The Concord Monitor’s Felice Belman writes on her blog from the newspaper’s website that the Concord police have stopped including narratives of the events surrounding an arrest in releases to the press. Recently, they began only including the name and charges against an individual who has been seized by their organization. This is to have stemmed from complaints filed by an attorney on behalf of city councilor Fred Keach, who was arrested for attempting to drive while intoxicated in October 2010. Keach was unhappy with the amount of detail provided by the police in the account of the arrest as published in the Monitor.
The article also overviews that a statutory change pending in the NH legislature will specify the amount of information to be released by police following an arrest. It is hard to imagine anyone would support a more secretive local police force that didn’t work for the police or prosecutor’s office. In case you may be curious as to what a typical arrest narrative given to a defendant would look like, here’s a scan of the report I received with my discovery packet from the Chalking 8 trial.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement are apparently now operating under a policy of not disclosing information about those that they arrest. Making their arrests and ultimate deportations essentially disappearances, ICE operations have progressively degraded the civil rights of those deemed to be undocumented immigrants. When even the nativist NH newspaper, the Union Leader, criticizes the practices of the federal paramilitary organization, it is worth taking notice.
An unsigned editorial published today wanted to clarify that it was not advocating for the rights of those arrested to not be disappeared. In obedient praise of federal immigration policy, the newspaper so subjectively reported, “We are all for getting illegal bad guys off the street.” Language focused against a targeted demographic couldn’t get more presumptuously loaded than “illegal bad guy”. But while the UL is happy to report the word of the federal government that the immigrants arrested were all dangerous criminals, they will not idly accept news of NH arrests without the most basic unit of information attached: the name of the arrested party. (more…)
“Word for word and character for character, it’s tough to beat Ryan Maddox.” – Super-activist Pete Eyre
This is the first episode in what will become a weekly series highlighting a range of pro-freedom topics. This one focuses on establishing the parasitic nature of the state. Others soon to follow will cover topics such as Mesh Networks, DarkNets, and open-source ecology. New episodes will be featured on my YouTube channel each Friday. The goal of this series is to bring newcomers to the ideas of liberty and to equip the liberty community with the technical aspects of maintaining strong virtual and real-life networks. One such real-life network is The Corner News, my favorite store. Check them out below:
Bazil notes that “Even if [monthly sign-ups] don’t continue to increase we should see the 20k mark by the end of the decade,” triggering thousands of liberty-lovers to move to New Hampshire en masse.
Political commentators often lump libertarians in with conservatives on the right, but how accurate is this?
To get a start on this question, I compared New Hampshire legislators’ liberalism or conservatism, as measured by W-NOMINATE, with their libertarianism, as measured by the NHLA’s Liberty Rating. (To make the comparison easier, I used the raw Liberty Rating scores. An “A” is 80-100%, 60-79% is a “B”, 40-59% is a “C”, etc.)
Did you know that Steve Lindsey is the most libertarian representative from Keene, according to the NHLA? Or that Molly Kelly is the most economically liberal senator in the New Hampshire Senate? Or that State Representative Sam Hawkes voted with conservative Republicans 18% of the time? (Chuck Weed only voted with them 5% of the time.)
These are the kind of things you can learn on Free Keene’s new Voter info page, where I am collecting data on local Keene legislators. The new page is intended to be a tool to help voters, and non-voting activists, keep track of their elected representatives. (Therefore it is under the “Tools” tab.)
Because knowing is half the battle.
With luck, I will eventually be able to expand the page with information about city councilors and other local officials, to help with city elections.
