Florida K-9 Killed In Action

Per this story on the Jacksonville.com website, a dog used by the sheriff's department has been killed on duty while attempting to chase down a car jacker. According to Florida law the killer could be sentenced to up to five years in prison for the third degree felony of killing a police dog.

 

Fang, the deceased dog in question, never responded positively or negatively when he was assigned to the K-9 squad. (Jacksonville Sheriff's Office)


It's remarkable that law enforcement agencies have expressed mourn at Fang's death. After all, that's his purpose, to absorb gunfire rather than that of his human counterparts.

2018 National Sports Center Velodrome All-Star Team

The 2018 racing season at the wooden track in Blaine, Minnesota has come to an end and it's time to mention the riders that have been the most impressive during this summer's Thursday Night Lights series.  

 
Woman's track rider of the year is Risa Hustad. In the last few seasons she's not only shown a development in form and bike handling skills, she's also become a savvy tactician who knows when to make the winning move. It's been a very good season for Risa.




Junior rider Peter Moore dominated the category 1-2 men's field on his way to male track rider of the year and earned a trip to the Junior World Championships in Aigle, Switzerland.

Category 3 competitor Mark Stewart gets first dibs on number 29 because he's been racing at the NSC Velodrome for every year of its 29 in existence.

Carolyn Stanley seldom misses a Thursday night race and won her first category 1 event this season after moving up in class.

Youthful rider Bogdan Rylski used his high rpm cadence to become a force in the Category 1-2 men's field.

Father-son duo Dan and Dave Schueller made competition a family affair.

Lazlo Alberti, already a force on the local road racing scene, took his riding skills to the velodrome and won a bunch of cat 1-2 races.

Veteran sprinter Linsey Hamilton has spent much of the season preparing for a big effort in the Master's Worlds competition being held this year Oct. 6-12 at the VELO Sports Center in Los Angeles, CA.

Satchell Mische-Richter used his explosive acceleration to become one of the leaders in the Cat 1-2 Division.

 Colette Meller was so successful at the Cat 4 level that she moved up during the season.

Peter Olejniczak, another road warrior, has had no trouble winning his share of Cat 1-2 men's races.

Regular rider Sara Bonneville wins the velodrome fashion award for 2018.

Kristy Crouse is the Cat 4 women's state scratch race champion.

If Cat 3 rider Nathan Li challenges you to a bike race on the street, turn him down.

Kadence Hampton steadily improved as the season went by and became a threat in every Cat 4 race.

Alex Terzich is usually near the front end when a Cat 3 race is decided.

The substructure of the NSC Velodrome, itself a star of track cycling. Sadly, the 2019 season will be its last. After 30 years of exposure to the elements of Minnesota it will no longer have the structural integrity for safe racing. If you've never witnessed the action on this gorgeous facility be sure and spend a Thursday evening here watching the world's fastest human-powered sport next summer.

Dallas Cop Amber Guyger Kills Botham Jean In His Own Home

The day after the shooting death of Botham Jean in his own home by a resident of the same complex, Dallas cop Amber Guyger, Texas Ranger investigators obtained a search warrant for Jean's apartment. While there are discrepancies in Guyger's account of the incident, we're not aware of any effort to obtain a search warrant for her residence. Even as she is at liberty due to meeting a bail requirement of $300,000 and Jean's relatives find that Guyger's story doesn't add up. There's more here.

 

The same conditions existed in the case of the shooting death of Justine Damond in Minneapolis, MN on July 15, 2017. When she was killed by a Minneapolis policeman in an alley  on the same block as her home, cops immediately acquired a search warrant for the premises. Perhaps that's normal procedure in a homicide investigation or any crime, regardless of the crime's proximity to the victim's home. In any event, we've never been informed of any commensurate search of the residence of either of the cops involved in the killing of Ms. Damond. And, well over a year later, both cops, including the man who pulled the trigger that released the bullet that killed Justine Damond, have yet to be involved in a court action that would declare their innocence or guilt in the matter of her death. 

More Bizarre Commercial Signage

This posted in the cosmetics section of a large, kind of important, national retailer:

 How would this be best described in one word? Pick from this list: tacky, classless, sleazy, repulsive, loathsome, abhorrent, offensive, revolting, disgusting, unclever.

A Goat On The Loose

Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul further down the Mississippi, has a big problem. Well, maybe not that big. It's the size of a goat. The goat has been wandering around town, peering in patio windows and evidently making a nuisance of itself, as this article explains. There is an APB out to the forty member police force to capture this animal before . . . .something or other. The police chief fears that the goat will wander onto one of the highways in the neighborhood and get struck by a car.

Sure, that could certainly happen, In fact, it happens fairly frequently. Not with goats but instead with white-tail deer, famous for dashing in front of speeding automobiles and often being plastered across the grille to fatal effect. The car is usually messed up as well.

Hunting deer, one of the more popular fall pastimes in Minnesota, results in the neutralization of thousands of deer that could damage new Teslas or the popular diesel 4x4 crew-cab pickups that lumber down the streets. It is, however, verboten to kill these deer in the populated areas where they're most likely to encounter a speeding car. In the rare cases where deer death is deemed the solution to a problem, they're exterminated by "professional" hunters. In this case, the pros are to be law enforcement officers, unless they can figure out some way to capture the goat and remove it to some enclosed environment.

No one worries much about other animal traffic fatalities, squirrels, rabbits, geese, ducks, possum, turkeys, raccoons, turtles and snakes, etc. Domestic dogs and cats, now treated more like children than pets, get smashed flat from time to time also. They're just the price we pay to get to work in the morning or buzz down to the C-store for a pack of smokes. And they normally don't do much damage to the Prius.


Update: The goat has been apprehended. Inver Grove Heights police have announced that with the assistance of a local resident the goat has been captured and transported to the University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul.

How Public Employees Become Rich

Through a convoluted system fire and police department administrators in California can reap pension payments that would dazzle an emperor while simultaneously bankrupting the communities that once employed them. This case seems particularly outrageous.

New Los Angeles police chief Michael Moore had retired from the department with a $1.27 million  going away present, was rehired weeks later to the same position and then given the chief's job in June. 

 
US police chiefs, like Michael Moore above, could easily be mistaken for North Korean generals or Soviet-era admirals. They certainly don't look like "public servants".

One of the biggest objections to the bygone Soviet system that the US spent billions of dollars to keep away was that government apparatchiks had access to things that ordinary citizens did not, including money. Even as the Russian experiment in socialism failed, their counterparts in the US are following the same path, siphoning immense sums from the private sector in exchange for non-productive activity. The US is rapidly approaching USSR 2.0.

The Growth of Federal Regulations

K-9 Cop Attacked By His Dog

According to this story from Columbus, Ohio, a K-9 police man was forced to shoot his dog partner when the animal went berserk and attacked him.
We've commented before on the unsuitability of dogs being used in law enforcement. This is because dogs' ability to speak and understand English is limited, they don't necessarily share the same value system as  humans and their behavior can't be predicted. Nobody knows for sure what a dog, even a well-trained one, will do in any given set of circumstances.

Regularly, all over the country, K-9s bite innocent bystanders and cities then settle with these punctured citizens for large amounts of money. Resisting a police dog attack is no different than resisting an arrest by a police officer. It's illegal. Harming a police dog is the same as harming a human cop. It's a felony.

Yet, in this case, the human, being a cop, won't be arrested for the attempted murder of another cop. The dog was, in fact, taken away and killed by someone else at another location.  He was given the death penalty for attacking a fellow cop. If the victim had not been a member of the coercion community the dog would have been petted and given a food treat. The human cop was hospitalized with serious damage to his arms, for which he will be generously  compensated, no doubt.

Law enforcement likes to extol the effectiveness of K-9s in searching for burglars in dark buildings or sniffing luggage for drugs. They conveniently forget to mention how dangerous these animals are. The Columbus Police Department, and all other police departments, should give serious consideration to eliminating their dog cops.

 

After several high-profile incidents that are likely going to result in large payments to innocent victims, St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter has modified department policy for K-9 use and halted dog demonstrations at the Minnesota State Fair.

Law enforcement figures in favor of the use of dogs in police work don't seem to recognize that "suspects", as they term them, can't be legally bitten by dangerous dogs when they haven't been charged with a crime.

Of course, when it comes to K-9 foul-ups, there's always more. The Orange County, CA Sheriff's Dept.'s K-9 force was using a county building in Santa Ana for an exercise on August 29. Dogs were released in the building for a practice search and one dog found a county employee who had not been informed of the search in his office. The dog mangled the man, who was hospitalized and expected to need plastic surgery, as described in this article.

Ex-cop and county supervisor Todd Spitzer said:  “I’m simply appalled, as a former police officer who has worked alongside canines for over a decade, that the handlers didn’t clear the building to check for innocent civilians before they released the dogs,” Spitzer said. “The dog is trained to bite. That’s what it does.”

All civilians, the term that law enforcement uses to differentiate themselves from gewhonliche Menschen, are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Dogs don't know or care about this mundane fact. No cooperation by the victim will discourage a dog bite.

The reason that dogs are used for searches is because the heroic police have no desire to expose themselves to danger. They prefer that ignorant, unknowing animals that don't have the intellectual capacity to volunteer for it be used instead. Additionally, law enforcement finds the ability of K-9s to inspire fear to be an advantage in their work. Terrified, and the use of vicious dogs in law enforcement is terror by any definition, suspects are easily subdued. At the same time, dogs don't ordinarily berate these suspects with racial epithets that offend the public, like cops so often do. Instead of being investigated for working over somebody with a night stick or kicking a handcuffed arrestee in the head, the cop passes along the responsibility to an animal whose purpose and training is to hurt people. The dog can't testify to internal affairs about his role in the event.