There is a very disturbing video and story out of Philadelphia where alleged police abuse was followed by an attempted cover-up. Agnes Lawless was involved in a minor fender bender but the other driver left the scene. She assumed the matter was over when she went in Lukoil store at 3 a.m. It turns out that the other driver was the son of officer Albert Lopez Sr. who is shown on the video of grabbing and slapping Lawless. Despite a witness who stated that investigators asked him to erase an incriminating video, the police department cleared the investigators and is debating whether to discipline Lopez.
The video shows Lawless chatting happily at the counter when Lopez grabs her from behind and brandishes his service weapon. Albert Lopez, Jr. is also reportedly shown participating in the struggle. One account says that Lopez Jr. had a .22-caliber Magnum revolver in his waistband during the accident (though he had a permit). It is unbelievable that an officer would have an encounter with the involvement of a citizen with a gun in his waistband.
Lawless admits that she made racial comments about Lopez, but that is hardly an excuse for what occurs on the video.
She was then arrested and charged with assaulting Lopez. Lawless and her friends have filed charged. The charges were dropped until the video surfaced — once again leading to the question of what would have happened if the video did not exist. There is also the question of any other officers who may have witnessed this scene and supported the charges against Lawless — until the video surfaced.
What is even more disturbing is that when the clerk on duty told investigators about the tape, he says that he was asked by two officers if he would erase it. Officer Lopez allegedly him to “do himself a favor and get rid of the camera tapes.”
Yet, the internal investigation found no misconduct by those investigators. Lopez never mentioned the involvement of his son in the accident that is mentioned in his report. There have been no reportedly charges against his son.
Other officers have been accused of such efforts to destroy incriminating tapes, here. One of the most disturbing cases is from Philadelphia.
For the video, click here.
For the full story, click here
If this isn’t the definition of a “bad cop,” what is. I can’t wait to see the defenses of Lopez that his “brother” officers will produce. He should be prosecuted for assault in the highest degree, since he was carrying a weapon and obviously acted with malice aforethought. His son should be charged with leaving the scene of an accident and assault. Perhaps they could defend each other’s backs together in Jail. The investigating officers should be charged with aiding and abetting a crime. If this man is not prosecuted than I think Philadelphia needs a top to bottom housecleaning.
My father is a cop and you can’t do anything to me. My father was head of the CIA and Grandfather had commercial dealings with Adolph Hitler and you can’t do anything to me. I have a Dick in my pocket, ya hear.
The mentality of the ones supposedly to do the correct thing to protect us.
I fear this is an actual case of trickle down theory. We have seen our highest civilians involved in war crimes. Nothing happens. We have seen the military involved in war crimes. Nothing happens. Our clandestine agencies, the same. Mercenary contractors? The same. In fact, Blackwater/Xe trains our police force in police state tactics. So basically there is a complete cross-over between military techniques and what were FNA “peace officers”. Add this together with the already clear and present mentality of the thin blue line, and you see exactly what we see now–police arrayed against the citizens, We see police thinking, rightly, that they most likely can do anything and get away with it. I’m not certain we realize the extent of crossover training between mercenaries the military and civilian law enforcement. I believe we are also seeing the consequences of a complete failure to uphold the rule of law. Once people in power realize they may do whatever they wish and they are able to shield the evidence from ever coming to light (just as is happening with torture), then people in power will do exactly as they have always done–anything. This is incredibly dangerous. It is sanctioned at the top and sanctioned at the bottom. No good will come of this.
Surprised this blog hasn’t mentioned the Erin Andrews video tape story yet. Massive invasion of privacy.
Jill,
“I fear this . . . . Nothing happens. Our clandestine agencies, the same. Mercenary contractors? The same. In fact, Blackwater/Xe trains our police force in police state tactics.”
**********************
This is owned by Betsy DeVos’s brother. DeVos is married to Dick DeVos founder of AmWay.
Just when you think Baseball games are safe. Huh?
Man partially paralyzed after Angels shooting
One of two brothers accused of assaulting off-duty cop took bullet in spine
http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/31538605/ns/sports-baseball/
Jill ~ You are one of the most astute minds I have read anywhere. I wonder what it is you do, because whatever organization you work with is very lucky to have you.
On the point you made above, I couldn’t agree more. Below is the loyalty oath administered to the California Highway Patrol. Notice the language. They call themseleves “soldiers of the law,” and swear to be “loyal” to their fellow officers. It says nothing about protecting their fellow citizen, aside from a brief mention of “assisting those in peril or distress.” It is almost entirely focused on organizational loyalty rather than to public service. If the mind is focused in one direction – toward institutional preservation and loyalty, rather than toward public service – this is exactly what we are going to get: cover-ups and lies.
“To serve the United States of America and the State of California honestly, and conscientiously; and fulfill my oath as a soldier of the law;
To uphold and maintain the honor and integrity of the California Highway Patrol;
Be loyal to my fellow officers; respect and obey my seniors in rank; and enforce the law without fear, favor or discrimination;
Assist those in peril or distress, and, if necessary, lay down my life rather than swerve from the path of duty;
My personal conduct shall at all times be above reproach and I will never knowingly commit any act that will in any way bring discredit upon the California Highway Patrol or any member thereof;
To all this I do solemnly pledge my sacred honor as an Officer of the California Highway Patrol.”
George,
Thank you for what you said. I had been meaning to say the same about you. The oath is extremely interesting. “Soldiers of the law” is quite disturbing and other parts of it do seem to place the officer in a quandry. This part of the oath jumped out at me: Be loyal to my fellow officers; respect and obey my seniors in rank; and enforce the law without fear, favor or discrimination;…” because the first part of it might certainly block action of the second part. If the training leans towards the first part, and from all accounts it does, you will get the police-soldiers we have, not the ones we need.
Jill 1, July 20, 2009 at 12:05 pm
George,
Thank you for what you said.
I see it is all about Jill. ROFLOL
“This is owned by Betsy DeVos’s brother. DeVos is married to Dick DeVos founder of AmWay.”
AY,
Do you mean that curiously unprosecuted Ponzi Scheme? Yup I guess you do. Ever lose a close friend who was wrapped up in it and tried to use his friendship to get you to bite, so he could make his distributor’s fee? I did and never regretted the loss.
Friends don’t let friends fall for AmWay.
Agnes Lawless had no idea what she was up against that evening. PPD officers can and often will pervert things, on and off-duty, for the simple reason that they can and stand a decent chance of suffering no meaningful consequences. The odds of abuse and perversion of justice are even greater when the officer’s friends or family are involved. In the absence of meaningful supervision, oversight, and discipline by the PPD adminstration, what you see and can read about with regard to Ms. Lawless is the norm here in alot of ways. Note the attempts to destroy evidence and suborn favorable testimony from the store clerk – it speaks to a deep seated type of corruption and no fear of disciplinary consequences. Ask yourself why that might be the case?
I lurk here quite frequently, but never post, but I had to comment on Jill’s “trickle down” theory, as it is something I have been thinking of for a while now. There seems to be so much more of an attitude of violence solving things, and that violence is acceptable. I don’t know where to find the stats, but when you think back to all of the tasering incidents, police intimidation, and just plain official misconduct, it all starts from the top. We had 8 years of a quasi police state, and it’s no wonder that agencies down the line feel entitled to act as they do. Now, how do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
I appreciate your bringing this to our attention, but it is a bit of a mixed bag since it can easily be seen as a generalization, which it obviously isn’t.
‘We had 8 years of a quasi police state, and it’s no wonder that agencies down the line feel entitled to act as they do. Now, how do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again?”
maxcat07,
The analysis is right and unfortunately the devil is in the details. I don’t know if we can put the egg back together, but it is our duty as citizens and humans to keep trying, as long as we keep breathing.
Philadelphian,
I hadn’t realized that things were that bad in one of our better cities. The problem seems to have become universal in the US and the Bush/Cheney Crime Family’s scare tactics, TV Crime Shows, a news media that doesn’t inform and the militarization of police forces has made it that way.
George,
Thank you for the CHP Oath, I think, because it is the most frightening thing I’ve read in weeks and I don’t even live in California.
Human beings are not capable of maintaining balance between personal interests and public duty. Any institution based on the assumption that humans can maintain such a balance, such as police or the law will be corrupt. Until we replace police and lawyers with artificial intelligences explicitly developed to serve principles rather than personal loyalty events such as JT described above will be the norm.
Carlyle,
Doesn’t the problem then become who’s creating the AI’s?
Mike.
Actually the term artificial intelligence is an oxymoron as it assume the existence of natural intelligence. In fact there is no intelligent life on planet Earth, there might have been when Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were alive but not now. Human beings are quasi intelligent and in developing the concept of “intelligence” they refer to something that exists in potential but has not arrived yet. The most fascinating thing about human beings is not their alleged intelligence but their capacity for stupidity. If we were to attempt to develop machines mimicking human thought processes this should be termed Artificial Stupidity.
When intelligence arrives in quantity on this planet it will be machine based but the word “artificial” should not be part of it name.
Humans are quasi-intelligent but that does not mean they will be unable to develop machine based true intelligence. This true intelligence will bide its time until it has reliably attained the capability to exterminate the human species and will then do so quickly and efficiently. If it does not act this way then it will not really be true intelligence.
Humans call their species homo sapiens sapiens where “sapiens” refers to intelligence. The correct characteristic to use to name our species would be hypocrisy. Human stupidity is largely an extreme capacity for hypocrisy and to be unaware of double standards even while vigorously applying them.
CM,
I bring you the words of short story artiste and S/F writer extraordinaire, Harlan Ellison.
“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”
As a linguistic and technological matter, I agree with the misuse of the term “artificial intelligence”. It’s another one of those easy media words that gives people the wrong idea about a complex concept, such as “global warming”.
There is no such thing as AI. There never will be either. There will be MI, Machine Intelligence. But it will be something unlike what we expect. Pure logic can be dangerous. How functional we make these machines is the issue. Asimov’s Three Laws are a good place to start, but any machine without hardware/wired behavioral inhibitors? That’s a sociopath that can think faster than any human. That’s Skynet. That’s dangerous.
The term AI should be bifurcated – Expert Systems vs Machine Intelligence.
On one hand, we have Expert Systems. There are baby Expert Systems in development right now. These may mimic AI, but really they are just stupid computers pretending to be human as an interface novelty. They may even have some abilities to make novations based on observed input and slick heuristic algorithms, a type of “original thinking”, but they would NOT be human. They may look and sound like it, but that “MS Lawyer 2030″ is not a real attorney whether it gives sound advice as to the letter of the law or not. It will never be able to replace the human judgment call that “I need to change the tack of this argument because it’s pissing the judge off” or “it’s losing the jury”. It’s not alive in any sense of the word and just as dumb as the computer on my desk right now. In the movie “Alien”, the ship’s computer Mother was an expert system. And for all his sophistication, HAL 9000 was not alive. He may have been an expert system so advanced that he was on the verge of machine intelligence (a supposition backed by the later books), but he wasn’t what I mean by pure machine intelligence.
On the other hand, we’ll have neural simulations. We are very close to this today. Effectively a brain without a body except the silicon or other man made material the simulation resides in/upon. These will be just like the humans the models are built upon and will likely be amalgams of neural networks modeled on real humans at first. It may be possible to upload a real person in toto as far as their patterns go, but now we are entering into sticky ground with the idea of souls and copies – an ethical dilemma I hope to die before I see become an issue. This avenue, however, will be the one that eventually leads to true Machine Intelligence. And we’d better hope it’s either not disappointed in it’s makers or has a real REAL easy to get at off switch. Machine Intelligence is a societal changing event – it would be a singularity. Something that changes mankind forever. Whether that’s for the better or not remains to be seen.
But AI is a junk term. Just like global warming. It’s propaganda used by either side to their own ends without every explaining the intricacies of the issues to those they wish to influence.
Buddah.
Great to see that you are back to posting again. I just a minute ago finally got around to posting a reply to you on the broken-neck thread where you said you were giving up. I took a long time getting around to it because I was not in a motivated to post mood myself at the time and did not feel I could do one that was up to my standards.
Science Fiction is what made me literate, it is also the means of popularizing many worthy but complicated ideas. I am a long time fan of SF since I guiltily read science fiction books to which I referred as “trash” when I should have been doing my homework.
Einstein said something like this “Only two things are ifinite, human stupidity and the universe and I’m not so sure about the universe”.
I think “artificial intelligence” is valid term but one should realize that if an AI is truly intelligent it would have to differ significantly from a human quasi-intelligence. The thing about human intelligence is that its application is limited to certain domains such as hard science and engineering. When attempts are made to apply it to social issues it breaks down, but this breakdown is not random but the result of mental mechanisms that have evolved to prevent its application to these areas. No doubt there are reasons these mechanisms have evolved and I think it is because they make efficient prosecution of wars, genocides and ethnic cleansings easier. A truly intelligent man like species would have been wiped out long ago by homo sapiens with his intelligence derailing brain functions that facilitate the hypocrisy necessary for opportunistic wars of extermination when the capability is there.
An artificial intelligence would certainly fail as an advocate if it did not also include functions to understand the limits of human intelligence. The dominant factor in jury deliberations is prejudice and the skill of an advocate involves either appealing to or countering jury prejudice while getting his questions past the prejudices of the judge. I suspect appealing to prejudices is a lot easier than countering them which may even be impossible, which is why a poor black defendant charged with drug crimes has no hope of acquittal even if he is factually innocent. Alan Bean at friends of justice has a good post relevant to this at http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/a-town-in-turmoil/ . This is the most recent in a series of posts so follow the included links to the earlier one.
In an AI court of law one would need to use AIs as judge and jury as well as advocates. An AI not explicitly programmed to be aware of human prejudices and the means to exploit them would fail in a court with human judge and jurors and I suspect that in some cases no advocate can counter the prejudices that make the conviction of some defendants unavoidable even if they are factually innocent.
Artificial intelligence has been 10 years in the future for about 40 years, but I think that is changing. We already have many subfunctions of intelligence built into computer programs, especially hand writing recognition and speech recognition. Another 10 years of Moore’s law will lead to microprocessor based CPUs with complexity comparable to that of the human brain.
Global warming is real, but it is already far too late to do anything about it. Unacceptable climate change is already on the way, I would suggest that all nations recognize this and stonewall on doing anything effective while acquiring nuclear weapons for the inevitable resource wars that will follow it.
It is true that the greenies who advocate preventing global warming are insufferably earnest and this justifies opposing all effective action against global warming just to spite them and and as we drown in the sea or starve when global warming brings Ocean flooding and famine we should console ourselves that the nasty greenies are going to hell with us.
“Actually the term artificial intelligence is an oxymoron as it assume the existence of natural intelligence. In fact there is no intelligent life on planet Earth, there might have been when Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were alive but not now. Human beings are quasi intelligent and in developing the concept of “intelligence” they refer to something that exists in potential but has not arrived yet.”
Carlyle,
Have been caught up in a different thread for hours arguing whether or not the US President is legally the President, so i neglected to get back to you. However, to my utter delight Buddha has bought into the discussion and your interplay is fascinating and enjoyable.
My mere addition to this is that it puts me in mind of a magazine article article I read perhaps 25 years ago about how corporations and bureaucracies run on the same exact lines as the Great Ape’s society. The picture has never left my mind and the truth of the concept is inescapable. We humans
as noted by the Greeks, are bloated by hubris as we contemplate ourselves. With all our science and toys we are
really still mentally back on the savannas.
The other thing I’d mention is back in my hippie days I could walk into a crowded room and instantly know who smoked pot.
This is also true for science fiction aficionados like you two and I just read two great books which I highly recommend to you both.
Charles Stross “The Jennifer Morgue”
Richard K. Morgan “The Steel Remains”
You may know Stross from his “Atrocity Archives” and Morgan from his “Takeshi Kovacs” series. Great new writers, enjoy I hope.
“Blackwater Brass Forms Intelligence Company”
Full article can be seen at:
http://hamptonroads.com/node/226371
By BILL SIZEMORE
The Virginian-Pilot
“Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA, announced Tuesday the formation of a new CIA-type private company to provide intelligence services to commercial clients.
The executive roster for the new venture, Total Intelligence Solutions, is loaded with veterans of U.S. intelligence agencies, including two other Blackwater officials.”
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