WebProNews

Tag: Police State

  • Employee Arrested 62 Times For “Trespassing” At Work

    Imagine working at a convenient store and being arrested for trespassing. Imagine for four years, you’re stopped 258 times by the police. Imagine being searched more than 100 times. Imagine being arrested and put in jail 56 times, with your highest criminal offense being possession of marijuana.

    This is all happening in Miami Gardens, Florida to a man named Earl Sampson, 28, who has been arrested 62 times for trespassing, during working hours, at his place of employment, according to USA Today.

    Almost all the citations that Sampson has received have been issued at 207 Quickstop, a convenience store located at 207th street in Miami Gardens; the place he works at. Simply by showing up to work, Sampson gets cited – even when his boss tells police that he’s allowed to be there and isn’t trespassing.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcGKX2IajLw

    Alex Saleh, 36, owner of 207 Quickstop, which has been in business for 17 years, has been curious as to why his employees and customers have been constantly pestered by Miami Gardens police. Saleh told the Herald that he’s seen stops occur three times in the same day. It is because of this constant harassment by police that Saleh installed 15 video cameras in his store on June 2012; he’s never been robbed.

    “Police line them up and tell them to put their hands against the wall. I started asking myself ‘Is this normal?’ I just kept thinking police can’t do this,’’ Saleh said.
    “There is just no justifying this kind of behavior,” police policy consultant Chuck Drago told the Herald. “Nobody can justify overstepping the constitution to fight crime.”

    “The real problem here is the police department does not have a relationship with its community – black or white. When they make these kinds of stops for minor offenses, it only re-enforced the mistrust.”

    Five videos that Saleh captured show the cops stopping people, questioning them, searching them, and arresting them for trespassing in 207 Quickshop.

    Despite phone messages and emails, questions regarding the behavior of the police were met with silence by both the Miami Gardens Police Chief Matthew Boyd, and City Manager Cameron Benson.

    Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union Florida, asked, “Where is the police chief in all this? In a police department in a city this size, this kind of behavior could not escape his attention. Doesn’t the City Commission know that they are exposing the city to either massive liability for civil rights violations? Either that, or they are going to wake up one day and find the U.S. Department of Justice has taken over its police department.’’

    According to the Herald, a pending lawsuit is at hand; Saleh and his lawyer, Steve Lopez, are preparing for a federal civil rights lawsuit that claims the Miami Gardens Police have engaged routinely in racial profiling, cover ups of illegal misconducts, and unconstitutional stops and searches.

    On November 4th, the Herald reported that Miami Gardens had 3 shooting deaths in less than 24 hours; the town has been facing troubles with gang violence and drug related crimes. The murder rates have more than doubled in recent years. It is fear that blinds men.

     

    (Pictures via Alex Saleh’s video footage)

  • Man Gets Arrested For Picking Up His Kids At School

    It’s 2:00PM on a Thursday, and the children at South Cumberland Elementary school in Crossville, Tennessee have been dismissed for the day. A father arrives on time to pick up his kids, but he is arrested. The school’s new policy only allows students to be picked up at 2:00PM if their parents are picking them up in cars, you have to wait until 2:35PM if you’re walking.

    Jim Howe and his fiancée, Amanda Long, bothered by the long line in traffic of other parents, decided to pick up their two children at the school at 2:00PM by walking.

    “You don’t need a reason as a parent to go get your children,” Howe told the school officials.

    But Avery Aytes, a sheriff deputy and school resource officer, disagreed – preventing Howes from leaving the school with his kids. As seen in the video below, Long captured the whole interaction between her husband and Aytes.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8r-bdcvx8E

    In the video, Howe doesn’t raise his voice and appears to be engaging in a civil discussion about picking up his kids. When Howes brought up how the new policy was illegal, Aytes threatened him with jail time.

    “I’m going to call some help down here and we’re going to take you up to the jail right now,” said Aytes to Howes.

    “I’m not putting up with this today. You’re being childish and it’s uncalled for.”

    The discussion continued until Howe mentioned that the state law was on his side; Aytes decided to arrest Howes for disorderly conduct.

    “I’m not standing here arguing with you, you’re disorderly,” Aytes added.

    The school had no words for the press, but the sheriff’s office did. They told an ABC local news channel that Aytes acted responsibly.

    “The resource officers are there to enforce the law,” said Cumberland County Sheriff Butch Burgess in a statement.

    Despite the commotion, Burgess did agree with Howes about inefficient pick up system, and that it was causing disorder. The cars are back up so far that they’re seeping into the highway, causing safety concerns.

    Currently, there’s a fundraiser for Howe’s legal expenses; the family’s goal is to raise $10,000.

    (Pictures via YouTube)

  • Snowden: American Patriot Says He Shared No Secrets with Russia

    Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an interview this month that when he fled to Russia from Hong Kong SAR, China, in June, he did not take any classified NSA files with him.

    Snowden further assured that Russian espionage agents had no way of getting access to the files, as he handed over all those documents to the journalists he met in Hong Kong, and did not make any duplicate copies for himself, “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest.”

    “What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?…There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he added.

    Snowden was also confident about China’s intelligence capabilities, claiming that as an NSA contractor he had extensively targeted the eastern giant’s espionage operations and even taught a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence.

    American espionage and covert operations officials have condemned Snowden as a traitor, and have asserted that Chinese and Russians might have gotten access to the files.

    The interview took place over several days last week in a “safe” location in Russia, where Snowden has been granted political asylum. The interview took place through encrypted online communications.

    Snowden, 30, has been praised by Constitutionalists and privacy advocates while Federal government has slapped charges on him under the Espionage Act for leaking the files. The famous fugitive claimed that he was acting in “nation’s” best interests, by revealing NSA’s omniscient surveillance efforts including conversations, emails, purchase habits, etc, and pleaded for vigorous national public debate about mass surveillance and monitoring of Americans.

    Snowden said,

    “The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure…So long as there’s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there’s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision,” he said. “However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that’s a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of ‘governing in the dark,’ where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input.”

    Snowden’s last target as NSA contractor was China, and he had “access to every target, every active operation” mounted by NSA against the Chinese, including:

    “ Full lists of them. If that was compromised,…N.S.A. would have set the table on fire from slamming it so many times in denouncing the damage it had caused. Yet N.S.A. has not offered a single example of damage from the leaks. They haven’t said boo about it except ‘we think,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘have to assume’ from anonymous and former officials. Not ‘China is going dark.’ Not ‘the Chinese military has shut us out.’ ”

    Snowden also feared that working through proper channels utilizing the chain of command would lead to swift gagging and retribution. In 2008 and 2009, while working in Geneva as an IT officer for CIA, he pushed for a promotion, but got into a “petty e-mail spat” over a senior manager’s judgment.

    When Snowden discovered serious vulnerabilities in a CIA software, he warned his supervisor, but was advised to keep his mouth shut. After much haggling, he was allowed to test the system with a “non-malicious” code, which proved that the system was in fact vulnerable. But this time, someone higher up in the chain of command was annoyed and gave Snowden a bad review in his personnel file.

    Snowden feared that he would be persecuted and stigmatized like former NSA employee Thomas A. Drake, who, like Snowden, had exposed NSA’s wrongdoings. He added that dissent was crushed or suppressed using “fear and a false image of patriotism.”

    Edward Snowden lamented that had he raised the issue of unconstitutional surveillance as an insider, his complaints “would have been buried forever,” and he would “have been discredited and ruined…the system does not work…you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.”

    Alarmed by a highly classified 2009 report he chanced upon at the agency, he concluded that, “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all…secret powers become tremendously dangerous…You can’t read something like that and not realize what it means for all of these systems we have.”

    Snowden is permitted to stay in Russia for one year, but his future appears perilous after this sojourn. Benjamin Franklin once remarked that, “those who sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither.”

    [image from youtube]