police

This seems almost too weird to be true, but Wired reports that on Oct. 1, federal agents seized the computers, manuscripts and pickaxes of an anarchist social worker in Queens, N.Y., claiming he violating anti-rioting laws on Twitter.

Dallas police wrongly ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English over the last three years, reports the Dallas Morning News.
It seems Dallas police were confused when, after pulling drivers over for other suspected violations, the police checked their in-car computers and a pull-down menu listed the “non-English speaking driver” charge as an option. [...]

This is a strange story.
Two DeKalb County police officers have been placed on paid administrative leave after an investigation revealed they ran a background check on President Barack Obama.
A representative for the DeKalb County CEO’s office identified the officers as Ryan White and C.M. Route.
Officials said Obama’s name was typed into a computer inside a [...]

Glenn Thrush reports on how the National Republican Congressional Committee is attacking Democrats over President Obama’s comment that Sgt. Joseph Crowley and Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking into his own home and then complaining about the police showing up to investigate.
The NRCC is sending out a raft [...]

Buried within the guts of a very good New York Times story about problems with the Afghan security forces is word of this effort at rooting out police corruption:
The United States is also retraining uniformed police units in a process called Focused District Development. Under this program, police units in districts are mentored intensely through [...]

With major gay rights victories in Iowa and Vermont in recent days, the movement seem to be on the upswing in much of the country. Arizona, however, is another story. While Democrats may be eyeing The Grand Canyon state as a historically red state that could turn blue in 2012, it may not be moving [...]

After being unsure how long it would take to train a 400,000-soldier Afghan Army, I started calling around to experts, and in the process it was gingerly pointed out to me that I misread The New York Times’ piece that reported the enlargement of the Afghan security force that the Obama administration will pursue. The [...]

Now I get it:  after all those reports lately about how local law enforcement is increasingly relying on its powers under the federal 287(g) program to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants who haven’t actually committed crimes, we learn from The Los Angeles Times today that the federal money those localities get to jail these immigrants [...]