Whipped Cream Difficulties

I have not been able to give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about the whole Drake/Chris Brown/Tony Parker kerfluffle. (If you are unaware of this, consider yourself lucky.) But there’s an interesting aspect to the story in today’s NYT.

W.i.P (the club where the fight broke out) and Greenhouse (another club) share both the building and a liquor license. Greenhouse has what the NYT characterizes as “a history of violence and other problems”. So…

…Faced with the prospect of being shut down, the owners signed an agreement with the Police Department in March 2011 that required them to scan the ID of everyone who passed through the club’s doors. The data was to be kept for at least 30 days, and provided to the police upon request.

Yep, that’s right. You go into a club, the club captures your ID, keeps it on file for 30 days, and gives it to the cops if they ask for it.

Gabriel Taussig, who heads the city Law Department’s administrative law division, said in a written response that starting in 2007, many nightclubs in the city had entered into agreements with the Police Department to scan the identification cards of patrons.

I’ve written previously about the Patricia Cook case (the woman who was shot by a cop in Culpepper, VA: the cop is now charged with murder). Reason has an interesting article about how the community used Facebook to draw attention to the case: the Facebook campaign led to increased press coverage and the discovery of a new witness. One thing that leaps out at me:

Local residents flooded the comment boards of the Star-Exponent*. Under the guise of anonymity, they defended “Pat” Cook, and called for an investigation into the Culpeper Police Department. “Two weeks after the shooting, [the publication] stopped that,” Jennings says of the message boards. “It deleted all the existing comments and all the existing discussion on that.” The paper relaunched with Facebook commenting, requiring people to identify themselves. At that point, the message boards for the small-town paper went silent. “I think people were afraid to speak up,” Jennings says, adding, “there are a couple of bullies in town.”

“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” indeed.

And do you remember Deputy James Mee of the LA County Sheriff’s Department? You might: he arrested Mel Gibson. Apparently, Mee later sued the department, claiming his superiors had tried to pressure him into removing Gibson’s anti-Semetic remarks from his report. Deputy Mee settled the suit for $50,000….

…and now the department is planning to fire him.

[Richard A.] Shinee [Mee’s lawyer] said the department is trying to fire Mee over a June 17, 2011, pursuit of a drunk driver who slammed into a gas station, causing a fire. Mee received a letter dated June 7 notifying him the department intended to fire him, Shinee said.
“Although they allege that he violated the pursuit policy, the letter is unclear and vague as to how that occurred,” Shinee said.

Mee’s lawyer claims that the department is also peeved because Mee testifed for one of his colleagues at a disciplinary hearing. The gentlemen in question was accused of drunk driving, Mee testifed as an expert on DWI, and…

The commission cited Mee’s testimony in its decision to clear the discipline case, finding that there was no credible evidence that the deputy involved had been drunk.

I don’t know what to make of this. My reading of the LAT account is that the LACSO is looking to get rid of a meddlesome deputy, but I concede that account is pretty one-sided. It would be interesting to see LACSO’s side of the story, but they probably can’t discuss it.