Santa doesn't send threatening cards

From the Huffington Post Canada:

In the spirit of the holidays, Abbotsford police are sending Christmas cards to gangsters and drug dealers featuring the police chief dressed as Santa in tactical gear.
A message in the card says: "We believe it is never too late to make a better choice for your life. For the sake of your family & for your own sake, consider 2013 the year you choose a new & better life. Make your New Year’s resolution now! We’re here to help."
The cards are being sent to "prolific offenders, property offenders and persons known for drug and gang activity," said police in a news release Monday.

Call me oversensitive, but if the police sent a card like this to me, my first call would be to the crown attorney to ask that they be charged with sending me threatening mail. My next call would be a civil litigator to sue the department for harrassment. Given that the police have been known to shoot people from time to time, I think it would be considered a credible threat. What's the difference between this and the cops sending out a note like this with "happy Valentine's Day" printed on the back?


pics on Sodahead

As to the cops Christmas card list of  supposed ne'er-do-wells, I imagine a good trial lawyer might have something to say about presumption of innocence and predjudical treatment should any of them land in court.
If you sent a neighbour you had repeatedly quarrelled with this kind of picture with note that said "You better stop letting your dog shit on my lawn or else" and were known to own guns, well, as they say "I am not lawyer, but..."  You can bet that if one of the recipients of these cards sent back a photo of themselves with an assault rifle that read "thinking of you this Christmas" they would be in jail by Boxing Day.
If someone from the Occupy Movement had themselves photographed as Saint Nick holding a bag of feathers and a pail of hot tar and sent it out to a bunch of  Wall Street types with the message "He knows if you've been bad or good, so you better be good for goodness sake" just imagine the howls of outrage. Don't think for a second they wouldn't be prosecuted. Why should the police be treated differently?

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All in all, they're all just bricks in the wall

"When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children any way they could"

So many authoritarian nitwits, so little time to blog. This kid is probably lucky they didn't taser her when she started crying. Almost as disturbing is the reaction of America's least favorite conservative law professor and box-wine sommelier (as noted by Pandagon). Obviously, the teacher cannot ignore a student writing on their desk and must instill respect for the property of others blah blah blah, but I think handcuffing and arresting a12-year-old teaches another lesson - fear your teacher! Don't step out of line! fear school!


Way to put the "Pal" in "Principal" Ms. Grant! What do you do if the kids chew gum in class, waterboard them? I was a fairly well-behaved kid in school, and my high school shenannigans tended to the bizarre and comical, rather than the destructive, but if I had a principal like this running my school, there definitely would have been major problems. It may be that by completely overreacting and responding in a way that would be considered child abuse if a parent had done it, Principal Grant may have done 12-year-old Alexa a favor and taught her a lesson she won't soon forget. Not the lesson she intended, but a lesson nonetheless: The people in charge aren't here to help you. The people in charge will abuse you any chance they get. Property is more important than people to the people in charge. The people in charge are a vicious bunch of hysterical fools more intent on showing they are in charge at all costs than actually doing their jobs.
Twelve is pretty early to learn a lesson like that, but at least there is time for her sense of idealism and trust to grow back.
I don't mean to malign all teachers and school administrators, far from it. I think teaching is a noble profession and that teachers get too little respect, too little credit and too much blame in our society. The vast majority are hardworking,nurturing souls who care about the kids they are trying to educate. Hurrah for teachers.
That said, as in any profession, there are those who have gone into it for the wrong reasons, those who have been defeated by the challenges of the job and now just coast and most dangerous of all, those who abuse their authority. In teaching, as in the police, there is no one more dangerous than a petty tyrant. Bullies suck in any line of work, but one with a badge, gun and taser who has been given a licence to hassle people is dangerous, not only for the abuses of power they commit, but for the effect it has in undermining respect for the law and police.
The same is true of authoritarian principals, vice-principals, coaches and teachers who think that they are entitled to bully and abuse the children entrusted to their care. Not only do they traumatize the individual kids they "discipline," but they also destroy the trust of the other students and parents in the system. They teach kids not to ask questions, not to stand up for themselves, not to think independently. Ditto for those petty dictators who insist on enforcing ill-considered "zero-tolerance" policies to the absolute letter, even while completely ignoring the spirit of the rule. They teach kids that being tolerant, reasonable, flexible and even merciful is wrong and that the kid bringing a plastic butter knife in his lunch to spread cream cheese on his bagel has committed the same crime as a kid who brings a machine gun to class.
Principal Grant may think that by having a kid arrested and jailed for writing her desk that she is sending a message to the other kids that she and the school will not tolerate any misbehaviour, but the message the kids will take to heart is that if they are to be hung for a sheep, why not take the whole flock? If just writing on the desk gets you sent to jail, you might as well set fire to that sucker, and the classroom as well, since you are going to be treated the same way for any offense, no matter how small.

Don't bring a gun to a snowball fight

Another cop who should be flipping burgers. And another set of brain-dead 'moran' commenters who's mouths should be filled in with cement. And yes, I'm talking about you "Ganhdiablo," "jblackrupert" and "nos744"

Some days at work are more entertaining than others

From the dept. of You Couldn't Make This Up:

Policeman held over theft of schoolgirl's underwear
The Yomiuri Shimbun
KOBE--A policeman was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of stealing undergarments from a 14-year-old girl while visiting her house to question her about a crime she had witnessed, police said.
Arrested was Yuki Miyamoto, 26, a policeman from Aboshi Police Station in Hyogo Prefecture.
According to the police, at about 1:50 p.m. Saturday, Miyamoto went to the second-year middle school student's house in Himeji in the prefecture, to question her about a case of public indecency she had witnessed earlier the same day.
Miyamoto is believed to have entered the student's room and stolen about 25 items of underwear.
The student told police that when she was about to take a bath, she noticed her underwear was missing. Her mother reported the theft to the police.
The police questioned Miyamoto about the incident on the same day.
They said Miyamoto has admitted to the allegations.
"It's inexcusable that a uniformed policeman committed a crime during the course of duty," Junichi Wada, head of the Hyogo prefectural police's office of personnel supervision said. "In addition to investigating the facts, we'll deal strictly [with this matter]."
(Oct. 21, 2009)

and I had almost forgotten this one from last month. I was going to post it when it first ran in our paper, but I was uh...holding it, for later use.

33% of men sit to pee: Toto poll
KITAKYUSHU (Kyodo)
About one in three Japanese men tend to sit on the toilet when urinating at home, according to results of a survey by toilet maker Toto Ltd.
The Internet survey conducted in May, covering 500 men in their 20s to 60s whose homes have Western-style toilets, found 33.4 percent said they prefer to sit, citing "ease of posture" and "to make cleaning easier" as the main reasons.
The figure was 9.7 percent higher than in Toto's last survey in 2004.
Takuji Yano of Toto's public relations department said, "It seems that people are tending to be more conscious about the bathrooms in their home, such as equipping washlet attachments to the toilet and trying to keep them cleaner."

I wonder if Pastor Anderson knows about this?

Why cops don't belong in schools

My only question about this incident is why it took so long to happen.

Teens question authority. It is what they do, it is practically hardwired into the DNA. Putting an authority figure in their way for no good reason is just asking for trouble. If that authority figure is a coach or a teacher or a vice principal, even one with a chip on their shoulder, they are at least used to dealing with kids. A police officer may not be as experienced in dealing with kids. And one that decides to arrest a teenager for making "bacon" jokes or being a smart ass, is not someone who should be working in a school.

Who is the cop supposed to be protecting the students from? And who is protecting the students from the cops?

Off-duty, but "on the job"

Yet another thug in uniform gets treated with kid gloves for an offense that would have gotten a civilian tasered, beaten and jailed for a least a year. If it hadn't been for the video of the drunken 250 pound off-duty cop beating up the 110 pound bartender, the cop probably wouldn't have even gotten probation.

Killer cops strike again


Police respond to a report of a brawl on a train platform in Oakland on New Years Eve. In the process of rousting a group of young men, the cops take one man, who is telling is friends to settle down, lay him down on his belly, and somewhere along the line shoot him dead.



What is really chilling in this video - and there are several others out there on the internet - is the total lack of reaction by the cops to the gun shot. For the most part, they don't even bat an eye. If the shot was accidental, what was the cop doing with his gun out in the first place? The man who was killed, 22-year-old Oscar Grant, was clearly not resisting. Even if, as some have suggested, the officer, Johannes Mehserle, a two-year veteran of the Bay Area transit police, was reaching for his taser not his gun, what the hell was he doing reaching for a weapon at all?


How long will police officers continue to be given the benefit of the doubt when they assault or even murder people -in front of dozens of witnesses in this case- simply because someone challenges their authority or otherwise annoys them?



Mario Pangelina, Mesa's brother who was riding on the same train, two cars behind Grant on Thursday morning, said Sunday he saw Grant beg police not to Taser him because of his child.
"He kept saying, 'Please, please don't Tase me,"' Pangelina said. "He was not acting hostile."
Other witnesses said Grant was lying on his stomach on the station's platform when he was shot.

Update: This case isn't going to go away. Over 100 arrests were made at this protest-turned-riot Wednesday night in Oakland. Reading the newspaper accounts, it sounds like coverage of the Watts riots.