Archive for the ‘Cops’ Category

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I may have spoke too soon.

Thursday, November 19th, 2020

This might be the headline of the day:

Rapper with flamethrower in custody over NYC bus stunt

More context:

Authorities said Dupree G.O.D was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon. There was no information on when he would be arraigned. He was in police custody Wednesday night.
The musical artist was filmed earlier this month in an unauthorized stunt that he said was part of a tribute video for the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan. The clip gained attention on social media after a police union tweeted it as an example of the city becoming less safe.

And of course:

I’m really not sure I see the “reckless endangerment” part of that charge. It seems to me that he was pointing it away from and above people. As for the “criminal possession of a weapon” charge, well, maybe, given that this is NYC.

Posted in Art, Cops, Firings, Hysteria, Law, Media, NYPD | 3 Comments »

Headline of the day.

Thursday, November 19th, 2020

(Though this actually is datelined yesterday.)

Ponzi Scheme Suspect Uses Underwater Scooter to Flee F.B.I.

The story is exactly as it says on the tin:

Tracked by air and trailed by F.B.I. agents and members of the California Highway Patrol, Mr. Piercey, 44, of Palo Cedro, Calif., was seen removing something from his truck and entering the frigid water with it in his street clothes, the authorities said. After about 25 minutes in the lake, part of which he spent submerged, a very cold and wet Mr. Piercey emerged and was arrested, the Justice Department said.

Posted in Cops, FBI, Law, Media | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 218

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020

Thought I’d post some gun stuff today, for reasons.

Miami Police Department’s patrol rifle class:

Bonus #1, also a bookmark for me: Ryan Cleckner explains milliradians.

Bonus #2: this is kind of gun adjacent, but I’m posting this explicitly as Lawrence bait: “Greatest Tank Battles”, on “The Battle of 73 Easting”.

Bonus #3: “Japanese Guns of World War 2”, from LionHeart FilmWorks.

(See also. Affiliate link, but it delights me down to the bottom of my shriveled little coal black heart that a lot of this stuff is coming back in Kindle editions.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Cops, Guns, Kindleing, Law | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 170

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

Today, I wanted to put up something that pushes a few of RoadRich’s hot buttons (and my own).

The California Highway Patrol has a YouTube channel. I thought it might be interesting to look at some aspects of operations that are common to both the Austin Police Department and the CHP. These are things that APD devotes presentations to in their Citizen’s Police Academy (which is on-hold at the moment), so why not take a look at how a department outside of the United States handles these things?

First up: “Air Operations”. This is a two-parter: Part 1.

(Can I note here that I hate “vlog”? I would say I hate the word, but it isn’t even a word.)

Part 2: this covers CHP’s fixed-wing (that is, not helicopter) operations.

You know what else CHP has? The mounted police.

You know I had to do that.

Anyway, the CHP mounted patrol.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Cops, Horses, Law, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 162

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

I haven’t posted any vintage police training videos in a while, because I really haven’t been finding any. At least, none have been popping up in my YouTube feed.

However, I went looking for a specific FBI video that Bill Vanderpool mentioned in his book, Guns of the F.B.I. : A History of the Bureau’s Firearms and Training. (Longer write up about that book to come.) I couldn’t find it, but I did find this:

“Officer Down Code Three” from 1975. This is one of those Motorola videos, but the quality of the transfer seems to me to be a bit higher. It is also interesting for another reason: this video is adapted from Pierce R. Brooks’s book of the same name.

Officer Down Code Three is considered by some to be the first “officer survival” book. It precedes the somewhat more famous Street Survival by about five years.

Rather than going into more detail about the book and author, I will refer you to this excellent review from FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training.

Bonus: vintage LAPD recruiting film from the 1950s.

Posted in Books, Cops, FBI, History, Law | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 128

Wednesday, August 5th, 2020

I’ve done a lot of plane stuff the past couple of days, so I wanted to break with that theme and do something different.

I haven’t run across any good car stuff yet. There are a lot of train videos coming up: many of them seem to be POV videos of guys hopping freight trains, and they all have the problem of being long.

Likewise, there are a lot of police video channels on the ‘Tube. It seems that various people have figured out that getting hold of body cam footage under local public records laws and posting it on YouTube is a good way to get views. Unfortunately, while I enjoy watching stupid people get theirs (especially stupid cop impersonators who are dumb enough to wear body cameras while impersonating a police officer) many of those also have the disadvantage of being long, long, long.

Here’s one that is about coffee break sized, though, that I’m putting up because it isn’t just Florida Man (“Florida Man, Florida Man…”) but also Florida Lunatic.

Bonus video: I’m being self-indulgent with this one, obviously. But when was the last time I was self-indulgent?

(That was a rhetorical question. Don’t answer that.)

Legendary shooter Jerry Miculek shows off his K-frame .22 revolvers, talks about his friendship with the equally legendary Roy Jinks, and takes some shots at 240 yards with an 85-year old K-22.

(By the way, you can still get Smith and Wesson history letters, but the current price is $100. It’s $90 if you belong to either the Smith and Wesson Historical Foundation or the Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association, or $75 if you belong to both organizations.)

Posted in Cops, Guns, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 29, 2020.

Wednesday, July 29th, 2020

NYT obit for John Saxon.

Lawrence sent me this story, which was also covered by Second City Cop: Dion Boyd, a Chicago PD officer (recently promoted to “deputy chief of criminal networks”) apparently committed suicide yesterday.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Please don’t fucking kill yourself. Entirely aside from the fact that you’ll miss all the movies of the next few decades, that you’ll miss the chance to fake your own death and escape to a South American country and become the mysterious foreigner who lives in the jungle, that you’ll leave behind a body that somebody has to clean up… you have a pretty significant chance of ending up in a nursing home, just conscious enough to feel pain and humiliation, for the rest of your life.
Give it another year. Do something different. Talk to somebody about it. Don’t end up on my unit with ARDS from inhaling your own vomit when the pills kick in. If the Huntington’s is closing in and you really gotta go before you turn into a slack-lipped veggie on a vent, plan that shit out and have your family by your bed. If you don’t think you could convince someone to sit by your bedside while you die, it’s not time for you to die yet.

Posted in Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

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

Tuesday, July 14th, 2020

I kind of thought I was done with the Art watch. But great and good FotB RoadRich sent me a second tip yesterday.

In a June 2 video, the current Houston police chief takes aim at Austin diversity while also seemingly blaming the city’s residents for inciting violence in Houston.
…
“I plead with you, [Houston] is the most diverse city in the United States. This isn’t Austin, Texas, where they’re diverse as long as they’re on the east side of 35,” said the police chief. “This is Houston, Texas. And for the people of Austin who want to come here and tear shit up, you’re in the wrong fucking city.”

Yeah. People from Austin were driving 300 miles round trip to tear (stuff) up in Houston, Art.

It’s unclear from the series of videos how Acevedo gets the megaphone, but he uses it to take another shot at Austin. “I know there are people here from Austin yelling at me and stuff from Austin, but I’m here to tell you, you ain’t in Austin,” Acevedo says. “You are in Houston. You are in H-Town.”
“One of the things I know is I’ve been coming here my whole life,” he continues. “We may fight, we may be angry at each other, but we know that when all these fucking people come out here from the outside trying to tear this shit up while the rest of the country’s burning. Nothing’s burning in Houston.”

Yeah, you’re in H-Town, all right, where Art Acevedo’s police department executed two innocent people during a drug raid. But somehow this is all Austin’s fault. We’re just out to get Art and his police department.

“One of the things I know is I’ve been coming here my whole life…”

Acevedo served as Austin police chief for nine years before taking the top job in Houston in 2016. He grew up in California, according to his HPD biography, and began his career in law enforcement in 1986 with the California Highway Patrol.

Posted in Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2020.

Saturday, June 13th, 2020

William Sessions, former FBI director.

…in a tenure crowded with troubles and stumbling responses, Mr. Sessions presided for less than six years over an agency that mounted much-criticized deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas; tried to enlist American librarians to catch Soviet spies; and was forced to concede that agents in the past had overzealously spied on Americans protesting government policies in Central America.

…

The first of the sieges under his watch occurred in 1992, when for 11 days the F.B.I.’s hostage rescue team surrounded a fugitive white separatist and others holed up in an isolated cabin on Ruby Ridge, near the Canadian border. After a United States marshal and the fugitive’s wife and son were killed by gunfire, a public furor arose questioning that use of deadly force. Mr. Sessions was not directly involved in the episode or accused of any wrongdoing, but the F.B.I.’s reputation was tarnished.
His agency again faced heavy criticism in 1993 over another violent standoff. This one began when four agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and six members of a cult called the Branch Davidians were killed in a gun battle at their compound near Waco, Texas. After a 51-day F.B.I. siege, President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno, fearing mass suicide, authorized a tear-gas assault on April 19. The compound caught fire. At least 75 people died, including many children.
By then, F.B.I. morale was abysmal and Mr. Sessions, a Republican stranded in a Democratic limbo, was under pressure to resign. His critics said he had failed to redefine the F.B.I.’s crime-fighting and domestic counterintelligence missions after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 during the administration of President George Bush. Some associates called him disengaged, a director who relished the trappings of high office but not the grind of bureau business.
But most damaging to Mr. Sessions was an internal Justice Department report — issued late in the Bush administration but pursued by the Clinton administration — accusing him of ethical violations, including using F.B.I. planes to visit relatives and friends around the country, often taking his wife; using agents to run personal errands; and having a $10,000 fence built around his Washington home at federal expense.

Posted in FBI, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2020.

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

Following up to yesterday’s obit watch, “Live PD” is now cancelled.

According to the Deadline article thoughtfully sent to us by Mike the Musicologist, there were discussions about bringing the show back in some form:

But A&E and the show’s production company pulled the plug yesterday.

Airing Friday and Saturday nights from 9 PM-12 AM, Live P.D. was ad-supported cable’s #1 show on Fridays and Saturdays in 2019 and has helped A&E become a leading cable network. The series had risen to the top spots in all cable during the pandemic when live sports were suspended, drawing a total of about 3 million viewers per weekend.

Bonnie Pointer, co-founder of the Pointer Sisters.

She left the group in the late 1970s and signed with Motown; she also married Jeffrey Bowen, a producer there. Her two albums for that label were heavy with disco remakes of 1960s Motown singles, like the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” with Ms. Pointer recording most of the vocal parts herself. The most successful in this formula was “Heaven Must Have Sent You,” which went to No. 11 in 1979.

Mary Pat Gleason, working actress. 174 credits on IMDB.

Pierre Nkurunziza, president of Burundi. He was 55, and apparently died of a heart attack.

Posted in Cops, Law, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 59

Thursday, May 28th, 2020

An assortment today. No unifying theme.

Police videos have been kind of skimpy recently because they haven’t been popping up in my YouTube recommendations. If I narrow the topics down to just “law enforcement”, I get…nothing but “Live PD” clips. Now, I have nothing against “Live PD”: I don’t watch it, because we don’t have cable, but I’ll certainly sit through a YouTube clip. In a private window in my browser, not signed in to YouTube, so why are these clips showing up in my recs? And if people want to watch “Live PD” clips, you all know where to find them, right?

Anyway, I finished the book great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn recommended back when I posted about the Newhall shootout: Newhall Shooting – A Tactical Analysis: Survival Lessons from One of Law Enforcement’s Deadliest Shootings (affiliate link) and I do recommend it, with some small quibbles.

One thing I learned from that book: in addition to the CHP Newhall training film, the LA County Sheriff’s Department made their own training film. I think you are better served watching the CHP film first, as the quality of the transfer on this one isn’t that great, and I have questions about the accuracy of LACSD’s film. In the interest of the historical record, however, here it is:

Totally unrelated: ever wonder about astronaut weightlessness training in the days before the “Vomit Comet”? Yeah, I do, too. Wikipedia says that the Mercury astronauts trained in a C-131. But this purports to be vintage film of Glenn, Grissom, and Shepherd training in an F-100F (not all three at the same time, obviously):

And speaking of the F-100: “TAC On Target”, from 1962, which features various aircraft in action (including the F-100, F-104, F-105, and F-4C).

I’ll just note: for those of you who work for, or deal with, a certain large company in the computer networking area (hi, Borepatch!) “TAC On Target” may have an entirely different connotation for you.

Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Cops, History, Law, Planes | Comments Closed

Noted.

Thursday, May 28th, 2020

I don’t usually link to Reason unless it is backup for a blog entry, or to make a larger point.

But I do rather like this J.D. Tuccille piece, “In Praise of Pointy Things“, and commend it to your attention.

Story: when I was going through the citizen’s police academy in !Austin, the chief of police showed up pretty regularly. There’s an entire class block devoted to his presentation on officer related stress and the physiology of critical encounters.

He likes to tell a story about asking his officers, “Why do you carry a knife?” and then mocking their responses. “In case I need to cut a seat belt.” “When was the last time you had to cut somebody out of a seat belt?” And so on, and so on. I kind of like the guy in general, but this is one aspect of his style I don’t get.

His answer: “In case I need to stab you.”

My answer: “Because I am a tool using animal. I have evolved over millions of years to be able to use tools. A knife is a tool.“

Posted in Cops, Knives | Comments Closed

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