All these stories do is fill me with impotent rage, but I can't stop reading or writing about them:

Interviewing the people in Tracy Ingle's life — his sisters, his foster brother, his friends — you hear one line often enough that it soon becomes a refrain: Tracy is no angel.

Though all express their love and admiration for him — a kind man; a man who can fix anything, they say — they tend to tell you the bad things about him first. A recovering alcoholic, Ingle had a couple of DWIs several years back. When the Arkansas Times spoke to him, he was on house arrest for a 5-year-old failure-to-appear warrant. A car accident in Maryland in 2002 left him with degenerative disk disease in his back and what his sisters said is an addiction to pain killers — though all of his pills are legally prescribed. Up until Christmas 2007, he had several roommates, many of whom had had recent run-ins with the law. Last year, he agreed to fix a stereo in a friend's Mustang — a car that turned out to be hot — and got arrested for receiving stolen merchandise. That case still hasn't shaken out.

No matter what Ingle or those he gave a temporary home to may have done, however, it's hard to imagine he deserved what he got Jan. 7. That night, the North Little Rock SWAT team stormed Ingle's house on a high-risk, “no-knock” search warrant. By the time all was said and done, Ingle had been shot five times — including one bullet that pulverized his femur and left his leg dangling from his body, connected only by a bloody mess of meat, skin and tendon.

According to an evidence list left at Ingle's house after the shooting, no suspected drugs or drug residue were recovered from the residence — only a digital scale, a notebook and a few plastic baggies, all of which Ingle's family members have identified as part of the junk they had collectively stored at the house.

It might seem strange, then, that Ingle currently stands accused of several serious felonies — including two counts of aggravated assault. While the North Little Rock police insist they got a dangerous criminal off the streets, Ingle and his family say the charges are all about appearances — and covering the police.

Here's a guy who is, at most, guilty of poor judgment, and for his trouble he's nearly shot to death, removed from the hospital by the cops (who provide him with substandard medical care, leading to infections in his wounds), and charged with "running a drug enterprise", even though no drugs were found in Ingle's home, and the equipment they seized belonged to his sister, who says she used the scale and baggies for a jewelry-making hobby.

Do these sound like the actions of a government intended to protect rights?  Whose rights are they protecting here?  Does anyone think for a moment this will somehow make our streets safer, will prevent even one person from obtaining illegal drugs?

Radley Balko has more here.  As is becoming typical for these cases, the police have clammed up—and even the judge in the case has slapped a gag order on the prosecutor, Ingle and whatever lawyer he ends up with (he currently can't afford to hire one).

And there's nothing you can do.  Spare me the false bravado: we are truly fucked when it comes to dealing with the unjust actions of the police.  Submit and you can still face jail time for whatever crimes the cops and DA can come up with, not to mention the damage to your home and trauma to yourself and your family.

But fighting back—to actually defend yourself and your loved ones from these power-mad thugs—will earn you a toe tag or possibly a trip to death row.

When private citizens are unable to defend themselves against the criminal actions of the police, and the cops themselves cannot be held accountable, how can anyone deny that this country has become a de facto police state?

5. So if you don't want your kid to go to the hospital after taking a spill, and you're one of those weird "constitutionalist" cranks, expect the SWAT team to bust down your door, throw you and your wife to the floor, and take your kid at gunpoint to the hospital.

I'm not fucking kidding.

Authorities said they had reason to believe Shiflett mistreated his 11-year-old son, Jon, by failing to provide him proper medical care for a head injury. But Shiflett says his privacy and his rights were invaded, and that he has the right and the skill to treat his son himself. Shiflett, 62, said he served as a medic in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. . . .

Speaking about the incident from his home in the Apple Tree Park on Monday, Shiflett was very upset. Perhaps most offensive, Shiflett said, was that law enforcement didn't announce there was a warrant before breaking into his home south of New Castle.

"I would have let them in," he said. "It was traumatic to my children, and it's unnecessary."

His spouse, Tina, and his six of 10 kids who are still at home were shocked at the manner of entry. Tina said law enforcement, wearing masks, broke down their door with a battering ram and pointed guns in her children's faces.

"They didn't need to bash into my home and slam my kids to the floor," Tina said, adding later, "I think they get a kick out of this."

Yes, they do get a kick out of this, the sick fucks.  Cops are nothing more than common bullies, thugs with badges working for the stolen loot of the criminal state.  These are the people who "serve and protect" you.

And the sheriff's rationale for sending a SWAT team on what amounts to a welfare check?

The sheriff said . . . the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

So you can now expect the cops to treat you differently based on your political views, especially if they're considered radical or "dangerous".

Oh, and the guy's son?  He's fine; the doctor told him to take Tylenol and apply ice to the bruises.

I'm so fucking angry I'm shaking.  Especially since this happened in my state.  It could happen to anybody.  It could happen to you.

Radley Balko returns from Mississippi after visiting Cory Maye's family:

I don’t doubt that there are lots of convicted felons who struggle to stay parents to their kids from prison. But in Cory’s case, it’s particularly brutal. He’s in prison not because he was a poor father, or because he engaged in a life of crime that hurt or put his kids at risk. On the contrary. By all accounts he was loving, even doting father. He had no criminal record. Talk to Cory’s relatives, and they’ll tell you that their memories of him have him dressing his kids, bathing them, changing them, holding them, and brushing and braiding their hair. He cooked for them, and played with them. When construction jobs dried up and he couldn’t work, he became his daughter’s primary caretaker while Chanteal worked nights. He’s in prison precisely because he acted out of fear for his daughter’s safety. He thought someone was breaking into his home to harm the two of them. That that act has now put him in a position where he’s being slowly erased from his daughter’s life—from a jail cell where there’s little he can do about it—is a crushingly cruel twist of fate.

It's long, but please read the whole thing, if you care at all about the state of the country's criminal justice system.  Balko has also posted a slideshow of photos he took during his visit.

Fortunately for Maye his death sentence for killing Ron Jones was overturned, but he is still destined to rot in prison for the rest of his life:

He’s trying to settle in to his new surroundings. He’s now at Unit 32 at Parchman Penitentiary, the hardest-knock wing of one of the hardest-knock prisons in the country. It’s the highest-security wing in the prison, save for Death Row. Thought in terms of living conditions, it’s likely worse. Lately, Unit 32 has had problems with rioting. There have been three inmate murders in the last two years.

. . . This is Cory's home now.

. . .

You have one man taken from his family, in the prime of his life. You have another man, also taken from his family, now losing the prime of his life. You have a son taken from his mother and father. And you have a loving father being taken from his son and daughter.

Thank this war. The goddamned drug war. It is so incredibly senseless and stupid. And it’ll continue to claim and ruin lives, because too few politicians have the backbone to stand up and say after 30 years, $500 billion, a horrifyingly high prison population, and countless dead innocents, cops, kids, nonviolent offenders, decimated neighborhoods, wasted lives, corrupted cops, and eviscerations of the core freedoms this country was allegedly founded upon, the shit isn’t working. It’ll never work. It never has.

It has to stop.  However many lives you think are being saved by trying to keep drugs off the streets, it pales to the number that are being ruined every day by the state.

If you can read all of this and still think Cory Maye deserves to be in prison, that his children should be deprived of their father, that the circumstances which sealed both Maye's and Ron Jones' fates are a just way of dealing with society's ills, then I have no hope for you, or for the future of this country.

Damn.  I was positively giddy when I saw the headline on Slashdot:

Man Hacks 911 System, Sends SWAT on Bogus Raid

Now HERE'S a revolutionary! I thought.  But I was disappointed after reading the story:

Officers apprehended and cuffed the resident and his wife, identified as Stacy B. It was moments later they learned the call was false, said Lt. Mike McHenry of the South County Investigations Bureau.

“The danger is significant,” said Lt. Don Barnes, chief of police services for Lake Forest. “That (situation) played out OK, although it scared the victims significantly.”

Ellis is expected to appear in an Orange County courtroom Monday to face charges of computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence, falsely reporting a crime and assault with an assault weapon by proxy.

No!  Bad haX0r!  No Halo for you!

Don't send the freakin' SWAT team after innocent people!  Send them to an abandoned warehouse, or an empty lot, or somewhere in the middle of the desert.  If he'd done this, sending SWAT on wild goose chases that prevent them from terrorizing other people, I'd call the kid a hero.  But deploying them to an occupied house isn't much different from pointing a loaded gun at people yourself (which explains the interesting "assault with an assault weapon by proxy" charge against the kid).

“It’s not a prank,” Emami said. “People’s lives were in danger.”

Given SWAT's propensity for shooting people, I'd have to say he's right.

I'll admit: this is pure rant-y speculation.  That said:

I just have one question about the Virgina Tech massacre: how the fuck did this psycho shoot someone in a dorm and then hang out for two hours before shooting even more people in a classroom across campus?  Where the fuck was the police response?  Was the SWAT team doing another drug raid on an 80-year-old pensioner's house and unavailable?

I realize VT is a big campus, but two hours passed between the first shootings and the second, deadlier shootings.  Since they didn't catch the gunman after the first shooting, that place should have been swarming with cops, the entire campus evacuated and locked down.  But what did officials do?  They sent out an e-mail saying they were "investigating" the dorm shootings, and that students should stay inside—meanwhile, the gunman was shooting up another classroom across campus.  The cops apparently didn't respond in force until after the second shootings.

It's probably too early to be pissed off about this; we certainly don't have many details about what happened.  But somebody is going to pay for this beyond the 30 or so who have already lost their lives.  Yet I fear the only real fallout will be another attack on gun rights.  Because, you know, only gun bans can prevent this from happening again, right?

EDIT: LawDog weighs in on the bitter irony of a bill which would have allowed concealed carry on college campuses dying in committee in the Virginia legislature—and a Virginia Tech spokesman being "appreciative" about the bill's demise.  Your students' blood is on your hands, asshole.

EDITx2: The latest update from AP:

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

"We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said.

Except there were multiple shootings at the dorm, not just one.  It would still seem prudent to lock down the campus as a precaution, no?

Steger said the university decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means of notifying members of the university, but with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out to everyone.

It's called radio.  And television.  And, you know, cops stationed at every entrance to the campus.  I can think of lots of ways they might have been able to get the word out, and I'm sitting 2,000 miles away.

Yeah, that'll teach ya for boosting a pack of Skittles, bitch.

This was in connection with a shoplifting investigation, which makes a SWAT response sound like overkill.  However, the owner of the convenience store (along with many others in the area) is allegedly involved in a major shoplifting ring.  Still, it might not have been a bad idea to, you know, ensure no customers were inside before hitting the place.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the cops.  After all, a lot of them might not know what the fuck they're doing.  In at least 30 states, some rookie cops are allowed to hit the streets without formal training.

Ganked from Radley Balko, whom y'all should be reading anyway.

Finally, a cop story worth reading.  (Thanks to ms_daisy_cutter for the link.)  Apparently LawDog is a sheriff's deputy on a beat not even COPS would cover.  Hi-goddamn-larious, and recommended.

This is my first political post in . . . forever, it seems.  But someone in libertarianism posted a link to the Cory Maye case in Mississippi, and it finally sparked something worth writing about.

The real short story is that Maye is on death row for killing a cop.  The devil, of course, is in the details:

• The cops hit the duplex where Maye lives on a no-knock warrant.  It's not clear if they expected to find anybody in Maye's side of the house, where he lived with his daughter.  (Edit: Actually, it's pretty apparent they didn't know who was in Maye's apartment, as the warrants named only the occupant of the other apartment, a suspected drug dealer, and "unknown occupants" for Maye's half.)
  
• One of the officers, the one whom Maye fatally shot, was the son of the police chief, but not a member of the SWAT team.  He accompanied the raid because it was his tip which led to the warrant.
  
• It's not clear if the cops announced themselves after busting in.
  
• Maye is a black man with no prior criminal record.  The jury which convicted him and sentenced him to death was mostly white.  There's also evidence to suggest he did not receive adequate counsel during the trial.

It's crystal clear to me that this man does not deserve to be on death row.  It's not quite as clear, but I'm willing to consider the idea, that he shouldn't be in jail at all.  People are, or should be, free to defend themselves against unknown assailants in their own home.  If the police don't identify themselves even after breaking in, what should be a private citizen's reasonable assumption?  Especially one who had no expectation that the cops were after him?  (And they weren't there to get Maye, but rather the occupant of the other half of the duplex.)

My comment in the original thread sums up my other thoughts (note: this is an edited form of the original):

And where are all the Hollywood liberals who flocked to Tookie's side as he prepared to take the needle?  Why aren't they hitching their wagons to Cory Maye's cause?

Maybe they have no problem with gangsters shotgunning innocent people in the face, but they ignore a black man with no prior criminal record who defends himself against an unknown assailant (who just happened to be the police chief's son, and should not have been there as he wasn't a SWAT team member), and receives a death sentence for his trouble.  Wouldn't surprise me.

Or maybe Cory Maye just needs to write a couple of children's books.

Here's a discussion from last month in libertarianism, over the Tasing of an eight-months-pregnant woman for refusing to sign a traffic ticket.  (I know one or two other people on my friends list picked up on this story as well.)

Even in a community supposedly devoted to the discussion of individual liberty and self-ownership, many of the responses amounted to "she's a stupid douchebag who got what she deserved."

So even some libertarians believe you should never question a cop's authority.  Great.

Can you see why I hold out little hope for our society?  We're just a bunch of fucking sheep, and we allow the wolves to work as sheepherders.

Apparently few people share my and moderndayknight's rather dim view of this arrest in Florida last year, in which a cop used a Taser on a 22-year-old woman whom he was attempting to arrest for driving with a suspended license.  (Granted, my initial reaction was based on a misunderstanding of when the Tasing took place—I initially thought it was before the cop found out the woman's license had been suspended.  I still consider it excessive force, and yes, I can't help but notice the race of the cop and the driver.  Would this have happened had the driver been white?)

So I'll let the rest of you decide if zapping her twice with 50,000 volts was an appropriate way to handle the situation.

Poll #505469 cluebyfour's random poll # 14
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Did the cop use appropriate force in arresting the woman?