like this have resulted in police and hospitals paying out huge amounts of money to settle lawsuits.
In 2016, the federal government and an El Paso hospital agreed to pay a New Mexico woman roughly $1.6 million dollars for the six hours of invasive cavity searches she was subjected to after a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) drug-sniffing dog alerted to her.
In 2014, the city of Deming, New Mexico, paid David Eckert $1.6 million after he was subjected to two X-rays, two digital probes of his anus, three enemas, and a colonoscopy in an ultimately vain search for drugs.
In another 2014 settlement, CBP and the same El Paso hospital agreed to pay out $1.1 million to a woman who endured a similarly degrading series of cavity searches.
“Aside from the vaginal probe and CT scan, the woman also underwent a forced observed bowel movement, a rectal exam and an X-ray,” the Texas Tribune reported. “She was eventually released six hours later then billed $5,000 because she refused to sign a consent-to-search statement.”
The drug charges against Jackson resulting from the traffic stop were thrown out. Jackson has refused to pay for the unwanted medical procedure, and the hospital is now threatening to send him to collections.
See also: ReasonTV’s video on the 2012 case of Timothy Young, who was handcuffed by Hidalgo County deputies and driven to a nearby hospital, where he was x-rayed and digitally probed against his will. No drugs were found.
Photo Credit: Mathayward | Dreamstime.com
“The government you elect is the government you deserve.”
— Thomas Jefferson
The state of California is massively in debt. Middle-class jobs are leaving and taking California’s middle class along with them. With growing crime, it is more dangerous to live in California each year.
After failure like that, California politicians call for higher taxes and more gun control. Why would politicians propose more of the prescriptions that failed in the past? That is a fascinating question. Let’s see if we can help.
For all the compassion that politicians show in front of the cameras,
— Thomas Jefferson
The state of California is massively in debt. Middle-class jobs are leaving and taking California’s middle class along with them. With growing crime, it is more dangerous to live in California each year.
After failure like that, California politicians call for higher taxes and more gun control. Why would politicians propose more of the prescriptions that failed in the past? That is a fascinating question. Let’s see if we can help.
California compared to other states-
California has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country. California is ranked first of the fifty states when it comes to gun-control.
Those laws are so severe and so extensive that California has an “A” rating by the Giffords gun-control group. Shouldn’t those gun-control laws guarantee very low rates of violent crime and a remarkably low murder rate?
The answer is a tragic ‘No’. California has regulated guns for decades, yet gun-control hasn’t come close to delivering on its promises. Not then, and not now.
California gun laws-
Unless you’ve lived there, you might not be familiar with California’s extensive gun laws. The state mandates safety training before a sale can take place. They have universal background checks before each gun sale, and a ten day waiting period before you can take possession of your gun.
Ammunition sales are also regulated. You have to buy a gun lock with each firearm. Most handguns sold in the United States are not allowed for sale in California. Magazine capacity is limited, and you can only buy one gun a month. California also regulates and registers what the state calls “assault weapons”.
Most California citizens can’t get a permit to carry a handgun in public. Nor does the state recognize carry permits from other states. California proposes more gun-control laws each year.
Each growing infringement on the right to keep and bear arms was supposed to guarantee that criminals wouldn’t use guns for violent crime. The opposite took place. In California, the criminals are armed and the law abiding citizens are disarmed.
Comparing California’s crime rate to other states
California is quite violent when compared to the rest of the fifty states. That is bad and becoming worse year after year. California ranks in the worse half of states when ranked by violent crime. Thirty five states were safer than California in 2016.
Also, the homicide rate in California increased by 18 percent from 2014 to 2016. Note that California classifies some crimes as non-violent that most states, and most citizens, consider to be very violent. For example, forcible rape is punished as a non-violent crime in California.
Political considerations
Why do California politicians persist with more of the same old policies in the face of repeated failure?
High taxes mean there are lots of government programs that reward special interests. Special interests provide campaign contributions to incumbent politicians. California is ruled by Democrats, and high taxes persist because they work for California Democrat politicians.
It is more important that California Democrat politicians succeed than that California citizens succeed.
We see similar forces at work with gun control. For Democrat politicians, rising rates of homicide are a beneficial feature rather than a fault. High rates of violent crime provide a justification for more gun-control legislation.
That legislation provides more campaign cash from gun-control donors. Gun-control works for Democrat politicians even while it fails for California citizens. Now, California Democrat politicians want to tax guns, but does anyone think that criminals will pay those taxes?
For all the compassion that politicians show in front of the cameras,
very little compassion makes it to the streets where people are dying.
This isn’t an academic question. We pay for these political adventures with our lives.
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By Kevin Myers |
| This is all so true and accepting refugees from these countries only makes the rest of the world have the same afflictions.Worth a refresh on the facts, before sending aid to Africa! Kevin Myers (born 30 March 1947) is an Irish journalist and writer. He writes for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, having previously been a columnist for the Irish Independent and a former contributor toThe Irish Times, where he wrote the “An Irishman’s Diary” opinion column several times weekly. Until 2005, he wrote for the UK Sunday Telegraph. His articles criticize left-wing opinion and the “liberal consensus”, sometimes incorporating hyperbole, sarcasm and parody. This essay appeared in The Irish Independent: Somalia is not a humanitarian disaster; it is an evolutionary disaster. The current drought is not the worst in 50 years, as the BBC and all the aid organizations claim. It is nothing compared to the droughts in 1960/61 or 73/74. And there are continuing droughts every 5 years or so. It’s just that there are now four times the population; having been kept alive by famine relief, supplied by aid organizations, over the past 50 years. So, of course, the effects of any drought now, is a famine. They cannot even feed themselves in a normal rainfall year. Worst yet, the effects of these droughts, and poor nutrition in the first 3 years of the a child’s life, have a lasting effect on the development of the infant brain, so that if they survive, they will never achieve a normal IQ. Consequently, they are selectively breeding a population who cannot be educated, let alone one that is not being educated; a recipe for disaster. We are seeing this impact now, and it can only exacerbate, to the detriment of their neighbours, and their environment as well. This scenario can only end in an even worse disaster; with even worse suffering, for those benighted people, and their descendants. Eventually, some mechanism will intervene, be it war, disease or starvation. So what do we do? Let them starve? What a dilemma for our Judeo/Christian/Islamic Ethos; as well as Hindu/Buddhist morality. And this is beginning to happen in Kenya, Ethiopia and other countries in Asia, like Pakistan. Is this the beginning of the end of civilization? AFRICA is giving nothing to anyone outside Africa — apart from AIDS and new diseases. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilization in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us out of Africa, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since the famous Feed The World campaign began in Ethiopia, and in that time Ethiopia’s population has grown from 33.5 million to 78+ million today. So, why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. Now they want to move to other countries to continue to breed and commit crime. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn’t count. One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of children starving. Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. There is no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this. It will win no friends and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous hand wringing, letter writing wrathful individuals; a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. Itwill also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like John O’Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire enormously. So be it. But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Irish Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison! Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30%. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules plane, Ethiopia’s population has more than doubled. Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts and housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world or allowances by the semi-communist Governments they voted for, money supplied by borrowing it from the > World Bank! This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or common sense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the president of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against AIDS infection. Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera. Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa. They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa,with its vast Savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS. Meanwhile, Africa’s peoples are outstripping their resources and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million; the equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly Protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley. So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country? How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity! But that is not good enough. For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed. It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates’ programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating. If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what? I know, let them all come here (to Ireland). Germany and the rest of Europe is already inundated and there are literally millions queuing up who want a hand out, taking in refugees because you feel sorry for them will end in the demise of those countries taking part. You will note that: No Gulf State is taking any refugees, and the head of the human rights commission is Saudi Arabian !?! |