We’ve been watching with interest a pitched battle playing out in Concord in recent weeks. In that city, police are hoping to use $258,000 in federal Homeland Security money to procure an armored vehicle, a purchase that’s raised eyebrows and voices.
It’s a fight that feels familiar here in the Elm City, where city councilors accepted a similar grant in 2011 to buy a Lenco BearCat Special Mission Public Safety Vehicle (though for $285,000 — did we miss a sale?) (more…)
Last week it was brought to my attention that Lenco had produced another propaganda piece: this one highlighting the disgusting response from law enforcement during the Boston Bomber manhunt. They entitled it Protect and Serve. The only problem is they got the music all wrong and completely forgot about the use of creative subtitles. I fixed it for them because that’s how nice I am. Now it makes more sense.
While more is learned about what motivated the theft of my camera that occurred at the hands of state police in June, content continues to upload as it becomes available. Embedded below is footage of the retrieval of the camera at the state police headquarters on Ash Brook Court in Keene. The return was overseen by trooper Aaron Gillis, who was also a participant in the theft, though identified as a subordinate by the orchestrator of the incident, trooper Joseph DiRusso.
Also discovered last evening was some vandalism to the camera underneath the battery port, where someone had scribbled on the camera with different sharpies.
I was grateful to be asked to moderate the civil disobedience panel this year at Porcfest and so I chose as my panelists the heroic activists who have spent the most time behind bars, Ademo Freeman, Derrick J Freeman, Lauren Canario, and Jim Johnson. It was an excellent panel with some great audience questions. Thanks to Paul and Athena from Red Pill Productions for doing the video work.
It was neat how excited folks were to get out and Copblock in a big group. Unfortunately, many Copblock groups are little more than a few dedicated activists in various areas of the country. The Copblocking during the conference showed how much more effective Copblocking can be when done with larger numbers. This is why the Free State Project is so important. When we concentrate activists, activism becomes more effective. It’s been proven over and over. Imagine 300 active Copblockers living in Manchester. You’d have enough to have 30 Copblockers on the streets every day of the week. Wherever the police might pull someone over – odds are a Copblocker would be nearby to respond.
This afternoon, I was happily reunited with my beloved Canon Vixia HFR21, after it had spent nearly two months in the custody of the state police. Since the unsealing of the secret search warrant, it is still unclear what caused judge Edward Burke and trooper Joesph DiRusso to believe that they had a right to conspire to steal property. Their search warrant lacks anything resembling probable cause of a crime, and the ‘victim’ of the alleged wiretap was royal court jester Tom Mullins, who collects funds from captive taxpayers. Mullins also has an active lawsuit against myself and five friends whom he suspects are behind the filling of parking meters downtown, depriving his organization of their coveted ticket revenue. Even without evidence of any criminal activity, Mullins nearly succeeded in depriving myself of a defensive tool by stealing my camera, a device that I carry with me when Robin Hooding without exception. Thanks to my friend James Cleaveland, I was re-armed with a Sony HDR-CX190 that evening following the shakedown, minimizing the intended damaging effect of the property seizure.
Also retrieved with the camera is the footage of the shakedown, which occurred just out of earshot of my home, while my roommates occupied the porch as I had just bicycled off to go Robin Hooding. At the corner of Leverett and School Street, a car that had earlier been circling my home appeared at a stop sign, and that is where the footage begins. Unfortunately, it appears DiRusso stopped the recording shortly after taking possession of the camera, so not included in this clip is the three to five more minutes I spent on the corner waiting for the receipt for my camera and verbally laying into DiRusso’s subordinate about the morality of their career choice. (more…)
Having been on “R” block in the CCHOC for a couple months, I have had a front row seat to observe the failure of the jail to address or even make a serious effort to address the plight of the mentally ill within its walls. The HOC is rife with mental illness. Many of its prisoners are here because they are mentally ill. Those who are mildly mentally ill on the outside frequently become dangerously so on the inside. The jail seems to be designed to take people who are a little crazy and drive them completely out of their minds.
There is no apparent therapy provided for mentally ill people here, except for a couple of meetings a week for the chemically dependent. There is, as far as I can tell, no psychiatrist. A psychologist, Barnes Peterson, who lacks the training to prescribe, makes the decisions about medication and passes them on to a Physician’s Assistant, who prescribes. These two frequently change people’s medication, then have the medication ground and dissolved in apple sauce. . . even though some of them are time release medications. This is completely irresponsible, as grinding many medications destroys the time release mechanism. (more…)
A somewhat surprising editorial piece from the Keene Sentinel opposes the Concord BEARCAT:
