Goodbye, Dylan.

Dylan Francisco, who was killed in Chicopee, as seen in a Facebook profile photo uploaded June 24, 2016.

This is Dylan Francisco, a 15 year old murdered by coward and gun fetishist Jeffrey Lovell.

Funeral services have been scheduled for a 15-year-old boy who was shot to death by a homeowner Saturday. […] The teenager, whose obituary who gives his full name as Dylan Christopher Waitson-Francisco, attended the Glenwood School in Springfield for elementary school, according to the obituary. Later he attended middle school in Chicopee. He also started working for the Summer Youth Program with the Valley Opportunity Council in July.

He leaves his mother and step-father, Heather Francisco and Steven Beauregard, and three siblings, Damien and Desiree Francisco and Anthony Beauregard.

Sounds like a good kid, who was gunned down for being a teenager doing teenager things. Unfortunately, this has sparked discussion of the so-called Castle doctrine, where some people are actually defending Lovell. Thankfully, there is no Stand Your Ground law in Massachusetts. So, where are all the pro-lifers, screaming in outrage over this child’s death? Where is anyone screaming in outrage over this death? You know we’re beyond fucked when the important conversation is deemed to be one over whether or not castle doctrine applies. I’m sure that’s of great comfort to Dylan’s family and friends.

Here in Massachusetts, there is no stand your ground law.

However, local attorneys said that homeowners have some rights, but they come with standards.

“To obtain the defense of self defense, the homeowner has to show that the intruder had actually entered into the home of the person who fired the shot in self defense. Furthermore, there has to be a threat of imminent serious hard. In other words, if the person has a weapon or threatens a weapon, if a person doesn’t have a weapon, I don’t believe there is a right to use force like a gun,” said Jack McQuade from the Law Offices of Mark E. Solomone.

Jeffrey Lovell.

“Mr. Lovell told this party to ‘get the f–k out’ and ‘stay the f–k out.’ As the … party continued to bang on the door Mr. Lovell stated that the window broke at which time Mr. Lovell raised his loaded S & W (Smith & Wesson) firearm and shot one round through the glass of the door,” the police report states.

The door has three windows lined up vertically. The top window broke when the boy was knocking on it, said James Leydon, spokesman for Gulluni.

“Mr. Lovell stated he aimed towards the … torso. After firing the weapon, Mr. Lovell then looked out of the kitchen door and saw the individual lying on the ground at the bottom of the stairs and the … individual was moaning,” the police report states.

[…]

When police arrived, they found no evidence that the victim entered the home, court records said.

“Mr. Lovell also indicated that the victim never entered his residence,” the police report says.

So, it’s obvious Mr. Lovell was not in any danger whatsoever, let alone imminent danger. I think it’s best to remember that this is the man who festooned his Pinterest page with photos of weapons along with “Can you say ‘pest control?’ Gotta get one. ”

Via MassLive, WMN, and MassLive.

“Can you say ‘pest control?’ Gotta get one. ”

Jeffery Lovell — (Chicopee Police Department)

A couple of teens were doing a very teenage thing, drinking and looking for a friend’s house. They didn’t find their friend, but they found a gun fondling lover of the 2nd amendment, and death.

A Massachusetts man, who used his Facebook page to promote the Second Amendment, is being held without bail after shooting through his front door and killing a teen who mistakenly knocked thinking it was a friend’s house.

Jeffery Lovell, 42, was charged with murder after killing an unidentified 15-year-old Saturday evening, reports MassLive.

According to prosecutors, “detectives were able to determine the victim, accompanied by a friend, were consuming alcohol at a near-by home that afternoon. The investigation indicates that the two friends were apparently confused while walking in the neighborhood and arrived at the address where the incident unfolded, believing it was the home of a friend, and began knocking at the door.”

Police state that Lovell went to his front door, gun in hand, and after trying to speak with the teen, shot him through the door after a pane of glass was broken.

I can certainly understand calling the cops if someone’s knocking broke a pane of glass anywhere on my house. That might be what I’d do. I have had very drunk people wander into my house, more than once. One time at about 2 or 3 in the morning. Got up, told them they were in the wrong place, waited for the penny to drop, and escorted them out. Being drunk should not result in a death penalty. It’s true that I don’t live urban, and I don’t deal with a high crime rate where I am. Back when I did, I would probably have been more inclined to call the cops.

MassLive reported that Lovell’s Facebook page featured a photo of him posing with a gun as his profile picture, along with posts promoting the Second Amendment.

While the Facebook page has been shut down, Lovell’s Pinterest page is still live and features multiple photos of handguns as well as a rifle under which Lovell wrote: “Can you say ‘pest control?’ Gotta get one. ”

Lovell was set to be arraigned in in Chicopee District Court on Monday.

This is what happens when you fetishize guns – you start viewing people as pests, as something beneath you, to be crushed, while you envision yourself as the great and grand defender of freedom, the guy in the white hat. And now a 15 year old person is dead.

Via Raw Story.

UPDATED.

Freddie Gray: Not Guilty Verdict.

Baltimore Lt. Brian Rice (Photo: Baltimore Police Department)

The final and highest-ranking officer involved in the arrest and ultimate death of Freddie Gray, Lt. Brian Rice, has been found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter, not guilty on the second degree reckless endangerment charge and not guilty on misconduct in office.

Gray suffered a broken neck while in the back of a police van that transported him on April 12, 2015. News of Gray’s death sparked protests across Baltimore, Maryland, and the nation as Black Lives Matter protesters demanded accountability.

The medical examiner in the case ruled that Gray’s injuries occurred inside the police van, but no officer involved has yet to be found guilty of his death. Gray wasn’t properly secured by a seat belt during transit and he didn’t receive immediate medical attention. It has left many in the Black Lives Matter movement frustrated that no justice can be found for those who have been killed at the hands of police.

Oh yes, of course, most people who aren’t properly seat belt secured just happen to break their necks, happens all the time! Thoroughly disgusting.

Via Raw Story.

The Norden – Police.

Holy shit, the contrast. Watch. Just watch. I want to live in Finland. Thanks to Ice Swimmer for this one! I was particularly impressed with the training, which shocked the LA cop. Not only the 3 years, but that they were being trained as part of the community, not as apart and elite, like is done here in uStates.

The Norden.

The Complexity of Road Signs.

The North Dakota DOT is replacing the old Highway Signs, as pictured on the right. Being that this is happening in ND, it will take half of forever, and the old signs will still be seen for some time, unless people start stealing them all, which might happen. Out in my part of the wilds, the old signs are still all over the place.

I’ve been conflicted about writing this up, it’s a bit more complex than it seems on the surface. It seems that most people feel replacing these signs is erasing Native people, and their presence here in Indian Country; that it’s a mark of disrespect and whitewashing. A lot of people are unaware of the history behind the sign, and who it honours. No, it’s not a generic Indian profile. It’s a specific honour to Red Tomahawk, later known as Marcellus Red Tomahawk. The Red Tomahawk family is a large one here in ND, and as far as I know, they are all good people.

The reason Marcellus Red Tomahawk was chosen to be honoured on the road markers was because white people felt he brought peace to the Plains by executing Sitting Bull. Marcellus Red Tomahawk was not in the least shy about recounting the event, but other peoples’ versions disagree with his account. Almost all of the accounts narrated by people other than Red Tomahawk place Bull Head as shooting first, striking Sitting Bull in the torso, whereupon Red Tomahawk pulled out a pistol and shot Sitting Bull in the head.

At this time, the Ghost Dance was spreading, and the white government and military feared it greatly. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the white people at the time believed in it more than Natives did. The 7th Cavalry carried out their massacre at Wounded Knee, citing the Ghost Dance as the justification. Sitting Bull did not take part in the Ghost Dance, however, he did not forbid his people from dancing. White authorities feared this meant the Indians would regains strength and continue to fight, rather than settle down into assimilation. The order was given to arrest Sitting Bull. The federal government had started instituting police on reservations, and Marcellus Red Tomahawk was one who joined the police force at Standing Rock rez. He had also embraced Christianity and was devout in that regard. Marcellus Red Tomahawk never disavowed his heritage, but it became terribly twisted by a desire to not only assimilate, but to be an important person among those he sought to be a part of, that of white men. While he himself often stayed dressed in regalia and traditional clothing, photos of his family show his wife and children dressed in the Western white manner. He sent his own children to the Carlisle Indian School:

One of Red Tomahawk’s sons came home in 1909 and committed suicide. I look upon what happened to Red Tomahawk as a tragedy, a by product of genocide and the demands of assimilation. It makes me feel so sad and wounded. Sitting Bull would never have survived arrest, he would have been murdered anyway, as Crazy Horse was, but it’s a hard thing to face that he died at the hands of his own. Personally, I’m glad the signs are being replaced, because they were never meant to honour Indigenous people at all. They were honour to a murder, an honour to the white way of doing things, a paean to how colonialism works.

ISIS, Pokémon Go, and Cyber-Demons.

Rick Wiles, a radio show evangelist Christian pastor with a fervent wish for end times, and an endless appetite for hate, has a new target.

Rick Wiles, who frequently warns the apocalypse is near, called police last week after spotting a middle-aged man apparently taking pictures with his phone outside his “TruNews” offices — but officers told him the man was playing the augmented reality game, reported Right Wing Watch.

That freaked Wiles all the way out, and he let his imagination run wild.

“These Pokémon creatures are like virtual, cyber-demons,” Wiles said. “What this man, Friday, was trying to find was the Pokémon demon that had been placed inside the ‘Trunews’ office.”

Wiles worried that terrorists could use information harvested by the app to target Christians.

“What if this technology is transferred to Islamic jihadists, and Islamic jihadists have an app that shows them where Christians are located geographically?” Wiles said.

Uh oh. All you people happily playing a game, you’re playing with DEMONS! I really don’t think that anyone, terrorist or no, would have any difficulty in locating Christians in uStates. It’s not as if we have you all handily quarantined to one geographical location. I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to find Christians anywhere. You don’t need the help of virtual cyber-demons of the Pokémon kind. Any old cyber-demon will do.

“The enemy, Satan, is targeting churches with virtual, digital, cyber-demons,” Wiles said. “I believe this thing is a magnet for demonic powers.”

It didn’t have to be terrorists, he warned, saying everyday Americans could be tricked into doing the wicked bidding of these “cyber-demons.”

“At what point does this game go live and the Pokemon masters are telling people to kill people in those buildings?” Wiles said. “People are losing touch with reality.”

Some people are losing touch with reality, yes. That’s quite obvious. It’s just not who you think, Pastor Wiles. *Cough*

He compared Pokémon GO to the Facebook Live broadcast of a traffic stop that led to Philando Castile’s fatal shooting, saying it showed how digital technology could alter reality.

“I thought, either this is staged or she has lost touch with reality,” Wiles said. “Which one is it? Both of them are weird and frightening.”

Ummm…so everything on the internet now is the equivalent of people shouting “photoshop!”? Generally speaking, someone who stages a death isn’t then buried. This is so damn offensive, I don’t know what to say. Except perhaps they should get off the radio, immediately. I hear it’s infested with fakery demons.

Wiles’ co-host, Edward Szall, agreed — and he backed up their argument with a fake quote by the creator of Pokémon that supposedly endorsed Satanism.

“They’re spawning demons inside your church,” Wiles said. “They’re targeting your church with demonic activity. This technology will be used by the enemies of the cross to target, locate and execute Christians.”

Oh, how convenient. So, virtual cyber-demons are going to locate, target, and execute Christians, and that’s all for real and genuine, but a live stream of cops murdering a man in broad daylight, why that’s just fake nonsense. Got it.

Via Raw Story.

Why Killer Cops Aren’t Prosecuted.

Max Becherer/AP Photo

Steve Russell (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. He lives in Georgetown, Texas) has a good article up at ICTMN. I’m just going to include a few points here. Click over to read the full, two page article.

2. When the officer is the perpetrator of the homicide, he or she is almost never interviewed in the same circumstances as other persons accused of homicide.

A civilian person of interest in a homicide may be interviewed without even a chance to change out of bloody clothes, and investigators will conduct the interview without a defense lawyer present, if possible. A spokesman for the Baton Rouge Police Department told The New York Times that the officers involved in the shooting of Alton Sterling were not interviewed the day of the incident because “we give officers normally a day or two to go home and think about it.”

Taking a human life unleashes powerful feelings even when doing so was necessary. Considering that, a police officer involved in a shooting will often be sent home right away and only returned to duty in a desk job. By union contract or by custom, the officer will have a lawyer provided and plenty of opportunity to talk to that lawyer before giving a statement for the record.

When the system finally does get around to recording the officer’s statement, the officer knows what’s on the video (if there is one, and there so often is now with phones and body-cams prevalent), and so is unlikely to give a statement that conflicts with it.

3. The normal burden of proof is reversed.

In normal circumstances, the homicide investigator is looking for facts to show probable cause to believe that an unjustified criminal homicide took place and the person of interest committed it.

Studies of how innocent people get convicted show a lot of “confirmation bias.” That is, investigators start with a theory of what happened and they minimize or disregard evidence that does not support their preferred theory.

When a police officer has deployed deadly force, the bias of every police investigator is to believe that the use of force was justified. Nobody wants to charge a fellow officer with a crime for coming down on the wrong side of a line around which they have had to dance. Rookie officers don’t get assigned to investigate other officers.

8. The prosecutor needs the police department and vice versa.

Should prosecutors and police start urinating on each other’s shoes, there is no practical limit to how bad each can make the other look in court, and in the court of public opinion.

For this reason, the investigation and prosecution of all officer-involved shootings need to be taken away from the department for which the accused officer works. The choices are a prosecutor from some other jurisdiction (complicated), a special prosecutor (expensive), or a prosecutor from the state Attorney General’s office (possible conflict of interest if the AG has to defend a civil suit from the same incident).

The final way to mitigate the team spirit between prosecutors and police officers is to go to a federal agency. To do this routinely would require legislation, because every officer involved shooting does not contain a federal issue.

Are the feds more competent and honest than the state police? Indians on reservations have strong opinions from watching Major Crimes Act cases.

We’ve come a long way since Indians could not testify against white people in court, but most of those rules came from states. The federal government has been better than that, the modern federal government lionized for honesty in the face of temptation in The Untouchables.

The FBI reported that between 1993 and early 2011, their agents killed 70 people and wounded 80 others. All 150 incidents were internally investigated by the agency that claims to be incorruptible and the source of forensic science that is state of the art for the entire world. How many FBI shootings out of 150 were found to be legally justified?

One hundred and fifty.

Full article is at ICTMN.

Faces.

A woman confronts stormtroopers. Credit: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters. Source.

A man being “detained”. Credit: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters. Source.

Ieshia Evans. Credit: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters. Source.

Police arrest activist DeRay McKesson during a protest along a major road that passes in front of the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters. (Max Becherer/Associated Press).

A man being “detained” by stormtroopers. Credit: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters.

Another person being “detained”. Credit: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters.

Once You’ve Broken the Law, There Is No Safe Space.

The stormtroopers in Baton Rouge have been particularly scary the past few days, and their more than questionable behaviour continues. Cops everywhere have been making up little Catch 22s that will see people arrested no matter what. Prior to DeRay McKesson being arrested, people were told to get on the sidewalk. When Protesters pointed out they were on the shoulder, because there wasn’t a sidewalk, they were arrested. In Baltimore, bus service to the protest area had been stopped by cops. Cops told people to disperse, but many of them had no way to do that because there were no buses. So, arrested for not dispersing. Ieshia Evans was arrested for impeding traffic, while that massive line of armored stormtroopers blocking the street was somehow just dandy for traffic. Now, when a homeowner offered her property as a safe place for protesters, the cops twisted about and came up with excuses to roust and arrest people anyway, saying there is no safe space, because you know, you just fucking might break the law at some point.

Hundreds of people in Baton Rouge who were peacefully protesting on private property Sunday evening were thrown into the street by police—and then several were arrested for being on the street.

Approximately 500 people had gathered at France and East in downtown Baton Rouge after first coming together at a nearby Methodist church to protest the police killing of Alton Sterling. Meeting the protesters were about 100 officers in riot gear. A homeowner gave the protesters safe refuge on her front lawn so they would not be arrested for being in the street.

“No justice, no peace!” they yelled.

After 90 minutes of peaceful assembly, police charged the crowd for no apparent reason. Protesters scattered, many running down a side street. Those protesters were then arrested for obstruction of a highway.

A wall of riot police then pushed the scattered protesters further away, block by block, and arrested some at the front of the crowd. “Clear the streets and leave the area!” one officer shouted through a bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly!”

The homeowner told CBS News she was “stunned” by police behavior.

“I kept telling them: ‘This is my property, please do not do that, I live here,’” she said. “They just looked at me and ignored the things I was saying.”

Lt. Jonny Dunham of the Baton Rouge Police Department said the protesters were arrested for previously breaking the law by obstructing a public passage by trying to get on an interstate on-ramp. “Once you’ve broken the law, there is no safe space.”

Throughout the confrontation, police threatened to arrest all journalists without credentials.

They "had already broken the law" Baton Rouge police explain why protesters were arrested on private property pic.twitter.com/I7pBpHPAsS

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) July 11, 2016

Allow me to emphasize that statement: “Once you’ve broken the law, there is no safe space.” We are fucked. All of us. If there’s no reason to arrest, they will make one up. Arrests will be justified on the basis of possible intent. Welcome to the dystopian nightmare.

this is currently going on in baton rouge, this is terrifying. #BatonRouge #BlackLivesMatter #AltonSterling pic.twitter.com/sYvrQzSteW

— greg (@n9viv) July 11, 2016

Baton Rouge home owner "very upset" after police storm her yard arresting protesters who had permission to be there pic.twitter.com/gwE8aRGKfL

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) July 11, 2016

Via Daily Beast and Raw Story.

Campaign Zero.

Read. Join. Help. Be a part of the solution. An article at Mother Jones highlights why this is so very necessary: Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People. Broken Window policing is a plague, and it needs to stop.

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