LAPD Officers Accused of Entering Names of Innocent People Into Gang Database
They need to PROSECUTE any cops doing this. Sure looks to me like the California Gang Database unit needs an overhaul!
Excerpts from the Article:
Officers from an elite division within the Los Angeles Police Department (“LAPD”) are under investigation regarding allegations that they falsified reports and listed some innocent people as gang members.
LAPD Police Chief Michel Moore announced in January that he was seeking to fire one officer for his role in falsifying the records. “The California Gang Database is a critical tool for law enforcement in its efforts to solve violent crime,” Moore said. “The information entered must be accurate. We are committed to holding anyone who falsified information accountable and will also fully cooperate with the State Attorney General Office.”
In a letter sent on February 10, 2020, to the LAPD, Attorney General Xavier Becerra promised an independent audit of the department’s CalGang entries. “We do not have a full or clear picture of what occurred, but we know enough that we must act,” Becerra said.
While Becerra acknowledged that those wrongly added to the database could be subjected to additional police scrutiny, he defended CalGang as a “good policing tool that keeps the community safe.” Nearly 80,000 persons are listed in the database.
In 2016, a state audit of CalGang revealed racially biased entries, violations of civil liberties, inaccurate entries, including “gang members” younger than one, transparency problems, and failures to follow basic rules.
One of my poems, worth repeating! Soon – kra
SOON – (room for improvement? You MUST be joking!)
I have my Court hearing this morning; super lawyers at the fore,
The goal is to get the bad guys onto that courtroom floor,
You see, the American trial process is designed to elicit the TRUTH, once you get in the door,
But if you’re a prisoner without counsel, the facts and the law, both the judge will ignore,
Heads are buried so DEEP in the sand concerning rampant problems in America’ prisons,
Legislators, clergy, so many others, even judges, see reality through very dark prisms,
The TRUTH is distorted, denied or ignored at every turn,
It’s enough to make your stomach churn,
The tragic dysfunction of our “corrections” (what!!??) system, could be easily solved,
By someone with integrity, professionalism, and sufficient resolve,
Good Lord, a handful of good managers could straighten out the mess,
And bring orderly progress to what is now chaotic distress!
Court today, moving in three days, a few days to get settled in, organized, back into gear,
Then on to expose America’s disgrace; got some new ideas to make the TRUTH perfectly clear.
KRA 3/27/13
I wrote this 13 months after my release, and the Courts are even more fucked up today!
Some tRumpsters say “Trump passed prison reform”. Are you shitting me! What he did was a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done and easily could be done! kra See so many articles on this website.
Judge Demands ICE Better Explain Why It Won’t Release Kids
Remember the kids in cages? How can we ever forget!
Anytime a judge calls out tRump’s racist, draconian, immigration policies, that is good news! A friend of mine knows judge Gee, and she will take no shit from ICE!
Excerpts from the Article:
A federal judge on Friday criticized the Trump administration’s handling of detained immigrant children and families, ordering the government to give the court detailed information about its efforts to quickly release them in the wake of the coronavirus. U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee on Friday ordered the U.S. government to better explain why it hasn’t released some of the approximate 350 parents and children in three family detention centers.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has come under fire for allegedly asking parents in custody if they would allow their children to be released without them.
Parents at all three facilities — one in Pennsylvania and two in Texas — were called into short meetings and asked if there were sponsors available to care for their children, lawyers who represent the families reported that late last week. They were then asked to sign a form.
ICE has declined to release the form.
Gee wrote that she didn’t find that ICE officially sought to get those formal waivers, but that officers’ conversations with detained parents “caused confusion and unnecessary emotional upheaval and did not appear to serve the agency’s legitimate purpose of making continuous individualized inquiries regarding efforts to release minors.”
While some parents reported slightly different details, the lawyers said they broadly believed they were being asked to choose between staying in custody with their children or letting their children leave.
“They were asking mothers to separate from their 1-year-old infants to go to a sponsor that perhaps had never even met or known the child,” said Bridget Cambria, executive director of the group ALDEA, which represents families at the ICE detention center in Leesport, Pennsylvania.
The Trump administration again faced allegations that it is trying to separate immigrant families as part of an overall border crackdown. The separation of immigrant families drew bipartisan condemnation in 2018 when the Trump administration implemented a “zero tolerance” policy on southern border crossings.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accused advocates of making “misrepresentations” and says it remains in compliance with President Donald Trump’s June 2018 executive order intended to stop family separation. In a statement Thursday, the agency said the form was used as part of a “routine parole review consistent with the law” and Gee’s previous orders.
“The court recognized that parents, not the government, should decide whether the juvenile should be released to a sponsor,” the agency said. “To comply with this order, ICE was required to check with each of the juveniles — and their parents — in custody … to make individual parole determinations with respect to those juveniles.”
In court papers filed May 15, the government noted more than 170 times that it had refused to release children currently in detention because the “parent does not wish to separate.” It labeled many children as flight risks without providing more specifics.
Gee wrote that she didn’t find that ICE officially sought to get those formal waivers, but that officers’ conversations with detained parents “caused confusion and unnecessary emotional upheaval and did not appear to serve the agency’s legitimate purpose of making continuous individualized inquiries regarding efforts to release minors.”
On Friday, Gee called on the government and advocates to devise a new process to determine whether families could be released.
Gee oversees a court settlement known as the Flores agreement, which controls how the U.S. is supposed to treat migrant children in its custody.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. government has imposed an effective ban on the entry of families and children seeking asylum. It has expelled hundreds of children within a few days of their crossing the border with Mexico instead of turning them over to government facilities designed to care for them, as normally required by federal law.
The agency says it releases most families from its detention centers within 20 days, the general limit under the Flores settlement for holding children in a secure facility. But many families currently in custody have been detained for months, some since last year.
Advocates contend that ICE should release all families from detention especially as the coronavirus has spread rapidly through immigration detention, with more than 1,100 people contracting COVID-19 and a positive test rate of about 50%. At ICE’s largest family detention center in Dilley, Texas, the detainees include a child with epilepsy, a 1-year-old with breathing problems, and several children with heart murmurs, according to Shalyn Fluharty, director of the legal group Proyecto Dilley.
ICE says it has released hundreds of people deemed to have heightened exposure to the virus, though it has contested lawsuits across the country demanding the releases of others.
The Trump administration is also currently appealing Gee’s order last year stopping it from terminating the Flores agreement.
The Whole Story:
ATF: What Is a Gun?
Legal “technicalities”. But since the ATF too often is out of control, good for Mr. O’Kelly!
Excerpts from the Article:
Making a decision about what is or is not a “firearm” under the law would seem to be a fairly straightforward process, but recent controversy about the regulations used by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosive (“ATF”) has shown that the definition of a gun is not nearly as clear as it seems.
The legal definition of a firearm is laid out in the 1968 Gun Control Act. That law’s definition includes not only what most people would think of as a gun but also “the frame or receiver of any such weapon.” 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(3). Defining what a receiver or frame is, however, was left up to regulating agencies – in this case, the ATF. The ATF defined a receiver as having three elements: hammer, bolt or breech-lock, and firing mechanism. This “receiver,” even without the rest of the weapon, is legally considered a firearm in itself.
The problem with this definition, according to former ATF agent and firearms expert Dan O’Kelly, is that roughly 60 percent of the guns in America do not have a single part that fits this description. As a practical matter, this means the ATF should not be able to charge a person with possessing a firearm if they have a piece of a weapon that does not exactly fit the regulatory description. The problem that has arisen, and has led O’Kelly to testify against his former employer, is that the ATF is pursuing prosecutions in cases where the firearm part in question does not fit the legal definition.
The part at issue belongs to an AR-15 assault rifle. This type of rifle does not have a stereotypical receiver. Instead, it splits the functions of a receiver across two parts—an upper and lower receiver, neither of which meet all three factors in the ATF’s own regulatory definition. The ATF administratively decided to classify the lower receiver as the legally prohibited part, despite O’Kelly’s protests while still serving as an agent, and the bureau launched legal actions based on this administrative decision.
It is unclear how long the ATF has followed this policy or how many prosecutions have been undertaken, but starting in 2014, O’Kelly began to testify on behalf of defendants facing prosecution for the possession of AR-15 lower receivers. In the first three of these cases, the defendants prevailed, but the government withdrew its charges before a precedent-setting decision was made. Then, in late 2019, the ATF and federal prosecutors risked the setting of a precedent in an Ohio court where two felons were charged with possession of lower receivers.
Dan O’Kelly testified at an evidentiary hearing for the defendants’ motion to dismiss, as did a current ATF agent. Despite government protests that they had broad discretion to interpret regulation, the court ruled that when the text of a regulation is clear and the action of the agency runs counter to that text, the agency’s action cannot stand. Specifically, if the defendants do not possess that part of a firearm that is defined as illegal, the agency cannot arbitrarily alter the standard to charge them with a crime.
O’Kelly takes no pleasure in being in an adversarial relationship with his former employer, nor does he like seeing criminals go free. He says the ATF needs to redefine the legal bar for what a receiver is. But, until then, when called to testify, he will tell the truth.
Letter to the Editor: For some, a respite from rooflessness – by Jim Martin
My friend, Jimmy Martin, has been a champion of the homeless for DECADES, and has improved thousands of lives. When we reduce homelessness we reduce crime.
If you live in Sussex County, DE, contact Jim, say Hi for me, and offer to help!
Jimmy is at:
Address: 408 N Bedford St, Georgetown, DE 19947
Hours:
Closed ⋅ Opens 11AM
Phone: (302) 858-4547
My friend, and tireless helper of the homeless: Jim Martin.
Jim’s Letter to the Editor:
COVID-19 brought new troubles for all Delawareans, but for the roofless, COVID-19 also brought a short period of respite and refresh. Hotel rooms throughout the state were utilized to provide immediate shelter for those in need.
Around 10 days from now, those people will lose these unique COVID-19 privileges of having a safe room to sleep, a place to use the bathroom, and a private spot to store their stuff. It will feel like they are losing many of these new rights as citizens.
Many of these roofless people are older with chronic health conditions. Summer months will be as tough as it gets for these Delawareans as they are escorted back into surviving on the streets.
At the Shepherd’s Office in Georgetown, we plan to continue working hard at providing free meals every day for the homeless, hungry, or lonely. Along with them we are also expecting to serve many others who will become homeless or roofless for the first time during June, July and August. Before COVID-19 many of our working poor were only two french fries away from complete economic ruin, and now those two french fries are gone.
Over the past few months, incomes have dropped drastically and 8,000 more were added to the state’s healthcare Medicaid plan. The next shoe to drop will be thousands of Delawareans who will become the new homeless once they are evicted from their homes.
It will be an uncomfortable summer, but we are here to help as much as we can.
Jim Martin
Director, Shepherd’s Office
Georgetown
Letter to the Editor – Delaware’s Hidden Gem – 5/20/20 – kra
PUBLISHED, at the top of p A5 of the Delaware State News of 5/26/20.
Letter to the Editor – Delaware’s Hidden Gem – 5/20/20 – kra
Why is this posted here? Reducing homelessness reduces crime.
Letter to the Editor – Delaware’s Hidden Gem – 5/19/20 – kra
There is a place, a facility, a home, right here in Dover, Delaware, which truly is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is part school, part healing
center, part training center, part spiritual center, part boarding facility, and much more. It is, unknown to many, a fantastic financial asset to the
community and to the entire state.
For every dollar spent in supporting/operating this place, facility, home, it returns ten to the community! Yes, for every dollar invested – grants,
donations from folks like you – there is a tenfold return on investment. That is virtually unheard of with the more common investments. But, as I said, this is not a common entity. The chairperson of this amazing place, facility, home, Ms. Jeanine Kleimo, has the numbers which establish this.
For more than a decade now, over twelve years, since its beginning in the top floor of the parish hall at Christ Episcopal Church, Dover
Interfaith Mission for Housing – DIMH – has been a truly extraordinary accomplishment. Saving and rebuilding the lives of “the forgotten
people” – the homeless, it has worked wonders.
Like any organization, its success is attributable to its people: the paid staff, the thousands of volunteer individuals and community
organizations, including many of Dover’s varied faith communities. So very many fine people have enhanced not only the lives of its residents
and other “forgotten people”, but the community as a whole.
Times are tough now; we all are struggling financially. But when you can, – make a note – and donate what you can to DIMH. You can reach them at https://www.facebook.com/www.doverinterfaithmission.org/ or at DIMH, 684 Forest Street,Dover, DE 19901,: 302-736-3600.
(you may like to note that the new CARES Act makes it possible for any thttps://www.facebook.com/www.doverinterfaithmission.org/axpayer to donate up to $300 to a charity and to receive a tax
deduction even if they don’t itemize.)
Hey, maybe you can get a tenfold ROI somewhere else, but you will never get the gratitude which most of its residents exude!
Ken Abraham, Dover, DE 302-423-4067
The Vaughn Files: The photo, videos and audio presented at trial. SEE THE EVIDENCE COLLECTED FROM WHAT HAS BEEN CALLED THE “DARKEST DAY” IN THE HISTORY OF DELAWARE’S PRISON SYSTEM
This article was sent to me by my good friend and great attorney, Steve Hampton. He is one of too few attorneys with the guts and the talent to sue D O C personell, and he represents many in their case concerning the beat downs by guards and the subsequent medical neglect.
I have written much about this prison revolt. See related articles under “prison abuse”. Although I did not encounter Floyd when I was in, I met many abusive C Os. His murder was not the answer, but it sure did not surprise me!
Excerpts from the Article:
The audio, video, photographs and documents contained here represent the bulk of what jurors saw over the course of three weeks-long trials for the murder of Lt. Steven Floyd during the Feb. 1, 2017, uprising at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center.
Throughout the course of the trials, The News Journal asked the courts to make public the evidence so that the public can review the sights and sounds of C Building on what Gov. John Carney has described as the state prisons’ “darkest day.”
For more than a year, the courts held that the material would not be made public beyond the courtroom where cameras and audio recorders are banned. But eventually, the courts agreed to release the materials months after the state abandoned criminal prosecutions for the uprising.
The material presented is most of the evidence exhibits presented at trial. Some exhibits that were shown to the jury but not entered into evidence remain closed in a vault at the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington. The court also withheld exhibits depicting injuries to the officers held hostage that day. The News Journal has chosen not to publish some crime scene images depicting Floyd.
The exhibits are categorized by topic as they were presented to The News Journal and are divided by media type.
Click here for lots of photos, the audio and the video.
North Carolina ordered to remove more than 1,000 from registry
Note: this case was recently decided, has not been appealed (I think it is highly unlikely to be reversed on appeal), and is very limited in scope, It IS a step in the right direction. 5/19/20.
Summary of the case:
Congratulations to NARSOL’s attorney, Paul Dubbeling, who has successfully challenged the constitutionality of registering individuals who moved to North Carolina prior to December, 2006, with convictions from out-of-state.
Federal District Court Judge Terrence Boyle signed an order yesterday (May 12) agreeing that these individuals (more than 1,000 of them) were placed on the N.C. registry without due process and must be removed.
NARSOL was responsible for contacting the registered members of the class in order to request feedback from them as a means to affirm that nobody in the class received any sort of process before being placed on the registry by a county sheriff or his/her agents. We are very pleased that Judge Boyle agreed with our position in this matter and granted the relief we sought.
Is it hereby ORDERED, ADJUDGED, and DECREED that defendants, their successors, agents, servants, employees, and all persons in active concert or participation with them who receive actual notice hereof
(1) SHALL REMOVE plaintiffs and the class members’ names and other information from the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry, and are further
(2) ENJOINED from prosecuting plaintiff or the class members for any offenses applicable only to registered sex offenders based upon their registration on the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry solely because of a prior determination that their out-of-state offense committed before December 1, 2006, is substantially similar to a North Carolina offense requiring sex offender registration.
North Carolina ordered to remove more than 1,000 from registry
Providing child support after prison: Some state policies may miss the mark
I have addressed this many times. The racism in the system is blatant. Locking up Dads foe failure to pay is totally counterproductive. This article highlights the many informal child support arrangements.
If you ever have been there, you know the truth of this image!
Excerpts from the Article:
Many states have policies that attempt to help formerly incarcerated people find work by limiting an employer’s ability to access or use criminal records as part of the hiring process.
But there is little evidence that these restrictions are helping non-resident fathers provide financial support to their children, according to Allison Dwyer Emory, a University at Buffalo sociologist and co-author of a new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from UB, Rutgers University, Cornell University and Boston University.
“We find fathers with a history of incarceration provide less support to their children and accrue greater arrears,” says Dwyer Emory. “Further, in states with more limited access to records, fathers who have never been incarcerated provide less formal support and accrue more arrears, though they seem to compensate with more informal support, possibly due to racial discrimination against black men in the hiring process.”
The findings were published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, which provides open access to the study.
States that limit access to online criminal record databases may reduce the costs of incarceration for fathers, but at the same time, they may be creating opportunities for a different kind of discrimination if employers, in the absence of information, default to racial stereotypes.
“It’s difficult to separate discrimination on the basis of a criminal record from discrimination on the basis of race, and policies that address one without the other may not be able to fully achieve their ends,” says Dwyer Emory, an expert on family demography, criminology and social policy.
“Fathers work hard to provide for their kids. When discriminatory labor markets make it difficult for them to pay formal child support, they provide informal cash support to their kids instead—even as they get in debt for unpaid formal support.
“We have to be careful to ensure that policies support fathers’ ability to be there for their kids.
Policy context is critical, according to Dwyer Emory.
“We want to know if these policies are helping fathers to be better parents or making it harder for them to be better parents,” she says. “These policies don’t seem to be associated with fathers who have a history of incarceration paying more support, but they do seem to be associated with fathers, particularly African American fathers, who have never been incarcerated, providing less formal child support.”
The researchers used data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, a sample of predominantly unmarried parents who had a child in a large U.S. city in the 1990s followed over time.
The innovative research also includes state information from every year of the dataset, including which policies were in place for specific states at specific times, while also breaking out both formal and informal support that fathers provide for their child.
Formal child support is a court order that specifies an amount owed each month to a custodial parent. But some couples have informal arrangements, made outside of the courts, where fathers contribute when they have the money either instead of or in addition to formal support.
The researchers also included arrears in their study, which is the debt fathers build up when they don’t pay formal child support in full.
“Arrears are particularly important when thinking about fathers with a history of incarceration, because in some states arrears can continue to accrue while a father is incarcerated,” says Dwyer Emory. “These fathers start out behind in their payments immediately upon release, which can cause a cycle where high enough arrears puts fathers at greater risk of being incarcerated in the future.“
Incarceration and its consequences after prison affect millions of families in the United States, according to Dwyer Emory, who worked with Lenna Nepomnyaschy, an associate professor, and Alexandra Haralampoudis, a Ph.D. candidate, at the Rutgers School of Social Work; Maureen R. Waller, an associate professor at Cornell University; and Daniel P. Miller, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Social Work.
The authors stress the need for additional research if we’re to better understand the mechanisms through which these associations operate to determine how policies could better support fathers’ ability to provide for their children.
My Second Biggest Heartache – Baxter – Essay -kra 5/17/20
The first huge heartache was the divorce, when my baby boy was 1. READ Shutuppayourmouth! Invaluable Practical Tip – Don’t Talk! Keep your MOUTH SHUT! BAXTER
The second is that since my drug crimes, my son is not talking to me.
After the divorce, I worked part, part time. Whenever I wanted to spend 1/2 day, 9 days, 30 days, with my son, I did. Whenever he did not have school, I went to pick him up, though it was 45 minutes each way from my apartment to “the mansion I bought when she was pregnant”. I also picked him up from school nearly every day. We’d go to the park, or McDonalds, or the library for a while, then I took him to Mom’s. Man, he used to come running when he saw me. Lit up my heart, and I knew I was doing the right thing.
The most I made in any one of those 16 years was $14,000, and I turned down some very handsome job offers. But I would not trade that time with my boy for all the money on Earth.
We had a ball, swimming nearly every day, reading, going to movies [I had an apartment about a mile from Universal Studios in Orlando, and when it opened we spent lots of time there, eating – my job gave me free food at the restaurants. It also got me free passes to all of the Amusement Parks ], window shopping, and going to the movies. OMG, I must have seen a zillion movies. The worst, which we saw when Baxter was little, was The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie, and when it was over, Baxter was a little embarrassed as I stood up and said in a loud voice: “Thank God, it’s over!” lol Many other parents laughed.
The first 4 or 5 years were rough, because every time Her Majesty came to pick him up, my son would cry and cling to me … you’d think she was going to take him home and torture him! It was upsetting to see him so distressed. But no, she was a good Mom. It was just because I spent every minute with him.
If anyone had said to either one of us at any time during those 17 years: “The day will come when you will not speak to each other”, we both would have said: “You must be crazy!” Well, that day has come. He was talking to me when I went to prison, and wrote letters too. But Her Majesty changed that. Have not seen him since he was 16, and now he is 31. I had to look twice when I found him on LinkedIn; he had grown up! But there he was “that’s my boy!”.
When I can, I will go find him. Praying he doesn’t say: “Get lost, Dad”.
Moral of the story: Don’t commit a crime; the consequences can be worse than imprisonment, the guilt, bankruptcy, homelessness and all the other bullshit!
kra
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