Bad PR move, SRB: a group of students from eight local colleges who'd planned to sleep in front of Baltimore City Hall to commemorate National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week on Saturday night were told to disperse by Baltimore City Police and threatened with arrest.
Oh noes! Kimberly Smedley, accused of using a room at the
Renaissance hotel to give a stripper from the Block illegal, ass-plumping silicone injections, was arrested in D.C. The dancer wound up in the hospital with silicone in her lungs, victims in other states were left with deformed buttocks ( NY Post headline: "Rear and Present Danger").
Baltimorean Terry L. Wilson goes to Indiana, robs convenience store, gets shot, dies. Assuming it's the same 20-year-old Terry L. Wilson in the Judiciary Case search, in 2007 he was charged with attempted murder and the case was remanded to juvenile court. In November of 2009 Wilson was again charged with attempted murder, in 2010 he was convicted and sent to jail.
A Baltimorean who brought cocaine to vend in Altoona, PA, Rodney "Rocco" Williams, is in custody after a year-and-a-half investigation.
Some good news: national reports show a huge decline in child sex abuse.
And here's one I missed back in August, but better late than never: five years after suing the City of Baltimore for sexual harassment, the 4th circuit found in favor Katrina Okoli, reversing the district court's decision. Wonder how much she'll get?
Really? Bloomberg News reports that "The U.S. prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail."
3 comments:
You would think that Baltimore City has enough to worry about, but apparently our boys in blue might be at the center of the pepper spray controversy. There is a former Baltimore police lieutenant named Charles Kelly that not only thinks pepper spray is just peaches, but wrote the department policy for its use.
Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department's use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a "compliance tool" that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.
"What I'm looking at is fairly standard police procedure," Kelly said.
Occupy Baltimore participants should invest in gas masks and be prepared to be sprayed at any moment. So much for nonviolent protest.
Actually, his name is Retired Lieutenant Charles Key, and yes he did write Bmore's use of force guidelines.
However, in context, when I read about using it as a compliance tool, I thought he meant something different.
For example, if a normal size officer is faced with attempting to arrest a man much larger and heavier for, say, assaulting his wife, or shoplifting, and though he isn't violently resisting, he is passively resisting, the use of pepper spray might be called for.
But on non-violent, non-resisting protestors? It strains credulity and common sense.
Lieutenant Key has a consulting business on police affairs like I do, but his mostly specializes in the use of firearms.
I wonder if he might get called to be an expert witness when the UC Davis gets sued for excessive force and defends the use of force witnessed on video.
It's my contention, and I think courts and insurance companies tend this way, that force is generally only appropriate to protect the safety of officers or others, or necessary to effect an arrest when other means are inappropriate. I don't think UC Davis's attorneys are going to want to defend this use of force in court. Passive resistance by non-violent protestors is diffeerent from a potentially dangerous subject who refuses to be taken into custody. My sense is that courts are moving well in that direction.
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