A suspicionless checkpoint will be established by the police on the roads of Concord some time during the first week of August. It’s no wild guess to predict that the court-sanctioned violation of rights will be occurring on either a Friday or Saturday evening. At the checkpoint, vehicles will be profiled and stopped without probable cause for the offence of happening to pass through the designated security area. These checkpoints are established in the name of preventing DUIs, though often more arrests are made for victimless crimes not related to impaired driving. Beyond the arrests made, the police produce thousands of dollars in revenue for the state by operating these checkpoints, as dozens of drivers are cited for innocuous motor vehicle violations. At a recent suspicionless checkpoint in Bedford, the Union Leader reports that of the 330 vehicles that were stopped, twenty-eight drivers were given motor vehicle citations, four were arrested for non-alcohol drug possession, one arrested on an immigration charge, and a whopping four drunk drivers were arrested. Also profiting from the festivities are the towing and impounding companies utilized by police.
In the Union Leader’s thorough overview of a night spent at the police’s peacetime security checkpoint, they describe the state’s modified RV, the DUI Mobile Command Center. In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like inside the Command Center, here’s a video I took of the vehicle on display at Concord’s law enforcement National Night Out, August 2, 2012.
Nationally Syndicated Radio Talk Show Host Indicted on Three Felony Charges
Free Talk Live Co-Host in Trouble – Viral Video of Police-on-Student Brutality in School Cafeteria Allegedly Includes “Illegally Recorded” Interviews with On-Duty Public Officials
According to court documents, Adam “Ademo” Mueller, journalist and co-host of nationally syndicated radio talk show Free Talk Live, has been indicted on three counts of felony wiretapping. The charges are a result of a vlog Mueller posted on CopBlock.org about an incident involving alleged police misconduct, which featured recorded interviews of on-duty public officials. Mueller’s report focused on video recorded by a student’s cell phone at Manchester’s West High School, which depicted Officer Darren Murphy slamming a 17-year-old boy into a cafeteria table in October of 2011. (more…)
Activists have purchased 100 video cameras for people in Austin, TX and gathered to discuss methods for holding police accountable and understanding, protecting, and standing up for our rights. Keene’s Pete Eyre of Copblock.org was given the opportunity to speak to the gathering:
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
Thanks to Kari DePhillips, the PR wizard behind 
