The Australian – POLICE will be given new powers to use people’s secret tax details against them in criminal trials, under legislation that weakens the privacy protection over Australians’ tax returns. For the first time, prosecutors will be able to use private tax information as evidence in court for “serious offences”, including identity theft, money laundering, drug-smuggling, corporate fraud, sexual slavery and terrorism. Read Article
Mail Online – A commuter in a diabetic coma, an 89-year-old man and children as young as 12 – just some of the targets of British police armed with skin-piercing 50,000-volt Taser guns. As the Home Office investigates bringing an even more powerful rifle version to Britain, Jason Benetto reports on the slow creep of arms onto our streets. Read Article
Telegraph – Hundreds more town hall staff and private security guards are to be handed police-style powers in a fresh Home Office drive to create an army of civilian “spies”. Almost 1,700 people, also including car park attendants and dog wardens, already have powers to hand out a string of fines and even take photographs of low level offenders under the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme. But the Government has quietly announced it plans to review the scheme with chief police officers to see how it can be expanded further. Read Article
CNN – Sitting at the kitchen table in his small house, Steven Butler has trouble even with a very simple question. He cannot tell you the day of the week or the month, and he has to have the help of a calendar to tell you the year. “Once a moment is gone, it’s gone,” said his brother and caregiver, David Butler says in an interview to air on tonight’s “Campbell Brown”. “He can’t remember any good times, birthday parties, Christmas, any event.” On October 7, 2006, Steven Butler, by his own admission, was drunk and disorderly. He refused an order from a police officer in his hometown to get off a city bus. The officer used his Taser ECD (officially, an “Electronic Control Device”) three times. Read Article
Daily Mail – Every police force in England and Wales will soon start using mobile fingerprint scanners to check suspects’ identity in the street. Security officers on patrol will be able to use the devices, which are about the size of a mobile phone, to check the fingerprints against national records. Up to 3,000 devices will be distributed to each of the 43 forces across England and Wales after senior officers claimed they will save hours of police time and speed up inquiries. The National Policing Improvement Agency has signed a three-year contract worth £9million with U.S. firm Cogent System to provide the devices. Read Article
Twelve people were killed in Baghdad on Thursday, including seven soldiers and police blown up by suicide bombers, days before a poll that will test Iraq’s prospects for stability as U.S. troops prepare to leave. Thirty-five soldiers and police were also wounded when two attackers with explosive belts struck at centers where security forces were voting early, an Interior Ministry source said. Read article
The Metropolitan Police: ‘Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.’ Read Full List Of Rules
Ed – Worth being aware of next time a photographer is arrested under the Anti-Terrorism Act
Politico – Former officials familiar with the deal say that Blackwater is likely to get a Defense Department-issued contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to train and mentor Afghan police. The police training contract is supposed to be decided next month, and the company has not been officially notified that it’s getting it. But the only competing bid for the contract, submitted by Northrop with MPRI, has been disqualified, a former official knowledgeable about the contract said. Read article
Columbus Dispatch – The few hundred residents who live in a bucolic corner of Maryland’s Eastern Shore don’t object to the 400 jobs that might come from a new State Department facility funded with stimulus money. But they’re not really into the noise and commotion that would come from the high-speed chases, machine-gun fire and bomb blasts. Read article
Washington Independent – Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military. Read article
The Guardian – Police questioned an amateur photographer under anti-terrorist legislation and later arrested him, claiming pictures he was taking in a Lancashire town were “suspicious” and constituted “antisocial behaviour”. Footage recorded on a video camera by Bob Patefield, a former paramedic, shows how police approached him and a fellow photography enthusiast in Accrington town centre. They were told they were being questioned under the Terrorism Act. Read Article & Watch Footage
BBC – A Nato air strike has killed seven policemen in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province, Afghan officials say. The officers were mistakenly hit after a joint Nato-Afghan patrol was ambushed by Taliban insurgents, the officials told news agencies. Read article
Ed – at this rate it seems safer to be an insurgent than a friendly Afghan or civilian
KATU Portland – 72-year-old Billie McKenzie is still in disbelief. She’s shocked that two officers – one a Beaverton Police officer and the other from Portland – working for Portland’s Transit Police, would use a taser on her disabled grandson, Jamal Green. Green, 34, is disabled, with serious cognitive impairments. His lawyer says it is hard for Green to understand and follow orders. Read Article
Wired – Police forces all over the UK will soon be able to draw on unmanned aircraft from a national fleet, according to Home Office plans. Last month it was revealed that modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers, and will be in place in time for the 2012 Olympics. Surveillance is only the start, however. Military drones quickly moved from reconnaissance to strike, and if the British police follow suit, their drones could be armed — but with non-lethal weapons rather than Hellfire missiles. Read Article
Ed – Not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell ever imagined police drone aircraft that can not only conduct surveillance of protesters, but also zap them into submission with non-lethal weapons.
CNET – Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves. Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices. Read Article
The Guardian – Metropolitan police assistant commissioner John Yates has been reprimanded by the culture select committee for what it claims was a failure to give more detailed evidence to MPs over the scale of hacking into private phone messages by former News International employees. The chairman of the culture committee, John Whittingdale, has written to Yates to deliver the reprimand. Yates has angrily replied it had never been his intention to mislead the committee and he is most concerned that the committee believed that to be the case. The Guardian revealed last week that a freedom of information request had disclosed that the police found News International had pin codes, which are used for accessing voicemail messages, belonging to 91 people. The phones had been accessed by the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who worked for the News of the World and the paper’s royal correspondent, Clive Goodman. Read Article
The West Australian = High-profile former policemen have spoken out about WA’s proposed stop and search powers, saying they are open to abuse. Former superintendents Dave Parkinson and John Watson said police needed extra powers to deal with street gangs, thugs, people affected by drugs, known troublemakers, special events and Northbridge, but current stop and search legislation was too wide-ranging. “What I don’t support is the fact that police may be put in a position where they can, for no reason, just search anyone on the street,” Mr Parkinson said. “That reeks of going back to a draconian era where innocent people walking down the street are stopped and searched. There must be a reason. Read Article
UPI – There are more private security contractors from Xe, formerly Blackwater, operating in Islamabad than capital police, a religious leader said. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi political party in Pakistan, said there were as many as 9,000 Xe contractors working in Islamabad, compared with just 7,000 capital police, Pakistan’s News International reports. Read article
The Examiner – A judge sealed a video tape showing the aftermath of police brutality and murder of Baron Pikes. The video is to be sealed until it is submitted for evidence at trial. Lawyers on both sides were concerned that the release of the tape could taint the local jury pool. In January of 2008, Winnfield, Louisiana police killed Pikes, an unarmed man. They handcuffed Pikes, a black man, and tasered him with a 50,000 volt taser 9 times within 14 minutes. He was handcuffed the entire time. The officer responsible was Scott Nugent, a white police officer. Read Article
BBC – The outrage over the shooting this week of a South African toddler has led some to question the government’s new strategy to fight crime. Three-year-old Atlegang Phalane was killed when a police officer allegedly mistook a pipe the boy was carrying for a gun – he died from a single shot to the chest. Read article
Lawyers & Settlements.Com – The Taser-related death of a 21-year-old man in January 2008 ended in the indictment of the Winnfield, Louisiana police officer who administered nine jolts to Baron “Scooter” Pikes—many of them while Pikes was handcuffed, and two after he was already unconscious. A hearing is scheduled for Monday, during which District Court Judge John Joyce is expected to rule on various video and documentary evidence and make decisions with regard to expert witnesses. The manslaughter trial of Officer Scott Nugent is set to begin February 9. Read Article
UPI – A man who was seeking psychiatric help at a University of Cincinnati hospital died after being shocked with a Taser, campus police say. Campus police chief Gene Ferrara called the Jan. 20 death of Kelly Brinson Sr., 45, of Cincinnati, unfortunate and tragic, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported Wednesday. A spokesman for the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office said Brinson’s death was under investigation, but indicated that if it is determined he died as a result of a Taser shock, it would be the first such death in the county. Read Article
Sydney Morning Herald – PRIVATE details of more and more people are finding their way on to databases used by the nation’s police. Information about licensed drivers and car owners are to be added to a network that already holds nearly 9 million police records. Police say it makes their job faster and safer, but critics warn of the potential for the misuse of such mountains of information. The National Police Reference System was introduced last year and links information from all the nation’s police forces. Its 8.7 million records include names and aliases of ”persons of interest”, their criminal history, outstanding warrants, bail information, domestic violence orders and warnings they may be dangerous or carry firearms. Read ARTICLE
Wall Street Journal – The FBI disproved its main theory about how the spores were weaponized. The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. The cause of death was an overdose of the painkiller Tylenol. No autopsy was performed, and there was no suicide note. Read article
Ed – (un)remarkably similar to the ’suicide’ of UK weapons inspector David Kelly, supposedly from an overdose of an analgesic and cutting his wrists with a knife whilst leaving no fingerprints.
New American – The RAND Corporation is the establishment’s go-to think tank for the pseudo-scientific justification for both the planned and perfidious expansion of government and the corresponding contraction of liberty. The latest RAND report, prepared at the behest (and on the dime) of the United States Army, is over 200 impenetrable pages long and proclaims loudly the urgent need for a “Stability Police Force (SPF).” It should shock no one that the RAND Corporation’s suggestions include relieving the Army of its police role. The Army’s budget is tight (to the point of reportedly sending troops into harm’s way outfitted with troop transports that are little more than assembly-line jeeps), the global deployments in furtherance of the spread of American hegemony and empire have stretched thin the available corps of soldiers, and the consistent policy of subsequent presidential administrations is to steadily send surge after surge to the front lines of the “war on terror.” Read Article
Ed – Perhaps they could call it Team America – World Police?
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