The FBI takes the isolated incident into horror-film territory.

It’s going to be a while before things get back to normal for Judy Sanchez and her three-year-old daughter.

Last Thursday, a team of FBI agents swarmed her apartment building as part of a massive citywide drug and weapons gang raid.

Trouble is, Sanchez lives in apartment 2R.

The suspect they were after is in 2F.

At 6:04 last Thursday morning, just before Sanchez’ alarm was set to go off, she heard a pounding outside her second floor apartment.

“I just happened to glance over and saw this huge chainsaw ripping down the side of my door,” she explains. “And I was freaking out. I didn’t know what was going on.”

Within moments, the chainsaw had cut through most of her door, and someone on the FBI’s arrest team kicked the rest of it in.

“That’s when I heard the clicking of a gun and I heard ‘FBI, get down!’, so I laid right on down.

If the purpose of these raids is to take dangerous people by surprise before they can shoot back at police, how exactly does taking the door down with a chainsaw fit that strategy?

With each passing year, the difference between America’s prisons and America’s public schools becomes smaller and smaller.  As you read the rest of this article, you will be absolutely amazed at some of the crazy things that school children in America are being arrested for.  When I was growing up, I don’t remember a single police officer ever coming to my school.  Discipline was always handled by the teachers and by the principals.  But today, there are schools all over the country that have police officers permanently stationed in the halls.  Many other schools will call out police officers at the drop of a hat.  In the classrooms of America today, if you burp in class, if you spray yourself with perfume or if you doodle on your desk, there is a chance that you will be arrested by the police and hauled out of your school in handcuffs.  Unfortunately, we live in a country where paranoia has become standard operating procedure.  The American people have become convinced that the only way that we can all be “safe” is for this country to be run like a militarized totalitarian police state.  So our public schools are run like prisons and our public school students are treated like prisoners.  The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world by far, and our schools are preparing the next generation to either “do time” in the prison system or to live as good little slaves in the Big Brother prison grid that is being constructed all around us.  But what our schools are not doing is giving these children the critical thinking skills that they need to live as free citizens in a nation that used to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

Of course very few people would deny that the character of American schoolchildren has changed dramatically over the decades.  Back in the 1950s, some of the biggest school discipline problems were gum chewing and hair pulling.  Today, kids bring knives, guns and drugs with them to school.  Gang activity is rampant in many of our schools and in some schools kids are evenhaving sex in the school bathrooms.

So there is definitely a discipline problem in our schools.

But what is going on in many areas of the country is absolutely ridiculous.  For example, in 2010 alone police down in Texas issued an astounding 300,000tickets to school children.

Yes, if a kid pulls a knife on someone the police should get involved, but teachers and administrators should be able to use some common sense and handle the vast majority of discipline problems that happen themselves.

What you are about to read is absolutely going to amaze you.  The following are 19 really crazy things that school children are being arrested for in America….

#1 At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume.

#2 A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.

#3 Another student down in Albuquerque was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket.  The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.

#4 A security guard at one school in California broke the arm of a 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.

#5 One teenage couple down in Houston poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up.  Instead of being sent to see the principal,they were arrestedand sent to court.

#6 In early 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith” was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.

#7 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.

#8 One student down in Texas was reportedly arrested by police for throwing paper airplanes in class.

#9 A 17-year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her to school.  It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples.  So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this?  The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.

#10 In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security officer even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender.

#11 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.

#12 Back in 2009, an 8-year-old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.

#13 A police officer in San Mateo, California blasted a 7-year-old special education student in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture.

#14 In America today, even 5-year-old children are treated brutally by police.  The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California a while back….

Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.

#15 At one school in Connecticut, a 17-year-old boy was thrown to the floor andtasered five times because he was yelling at a cafeteria worker.

#16 A teenager in suburban Dallas was forced to take on a part-time jobafter being ticketed for using foul language in one high school classroom.  The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.

#17 A few months ago, police were called out when a little girl kissed a little boy during a physical education class at an elementary school down in Florida.

#18 A 6-year-old boy was recently charged with sexual battery for some “inappropriate touching” during a game of tag at one elementary school in the San Francisco area.

#19 In Massachusetts, police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl.

Unfortunately, what is going on in our schools is a reflection of the broader society as a whole.  Our schools are being turned into prisons because our entire society is being turned into a giant prison.

Our nation is rapidly heading down the toilet, and the children of this nation do not have a bright future to look forward to.

If the police really want to find some criminals, they should start investigating some of the sickos that are in charge of some of these classrooms.

It seems like almost every day now there is a news story about some public school teacher that is involved in some kind of really perverted stuff.

For example, just check out what police down in Los Angeles recently found that one teacher was hiding….

A former Los Angeles elementary school teacher has been arrested for felony molestation of nearly two dozen students, accused of gagging children and putting live cockroaches on some of their faces. Deputies say the crimes were committed on campus.

Sickos who do that kind of stuff to kids should be punished very severely.

America’s schools are changing, and not for the better.

Personally, I went to public schools all my life, but I would not recommend that anyone send their kids to public schools today.  There is just way too much crazy stuff that goes on.

And our kids are learning less than ever in these public schools.  As I have written about previously, many of them are coming out of the system as dumb as a rock.  Instead of teaching our kids how to think critically and examine all sides of an issue, these schools are indoctrinating our kids and pushing particular social and political agendas on them.

There are a few public schools out there that are still good, but the vast majority of them are horrible.  They are not producing the leaders of tomorrow and they are not preparing the next generation with the tools that they need to survive in a complex world.

So is there much hope that our schools can be turned around?  Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….

Man gets the stun gun treatment for walking his dogs off-leash.

A Montara man walking two lapdogs off leash was hit with an electric-shock gun by a National Park Service ranger after allegedly giving a false name and trying to walk away, authorities said Monday.

The park ranger encountered Gary Hesterberg with his two small dogs Sunday afternoon at Rancho Corral de Tierra, which was recently incorporated into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, said Howard Levitt, a spokesman for the park service.

Hesterberg, who said he didn’t have identification with him, allegedly gave the ranger a false name, Levitt said.

The ranger, who wasn’t identified, asked Hesterberg to remain at the scene, Levitt said. He tried several times to leave, and finally the ranger “pursued him a little bit and she did deploy her” electric-shock weapon, Levitt said. “That did stop him.” . . .

Witnesses said the use of a stun gun and the arrest seemed excessive for someone walking two small dogs off leash.

“It was really scary,” said Michelle Babcock, who said she had seen the incident as she and her husband were walking their two border collies. “I just felt so bad for him.”

Babcock said Hesterberg had repeatedly asked the ranger why he was being detained. She didn’t answer him, Babcock said.

After shocking him, the ranger did at least call paramedics. Then she arrested him. The park only recently started requiring dogs to be on a leash. Apparently, the ranger was merely trying to provide the man a service.

The ranger was trying to educate residents of the rule, Levitt said.

Lesson learned, I guess. Note too that the ranger is the only person in the story not mentioned by name.

Two pals were barred from entering the US after innocent tweets joking about “destroying America” were picked up by the country’s anti-terror cops.

US special agents monitoring Twitter spotted Leigh Van Bryan’s messages weeks before he left for a holiday in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting.

Leigh, who also quipped about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” on Twitter, said they were treated like terrorists on arrival at a Los Angeles International Airport. The pair were held by armed guards and quizzed for five hours before being handcuffed, put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight.

They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells and were then put on a flight home.

Leigh, 26, was kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers. The Department of Homeland Security flagged up Leigh as a potential threat when he posted a Twitter message to his pals ahead of his trip to Hollywood.

It read: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America”.

Despite telling officials at LAX airport the term “destroy” was British slang for partying, the pair were held on suspicion of planning to “commit crimes”.

Read More…

Mili Note: Maybe cops just shouldn’t use the “blazing-guns approach” at all, Mr. Cusick.

Source: Officer.com (note, this story appears to have been removed from the Officer.com website and I cannot find a full transcript.)

Back when the smoking bans were spreading across the country, those of us opposed to them made the point that you could make many of the same arguments about perfume and cologne that ban proponents were making about second hand smoke. (And there’s about as much evidence that fragrances are a health risk, which is to say very little.)

But you can’t really make a reductio argument for too long before someone embraces it.

Many women love wearing perfume, but have you ever gotten a headache from someone who has sprayed on way too much of a scent you don’t like? Back in 2008, Susan McBride, sued Detroit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming a co-worker’s fragrance made it hard for her to breathe and do her job. She was eventually awarded $100,000, and the city warned workers to avoid using scented products like perfume, cologne, deodorant, lotion, and aftershave. Now New Hampshire is looking to do the same.

State representative Michele Peckham is sponsoring House Bill 1444 which hopes to ban state employees who work with the public from wearing perfume. Apparently a constituent with extreme allergies approached Peckham with the proposal. “It may seem silly, but it’s a health issue,” Peckham told the Union Leader. “Many people have violent reactions to strong scents.”

The author then poses an honest question that puts this nonsense into the proper perspective:

Allergies and annoyances aside, should the government be able to regulate what we smell like?

The bans at the moment are just for state employees. But that’s merely where these ideas start. Just to hammer the point home, this, from  a tweet from Stacy Malkan, head of an organization called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

Fragrance is the new secondhand smoke.

Of course, body odor is fairly offensive to the senses as well. Don’t we deserve protection from that? Clearly the proper balance here is for the federal government to require regular showers and the application of deodorant, but ban all but the unscented varieties. All of this would be proper under the authority  of the Commerce Clause, of course.

(In manufacturing, when a machine becomes broken, it is either repaired, retired or replaced.

As is clearly shown in Mr. Steele’s case, David Hinksons’s case [LINK TO WEB SITE], and now this Denver case (three tips of a massive iceberg) – corruption, false charges and convictions pervade Amerikan government, which is essentially a broken machine. However, in the case of government, when it is found broken, its flaws are kept and it is given additional funding, personnel and autonomy to continue its rogue destructiveness.)

[LINK TO ARTICLE]

More than 500 people were wrongly imprisoned in Denver’s jails over seven years, with some spending weeks incarcerated or pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit before authorities realized they nabbed the wrong person, a federal court filing shows.

Civil-rights lawyers suing the city and county of Denver assert the documented mistaken-identity arrests “are the tip of the iceberg” and are an undercount of the true magnitude of the problem.

In one case a black man spent nine days in jail after he was arrested on a warrant for a white man wanted on a sex-crimes arrest warrant.

In another, authorities arrested an 18- year-old when they were searching for a man 30 years older.

A white man was hauled in even when the suspect actually was an American Indian who was nearly a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier. He wasn’t released until almost a month had passed and not until the victim of the crime alerted authorities at a court hearing that they had the wrong suspect.

Another man was jailed twice on a warrant for second-degree burglary and sexual assault even though his tattoos didn’t match the real suspect’s, described in the arrest warrant.

“I missed five full days of work and lost five days of wages due to my first mistaken- identity arrest,” Carlos Alberto Hernandez, now 34, stated in a declaration filed with the court.

“I also lived in fear that I was going to be terminated from my employer due to the missed work and the accusations about the sexual assault charges. I had problems and numerous arguments with my girlfriend because of the accusation that I was guilty of sexual assault and a sex offender.”

City officials say the documented mistakes make up a fraction of the more than 33,000 inmates incarcerated at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Facility last year. They say they strive to avoid detaining the wrong suspects but concede that mistakes do happen.

“The best we can do is set up processes so these get addressed immediately, and that’s what we’ve done,” said Denver police Lt. Matt Murray.

The mistaken-identity arrests are detailed in a 216-page motion filed at the U.S. District Court in Denver by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.

Motion blasts lax tracking system

The wrongful arrests in Denver occurred for a variety of reasons. Often those wrongly held had the same names as criminals, but authorities failed to check their dates of birth. Some were wrongly arrested because their identities had been stolen. In other cases, the last name matched but not the first or middle.

It often took days and sometimes weeks before authorities realized they had the wrong person behind bars.

“Denver’s approach to this pervasive problem is to put its head in the sand,” the ACLU said in the motion asking the judge to rule on behalf of four individuals suing the city for wrongful arrests. Three others represented by the ACLU already have reached settlements with the city.

The ACLU, in the motion, cites a 2010 report by the city auditor’s office that blasted the city for having an inadequate system for tracking arrest identity issues.

“We cannot improve what we do not measure,” that city audit reported.

Despite the city’s lack of a comprehensive system to track mistaken- identity arrests, the ACLU identified 503 such cases from 2002 into 2009 by combing through orders issued by judges, internal affairs records, arrest warrant logs and jail records. The ACLU maintains that many more cases exist but the city’s lack of a robust tracking system makes it impossible to get an accurate count.

The ACLU did not document cases after 2009 because that time frame did not match that of the people it is representing.

Denver’s lawyers, in court filings, assert that the problem has not reached the level of deliberate indifference needed to show constitutional violations occurred.

“The deliberate indifference standard requires that the municipality have actual or constructive notice that its action or failure to act is substantially certain to result in a constitutional violation, and further, that it consciously or deliberately chose to disregard the risk of harm,” Denver stated in a motion seeking summary judgment.

The city further maintained that law enforcement agencies throughout the nation grapple with the issue of mistaken-identity arrests and have failed to come up with a solution.

“There is no simple all-encompassing warrant identification silver bullet in evidence to which the city was deliberately indifferent,” the city’s lawyers said in court filings.

The city also contends it has made improvements in recent years. Those include a 2007 training bulletin warning police officers that “merely locating a name in a computer database that is the same or similar to a suspect’s name does not, by itself, provide probable cause” for an arrest. Supervisors also are now notified when an officer makes a mistaken-identity arrest.

A task force also continues to study the mistaken-identity arrest issue, Murray said.

Can such cases be avoided?

In 2008, the Denver Sheriff Department initiated a policy of alerting the police identification bureau when a prisoner claims he or she isn’t the actual suspect. From 2009 through the first 11 months of last year, 190 inmates used that new system to complain to deputies that they were being held on warrants for other individuals, an accounting provided by city authorities to The Denver Post shows.

Of those complaints, authorities determined 46 were being held when there was not a valid warrant for their detention. Authorities dropped warrants as not valid on another 73 people but determined they were being properly detained on other valid warrants. The remaining complaints did not hold up, officials said.

Other cases likely exist, according to the ACLU, because the records do not include mistakes found by judges or instances when inmates failed to make a proper complaint.

The ACLU believes many of the wrongful arrests it documented could have been avoided if Denver police officers or sheriff’s deputies had taken simple steps and precautions.

The ACLU lawyers say officials often failed to check whether the race or gender of those they were arresting matched arrest warrants. In other cases, they failed to check for identifying markers, such as tattoos, or did not check fingerprints against those already on file of the actual suspects.

Hernandez said officers ignored him when he told them he was not the suspect named in the warrant, Ray Alfonso Hernandez Martinez. The first arrest occurred Aug. 15, 2008, when he was correctly arrested on one outstanding warrant for himself but mistakenly identified as the suspect wanted on another Arapahoe County warrant.

After he posted bond on his legitimate case, he was transferred to the Arapahoe County jail. Deputies there released him when they reviewed a mug shot of the actual suspect and realized they had the wrong person. His tattoos did not match the suspect’s.

He was arrested again in October of that same year after he was pulled over for not having proper tags on his license plate, and authorities took him on the Arapahoe County warrant again. Authorities released him a day later after they concluded a mistake had been made. He said he has since had to hire an attorney to help untangle his records from those of the true suspect.

The ACLU filing details 291 orders issued by Denver county judges identifying mistaken-identity arrests — cases the ACLU researched further. Of those cases, more than 200 could have been avoided because police already had on file a fingerprint or mug shot of the correct suspects.

“It seems that it ought to be easy to have a procedure so that at least when someone is brought in on a warrant that the ID bureau could check to make sure the one brought in is the one that is wanted,” said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado.

The notes from the judges include the following:

“Wrong defendant brought into court. Jamie Milner is a female. The defendant Jamie Sandoval is male.”

“Again wrong person — Yes Ms. Brown, but prints don’t match.”

“Wrong person entered guilty plea. . . . Pleas vacated.”

“Wrong person entered plea fine paid under duress of arrest. Court orders a refund of $89 that was paid.”

“Def brought in was wrong defendant . . . Go figure!”

The ACLU had the city perform an electronic search on a set of keywords in judicial orders that might record a mistaken-identity arrest. A judge might not have used one of those keywords or might not have actually noted the mistaken-identity arrest, which means there are likely more mistaken-identity arrests, according to the ACLU.

The problem is magnified in Denver District Court because some of those wrongly arrested in the city have languished for days in jail while they wait for the court system to free up a judge for an initial appearance.

One Denver sheriff’s official, in sworn testimony attached as an exhibit, said he had seen many of those arrested go a week without an initial court appearance “many, many, many times.”

Source: ABC 7

Any normal person found guilty of stealing $40,000 from, say, a bank or an employer, would likely be sentenced toat leastfive years of prison. But when you work for the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), you can expect to be given special legal treatment and sent on your way.

The Associated Press reports that two former TSA screeners, 44-year-old Coumar Persad and 31-year-old Davon Webb, both of which worked at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, have pleaded guilty to grand larceny, obstructing governmental administration, and official misconduct, for stealing nearly $40,000 from an airport traveler’s luggage. But rather than receive a normal prison sentence for such crimes, the two were sentenced to just six months in prison with five years of probation.

Reports indicate that Persad, who was an X-ray luggage screener at the time, had spotted the wad of cash in a suitcase while monitoring the X-ray screen. He reportedly then contacted Webb, who worked in another baggage area, to watch for the bag and mark it with special tape. Persad later intercepted the bag in another baggage handling area, and proceeded to open it up and take the cash.

All in all, the two thieves snagged $39,980, which was later retrieved by police from the men’s homes. But based on typical sentencing guidelines, the punishment the two men received for their crimes is inadequate, and indicative of the lax manner in which TSA agents who violate the law are treated within the justice system.

Grand larceny alone is enough to warrant a much longer prison sentence than just six months. And when you add the other two charges into the mix, sentencing could easily top 15 or 20 years. But because these agents worked for the government, they apparently are not subject to the same treatment as the rest of the general public.

TSA “agents” are not actually agents at all, however. They are not law enforcement, and they do not legally or constitutionally hold any type of special authority over anyone. The TSA you see working at airports, in fact, are hired screeners that are technicallyallin violation of the law for impersonating law enforcement officers (http://www.prisonplanet.com/congresswoman-tsa-screeners-should-stop-impersonating-federal-law-enforcement-officers.html).

Sources for this article include:

http://online.wsj.com/article/AP5342f284c21c434e92bf300d1a67c3ca.html

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/034647_TSA_theft_luggage.html#ixzz1jgQPsmcc