Even though Shrove Tuesday was this week, IHOP is having it’s free pancake day next week on February 12. They are collecting donations for Children’s Miracle Network.
Which brings up:
Category: Random News
quoted in toto from Reason:
More on the Vang Khang Raid:
I’m quoted at length in this piece by St. Paul Pioneer-Press columnist Ruben Rosario on botched SWAT raids.
The police are in prime CYA form on the Khang raid:
Minneapolis police say they are not to blame for a mistake that sent a SWAT team into the wrong house over the weekend.
[…]
“It was bad information that came on the informants end, not on the police end,” said Jesse Garcia, a Minneapolis Police spokesman.
Garcia said after the informant gave police three addresses they did their homework.
“Like I said, this is a long-term investigation that involved surveillance, looking at background of this whole situation to find out exactly what’s going on,” said Garcia.
In addition, a judge reviewed the information from police. The judge OK’d the three search warrants.
“The first two addresses were very good, a lot of information, numerous guns were recovered,” said Garcia.
[…]
WCCO-TV asked police if they would make police changes to prevent a mistake.
“I don’t think it was a mistake on our part, you know, we did everything correctly. We did everything in good faith, we followed the search warrant, we did everything correctly. It turns out some of the information that was given on the front end from the informant, just wasn’t right,” said Garcia.
But the informant works for the police. Informants aren’t sworn public servants. They aren’t trained to become police officers. They aren’t accountable to the public. Most, in fact, are pretty shady characters. The police ought to be independently coroborrating every informant’s tip before they go kicking down doors. Even a reliable informant could inadvertently transpose numbers, or get a street name wrong.
So don’t blame this on the informant. It’s the job of the officers he’s working with to corroborate the information he gives them. If his information is wrong, and they act on it, it’s their fault. They’re the ones with the guns, the authority, and who are accountable to the public. The fact that they shot up the wrong house by itself indicates that the police made a mistake, here. Here’s more from Minneapolis police:
“This house was part of a package of very credible information that resulted in other successful enforcement actions,” she said. “This was the end of a chain of things, and there was no reason to question the credibility of the information.”
Except that, quite obviously, the information wasn’t credible. Or they wouldn’t have nearly killed an innocent family.
The police apparently knocked out six windows in the Khang home, some of them before the shooting began. The fired 22 rounds, spraying the Khang home with shotgun blasts.
One local media outlet is reporting that the police were investigating a black street gang. Had they taken the two minutes to type the address into the local property records website, they’d have seen the name “Vang Khang” pop up, which should have at least hinted at the possibility that the address might be wrong, and that it would probably be worth the time to do a bit more investigation before heading out to play soldier.
The fact that the police didn’t even take this small, not particularly labor intensive step by itself puts the lie to the statement that they “did everything correctly.”
Why do folks think they can get away with staging attacks on themselves?
Staged College Hate Crimes::
Eugene links below to the story of the fake hate crime at Princeton. Is it just me, or are staged hate crimes on college campuses unusually common? My own university, George Washington, recently had such an episode. Swastikas were found on dorm room door of a Jewish student,and it turned out most and probably all of the swastikas were put there by the resident herself. I’m not sure what it means, and I don’t think it’s something new, but it sure is strange.
I don’t know how exactly to categorize Stephen Fry. He does a bit of everything – comedian, actor, director, author – and he does them all wittily and well. He has now started a tech blog for The Guardian; here’s a sample that demonstrates his polymathic interests:
Well, people can be dippy about all things digital and still read books, they can go to the opera and watch a cricket match and apply for Led Zeppelin tickets without splitting themselves asunder. Very little is as mutually exclusive as we seem to find it convenient to imagine. In our culture we are becoming more and more fixated with an “it’s one thing or the other” mentality. You like Thai food? But what’s wrong with Italian? Woah, there…calm down. I like both. Yes. It can be done. I can like rugby football and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. High Victorian Gothic and the installations of Damien Hirst. Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and the piano works of Hindemith. English hymns and Richard Dawkins. First editions of Norman Douglas and iPods. Snooker, darts and ballet. Such a list isn’t a boast, it doesn’t make one an all-rounder to rival Michelangelo, it’s how humans are constructed. Adaptable, varied, versatile. So, believe me, a love of gizmos doesn’t make me averse to paper, leather and wood, old-fashioned Christmases, Preston Sturges films and country walks. Nor does it automatically mean I read Terry Pratchett, breathe only through my mouth and bring my head slightly too close to the bowl when I eat soup. (None of the above, I grant you, excuses a 50-year-old for saying that anything “rocks his world”; that’s just too horrid and must stop.)
As the man says, read the whole thing.
False security is worse than no security at all.
The data are in:
Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.
Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.
I’m not really thrilled that this info is going public, but I suspect would-be terrorists already know this. The bottom line–we are spending millions of dollars worth of travel time and TSA employee time for nothing. It’s a sham. Instead of having incredibly expensive machines to x-ray our luggage and incredibly expensive people standing around and pawing my underwear and incredibly expensive lost time from waiting in line and instead of losing all the foregone benefits from travel that doesn’t take place because the TSA has made it so unpleasant, let’s just say a magic spell or put on a lucky shirt when we travel. True, it won’t really make us safer, but NEITHER DOES THE CURRENT SYSTEM.
But there is a bright spot, sort of:
San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows.
So they’re roughly three times more conscientious about their job than the government employees, confirming the virtues of privatization, yes. But 20%? For me, even that “low” number makes the costs unlikely to exceed the benefits.