Tim Cushing

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.

It's the sort of thing we see a lot of: a government gets caught doing something wrong and decides it's the public that needs to suffer for the government's sins.

Never underestimate the amount of effort law enforcement officers will expend to dispense as much cruelty as possible. And never forget these are the people we are expected to believe are actually there to protect and serve. While it's great there's a settlement payment on the way, the fact is that this extremely vindictive and extremely expensive act of uncalled-for “retribution” should never have happened in the first place.

Well, these entities deserve each other. The problem is we really don't deserve either of them.

Maybe if law enforcement didn't abuse subpoenas so frequently, it might be a little bit more difficult for criminals to do the same thing. Subpoenas can be used to order companies and service providers to turn over user data and information. But they don't require law enforcement to run this request past a court first, so subpoenas are the weapon of choice if investigators just don't have the probable cause they need to actually obtain a warrant.

Thu, Nov 14th 2024 01:04pm - Tim Cushing The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court was somewhat hesitant to bless the 18 months of pole camera surveillance in the Tuggle case back in 2021.

Detroit law enforcement officials got a bit of shock last week when some seized iPhones rebooted themselves, despite being in airplane mode and, in one case, stored inside a Faraday bag. Panic — albeit highly localized — ensued.

Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD “investigators” spent 17 hours torturing Perez i…

This stop may not have been all that pretextual — after all, the officer clocked the driver doing 69 mph in a 55 mph speed limit — but it swiftly turned pretextual for reasons the officer couldn't competently explain.

This is just what I needed to read after a post-election hell week or two. The city of Los Angeles has gone past exhaustion to vindictive irritation after being sued by the same cops it employs because it (legally) handed over photos and names of LAPD officers to journalist Ben Camacho. Ben Camacho then shared those with activist group,