Photographs of Evil People

This article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press reveals that a senior investigator of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension used his status to coerce sex from a paid informant and that in 2015 the state paid $117,500 to settle the affair with the offended lady.


Adam Castilleja

The individual involved, Senior Special Agent Adam Castilleja, was suspended for 30 days and assigned to other duties but remains employed at the state's most important law enforcement agency, roughly the Gopher State version of the Texas Rangers.

Amazing as that may be, what's even more amazing is that a media institution with a history of publishing significant news for 168 years couldn't come up with a photograph of this Adam Castilleja. While photographs of the easily recognized, Donald J. Trump, Tom Brady, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Governor Mark Dayton, etc. are daily sprinkled through the pages of the capital city's news and mug shots of unconvicted miscreants are generally seen, there's no likeness of a person so sleazy that no ordinary person would wish to be in the same auditorium with him. This is a normal operating procedure for a newspaper that defends the felonious elements of law enforcement no matter what the circumstances. It demonstrates not only the power of law enforcement over the criminal portion of society but also the media whose duty is to inform and enlighten that supposedly democratic society.

Maybe we should be happy to receive any information at all about this whole affair. Maybe there's some regulation that forbids the publishing of photographs of disgraced public employees. Even so, let's remember that video surveillance cameras and their still counterparts aren't installed for artistic purposes. Official video recording and photos are used primarily for identification purposes. The idea that the public shouldn't have easy access to the physical identification of its own employees is a feature of a secret police in a police state.