Coyote Blog

The last post on Elisha Storm’s blog before her house was raided and she was dragged to jail for blogging about a local drug enforcement task force.

I personally am all for more citizen imposed accountability on police forces and an tired of the police’s resistance to such efforts.  I suppose one could argue that the police need some protection for legitimate undercover efforts, though Virginia apparently does not have a law on its books to this effect, so lacking such legislation it’s hard to see how Ms. Storm can be prosecuted (its also unclear if the officers involved were even strictly under cover — paging Valerie Plame).  My sense is that the courts have been very, very, very leery about applying “harassment” laws to monitoring and criticism of public employees.

Update: We had a kind of similar case here in Phoenix with the New Times and Sheriff Arpaio.

Update#2: Radley Balko has more thoughts.  He says

Assume instead that these officers were investigating organized crime, or a terror cell. What do you think of this woman’s arrest? Photographing, writing about, and criticizing police officers, even by name, should of course be legal. But it’s a tougher call when the officers in question work undercover. Naming them, posting their photos, posting their addresses, are all pretty clearly efforts to intimidate them, and it isn’t difficult to see how doing so not only makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs, but may well endanger their lives.

I might agree with this. But then it (publishing names of undercover officers) should be specifically illegal in Virginia. There are very, very, very few and very narrow exceptions to the First Amendment acknowledged by law and the courts. A reasonable person should expect that if an exception has not been made for the specific activity in which they are engaging, that their behavior is legal.  And besides, one should never have to go to court and wait for a jury verdict for everyone to figure out if an activity is legal or not.

Update #3: I have heard it argued that she was really just tweaking these guys without serving any real positive purpose.  Maybe.  Could be she just had a grudge.  But many of her activities are virtually indistinguishable from those of someone who was really trying to impose some accountability.  I have never heard of the effectiveness of public speech being a criteria for the legality of such speech.

I did a double take when I found these two stories back to back in my feed reader

1. Via TJIC (welcome back!) Spokane policeman gets drunk, chases another patron out of a bar,  participates in a drunken car chase, shoots the other man in the head, and then initiates a cover-up.  Acquitted and paid $150,000 in back pay.
2. Via Photography is not a Crime (one of my new favorites) Spokane policeman caught peeking into bedroom of 14-year-old girl (possibly after making obscene phone calls) and then  gets in a fight with police who show up.  Charges dropped by accommodating prosecutor.  The officer did have to accept a “last chance” agreement with the force (having already had a history of discipline problems) but since this is his third last chance agreement, I do not think that word means what Spokane thinks it means.

What does the title of the post mean? Well, if you are the Phoenix police (and at least one sorry-ass local judge) it is the name of the new “crime” invented to describe blogging that is critical of public officials.

In what should send a frightening chill down the spine of every blogger, writer, journalist and First Amendment advocate in the United States, Phoenix police raided the home of a blogger who has been highly critical of the department.

Jeff Pataky, who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, said the officers confiscated three computers, routers, modems, hard drives, memory cards and everything necessary to continue blogging.

The 41-year-old software engineer said they also confiscated numerous personal files and documents relating to a pending lawsuit he has against the department alleging harassment – which he says makes it obvious the raid was an act of retaliation.

Maricopa County Judge Gary Donahoe signed the search warrant that allowed at least ten cops to raid his home in North Phoenix on March 12 while handcuffing his female roommate for three hours as they tore the place apart….

The search warrant lists “petty theft” and “computer tampering with the intent to harass” as probable causes. He has yet to see an actual affidavit that lists in detail the probable cause and is skeptical that one even exists.

Hat tip to Radley Balko.   The police are apparently considering throwing in identity theft to the charges. The Bad Phoenix Cops web site is raw and over the top traffics in salacious gossip about senior police officers, but I can’t see how that is illegal.  Well, its been a good week here in the Phoenix area — Sheriff’s deputies arrest four people for applauding a speech critical of the Sheriff, and now police arrest a blogger who has been critical of them and confiscate his computer.

Postscript: The author of the blog where I excerpted the article above is a Miami photographer who has been on the front lines of one of an emerging civil liberties issue.  Police have somehow developped a theory, based on no law and in total contradiction to the first Ammendment, that it is somehow illegal to photograph or film police doing their jobs in public places.  They particularly hate such filming and photography when it shows them doing something absurd.  The photographer’s ongoing fight with the legal system, all begun when he had the temerity to take pictures of police officers in a public place, is here.  The blog is very well written and thoughtful and seems to try hard to be fair — in fact, this is one of the most unbelieveably fair descriptions I have ever seen someone make of his opposition.

Radley Balko is having a back and forth with a guest blogger at Patterico over the drug war and violent crime.  Balko is always worth checking out, because while many of us bloggers may call ourselves the new media, we are mostly just a bunch of op-ed pages.  Balko is one of the few major bloggers out there doing real reporting.

One part of the discussion caught my attention:

Second, JRM leaves out the rest of my discussion of police militarization in the piece, which includes the very real, not-made-up statistic based on police department surveys done by Peter Kraska showing the number of SWAT deployments in the U.S. jumping from a few hundred per year in the 1970s to 50,000 or more per year today. Most of these SWAT deployments are to serve drug warrants. JRM can disagree, but my point is that even if these raids don’t produce a single gun shot (though we know that’s far from the case), that’s a disturbing trend. The image of state agents dressed in black, kicking down doors, and wresting people out of bed at gunpoint in order to police nonviolent crimes just isn’t one I associated with a free society (oddly enough, some prominent conservatives agree, at least when other countries do it).

Perhaps because I read this as my inbox is filled with Minuteman missives (I don’t know how they got the impression I was somehow sympathetic to their cause) asking me to send a valentine to agents Compean and Ramos, but I sometimes really wonder about conservatives.

Conservatives distrust government and government bureaucrats.  Many understand public choice theory.  Many understand how faulty incentives within government can turn even good, smart people into stupid bad actors.

So I am left to wonder why conservatives feel ever so much better about the situation when the government employee is given a gun, and the unique authority to use it on the citizenry?