Browsing: FTP

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USA Today set out to discover if the racially lopsided arrest statistics in Ferguson, Missouri, where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer, were an anomaly. Sadly, no: A fascinating new report reveals a racial gap in arrest stats in many locations across the country, including at least twenty in Colorado.
Westword broke out USA Today‘s Colorado numbers and ranked the twenty agencies according to how many blacks were arrested per 1,000 residents — and the results are startling. Check them out here, and to see the complete USA Today piece, click here.

A former City of Ferguson corrections officer has been charged with the rape of a jail inmate. The incident occurred back on October 9, 2013, but the charges against Jaris Hayden — for felony sexual contact with an inmate and permitting an escape — were just filed on November 5 of this year.
The indictment came just a week and a half before the victim, identified only as J.W., filed a suit in federal court against the City of Ferguson as well as Hayden. She was in custody for driving with expired plates and giving a police officer a fake name. Riverfront Times has more.

FlickrCommons

In Florida, like pretty much every other state in the nation, black people get arrested on pot charges four times as often as whites. The state is consistently in the top five in the country for marijuana-related arrests, and getting busted with anything under 20 grams can get you a year in jail.
So when four plainclothes cops from the Miami Dade Police Department walked up on Tannie “T-Man” Burke and two of his buddies on the evening of August 27th and accused them of smoking weed, it’s really no surprise that Burke ended up in the back of a police cruiser.
What is pretty disturbing is what the cops did with him next.

More than 52 percent of voters in South Portland, Maine made it clear earlier this week that they are tired of their fellow South Portlanders getting hassled for small amounts of herb. A new ordinance makes the possession of an ounce or less legal for adults 21-and-up.
The move is largely symbolic, but the cops still say they don’t care. They’ll continue to enforce the law as they see fit.
South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins says his officers are going to ignore the people they are charged with protecting and serving. The same thing happened in Portland, which passed a similar measure earlier this year and yet still sees marijuana possession charges in their courts.

Tim Casey, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s longtime lawyer, wants out of the hot-potato Melendres racial-profiling case now that it’s in a “compliance phase.”
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona don’t want him to leave so fast, though — not with questions and things left to discover related to corrupt deputy Ramon Charley Armendariz, who hung himself in May rather than submit to arrest.


Some call it “stop-and-frisk by another name.” Others say it’s an excuse for cops to up the number of outstanding arrest warrants.
But the facts in a recent CUNY Law School study show that from 2008 to 2011, the New York City Police Department issued more tickets in minority than in other neighborhoods to cyclists who rode their bikes on the sidewalk. Of the 15 neighborhoods with the greatest number of summonses for the crime of bicycling on the sidewalk, 12 consist mainly of blacks and Latinos. And you’d better bet they used pot as a reason to arrest a good number of those folks. More at the Village Voice.

D.W. Kee/Flickr.


A Los Angeles Police Department officer who resides in Huntington Beach has been arrested for exposing himself near the Bolsa Chica wetlands, according to cops in Surf City. Police received several calls about a man exposing himself in the wetlands at the dead end of Bolsa Chica Street, which led detectives to stake out the area, observe a fellow exposing himself on an open path and place him under arrest last Thursday morning, Oct. 23, according to Huntington Beach Police Lt. Mitch O’Brien.
The suspect was later identified as 33-year-old Ryan Eric Galiher, who works out of the Van Nuys station but was, obviously, off duty at the time he was allegedly getting his jollies.

A photo of Michael Brown, who was killed in a Ferguson, Missouri police shooting. More images below.

As we’ve reported, prominent addiction specialist and Project SAM principal Dr. Christian Thurstone stirred controversy via a blog post implying that marijuana contributed to — and perhaps even caused — the death of Michael Brown, whose shooting by a police officer caused weeks of rioting in Ferguson, Missouri. Thurstone subsequently removed the post but didn’t rescind his thesis, and that infuriates marijuana advocate Wanda James. She feels misinformation like that spread by Thurstone is being used to justify police shootings of “young black and brown men.”

Patrick Quinn, from a screenshot of KHOU coverage.


Police in this country have a problem. Sure, there may be some good, honest cops out there but they’re too often overshadowed by bully-creeps like 26-year-old Patrick Quinn, a school district cop in Houston.
During a recent traffic stop, Quinn allegedly told a woman he smelled weed in the car. That’s not what he wanted to be smelling, though. Nope. His olfactory glands were tuned to other things: her feet and underwear.

Flickr/Anupam Kamal edited by Toke of the Town.


While the trigger-happy pukes of the American drug war beat down the doors of innocent citizens, armed to the teeth and prepared to rain down hell on any man, woman or child who stands in their way of busting petty drug offenders, one California tech firm hopes to prevent this brutality with a new watchdog device aimed at monitoring the psychopaths in blue.