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[JJR512]

Yes, speaking of well-connected, like the Arizona sherrif who had his SWAT team crash their truck into a car, burn a house down, kill the dog that lived in the house, and laugh about it, all for trying to arrest a guy wanted for outstanding traffic violations, and didn't get taken to task for it, because his brother-in-law ran the local newspaper and didn't publish any story about it.

 

[Gonz]

Sheriff Arpaio did what?

 

[JJR512]

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2004-08-05/news/dog-day-afternoon/full

If you're the sheriff of Maricopa [County], AZ and want to see justice done for traffic citations do you:
1) send a letter advising turning himself in
2) send an officer with a warrant
3) get the SWAT team to burn his house down and kill his dog

 

[jimpeel]

1 : a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion

Barney Frank creates and votes on laws that affect all of us. He then flaunts the very laws he creates for the rest of us holding himself above those laws. That means that he does not believe in what he creates as applicable to himself and that is hypocrisy.

Do as I say, not as I do is the very tenet of hypocrisy.

Frank claimed that he was unaware of the criminal enterprise being perpetrated under his own roof. He had to know that he was fixing traffic tickets for his lover though.

Try to get him to fix a ticket for you and see how far you get. Perhaps if you were to crawl into his bed but now that he has been caught once he might not be so willing to do that for you.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/scandal/gobie2.htm

TV Movie Led to Prostitute's Disclosures
'Mayflower Madam' Gave Gobie Idea
By Bill Dedman
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 27, 1989

Prostitute and pimp Stephen L. Gobie settled in with his "girls" in his Georgetown town house one evening in late 1987 to watch "The Mayflower Madam" on television. As Candice Bergen portrayed upscale madam Sydney Biddle Barrows, Gobie's companions had an idea.

"The girls turned to me and said, 'You're just like her,' " Gobie recalled in an interview yesterday. "That's when I realized that I was in the middle of a developing story that could be worth something someday. I told them, 'One day, don't be surprised if you see me on TV.' "

Gobie's dream has come true. His accusation that Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) knew that Gobie had operated a prostitution service out of Frank's Capitol Hill apartment became national news after it was first reported Friday by the Washington Times.

Frank, one of two openly gay members of Congress, confirmed Friday that he paid Gobie for sex, hired him with personal funds as an aide and wrote letters on congressional stationery on his behalf to Virginia probation officials, but Frank said he fired Gobie when he learned that clients were visiting the apartment.

...

Although Frank and Gobie differ in some details of their relationship, they agree on the story line. They met on April Fool's Day 1985. The representative answered a classified ad in the Washington Blade, the local gay weekly. "Exceptionally good-looking, personable, muscular athlete is available. Hot bottom plus large endowment equals a good time."

Then in his third term, the 45-year-old representative had not yet stated his homosexuality publicly. He paid Gobie $80 in cash for sex.

Yet here we are EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER crucifying a senator for tapping his foot in a public bathroom.

 

[chcr]

Barney Frank creates and votes on laws that affect all of us. He then flaunts the very laws he creates for the rest of us holding himself above those laws. That means that he does not believe in what he creates as applicable to himself and that is hypocrisy.

There are a few leaps of faith regarding Barry's thought processes, don't you think?

Do as I say, not as I do is the very tenet of hypocrisy.

Correct.

Frank claimed that he was unaware of the criminal enterprise being perpetrated under his own roof. He had to know that he was fixing traffic tickets for his lover though.

Which was, again, corrupt but not hypocritical. I think you can rest assured that everyone does anything like that that they can for their friends and family because, in fact, they do.

 

[Gonz]

"They looked unprofessional. They were getting dressed on the scene. They weren't organized," Delfino, 22, says.

Delfino could see no readily visible insignia on any of the men, so he figured the scene must be a prelude to a prank

If it was a prank, shouldn't they appear unprofessional. Although, what a 22 year old knows about law enforcement professionalism is beyond me.

Especially when teh car they pulled up in looks like this
Link

Is this an editorial in a news story?

Delfino's 'hood wouldn't have fared much worse if it had been a gang of street thugs blasting away at the house, rather than Sheriff Joe Arpaio's inept and bumbling SWAT team.

I recall the New Times as being the leftist rag of Phoenix when I was there. Looks like little has changed. I seriously doubt
that the Maricopa County Sheriffs office is filled with thugs & hooligans. Overzealous? Probably. However, in a city that has the
meth & illegal alien problem Phoenis has, they must be willing to go to lengths to do their job. SHeriff Arpaio has an outstanding
reputation in the community & among law enforcement nationwide. This looks like a hit piece.

 

[JJR512]

I took the whole thing to be more of an editorial than an actual news story. It had much too much flavor to be straight news. I think that most of what happened in that situation can be explained reasonably. For example, burning down the house: Probably done by a candle that was knocked over in the commotion, according to one source, but even so, it's not too far-fetched (in my uneducated opinion) to imagine that a flash-bang or smoke grenade could start a fire. They're not supposed to, but then again, tasers and pepper spray aren't supposed to kill, yet they do, in rare instances. And parking brakes do fail and vehicles do roll down hills into other vehicles.

I think the main thing that concerns me, in a concerned-citizen kind of way, is did the deputies force the dog back into the burning building, and when it was dead, did they laugh about it? Personally, I can't imagine it's possible to force a dog into a fire. I think you could smack it, kick it, shove a stick up its ass, but it just won't go into a fire. And neither would I. So I don't know what happened to the dog, but it did die somehow, so the next question is did the deputies laugh about it? Well, we all know there are some pretty sick-minded people out there. If some people can be in the military and get their laughs doing cruel and unusual things to prisoners, I'm sure there can be people like that in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, too. If that's what they were laughing at, if they were in fact laughing at all.

Of lesser concern to me is that the deputies were getting into gear on the scene. I don't know if that's their SOP or if there was a special reason for that, if that was accurately reported. I'm no expert, but from what I've seen on TV (Cops, World's Wildest Police Videos, etc.), SWAT teams show up at the scene ready to go. So this part is curious to me.

Now I'm not saying anything about Sheriff Arpaio; I know nothing of his reputation or record. But reputations are based on perception, not reality. People in customer service are (or should be) taught that what a customer (in this case, the population of Maricopa County) believes to be true is the truth. Case in point: Howard County, Maryland. Howard County has a reputation as being a low-crime area and a safe place to live. The fact is that Howard County has a crime rate that would surprise most of its and the surrounding area's residents. But there is no big city in Howard County, thus no major newspaper of its own, and the small one that does exist has a vested interest in keeping up appearances. Howard County neighbors Baltimore and is directly covered by the news media there, but they have little interest in reporting Howard County's problems. Some of this is because of more interest in other areas, some of it is thanks to an excellent public relations team in the HCPD. Since most people never hear about Howard County's problems, they think it doesn't have any, thus it doesn't have any.

 

[jimpeel]

The tenor of the entire "article" was editorialized. I do have some question about that part about there being a burning candle that caused the blaze, though. That is the excuse the police seem to use every time they incinerate someone which, by the way, seems to be the new weapon of choice for the cops -- fire.

From the LA Daily News 09-01-2001

Officials let armed suspect's home burn to keep others safe

By Orith Goldberg
Staff Writer

STEVENSON RANCH -- As a two-story home in an affluent Stevenson Ranch neighborhood burned with an armed man barricaded inside Friday, police and firefighters stood by and just watched.

After an attempt to serve a warrant went horribly awry, with the suspect in the house shooting and killing a deputy sheriff, then firing a barrage of ammunition throughout the neighborhood, officers let the house burn to the ground with the suspect inside.

In that shootout, the warrant was for "stockpiling weapons". Note THIS :

The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that an investigation into Friday's shootout with James Allen Beck has raised the question of whether Beck fired the bullet that killed Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Hagop "Jake" Kuredjian or whether the officer mistakenly was hit by a fellow law enforcement officer.

...

Beck, a convicted felon, was alleged to have impersonated a U.S. marshal and be building a weapons cache. As authorities approached, Beck began shooting at officers from the U.S. Marshal's office and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

...

The exchange of gunfire startled neighbors, especially those who saw officers firing at the wrong house.

"I hollered out the window, 'You're shooting at the wrong house!"' said one neighbor, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity. "They must have heard us or something, because I could hear one of the deputies say, 'Is it the house with the Explorer?' And another guy says, 'No, the one next to it."'

Homes on either side of Beck's house were riddled with bullet holes, including one where a couple and their 30-hour-old newborn cowered.


...

Investigators discovered a body believed to be Beck's. But the coroner's office said an autopsy would not be conducted until Tuesday, at the earliest.

An AK-47 and AR-15, a shotgun, a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol, handguns and ammunition were collected from the ashes.

Some "stockpile".

 

[Inkara1]

So should the cops have used a kinder, gentler approach to getting the guy to surrender? Maybe invite the guy to their mancave basement, pass around a blunt, sit on the couch doing nothing for seven hours with the TV on the Weather channel, then all head over to Denny's for the sampler plate and the moons over my hammy?

 

[Gonz]

They could have done the usual thing & shot the dog.

There's far more to this "story" thank meets the eye. Cops, acting in brutish fashion? That's whay we pay them for. So we don't have to do it. Sometimes, they need to be reigned back in.

On the other hand, the bad guys act innocent even when proven guilty. Having known both, I tend to distrust the cop yet allow them more slack because of their position. Nice guys don't stop crime.

 

[JJR512]

As a two-story home in an affluent Stevenson Ranch neighborhood burned with an armed man barricaded inside Friday, police and firefighters stood by and just watched.

From hanging out at the fire station and talking to both volunteer and career firefighters, and from having partially completed basic firefighting training (which starts with safety), I see absolutely nothing wrong with this statement. Public safety/emergency workers are taught that our number one priority is our own safety, followed by the safety of those working with us (our partners), then followed by the safety of those we're ostensibly there to protect. Sure, some safety/emergency workers don't always act like that's what they're trained, but that's why they're called hereos...usually posthumously.

Man with guns inside a house on fire? No firefighter I've spoken with is going near it. If the guy would rather burn to death (a horrible, extremely painful way to die) than go to jail, no firefighter is going to risk his own skin to save him, knowing he's more likely to shoot his rescuer than let himself be rescued.

Aside from the man with the gun, there are other reasons the firefighters might have been standing by. It all goes to their own safety. How many firefighters were on scene? What pieces of equipment did they have? While some firefighters appeared to be standing by, were others connected hose lines to hydrants? Were they actually standing by, watching, or were they planning? It's possible that those who were there knew they weren't enough to safely start attacking the fire and were waiting for further resources. That's irrelevant of the man with the guns. That's basic firefighting training. At the point they got there, what was the condition of the house? Firefighters are trained to recognize a salvagable structure from one that it's better to just let it go. Sometimes you attack, sometimes you defend, sometimes you just watch.