Coyote Blog

On the way to work today, which is normally only a 5-minute drive for me, there was a small fender-bender among a couple of cars.  The cars did exactly what you are supposed to do:  they pulled off the road into a nearby parking lot so they would not block traffic.  The police could not be bothered, and just parked in the right lane, jamming traffic up for a mile or so.  I looked – there was no debris or anything in the road that they were trying to block (you can confirm that from the picture below), the police simply did not have the common courtesy that the other drivers had.

Yes, the police car below is actually parked and unoccupied in the right lane at morning rush hour.  The citizens involved can be seen pulled into the parking lot at the left.  Though it is hard to see from the picture, the traffic backup extends well into the distance.

I was surprised to find this bit of awesomeness on the net:

Update: Speaking of which, Carlos Miller, from whom the title of this post is stolen, was yet again arrested for filming police in a public place.

Folks on the Left prefer public institutions over private ones because they percieve them as more “fair.”  But the power of lawmaking and police and prisons allows public institutions to be far more abusive than private entities could ever be.  We spent months and years torturing ourselves about accounting abuses at Enron, but these are trivial compared the accounting shenanigans state institutions engage in every day.

Or consider this, from Europe, particularly the first bit

“In the event of default (i) any non-official bond holder is junior to all official creditors and (ii) the issuer reserves the right to change law as needed to negate any rights of the nonofficial bond holder.

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“We should not underestimate the damage these steps have inflicted on Europe’s €8.4 trillion sovereign bond markets. For example, the Italian government has issued bonds with a face value of over €1.6 trillion. The groups holding these bonds are banks, pension funds, insurance companies, and Italian households. These investors bought them as safe, low-return instruments that could be used to hedge liabilities and provide for future income needs. It was once hard to imagine these could ever be restructured or default.

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“Now, however, it is clear they are not safe. They have default risk, and their ultimate value is subject to the political constraint and subjective decisions by a collective of individuals in the Italian government and society, the ECB, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). An investor buying an Italian bond today needs to forecast an immediate, complex process that has been evolving in unpredictable ways. Investors naturally want a high return in order to bear these risks.

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“Investors must also weigh carefully the costs and benefits to them of official intervention. Each time official creditors provide loans or buy bonds, the nonofficial holders become more subordinated, because official creditors including the IMF, ECB, and now the European Union continue to claim preferential status.”

This is not to say that bondholders in private entities don’t get crammed down in a refinancing or bankruptcy.  But here we are talking about differential treatment of holders of the exact same class, even issue, of securities.

For those of you not in Arizona that wonder from all the articles about him why Sheriff Joe is still elected by almost landslide majorities, and why Republicans all over the state still beg him for his endorsement, here it is:

A subsequent examination of the sheriff’s file showed that residents of Maricopa County wrote to him regarding the presence of Mexicans in greater Phoenix.

Citizens saw day laborers. They saw people with brown skin. They heard Spanish spoken.

And what the letters reveal is enormous anxiety about Hispanics:

• “I always see numerous Mexicans standing around in that area . . . These Mexicans swarmed around my car, and I was so scared and alarmed . . . I was never so devastated in my life regarding these circumstances . . . Although the Mexicans at this location may be within their legal right to be there . . . I merely bring this matter to your attention in order that all public agencies, FBI, etc., may be kept informed of these horrific circumstances.”
• “I would love to see an immigrant sweep conducted in Surprise, specifically at the intersection of Grand and Greenway. The area contains dozens of day workers attempting to flag down motorists seven days a week.”
• “The Mesa police chief drags his feet and stalls . . . the head of the Mesa police union is a Hispanic.”
• “As a retiree in Sun City, formerly from Minnesota, I am a fan of yours and what you are doing to rid the area of illegal immigrants . . . when I was in McDonald’s at Bell Road and Boswell (next to the Chase Bank) this noon, there was not an employee in sight, or within hearing, who spoke English as a first language — to my dismay. From the staff at the registers to the staff back in the kitchen area, all I heard was Spanish — except when they haltingly spoke to a customer. You might want to check this out.”

And Sheriff Arpaio did check it out.

None of the Hispanics described in the letters had broken the law. It is not against the law to speak Spanish or work as a day laborer.

Arpaio nonetheless gave the correspondence to Deputy Chief Brian Sands. Federal Judge Snow determined that raids and roundups quickly followed. Hispanics were rousted because white people were uncomfortable.

Sheriff Joe once did a roundup in tony Fountain Hills, which I would be surprised if it had even 5% Hispanic population, and managed to drag in for various petty violations (e.g. cracked windshield) a group that was about 95% Hispanic.  His favorite thing to do, when he isn’t busting into homes with Hollywood celebrities, is to send his deputies into a business and have them handcuff everyone with brown skin and refuse to release them until they or their family members have arrived to prove they are in the US legally.

This whole article is a good roundup of yet another abusive side of Arpaio, his flagrant disregard for public records laws and the rules of evidence.  In Maricopa County, “exculpatory evidence” and “shredded” have roughly the same meaning.

Apparently, while Sheriff Arpaio was busy raiding businesses and zip-tieing everyone with brown skin and distracted by his attempts to arrest judges that handed down unfavorable decisions, there was actual violent crime happening in Maricopa County.  With the Sheriff busy with celebrities raiding homes suspected of cockfighting with tanks, minor stuff like rape got put on the back burner.  The story has just been discovered by the AP but it has been kicking around town for a while:

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office failed to adequately investigate more than 400 sex-crime cases, including dozens in El Mirage, over a two-year period because of poor oversight and former Chief Deputy David Hendershott’s desire to protect a key investigator from bad publicity, according to documents pertaining to a recent internal investigation released by the Sheriff’s Office.

The errors led to interminable delays for victims of serious crimes who waited years for the attackers to be brought to justice, if they were ever caught.

More than 50 El Mirage sex-crime cases, most involving young children reportedly victimized by friends or family, went uninvestigated after police took an initial report. The lack of oversight was so widespread in El Mirage that it affected other cases: roughly 15 death investigations, some of them homicides with workable leads, were never presented to prosecutors, and dozens of robberies and auto-theft cases never led to arrests.

The East Valley Tribune actually had details on this story over three years ago, in a story that won a Pullitzer, but the Sheriff never bothered to do anything until the story hit the AP.

Employees were preparing to close the 99 Cent Discount Store in El Mirage on Aug. 20, 2006, when a teenage girl ran inside.

Agitated and refusing to leave, the 15-year-old girl told the store’s manager that two men had just raped her in a ditch outside, a police report says.

Paramedics took the girl to Del E. Webb Hospital in Sun City West, where medical staff found physical evidence of sexual assault, according to deputy chief Bill Knight, head of the sheriff’s central investigations, who researched the case.

At midnight, a detective from the MCSO’s special victims unit arrived at the hospital to begin an investigation, the report says.

But the investigation never really began.

The MCSO closed the case a month later by designating it “exceptionally cleared,” which is supposed to be applied to cases where a suspect is known and there’s enough evidence to make an arrest but circumstances prevent an arrest. That designation allows the MCSO to count the case in the same reporting category as investigations that end in arrest.

But in this case, the detectives didn’t have a suspect and appear to have done no work on the case.

I would love to see a reincarnation of “the Wire” focused on our Sheriff’s department.  All the same corruptions in the show are on display every day here in Arizona.

If nothing else, the OWS movement is helping ordinary Americans see the abuse of power that is so endemic in many police departments.  I am tired of the quasi-cult of police ass-kicking on average citizens, as fed by reality cop shows and folks like Joe Arpaio.  As Radley Balko points out, the casual way that the officer hoses down citizens who are just sitting on a curb with pepper spray is just outrageous.  From past experience, my guess is that these guys were ready to go limp and be dragged off – the pepper spray was just pure torture for the entertainment of the cops.

We would not do this to a terrorist in Gitmo, so why are we doing this to American citizens? I think I get particularly angry and intolerant of this kind of crap because I used to be the kind of law and order conservative that would excuse this kind of behavior, and that embarrasses me. The saying goes that a converted Catholic is often more fervent than a born one, so to I guess for this civil libertarian.

Though it’s a high bar given what has been going on recently, this is the most aggravating thing I have read this week, via Glen Reynolds:

Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public employees and thus members of the union, which receives $30 out of the family’s monthly Medicaid subsidy. The Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3) deducts union dues on behalf of SEIU.

Michigan Department of Community Health Director Olga Dazzo explained the process in to her members of her staff.  “MQC3 basically runs the program for SEIU and passes the union dues from the state to the union,” she wrote in an emailobtained by the Mackinac Center. Initiated in 2006 under then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich., the plan reportedly provides the SEIU with $6 million annually in union dues deducted from those Medicaid subsidies.

“We’re not even home health care workers. We’re just parents taking care of our kids,” Robert Haynes, a retired Detroit police officer, told the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. “Our daughter is 34 and our son is 30. They have cerebral palsy. They are basically like 6-month-olds in adult bodies. They need to be fed and they wear diapers. We could sure use that $30 a month that’s being sent to the union.”

This is a microcosm of the typical liberal fail — a group or agency does initial good work (private unions in the early 2oth century, civil rights groups in the 60′s and 70′s, the EPA in the early 70′s) but refuse to go away and declare victory, instead morphing into self-sustaining parasites whose only concern is their own survival.

The most frequent customer service fail we have in our company is when an employee, thinking they are doing me some kind of favor, go nuts on a customer trying to enforce some trivial rule or trying to collect the last $5 our company might be owed.

It is astronomically hard to train people to use their judgement the same way I would in a customer situation.  This is particularly true when ego gets involved, when the employee feels like they have somehow taken a ego hit, with the customer “winning” and them “losing.”  I once had an employee drive out of the park we were operating and chase a woman down the road over a misunderstanding about whether $5 had been paid correctly.  Incredible.  Unfortunately,  I have found no amount of training can fix judgement this bad, and the only thing I know how to do is fire them as fast as possible so they can’t do any more harm.

I have always supposed this over-zealousness was a general human train, but in certain am-I-crazy moments, I wonder if somehow I am preferentially selecting for this kind of nuttiness.  Apparently not:

A Hawaii couple’s 3-year-old daughter was taken away from them for 18 hours after they were arrested for forgetting to a pay for two $5 sandwiches.

“This is unreal this could happen to a family like ours,” Nicole Leszczynski told Hawaii’s KHON.

The outing-turned-nightmare happened Wednesday while the family was shopping at a local Safeway.

“We walked a long way to the grocery store and I was feeling faint, dizzy, like I needed to eat something so we decided to pick up some sandwiches and eat them while we were shopping,” Leszczynski told the news station.

Leszczynski, who is 30-weeks pregnant, her husband, Marcin, and daughter Zophia bought $50 worth of groceries — but forgot about their two chicken salad sandwiches.

“It was a complete distraction, distracted parent moment,” Leszczynski told KHON.

As the family left, they were stopped by store security, who asked for their receipt.

“I offered to pay, we had the cash. We just bought the groceries,” Leszczynski told the station.

Instead, the expectant mother told KHON that the Safeway manager called police. They were taken to the main Honolulu police station where they were booked for fourth degree theft. Then Zophia was taken into custody by Child Protective Services.

I will say that I think the public agencies we replace in operating these parks are generally worse at this than we are, simply because so many of their employees have law enforcement certifications.  Dealing with customer service issues using law enforcement officers is often a recipe for bad outcomes.

Ken at Popehat has some good thoughts, prompted by the dropping of the rape case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The critical narrative holds that this case shows that the rich and the powerful are above the law. I’m not so sure. I don’t believe the DA took this route because he was afraid to prosecute a rich and powerful man, or as a favor to rich and powerful forces behind the curtain. But there’s no doubt that money and power get you a vastly better chance of this result. They get it because rich and powerful people can field a team of lawyers and investigators to find problems with the case. Those problems are often there — but usually the defendants don’t have the money to hire teams of people to find them. The rich and the powerful draw media attention, which leads to people coming forward with information that might not otherwise come out. Sometimes this hurts the defense, but just as often it yields critical impeachment evidence about prosecution witnesses. Perversely, this case shows how wealth and power and lead prosecutors to discover flaws in their own case. Most rape cases wouldn’t get anywhere near the police and prosecutorial scrutiny that this one did. But the police and the DA knew they were under the spotlight, and knew that Strauss-Kahn could field a serious team, and devoted vast resources to the case — resources that revealed issues that might never have been discovered in a rape case against the poor and the obscure.

Why decry the quality of justice that the rich and powerful get, when we could decry the level of justice that the poor get? The justice that the rich and powerful get illustrates how the system can meticulously test the adequacy of evidence against an accused. Why not try to raise every defendant closer to that level, rather than suggest that we ought to tear down the adequate justice available to the few? Believe me, the government lovesthat narrative — loves it when people view a vigorous and thorough defense as some sort of scam to be scorned. Resentment of the justice that Strauss-Kahn can afford is the government’s weapon, which it wields to get you to accept steadily less and less justice in every other case.

I am sure there are situations where the rich get a special break, but anyone who wants to argue that they systematically get off easier has to explain Martha Stewart, who went to jail not for insider trading by lying to the police, a charge no street hustler would ever be brought to court on.  And how about Barry Bonds, on whom the full force of and resources of the US Government is focused for a crime I can find going on in about any Gold’s Gym in the country.

The imbalance of wealth and power are on the prosecution side, and politicians trying to get elected propose laws constantly to increase this imbalance.  The rich have the resources to stand up to this onslaught, the poor often do not.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has a web site where he encourages the public to poke fun at the ugliest or most odd-looking mug shots taken by his officers.  He has a mug shot of the day contest, where citizens can vote for their favorite.

What do all the people pictured in these photos have in common?  The are all innocent — by definition, since they have not plead in any court or gone to trial.

Sorry, I know he has added the reminder that these folks are innocent on that page, but this kind of public shaming and ridicule for un-convicted arrestees (part and parcel with other favorites like the perp walk) are absolutely inappropriate for the police to engage in.  It is absurd to see our Sheriff running his only little TMZ.

(Yes, I know there are private sites that engage in this, as the photos are public information.  I have always wondered why arrest records are not confidential, but that is another post.  There is a big difference between a private entity engaging in such a behavior and a law enforcement officer doing so.)

Private actors are often accused of collusion to restrain trade and decrease competition, and certainly there are a number of examples of this in history.  However, all such private arrangements are usually doomed, in part because the incentive for certain parties to cheat are high in such arrangements.  And the parties to such agreements have no control over new or outside competitors entering the fray.

The only stable restraints of trade and competition are therefore enforced by the government, who can use police and prisons to enforce such rules.  That is why successful businesses who are tired of fighting off upstart competitors run to the government for help.

But the government does not like competition with its own services (e.g. Federal bans on intracity mail delivery competition). Here is a good example:

“Drivers attending the Indiana State Fair or a major sporting event downtown may sometimes opt to grab a parking spot in someone’s yard rather than pay higher prices in a parking lot, but some city officials think people who provide parking spots should get a permit first. City leaders are proposing that residents pay a $75 fee (per event) if they want to turn their yards into parking lots.”

Does anyone think there is a burning safety issue here?  The goal is to kill competition with publicly operated parking garages.  My guess is that someone figured out the average revenue of a private home offering front lawn parking, added $5, and made that the registration fee.

The point of this story seems to be to criticize cops for tasering, beating, pepper-spraying, and incarcerating a handicapped boy who apparently did nothing wrong.

Dayton police “mistook” a mentally handicapped teenager’s speech impediment for “disrespect,” so they Tasered, pepper-sprayed and beat him and called for backup from “upward of 20 police officers” after the boy rode his bicycle home to ask his mother for help, the boy’s mom says.

But the larger issue is the culture that seems to exist among many police that disrespecting them is somehow a crime.   Sorry, but it is not, anywhere in this country, a crime to disrespect a cop.

As an aside, the three words that are always a big flashing warming light for me are “he disrespected me.”  I am amazed when I hear this on the news all the time as if it justified whatever bad behavior that was to follow.  In investigating customer service problems in our company, any employee of mine whose explanation of an incident with a customer that includes the line “he disrespected me” is not going to be an employee very long.  Nothing gets in the way of good customer service faster than an employee trying to save face or protect his or her ego.

via Mike Riggs

Well, the execreble Sheriff Joe Arpaio, America’s most-desirous-of-PR-exposure lawman, is at it again.  Phoenix will be mobbed by the press in a couple of weeks when the MLB All-Star Game comes to town, and of course Sheriff Joe will be hurt and depressed if he doesn’t get himself in front of all those cameras.

So this is apparently his plan for doing so:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s publicity stunt of choice for All-Star weekend: a female chain gang that probably will make a stop at Chase Field to pick up garbage as the national sporting press tries to cover a baseball game….

This particular gang is comprised of women convicted of DUI. They will be decked out in the standard striped uniforms. However, they will also be wearing pink T-shirts with messages about DUI.

Because nothing says “thoughtful and humane treatment for alcohol problems” like parading prisoners in front of national TV audiences like a modern remake of Cool Hand Luke.

We give special, unique powers to use force to the police, and it is horrifying to see them used for personal aggrandizement.

By the way, I will share my secret fear.  As you may know, Apriao enjoys leading raids on businesses that hire Mexican immigrants.  His MO is to zip-tie everyone with brown skin or an accent until they can produce proof of citizenship.  My deep fear is that he will run a raid of the concession operations at the ballpark during the game.

From Ace of Spades via Maggies Farm

Obama and, it seems, many courts, would like to pretend that while the Constitution generally speaks of enumerated and limited powers — all other powers, such a the police power, reserved for the people and the states — that the Commerce Clause generally is a “Take-Back” clause that essentially calls bullshit on everything else in the Constitution.

That is, everything else in the Constitution is about establishing particular powers of the federal government, and, expressly, reserving those not named (or “necessary and proper” to undertake a named power) to the states.

But this new claim is that really there is only one clause that matters in the Constitution, and that is the Commerce Clause, and this one brief clause renders all 4400 other words in the Constitution null and void, because the Commerce Clause says, it is contended, that the federal government may do anything so long as, in the aggregate, it “affects interstate commerce,” which, as is often pointed out, applies to everything.

Radley Balko wins journalist of the year award. I used to say he was the best reporter on the web but he is one of the to reporters in the country in any medium. His work on police and prosecutorial abuse has been critical in an era when the media is generally in the tank for tough on crime overreach (eg love affair of press with sheriff Joe).

Local NFL star Darnell Dockett apparently got pulled over by the police today.  Dockett live-tweeted the encounter, including gems like this:

-I don’t know why the police always messing w/me I’m never gonna let them search my car with out a search warrant! No matter what!

-Police sitting here waiting on back up cuz I told them YOU NOT SEARCHING MY CAR! PERIOD! & now I’m sitting here! Owell I aint got shit 2 do!

-There R 3police cars and they are talking! I don’t see A search warrant they won’t see inside this escalade! I got all day hope they don’t!

-Police said “do you mind if we look around in your Vehicle?” I said I sure DO! He said “I’m gonna call back up” I said u wanna use my phone?

You go Darnell.  Everyone who stands up for his Constitutional rights makes it easier for the rest of us to do so.

I am afraid we are on a path to thoroughly eviscerating the Fourth Amendment simply because police forces find it too big of a hassle to comply.  Just look at almost every case of abuses of search and seizure rules or of missing search warrants and you almost never see a time-based urgency that is often used as an excuse to end-around the rules.   What you almost always see is just, well, laziness.

Here is yet another example (bold added):

Now comes the news that the FBI intends to grant to its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers that include relaxing restrictions on a low-level category of investigations termed “assessments.” This allows FBI agents to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect individuals, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing. (Incredibly, during the four-month period running from December 2008 to March 2009, the FBI initiated close to 12,000 assessments of individuals and organizations, and that was before the rules were further relaxed.)

This latest relaxing of the rules, justified as a way to cut down on cumbersome record-keeping, will allow the FBI significant new powers to search law enforcement and private databases, go through household trash, and deploy surveillance teams, with even fewerchecks against abuse. The point, of course, is that if agents aren’t required to maintain a paper trail documenting their activities, there can be no way to hold the government accountable for subsequent abuses.

Freedom dies because we couldn’t be bothered with all the work to protect it.

PS-  why is it no one wants to address any of the paperwork hassles in starting construction or opening a restaurant or getting a liquor license or starting a taxi service or any number of other private enterprises, but the government jumps right on the task of streamlining the work it takes to spy on me.

My column this week in Forbes elaborates on a theme I discussed last week in this blog.

I am not a big fan of prohibition, or the income tax (16th Amendment) before it, but in some sense these come from a better time.  Instead of dealing with the Constitutional problems of these initiatives by having a series of judges stare at the Constitution with their eyes crossed until the problem disappears, they actually wrote and passed a Constitutional amendment.  The took the wording of the Constitution seriously.

Consider alcohol prohibition.  Today, would we even bother modifying the Constitution?  After all, we’ve driven a forty year war on drugs — with massive spending, highest in the world imprisonment rates, militarization of our police, and frequent slashes into the heart of the Fourth Amendment — with nary a hint of the need for a Constitutional Amendment.  In fact, in Raich, the Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana legally (under state law) grown, sold, and consumed in California could still be prohibited by the Federal government under their Constitution powers to regulated interstate commerce.  It seems almost quaint today that we sought a Constitutional change for Prohibition.

I am sure everyone is resting easier now that the government has taken over all student loan activity.  Now we won’t see any of that abusive behavior by private lenders.  Ha ha, just kidding.  Don’t get behind on your government student loans! Via Radley Balko (Updates:  Still bizarre the DOE has this kind of firepower, but DOE says its a criminal / fraud case, not a payment issue.)

Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said.

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

“He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there – Wright’s estranged wife.

“They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” Wright said.

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the City of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright’s search warrant.

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife’s defaulted student loans.

Because we give special powers to use force to the police that most of the rest of us do not have, the police need more scrutiny and accountability, not less.  However, the police tend to fight this accountability at every turn — in particular, they tend to want to ban any filming of their public activities, even if they have to do it through violence.  Likely, this is because every time a video surfaces, it seems to contradict the cover story the police involved have agreed to.  I am all for mandatory surveillance of police.

Update: Here is a fun search.  Google:  ”Video Contradicts Police Report” and see how many different hits you get.

Here is an amazing example of how far the state will go to protect entrenched competitors from new competition.  Because it is far more important to make absolutely, 100% sure (precautionary principle, you know) that no one is competing in the Minneapolis market without a license than it is to encourage volunteer-ism in the wake of a natural disaster.

Tree trimmers who work in Minneapolis need to be licensed with the city. It’s a regulation in place throughout many cities, and something Haege knows all about. He’s licensed in Hastings and several area cities. Since he doesn’t work in Minneapolis, he isn’t licensed there.

All that was moot, of course. He was just going to volunteer and was not charging residents for his services.

He had brought a bucket truck to get high if needed, and he brought a wood chipper to dispose of fallen trees. He and the volunteers got to work on homes where the resident didn’t have insurance.

“We were removing stuff so people could get out of their driveways and out of their doors,” he said. “The place was a pretty big disaster.”

What happened next shocked Haege.

A city inspector arrived at the scene. She told Haege he had to leave. Immediately.

“You have to leave right now,” the inspector told Haege. “You’re not licensed to be here.”

“I said, ‘I’m just a volunteer,’ and she didn’t believe me.”

Haege went back to his truck and got his volunteer paperwork. Still, that did little to get the inspector off his back.

“I don’t want to see you up here,” she told him.

“She just didn’t believe me,” he said.

A volunteer from the Urban Homeworks, who had been with Haege since he signed up to volunteer that morning, did his best to convince the inspector that Haege wasn’t charging for his services.

Residents then came out of their doors in his defense, telling the inspector that he had just performed work at their house and hadn’t charged them a dime. Still, the defense fell on deaf ears.

The inspector told him to get out of the city, so Haege left with the volunteer. As they were on their way back to the volunteer area, residents waved down Haege, pleading for help. He pulled over and helped get a tree out of the way for them.

Haege had no idea police officers were behind him in a sort of unofficial escort out of town. He said they stopped traffic for about two hours while they figured out what to do with him. At one point, officers threatened to throw him in jail, he said.

All the while, residents continued defending him, screaming in his defense.

Officers told him to leave. They told him he was going to receive a “hefty fine” in the mail, and that if he stopped on the way out, the fine would be doubled.

Several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, notably the second and the tenth, are no longer treated by many folks as “real.”  Just old TJ kidding around.

Over the last several years, I have worried that the Fourth Amendment is rapidly heading in the same direction.  This week has been a bad week.

First up, today’s decision that if cops have some reason to think valuable evidence is being destroyed, they can bust down your door without a warrant.  Toilet flush?  Must be getting rid of drugs.  Can be seen in the window at the computer?  Must be deleting child porn.  Silence?  Must be destroying evidence really quietly.

Think I am exaggerating?  Here are the facts of the case:

It began when police in Lexington, Ky., were following a suspect who allegedly had sold crack cocaine to an informer and then walked into an apartment building. They did not see which apartment he entered, but when they smelled marijuana smoke come from one of the apartments, they wrongly assumed he had gone into that one. They pounded on the door and called “Police. Police. Police,” and heard the sounds of people moving.

At this, the officers announced they were coming in, and they broke down the door. They found Hollis King smoking marijuana, and put him under arrest. They also found powder cocaine. King was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Sounds of people moving in apartment = break the door down, no warrant needed.  This is just a joke, though I must also say the drug war has already gutted any number of Constitutional protections, so its not surprising to see yet another blow to liberty in the name of rounding up anyone who might be smoking a joint.  (more here)

The other case is perhaps even more egregious, and comes from Indiana, where the state Supreme Court decided that citizens must defer to agents of the state, even when those agents are violating the law.   In particular, if a cop wants to enter your house for no reason at all without a warrant, you can’t resist.

“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

David said a person arrested following an unlawful entry by police still can be released on bail and has plenty of opportunities to protest the illegal entry through the court system.

Escalation of violence is a two-way street.  Why is the homeowner, the innocent party, the one who is made legally responsible for such escalation?  Why isn’t it the agent of the state who is responsible for any such escalation?  And while a homeowner may have plenty of opportunities to protest illegal entry after the fact (though this is debatable in real life) I would argue that the police officer had plenty of opportunities before the fact to get a freaking warrant.

From the AZ Republic

Arizona police officers accused of misconduct will soon have more protection.

Gov. Jan Brewer has signed six bills, backed by police unions, that spell out procedures for internal investigations.

Great, because it was not already hard enough to take action against bad cops in a system where all the insiders – police and prosecutors – generally close ranks to defend them from scrutiny.

The new laws are not all bad — at least one gives protections to internal whistle-blowers, something that is needed in a police culture that has an effective law of omerta against cops who call out other cops for bad behavior.  My guess, though, is that this rule will be used by unions who want to harass police management, rather than to protect street cops who testify against other street cops.

Defenders of the law said

Police unions weren’t asking for anything more than the due process an arrested citizen receives, said Larry A. Lopez, president of the Arizona Conference of Police and Sheriffs.

“Just because we wear uniforms, we’re not relegated to a watered-down version of constitutional rights,” said Lopez, a Tucson officer.

I have said a number of times that this is not quite true.  Police are given powers to use force against other citizens that the rest of us do not possess.  This necessitates a kind of scrutiny and oversight by the state that would not be appropriate or legal for the average citizen.  For example, police simply do not have the privacy rights in conducting their jobs that the rest of us do.  We have seen too many times that when we give police broad discretion, special powers, and no oversight (or even a nudge and a wink guarantee against oversight), bad things inevitably happen.

If you are confused about what I am talking about, go read Radley Balko’s archives.

We give police officers special powers to use force that we allow no other citizen.  As such, they should be subjected to special accountability and monitoring.  One wonders how many people have served time in jail for officers making up BS stories, actually reversing the direction of an assault, and making it stick because the legal system circles the wagons to protect its own.  Thank god for video.

http://ktar.com/category/local-news-articles/20110215/Arpaio-leads-in-poll-for-Senate-race/

The early returns are in, and right now it would seem Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has the early edge in replacing Jon Kyl.

According to Roll Call, Arpaio led a field of potential Republican candidates by 21 percent in a poll of likely GOP primary voters.

Though this makes us feel better, a little

Maricopa County’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio, says he’s considering running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Senator Jon Kyl.

That said, New Times guaran-damn-tees he won’t actually run.

“The issue is whether I want to leave this office and go to Washington and try to make a difference there, which I would do if I run and win,” the 78-year-old Arpaio tells The Hill. “I think I could do that job.”

Sorry, Joe, we’ve heard it all before.

As you may recall, Arpaio pulled a similar stunt last year when he claimed to be considering running for governor. And he did the same thing four years earlier, when he also claimed he was mulling over a run for the governorship.

In neither case did Arpaio actually run.

You see, Arpaio seems to get off on seeing his name in the headlines, and what better way to make that happen than to continually fuel speculation about potentially running for office — and a poll showing he’s the front-runner certainly doesn’t help things.

Update: This was an interesting post about how TV has become far more accepting of police and proprietorial abuse in its heroes, comparing quasi-terrorist Steve McGarrett from the current incarnation of Hawaii 5-0 with the respectful and conscientious Jack Lord version.  Next up, the new show Arpaio 4-8?