Archive for the ‘Cops’ Category

City Hall About to Burn Down Chicago Again?

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

The invaluable Second City Cop alerts us that Chicago Police Department Internal Affairs is investigating John Andrews, a cop who wrote an extremely critical blog post, asserting that the CPD is so badly managed, understaffed, and maintained that the city is “at War with Itself” and “Fast Tracking to Anarchy”. And that’s just the title. I’m not excerpting anything else. Go read SCC, and read John Andrews.

Daley and his cohorts need to burn. Chicago is one of America’s grand old cities, and Daley has run it into the ground as his personal, hereditary fiefdom.

If the nation blows up, folks, this could well be the primer.

Cold Water and Drowning

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Two life-saving articles. I’m very tempted to just reprint both in their entirety, but no. Just, as you love life and your children, read both of these:
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

  1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. Th e respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
  2. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
  3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
  4. Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
  5. From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.

Look for these other signs of drowning when persons are n the water:
* Head low in the water, mouth at water level
* Head tilted back with mouth open
* Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus
* Eyes closed
* Hair over forehead or eyes
* Not using legs – Vertical
* Hyperventilating or gasping
* Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway
* Trying to roll over on the back
* Ladder climb, rarely out of the water.

The Truth About Cold Water

  • It is impossible to die from hypothermia in cold water unless you are wearing flotation, because without flotation – you won’t live long enough to become hypothermic.
  • You Can’t Breath
  • You Can’t Swim
  • You Last Longer than You Think
  • Rescue Professionals Think You Live Longer
  • Out of the Water is Not Out of Trouble
    I lost count of the number of survivors I annoyed in the back of the helicopter because I wouldn’t let them move. I had a rule – if they came from a cold water environment – they laid down and stayed down until the doctors in the E.R. said they could stand. It didn’t matter to me how good they felt or how warm they thought they were. Because the final killer of cold water immersion is post-rescue collapse.

I excerpted more from that last not only because it’s the thing that surprised me the most, but because it contains a general survival rule:

Do What The Rescue People Tell You To Do

The drowning article also contains a story about a very annoyed couple trying to wave off a rescuer who refused to understand that they were fine and didn’t need any help — except he was coming for their daughter whom they didn’t realize was drowning.

Door Armor

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

Preventing kick-ins:

On a news station consumer testing video, it withstood repeated blows with a steel-pipe battering ram, although the door itself eventually broke.

Via Sipsey Street.

Unusual, Yes. Cruel, Oh Damn Sure Betcha!

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Lawdog:

here I am, staggering through the briefing room in search of a coffee pot when my Sergeant lays a fatherly arm across my shoulders.

“‘Dog,” sayeth that worthy, “I just received a grievance from TDC.”

I blink at him, muzzily.

“Seems like one of our prison-bound inmates has complained that the deputy who transported him to durance vile provided him with an actual child’s Happy Meal from McDonalds for lunch on said trip.”

I can smell coffee. It’s here. Somewhere.

“According to the inmate, when he protested, this deputy confiscated the toy from said Happy Meal, hooked it into the partition between the seats, and … I am quoting here … ‘Made it talk smack’, unquote, to the inmate for the rest of the trip.”

Coffee. Coffeecoffeecoffee.

“In a high, squeaky voice.”

If only we had, like, a Constitution or something, I dunno, that would prevent abuse like this.

Possibly by allowing intended victims to carry firearms so as to preempt the misery of would-be perpetrators.

Presumption of Competence

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Son of a gun.

No sooner had I posted my “elevator pitch” for liberty, but Billy Beck points me to Wendy McElroy’s excellent expansion of the idea, “A Legal Presumption of Competence.”

A core principle of the Nanny State is that people do not know their best interests and must be treated like children with the State acting as guardian. Indeed, that’s where the word “nanny” comes from. The Nanny State proceeds from the presumption that you are incompetent to administer your own life. Even fully-functioning adults are deemed unable or unwilling to make wise decisions and, so, the state rushes in to fill the void with extensive regulation of every individual’s personal health and safety.

How much transfat or salt can be in your fast food burger? You are too obese, too nutritionally ignorant, too addicted to McDonalds to be trusted. Should you smoke, drink, or chow down on sweets? Of course not! But if you do, then, like a good parent, the State will force you to bear the cost of irresponsibility by uber-taxing your minor vices and imprisoning you for the major ones.

The “wise parent” list scrolls on and on: wear a helmet while bicycling, don’t use saccharine, no public nudity, don’t loiter in parks, monitor your words to coworkers, don’t download porn, take a urine test at work, don’t drive too fast, take only approved drugs and only in the prescribed fashion, strap on your safety belt, pay a tax for the error of fast food, no smoking in public places, register your handgun, don’t use incandescent bulbs, recycle, homogenize all milk, buy health insurance. . . . And, recently, Maine was pushing to eliminate sex-specific bathrooms because separate “men’s” and women’s” rooms discriminate against your gender rights. Yes, where you take a piss is now a matter of state to be debated by legislatures, and all because they want to protect you. Happily, Maine has backed away from politicizing toilets.

It gets better. Read it all.

But especially read this:

There is a word to describes the situation in which another party claims ownership over the body of another: it is “slavery.” As such, the Nanny State is misnamed. Although it would like to project the image of a wise guardianship of children — a sort of stern Mary Poppins who uses a “spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down” — a more accurate image is that of a slave owner. One hand of the Nanny State may be wagging an admonishing finger at you but the other hand is holding a whip at-the-ready.

Slavery. That’s really what we’re talking about here.


Oh, and that’s not all from Beck:

The entire effect — if not the purpose — of a jaywalking statute is to strip the individual of that which he is born with: the principal device with which humans are able and naturally authorized to make their ways through the world.

Me? I know how to get across a street. My parents saw to that at an early age.

As usual, Beck gets right to core of the thing, and you should read every golden word.

This was his comment over at Radley’s Agitator article concerning a woman who got punched in the face by a cop over a jaywalking ticket.

John Venlet was talking about “Fort Sumters”, and I was talking about small individual actions, “candles not forest fires”.

This, folks, is what candles look like.

Also notice in the video that damn near every person in the crowd had a phonecam out. No effort to arrest the guy making this video, it would have been futile.

Imagine the woman quoting the Constitution, the law, the Declaration, Locke, Paine, Henry, Jefferson, or, hell, Beck, making a principled stand against a minor tyranny.

Now imagine everybody in that crowd with a gun on their hip, nodding their heads at every word she says and scowling at the cops.

Imagine that freedom, liberty itself, was politically correct.

Hahahaha! What a ridiculous idea! I slay myself sometimes.

Human Shields: Not Just For Jihadis

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

An appalling, frightening conjecture from Second City Cop in Chicago:

We’ve also noticed a disturbing phenomenon lately. On a number of occasions, we have seen male subjects carrying infants around. The males are dressed in the uniform of the day, baggy jeans and white t-shirts, while the infants are dressed contrasting colors and being carried out front rather obviously. It was striking enough to catch our notice more than once.

After this shooting, we’re afraid we may have discovered the reason for heretofore inattentive fathers suddenly taking an interest in the child:

* Human Shields

The nighttime travels that put children in danger can almost be explained by ignorance. The carrying of infants in differing colors seems more sinister. Especially when we know the carriers to have rap sheets more than a few pages long.

And as the story he relates shows, the value of those shields may be eroding.

I hope so. I hope this fad burns out very fast.

But what that says about Mayor Daley’s gun free paradise, and the people who live in it, is heartbreaking.

It sounds like some residents in Chi-town are dabbling their toes in the sucking tar pit of complete social breakdown, the kind of thing that bad action movies and SF dystopias would show as a precursor to cannibalism — and not out of starvation, although that will come, but out of sheer disregard for human life.

SCC, get you and your family out of town. Convince as many of your colleagues, friends and neighbors as you are able. You can’t fix it, not legally, you can’t slow it down, you’ll just get eaten. Oh. you’ll take a lot of the zombies with you, but they will get you in the end.

And we need you.

Nutjobs

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

I visit several cop blogs on a daily basis, mostly to learn how to behave in encounters with the police. As valuable as these sites are, and as much as I am sympathetic with their authors in their honest efforts to protect us, many of them strike me as having forgotten what it is like to be an un-badged civilian, to simply want to go about our daily business as quickly and painlessly as possible without drowning in the minutiae of the traffic code.

Second City Cop is an outstanding exception. (So is Law Dog, but sadly, he is more often than not MIA.) SCC concentrates on exposing the corruption of Chicago politics, especially as it affects police operations. You should go there at least once a week to understand the political hothouse in which Obama flowered.

SCC gets it. He understands his role in protecting the Constitution, not just enforcing the law. He respects the citizens in his jurisdiction, and he respects their liberty.

Witness today’s post on the Hutaree, writing about “all the hyperactive “reporting” tying a Michigan Militia group to Christians, right-wing hate groups, Tea Party activists and every other entity opposed to the Obama socialist agenda:”

There are people on both sides of the political spectrum that hate each and every one of us because we wear the uniform of a police officer. We are the most visible functionary of government. We are easily identifiable by our uniform and are tasked with carrying out the laws passed by the elected legislators, regardless of personal feelings. This makes us targets. And sometimes the targets are well-armed morons who dream up some scary shit.

We won’t get into the piss-poor reporting done on this story, nor the media smear jobs twisting this into something it obviously isn’t. Violence against the police and government isn’t the exclusive domain of either political wing, but it has been advocated and exercised far more often by the leftists than the right.

Even though he is a member of the target class, SCC refuses to allow himself to sucked into the hysteria. He is a staunch advocate of the Second Amendment, and understands who makes up the true militia: his fellow citizens, badged and unbadged.

Good on him, and thank you, sir.

[Incidentally, he appears to quote this article "by an old acquaintance of ours" at the Sun-Times.]

“Trepanazine” Needs a PDR Writeup, Stat

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

So, your friendly neighborhood Ambulance Driver describes a malady for which “220 grains of Trepanazine” is the recommended treatment regimen.

You arrive on the scene for the unconscious male lying in the roadway, cruise slowly past the police cars blocking traffic, and without even getting out of your ambulance, you roll down the window and bark, “Leon! Get your ignorant ass outta the road! Someone runs over you, you might damage a perfectly good car!”

And not only does Leon obediently cease being an impediment to traffic flow, he also hobbles meekly to your ambulance and climbs aboard. You should have seen the face of the cops who called us.

Which is indeed educational, but WTF is “Trepanazine”? A Google search turns up no dosing info, no link to the manufacturer, no….Oh, wait.

“Trepanazine” as in “trepanning“, right? Drilling a hole in the skull to let out the evil spirits, or “remove the stone of madness”?
trepanning-Hieronymus_Bosch_053-w

Slight risk of lead poisoning with the dosage I believe AD refers to.

And I note that the 230 grain dose for close-range injection is far more common than 220 grains.
bullet45acp-w

Showing Up

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Officer Krupke from Cop’n'attitude did. No, nothing special. Just showed up, did his eighteen hour shift, and went home.

When some of his fellow officers, “including supervisors”, decided to stay home behind the snow, he’s ticked at his department for reasons he didn’t go into, and the Days Inn he stayed at close to his station ripped him off.

Sometimes the simple stuff needs to be recognized, and this is one of those times. Thanks, Officer. And thanks to all the cops, firefighters, and medics who went out in the cold and snow and did what needed to be done.

The Power to License a Right Is the Power to Destroy It

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

The First Circuit has upheld the power of Massachusetts police to draw on and arrest a concealed carry license holder and seize his weapon even after he has displayed his license, because there is no mechanism to confirm the license is valid.

Understand: the police can threaten and arrest a law abiding citizen for exercising a Constitutionally protected right, a right he has, in addition, gone through considerable trouble to license, including the training so often demanded by citizen control fanatics like the Brady Campaign and Violence Policy Center.

He’s jumped through all the hoops, and still faces violent arrest and confiscation by an office who lectures him that he is “the only person allowed to carry a weapon on his beat”.

The case stems from a lawyer who sued a police officer after he was detained for lawfully carrying a concealed weapon while in possession of a license to carry concealed. According to the case opinion, the lawyer, Greg Schubert, had a pistol concealed under his suit coat, and Mr. Schubert was walking in what the court described as a “high crime area.” At some point a police officer, J.B. Stern, who lived up to his last name, caught a glimpse of the attorney’s pistol, and he leapt out of his patrol car “in a dynamic and explosive manner” with his gun drawn, pointing it at the attorney’s face.

Officer Stern “executed a pat-frisk,” and Mr. Schubert produced his license to carry a concealed weapon. He was disarmed and ordered to stand in front of the patrol car in the hot sun. At some point, the officer locked him in the back seat of the police car and delivered a lecture. Officer Stern “partially Mirandized Schubert, mentioned the possibility of a criminal charge, and told Schubert that he (Stern) was the only person allowed to carry a weapon on his beat.”

For most people, this would be enough to conclude that they were being harassed for the exercise of a constitutional right, but the officer went further, seizing the attorney’s pistol and leaving with it. Officer Stern reasoned that because he could not confirm the “facially valid” license to carry, he would not permit the attorney to carry. Officer Stern drove away with the license and the firearm, leaving the attorney unarmed, dressed in a suit, and alone in what the officer himself argued was a high crime area.

In effect, this ruling means that a concealed carry license — or any license, really — does not confer the protection of the law on the licensed activity, does not protect even the presumption of innocence, but merely protects you against charges actually being filed, and against conviction. Any suppressive action short of that is permissible.

“Shall not be infringed”. How the bloody hell is this not “infringement”?