Archive for the ‘Cops’ Category

Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AH of a series)

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

He’s gone, gone.

Well, technically, not quite yet:

Miami City Manager Art Noriega moved to fire embattled Police Chief Art Acevedo Monday night, ending weeks of speculation following two circus-like public hearings where city commissioners slammed the chief for everything from a tone-deaf statement about “Cuban Mafia” running the department to a tight jumpsuit he wore years ago during a fundraiser in another city.
Technically, the manager suspended Acevedo pending termination — forcing an almost-sure-to-lose hearing before a five-member commission with three vocal critics who appear likely to support his ouster after his tumultuous six months in charge.

In just six months, Acevedo angered city leaders with a string of decisions and comments. Noriega, Acevedo’s boss and who was ultimately responsible for his hire, was left with little choice but to force the chief out.
Since early April Acevedo has taken control of internal affairs, publicly disparaged the legal community for early prisoner releases and short sentences and fired the highest ranking police couple in the department for not properly reporting an accident in which two tires were blown out of a city-issued vehicle. He also demoted four majors, including the second-highest ranking Black female officer in the department.
Acevedo also “accidentally” posed for a picture with one of the local leaders of the white national movement Proud Boys.

Some of the complaints seem quite petty, like the one about the tight white jumpsuit. But others…

His relationship with the city’s five commissioners — who direct Noriega — only worsened. Three weeks ago he penned a memo to Noriega and Mayor Francis Suarez accusing Commissioners Joe Carollo, Diaz de la Portilla and Manolo Reyes of interfering with police investigations. The chief also said he had informed federal investigators and compared the trio’s actions to Communist Cuba.
Like Acevedo, two of the city’s three Cuban-American commissioners fled Cuba as children and the families of all three have suffered since Castro’s takeover 60 years ago. Infuriated, commissioners called for a pair of public hearings in which they excoriated the chief without rebuttal.

And even in the few days that separated the two commission hearings on the chief, Acevedo created more ill will. During a 75-minute fiery and private grievance-filled speech to staff, the chief said he had enough probable cause to arrest people obstructing police probes, without naming commissioners.

According to several sources, the chief called Miami a corrupt city during that meeting and said he could cure it if he were permitted to bring in the right people. He also complained that several senior level positions were being eliminated by commissioners to stop his plan. The usually boisterous staff was stone silent after the chief’s outburst.

Noted:

Back in March, when Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami revealed that the city would bring on Art Acevedo, the Houston police chief, to head its Police Department, Mr. Suarez told the local newspaper that the hire was “like getting the Tom Brady or the Michael Jordan of police chiefs.”

21stCenturyCassandra, you sure called that one.

Most Shocking!

Tuesday, October 5th, 2021

Here’s a surprise for you:

Federal investigators on Tuesday morning raided the Manhattan office of one of New York City’s main police unions in connection with an ongoing investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, represents about 13,000 active and retired police sergeants in New York. Its headquarters were searched as part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the people said.

The home of the union’s president, Edward D. Mullins, was also searched.

Though the focus of the investigation into the Sergeants Benevolent Association is unclear, it comes as Mr. Mullins faces departmental discipline over his conduct on social media. Known in recent years for making brash and incendiary remarks on Twitter, particularly about Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mr. Mullins declared war on the mayor last year after two officers were shot, accusing Mr. de Blasio of promoting anti-police attitudes.
Mr. Mullins is being brought up for department discipline over his posts on Twitter, including for sharing a police report documenting the arrest of Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, during protests over police brutality and racial justice in New York last year. The Police Department does not typically release internal reports, and the one that Mr. Mullins shared contained personal information about Ms. de Blasio.
A disciplinary hearing on the charges started last month and is scheduled to resume on Oct. 27. Mr. Mullins’s lawyer, Andrew C. Quinn, has defended his conduct as free speech and as part of his obligation to advocate on behalf of the union’s members.

Mr. Mullins also faces internal discipline over tweets in which he used profane language against Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the former city health commissioner, and Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman who represents the Bronx.
Mr. Torres, who has called for Mr. Mullins’s resignation over what he has described as racist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks, tweeted on Tuesday that Mr. Mullins had received a “first-class raid” from the F.B.I.
Mr. Mullins has also drawn scrutiny for his outspoken right-wing politics in a city where Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans. Both the sergeants’ union and its larger sister union, the Police Benevolent Association, have been run mostly by conservatives whose views are not widely shared by many in the metropolis they police.
Mr. Mullins has praised former President Donald J. Trump, a Republican who was deeply unpopular among city residents. He also came under fire from liberal lawmakers after giving an interview to Fox News surrounded by paraphernalia linked to QAnon, a fringe conspiracy theory popular among Trump supporters.

(Side note: “one of New York City’s main police unions”? You may be asking: how many police unions does NYC have? Mike the Musicologist asked me that same question a while back, in relation to a different scandal. Other than the Sergeants Benevolent Association, there’s also the Police Benevolent Association, which represents the line officers, and the Detectives Endowment Association, which represents the detective ranks. It isn’t clear to me if the command ranks (above sergeant) and the civilian staff have their own unions.)

Edited to add 10/6: Sergeant Mullins resigned his union presidency last night, after I posted this. The Post reports that he remains a NYPD sergeant, and that he made “$88,757 from the union and $133,195 from the NYPD” last year.

When was the last time there was a shootout on a train? Maybe the Long Island Rail Road, but was that a shootout?

Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AG of a series)

Tuesday, September 28th, 2021

I was not expecting this.

When last we left Art Acevedo, he was the new police chief in Miami.

How’s that working out for him?

Now Chief Acevedo is at the center of an archetypal Miami political drama, replete with references to Cuban Communism and corruption, that has roiled City Hall and threatened his job.

…the Miami imbroglio is not over policy. It is a clash of personalities between an ambitious new outsider and powerful city commissioners miffed over both Chief Acevedo’s surprise appointment and his tendency to say exactly what he thinks.

Chief Acevedo has accused several commissioners of thwarting his attempts to “change the culture” of the department, as he said he had been hired to do, by improperly meddling in personnel decisions.
“These events are deeply troubling and sad,” he wrote in an eight-page letter on Friday in which he denounced how commissioners tried to influence an internal affairs investigation and then retaliated by defunding top positions in the Police Department’s budget. “If I or M.P.D. give in to the improper actions described herein,” he added, “as a Cuban immigrant, I and my family might as well have remained in Communist Cuba, because Miami and M.P.D. would be no better than the repressive regime and the police state we left behind.”

The commissioners can’t directly fire him, only the city manager can. But they can make things uncomfortable.

…he wasted no time in generating controversy of his own. He terminated two high-ranking officers and demoted the department’s second-highest-ranking female Black officer. He said his own department — rather than the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — should investigate police shootings. And he angered the police union by telling a local radio station that officers should get vaccinated against the coronavirus or risk losing their jobs.
Last week, a majority of members polled by the Fraternal Order of Police said that they had no confidence in the chief and that he should be fired or forced to resign.

What especially incensed commissioners, in addition to the housecleaning at Police Headquarters, was when Chief Acevedo told a group of officers this summer that the department was run by a “Cuban mafia.” The chief later apologized, saying he intended it as a joke and had not realized that Fidel Castro had used the same phrase to refer to Cuban exiles in Miami who opposed his Communist regime.

At one point, Commissioner Joe Carollo frame-grabbed a video clip of Chief Acevedo, taken before he worked in Miami, performing a raunchy dance at a fund-raiser. (In another clip, he was dressed like Elvis, prompting Mr. Carollo to tut-tut the tightness of the chief’s pants.)
A supporter of the chief at one point yelled at the dais and, as he stomped out of the chambers, extended a finger to the commissioners.
Mr. Carollo spent several hours reading news clippings and other documents about Chief Acevedo’s record in law enforcement agencies in California and Texas, including at least one allegation of sexual harassment that the chief has denied. Mr. Carollo repeatedly asked Mr. Noriega if he had been aware of those controversies before hiring Chief Acevedo.
“No, sir,” Mr. Noriega responded.
“He’s not accountable to anyone,” Mr. Carollo said of Chief Acevedo. “He’s not accountable to the city manager, not accountable to the residents of Miami — not accountable, period.”

…Chief Acevedo never applied for the position. Now he makes $315,000 a year, though his total compensation package, with benefits, is worth more than $437,000.

Chief Acevedo is the sixth police chief in 11 years.

Obit watch: August 11, 2021.

Wednesday, August 11th, 2021

Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.

Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.

Born on July 7, 1928 in the UK to famed film director Alfred Hitchcock and his infamously loyal wife, Alma Reville, the legendary duo’s offspring would go on to appear in a string of her pop’s projects including “Stage Fright” (1950), “Strangers on a Train” (1951) and the aforementioned “Psycho” (1960). She also guest-starred in 10 episodes of the classic TV anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” from 1955 to 1960.

She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.

Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.

In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.

Other megahits released during Mr. Yetnikoff’s tenure included Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” in 1977, the ambitious Pink Floyd double album “The Wall” in 1979, Mr. Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984, Mr. Jackson’s “Bad” in 1987 and a series of hit albums by Mr. Joel, including “The Stranger” (1977) and “Glass Houses” (1980).

Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.

…his ascension was accompanied by numerous affairs, which he detailed, along with his substance abuse, in his autobiography. Other record executives from the period wrote their stories, too, but Mr. Yetnikoff’s was in a class by itself. It was, Forbes said, “a portrait of such out-of-control megalomania that any music executive today, no matter how egotistical or ruthless, has to look better by comparison.”

In 1990, Mr. Yetnikoff, having offended too many people with his outrageous behavior, was dismissed by Sony, the company that at his urging had bought CBS Records only three years earlier. He had gone into rehab in 1989 and kicked the booze and drugs that had been his more or less daily diet throughout his reign, but getting clean didn’t make him any more tolerable.

Tommy Mottola, once a friend and later, as Mr. Yetnikoff’s successor at CBS Records, viewed as an enemy, put it this way in his own autobiography, “Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” (2013): “The treatment center had removed the alcohol and drugs from Walter’s life — but not the underlying problems that Walter had been using them to anesthetize.”

Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”

Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”

Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”

In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.

He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.

Obit watch: August 1, 2021.

Sunday, August 1st, 2021

Austin Police officer Andy Traylor passed away last night.

His death came as a result of severe injuries sustained in a traffic accident on Wednesday.

APD said on Wednesday Traylor had been with the department for nine years and said in 2018 he served in the Navy for 10 years prior to becoming an officer. The Office of the Chief Medical Officer for Austin said he leaves behind a wife and five children.

Obit watch: July 23, 2021.

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.

McKinney, who also worked as a San Antonio Police Department sergeant, frequently set his work in the Alamo City and incorporated elements of police procedural into his novels and short stories. He died in his sleep on Tuesday, according to multiple online posts by friends, and is survived by a wife and two daughters.

As an author, McKinney was known for brisk, action-oriented prose. His first novel, Dead City, came out in 2006, amid a wave of zombie pop culture, and it’s been cited in academic papers as a canonical work in modern zombie fiction. The book, which follows a San Antonio patrol cop as he tries to survive an undead apocalypse, spun into a four-novel series for Pinnacle Books.

He was 52.

The Cleveland Indians.

Obit watch: July 9, 2021.

Friday, July 9th, 2021

Dicky Maegle.

Maegle was an all-American as a senior in the 1954 season, when he ran for 905 yards and 11 touchdowns and finished sixth in the balloting for the Heisman Trophy, presented annually to college football’s most outstanding player. The trophy was won that year by the Wisconsin back Alan Ameche (who went on to fame with the Baltimore Colts for scoring the winning touchdown in overtime in the storied 1958 N.F.L. championship game against the New York Giants).
The San Francisco 49ers drafted Maegle in the first round of the January 1955 N.F.L. draft. He was a 49er for five seasons, playing mostly at right safety and occasionally as a running back, then concluded his pro career with the 1960 Pittsburgh Steelers and the 1961 Dallas Cowboys. He intercepted 28 passes, running one of them back for a touchdown.
He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1979.

But he’s best remembered for something that happened in 1954 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas:

Taking a handoff at Rice’s 5-yard line in the second quarter of its matchup with Alabama, Maegle cut to the right and raced down the sideline. When he passed the Alabama bench while crossing midfield, on his way to a virtually certain touchdown, the Crimson Tide fullback Tommy Lewis interrupted his rest period and, sans helmet, sprang onto the field and leveled Maegle with a blindside block at Alabama’s 42-yard line.
The referee ruled that Maegle was entitled to a 95-yard touchdown run. Rice, ranked No. 6 in the nation by The Associated Press, went on to a 28-6 victory over 13th-ranked Alabama.

Chick Vennera, one of those knock-around actors. Credits include “Thank God It’s Friday”, “The Milagro Beanfield War”, and a lot of TV, including “The Golden Girls” and voice work on “Animaniacs”.

James Kallstrom, FBI guy.

In his 27 years with the F.B.I., Mr. Kallstrom helped convict the bosses of New York City’s five Mafia families with cleverly concealed wiretaps and spiked meatballs. And he investigated the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, expanded the bureau’s surveillance purview to include cellular phones, and recovered a half-million dollars in diamond jewelry that had been stolen by a baggage handler at Kennedy International Airport in 1995 and that had belonged to Sarah, the duchess of York.
In the investigation of the crash of Flight 800, he became the face of the F.B.I. in daily briefings as he and other authorities sought to understand what caused the explosion that sent the jetliner plummeting into the waves off Long Island on July 17, 1996 — one of the deadliest aviation incidents in American history.

He may also be known to some folks as the guy who introduced episodes of “The F.B.I. Files”.

There WASN’T supposed to be an earth-shattering KA-BOOM!

Thursday, July 1st, 2021

Over a dozen people were hurt when an LAPD bomb squad truck was blown to smithereens during a planned detonation of illegal fireworks on Wednesday night.

From the LAT (through archive.is):

At a news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said officials responding to a home on the 700 block of East 27th Street had found several thousand pounds of illegal fireworks as well as improvised explosive devices that were “more unstable.”
An LAPD bomb squad transferred the improvised devices into the iron chamber of a semitruck that’s meant to contain such explosive material, he said.
Police detonated the devices at 7:37 p.m., believing that the vehicle would be able to contain the explosion, but there was a “total catastrophic failure of that containment vehicle,” Moore said.

At the residence’s patio, officers found several thousand pounds of commercial fireworks stacked 8 to 10 feet high in boxes, and bomb squad personnel spent the day moving them to be stored at another location.
Officers also found improvised explosive devices with simple fuses — about 40 the size of Coke cans and 200 smaller objects of similar construction — and conducted X-rays to determine their contents.
Less than 10 pounds of the devices were transferred into a semitruck, which Moore said was rated, with its outer containment shell, to handle 18 pounds. Officials established a 300-foot perimeter behind the vehicle and evacuated the north and south sides of 27th Street.

According to reports, none of the injuries are “life-threatening”.

FotB RoadRich can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a memory of APD’s bomb squad telling us (when we were going through the Citizen’s Police Academy) that the most dangerous thing a bomb squad does is…disposal of fireworks. I don’t know if that’s because they do more fireworks disposal than anything else, because people get blasé around them (“It’s just fireworks!”), or if because fireworks are more volatile than anything else they deal with.

Edited to add: Lawrence sent over this tweet from CBS LA: their helicopter was directly overhead when…

Obit watch: June 28, 2021.

Monday, June 28th, 2021

NYT obit for Frederic Rzewski, which went up after I posted yesterday.

John Langley. He was perhaps best known as the creator of “COPS”.

Apart from Cops, Langley also produced American Vice: The Doping of a Nation, which showed live drug arrests on television. Other credits include Inside American Jail and Las Vegas Jailhouse; documentaries Cocaine Blues, American Expose: Who Murdered JFK?, Anatomy of a Crime and Terrorism: Target U.S.A.;and series’ Video Justice, Undercover Stings, Jail, Street Patrol, Vegas Strip and Road Warriors.

He also was involved in off-road racing, and apparently did quite well at that:

In 2009 and 2010, Langley’s team, COPS Racing, took first place in its class in the Baja 1000, an off-road motorsports event held annually in Baja California.

He died of an apparent heart attack while his team was competing in the “Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250” this past weekend.

I have not seen this elsewhere, but “Reason” is reporting the death of libertarian economist Steve Horwitz.

Memo from the police beat.

Tuesday, May 18th, 2021

There have been a few mildly interesting police stories in recent days. Here’s a round-up.

1. The police chief of the Manor ISD Police (yeah, the school district police, not the city police) has been “placed on administrative leave“.

The accusations against him seem to amount to two things: “falsifying timesheets”, and “improperly donating used cellphones to a local domestic violence shelter”.

The defense attorney representing Chief Shane Sexton and three other officers in the force, said credible evidence has been submitted to the district to show that all timesheets have been accurate.
Sexton’s attorney Brad Heilman said Verizon Wireless donated the cellphones to the department, came at no cost to the district and were no longer being used.

Manor is about 34 miles down the road from here, and has an estimated population (as of 2019) of about 13,000 people. Small town politics…but I’ll come back to that in a bit. (I also have some questions about why small school districts need their own police departments, but that gets into other issues: how big does a school district have to be to justify their own police force? Does not having a police force for a small school district divert resources from a small city police force? Is it just a question of which pocket the money comes out of? I haven’t though through all of this yet.)

2. Lorenzo Hernandez used to be a deputy with the Williamson County sheriff’s department. He also appeared on “Live TV”, back when they were in WillCo and “Live PD” was a thing.

And now he’s been charged with “assault and official oppression”.

In the arrest affidavit, a Williamson County detective wrote that the woman Hernandez is accused of assaulting “did not pose a threat.”
“Defendant Hernandez escalates the event through an intentional, unreasonable use of force against [the victim] by placing his hand on her throat directly below her chin,” the affidavit said, adding that Hernandez then squeezed her throat and pushed her back into the apartment wall.
“The intentional use of force by Defendant Hernandez by placing his hand on the throat of [the victim] is unlawful, as no exception provides Defendant Hernandez the justification for the use of said force.”

3. This one is in my own backyard, but I’ve avoided writing about it. The story broke late Friday afternoon, and I’ve been trying to get a little more clarity about what’s happening.

The Lakeway police chief, Todd Radford, resigned on Friday. His resignation was not voluntary.

“I stand before you tonight more than likely for the last time as your chief of police, regrettably so. Upon request I am submitting my resignation,” Radford told the council. “Over the last 14 years, I have been every other week in this chamber with multiple volunteers who have sat in your seats as council members and I have served honorably, in my opinion, for three mayors and felt like I have done above and beyond what has been asked of me. And I believe the agency has done so as well. To receive the number of accolades we have has not been easy and I feel like it should be better recognized.”

There is a lot of speculation on NextDoor about what’s going on. Most of it I find unreliable. The theory that I do find compelling is: this is related to a move by the council to eliminate contracts for all city employees and convert them to at-will status. This is something I can get behind for most city employees, but not for the police chief and police officers. I think law enforcement people should be on a contract basis – one which allows termination for clearly defined reasons. I don’t think a cop who murders or rapes someone should keep their job, but I don’t want them being fired because they didn’t fix a ticket for the mayor’s brother-in-law.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 409

Friday, May 14th, 2021

Today, a handful of random.

Skallagrim” discusses “End Him Rightly”, a fighting technique from the Gladiatoria.

Bonus #1: Here’s another video from the good folks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC): “Integrity in the Workplace”. Or, things you shouldn’t do as a Federal employee.

Bonus #2: A little something for FotB RoadRich again. Guy picks up a 1973 Piper Cherokee Cruiser for $9,000 (it needs an overhaul and the owner couldn’t afford it) and does a restoration and rebuild.

Besides putting this up as RoadRich bait, I’m posting this because that’s a really nice looking airplane. I could see myself flying something like that.

Bonus #3: And speaking of the Cherokee, “50th Anniversary of the Piper Cherokee” from the good folks at Piper.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 400

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

This popped up in my feed, and you know I had to post it here: “TRS-80 Color Computer: Radio Shack’s $399 Micro from 1980!”

It me. Mine had 4K of memory: not 4 GB, or 4 MB, but 4,096 8-bit bytes of memory, and used cassette tape for storage.

Bonus #1: I’m marginal about using this one, but it calls back to an earlier blog entry: “The Norco Shootout, 40 Years Later”.

Not officially part of the content here, but: the “Behind the Badge” channel posted the Norco documentary in one (54 minute) chunk. I linked to that in my previous Norco post, but that version divides the video up into three chunks.

Bonus #2: Here’s something we hope you really like (especially you, RoadRich): a video on “Use of Force” from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC).

Bonus #3: This is short, but I thought it was worth putting up here. Simon Sinek on “The Most Toxic Person In The Workplace”.