Today the Union Leader’s editorial board published an anonymous review of the recent case of State v Jonathan Evans. Evans stood accused of acting in concert with other members of the “road dawgs” motorcycle club to steal a vest from a Concord store on May 21, 2011. The harsh critique of the not guilty finding in the case comes just over a week after the UL published an objective article overviewing the case. Coverage of the trial is also available from the Concord Monitor.
I videographed the trial last week and have made the full video available at the FreeConcordTV youtube channel. Below is the editorial published in today’s Sunday News. Check back tomorrow for an original article on the trial from Free Concord. (more…)
WeAreChange released on their youtube channel yesterday a video update of events around the nation which begins with an overview of the military police occupation in Anaheim, California. After a series of shootings of unarmed suspects, protests have swelled in the streets of the Los Angeles suburb whose local government is dominated by Disney’s commercial interests.
This unidentified man was surrounded and arrested seconds after this photograph was taken. July 29, 2012. Anaheim, CA
The video then highlights happenings here in New Hampshire, featuring video from Ademo’s wiretapping pretrial hearing, and footage from the recently releasedDerrick J’s Victimless Crime Spree, a documentary composed of content created by many Shire activists. See the well-produced three minute video “Disney Wiretapping Crime Spree” attached below.
Radley Balko, HuffPo journalist and chief of The Agitator blog reportson the increasing corporate media focus around a “war on cops”. 2012 is shaping up to be one of the safest years for law enforcement since 1944; a much different time for policing in the US.
A few other media outlets are now picking up on the massive drop in police fatality statistics this year (Welcome to the story!) But so far, none of them have questioned what happened to all of those alleged trends (gun ownership, increasing contempt for cops, videotaping of police misconduct, anti-government sentiment, decreases in funding for police departments) that they all reported were behind the non-existent “war on cops” they were all reporting last year. Or in the case of the New York Times, as recently as April.
If we use the numbers from the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, there are 800,000 cops on the streets. There have been 53 on-the -job fatalities so far this year. But 21 of those were car accidents. There have been 19 firearms homicides against police. I looked through the descriptions of this year’s officer deaths at the NLEMF page. Two of the fatalities were from firearms injuries sustained in previous years (in one case, 30 years ago). That puts us at 17 for this year. I then looked through the 13 deaths classified as “other.” Four of those appear to have been homicides—three stabbings, and one officer who died from a blot clot resulting from an altercation with an inmate. So let’s add those to our 17. That gives us 21 homicides in the first half of 2012 (I’ll go ahead and count the two officers killed during SWAT-like drug raids, even though it’s possible the tactics themselves may have contributed to the officers’ deaths).
By my math, that gives us a homicide rate of 5.25 (more…)
If you have been trying to access the Keene Police Scanner stream over the past couple of days, it has not worked. That was due to a server change – we’re now located in “the cloud”, so there is almost zero chance of hardware failure from here out. If you had been listening via the KPD.FreeKeene.com shortcut (just use “open URL” in your favorite media player and put that in), then you’ll merely need to reload the stream. Had you been listening using the direct IP address, you’ll need to update that to http://98.143.36.105:6060/live
It was a strange morning at the Keene Activist Center on Thursday, June 14, when Fred Parsells, Gary Lafreniere, and a slick videographer named John walked their unwelcome way into the private residence. With a warrant for a dubious inspection, and asking vague questions about tenants from years past, the uncomfortable fire captain and the ever-mcgruff housing inspector creeped their way around the house. Looking for smoke detectors, they awoke the sleeping Darryl, who was ignored thereafter when he requested an explanation and apology for why he was woken up. Darryl works a late shift and has a long commute, so his sleep cycle began earlier that morning, and he had to go to work later that day. He has since filed suit against the bureaucratic interrupters of his rest.
Here is the video of the Keene city bureaucrats invading the KAC, with the assistance of the Toilet Safety Administration, a homeland security program with offices in South Park, Colorado. Original raid video w/out TSA (youtube).
It was in the cards that Uncle Sam would be delivering a Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck for dual use to the communities of Berkeley and Albany, California. The respective city committees had earlier in the year approved the measure at the behest of the police. But since Berkeley Copwatch released the details in May, city officials have distanced themselves from the expensive war machine, and on July 4th, the news broke that the cities would be rejecting the Bearcat, with Berkeley mayor Tom Bates and Albany mayor Farid Javandel signing cancellation statements.
The news is a major victory against police militarization in those communities, and comes months after Keene city officials’ controversial decision to accept a free Bearcat. The UC Berkeley Bearcat was to have been purchased under the (Orwellian) Urban Area Security Initiative. The UASI is a Department of Homeland Security program that has its own creepy blog and funnels money from federal tax dollars to fund the domestic military industrial complex. Keene is certainly not the high density urban environment Berkeley is, and it is encouraging that such a metropolis was able to resist the introduction of offensive weaponry into their neighborhoods.
Today the Union Leader’s editorial board published an anonymous review of the recent case of State v Jonathan Evans. Evans stood accused of acting in concert with other members of the “road dawgs” motorcycle club to steal a vest from a Concord store on May 21, 2011. The harsh critique of the not guilty finding in the case comes just over a week after the UL published an objective article overviewing the case. Coverage of the trial is also available from the Concord Monitor.
It was in the cards that Uncle Sam would be delivering a Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck for dual use to the communities of Berkeley and Albany, California. The respective city committees had earlier in the year approved the measure at the behest of the police. But since Berkeley Copwatch 
