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Phoenix Police Seize PCs of a Blogger Critical of the Department
logicassasin sends in a story about a blogger in Phoenix, AZ, who runs a site that is critical of the local police department. The police recently raided his home and seized his computer hardware. "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." A local publication quotes Pataky saying, "We have heard internally from our police sources that they purposefully did this to stop me... They took my cable modem and wireless router. Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem."
Which is exactly why I've stuck a flash drive in mine that I can run a USB cable to when I want to do some "backups to my modem".
Wink wink.
This guy's obviously already been in court. ACLU time, and even up to the supreme court. The Phoenix police department is about to get a federal raping.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
When the Police came for the bloggers,
I remained silent;
I was not a blogger.
Then they locked up the rich,
I remained silent;
I was not rich.
Then they came for the gun owners,
I did not speak out;
I was not a gun owner.
Then they came for the press,
I did not speak out;
I was not a member of the press.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
This is what happens when panic'd decisions are made. The police force thinks they can go in and silence the whole thing with a BS warrant and put an end to it, only for the story to be picked up nation wide and now they're drawing way more attention than ever.
Serves them right. This looks like a clear cut abuse of power by the department and now that the story is national, hopefully some heads will roll.
Harassing a critic is just a bonus, what the police really wanted was the names of the internal informants so that they can be silenced.
No informants = No credible criticism.
...to explicitly layout stronger civil and criminal penalties for abuse of office in the US.
Use of the office to start an unjustified war, death and 50 million dollars or 50% of your wealth whichever is greater.
Use of the office to murder, death and 50% of assets.
Use of the office to take bribes, death and repayment of any contracts lost by competing companies.
Use of the office to facilitate violence or cause violence against a person, 25 years to life.
Use of the office to intimidate, threaten or harass, 15 years.
Use of the office to deny someone their constitutional rights, 5 years.
Anyone want to help get this on the ballot in 50 states while we still have the populist fervor going?
Public servants need to be held to a higher standard because of the amount of power they have been given. If we continue allowing politicians and police to be above the law than we have lost our way as a people. We need to remake the laws so that this sort of thing carries penalties that these police officers and district attorneys will be forced to reckon with when they demonstrably are routinely operating as criminals with badges and warrants.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Orwell got everything right except the year. The Thought Police are now a reality, at least in Phoenix.
...that law enforcement agencies are still foolish enough to harass people in such a public and blatant way. Over time they will gain more technical expertise and find other, more difficult to detect, methods of harassing citizens who dare to criticize them. I fear the day when the police get a little bit smarter about disguising their abuses of power. Until then it will continue to be relatively easy to bring the enforcers of law to justice.
It's only going to bite us once the police report what he may have been actually doing, or what was not published. Where I find it horrible that they would do it for no reason, I also find it unlikely that they would go to such efforts, when it is obvious that it was retaliatory. My guess is there's more than they reported or know.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
I am so glad I do not live in Phoenix anymore. My friend who has HIV was on his way to the doctors when he got pulled over and arrested for a suspicion of a DUI and had to spend 24 hours without his medicine. They laughed at him in his holding cell and said things like, "Cold enough for you faggot?" when he started shivering from lack of his meds. If you are considering raising a family there remember Phoenix is one of the #1 places in the country for shooting underage suspects, often unarmed. Almost no one ever gets prosecuted for police misconduct there. Scary fucking place.
I don't live in a police sta%%%CARRIER DISCONNECT%%%
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
Second, this appears to be a simple domestic dispute. Guy gets a divorce and wife starts accusing him of what he says are false claims. Judge, probably just seeing that this couple can't stand each other, and probably does not want to waste time sorting out the truth, just drops the charges. Who knows who is telling the truth in such cases. I know people who have been accused of cutting other peoples phones off to harass them. I know for a fact that they didn't do it how can you prove it one way or another?
So what does this guy do. Start collecting 'tips' from persons inside the department and posting these accusations online. OK, that makes sense, you get slandered by unsubstantiated charges, so you go out and do the same? This is a good way to make friends with the police. Tell the world that one of them is a child molester, even though it may or may not be true. I telling you this is what I live for. Trying to do my job by helping two people that are too immature and uncivilized to get along with each other, I mean the police are required to investigate any reasonable charge, and then what do I get. My face plastered on the internet as a child molester. Oh yeah, that brightens my day.
Predictably this guy goes too far and gets himself in trouble and the police uses the excuse to take out a problem. Again, overkill, but so is calling a soon-to-be cop a child molester on the internet is not the way to go, especially when all the documentation is apparently yet to be delivered.
Arizona seems to have it's share of messed up policing, but there must be a better way to go about this than ranting on the internet with unsubstantiated claims.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Perhaps it is too soon, but a search on Google news suggests that this story is getting little attention in news media.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gr4RsI2V6Y
Check out the video. Some college kids from the UofO are out in the "Ken Kezzie Free Speech" plaza in Eugene protesting the spraying of pesticides and get harassed by the cops and the taserd.
I mean look at the kids out there, 18 or 19, doing one of the great things about this country and that is letting you're thoughts be voiced.
This is crazy!
In other words, the subpoena was so outrageous that the recipients published it, and the law enforcement authorities then "lost" their copy. For a document like that to go missing intentionally would be criminal on so many levels that I'm not sure where to start. It also means that the editors can try to justify their "act of civil disobedience" by saying that they knew that the justice department was crooked, and was likely to illegally destroy its own incriminating documentation (even when that documentation has been signed personally by judges), and that publication was the only way to ensure that the document used against them could be preserved for potential future legal investigation.
It certainly sounds crooked. It's not good when reading an online newspaper article about a potentially crooked policeman leads to a subpoena demanding that the newspaper give your IP address to the police department involved, so that they can investigate you as a potential trouble-maker.
Apparently, reading a newspaper article about police corruption can make you a legitimate target for police investigation these days. Goodbye freedom of the press, and goodbye the citizen's ability to read about the news on their PC in their own home without the police looking over their shoulder and monitoring what they're reading.
It'd seem that the editors probably realised that the subpoena was the bigger story, and that the Justice Department did too, which is presumably why someone there illegally destroyed or "relocated" the document.
I was also struck by the case listed where the parents of a mentally handicapped man asked for police help to remove him from a store, the police took him away and put him in a restraint chair, then the guy then mysteriously died from a massive methamphetamine overdose. It sounds like someone in that local police force is killing people and trying to make the deaths look like junkie deaths.
Eric Baird