This is a shocking statistic. Nearly a third of young people arrested by age 23? Either something is wrong with our laws or with law enforcement.

Via New York Times:

By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.

The study, the first since the 1960s to look at the arrest histories of a national sample of adolescents and young adults over time, found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated reported having been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation.

That figure is significantly higher than the 22 percent found in a 1965 study that examined the same issue using different methods. The increase may be a reflection of the justice system becoming more punitive and more aggressive in its reach during the last half-century, the researchers said. Arrests for drug-related offenses, for example, have become far more common, as have zero-tolerance policies in schools.

Thirty percent. Nearly one in three. Something is not right, and while this study did not look at racial breakdowns, it's likely the percentage is far higher among minority and poverty-stricken populations. Nick Peart, a young African American student at a New York community college, wrote a heartbreaking column for the New York Times Saturday asking why the NYPD was after him. He says police target black and Latino youth.

Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem — a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they’re fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don’t feel safer as a result.

We need change. When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.

What is happening here?

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While Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been busy arresting Latino car-wash workers and hapless mothers at roadblocks in his Ahab-like pursuit of undocumented immigrants, he's also been looking the other way when it comes to rape and other sex crimes, and letting criminals escape justice.

It's not exactly news that Arpaio's anti-immigrant fetish (not to mention his publicity-hound style) has meant that other kinds of crime in Maricopa County have not received the full attention of the Sheriff's Office. But now it's produced a particularly ugly and telling twist:

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office failed to adequately investigate more than 400 sex-crime cases, including dozens in El Mirage, over a two-year period because of poor oversight and former Chief Deputy David Hendershott's desire to protect a key investigator from bad publicity, according to documents pertaining to a recent internal investigation released by the Sheriff's Office.

The errors led to interminable delays for victims of serious crimes who waited years for the attackers to be brought to justice, if they were ever caught.

More than 50 El Mirage sex-crime cases, most involving young children reportedly victimized by friends or family, went uninvestigated after police took an initial report. The lack of oversight was so widespread in El Mirage that it affected other cases: roughly 15 death investigations, some of them homicides with workable leads, were never presented to prosecutors, and dozens of robberies and auto-theft cases never led to arrests.

Concern about the handling of the cases dates back several years. However, a recently concluded investigation by Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu revealed that an internal probe to get to the root of the problem was blocked by Hendershott two years ago because it would have reflected poorly on an investigator he considered crucial to a separate case.

Hendershott, according to investigators, killed the internal probe to protect Sgt. Kim Seagraves, because she was potentially needed to testify in a corruption case he was pushing.

The Pinal County investigation not only found fault in the El Mirage case, but it illustrated a larger problem with agency investigations.

"It wasn't just El Mirage PD cases," Deputy Chief Scott Freeman told Pinal County investigators. "As they started to look into that, they found that there were a lot of cases that hadn't been worked properly, hundreds of cases."

The Sheriff's Office would not comment on the mishandled investigations, which are the subject of an ongoing internal probe that began after Hendershott was placed on administrative leave last fall.

This reflects something the conservative Goldwater Institute reported three years ago:

The Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.

MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.

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It's the new political correctness, I gather, not to ever suggest that anyone who's ever served in the military is ever capable posing a threat to law-enforcement officers or the general public. That was the whole upshot of the recent fake controversy over the DHS report on domestic terrorism.

In the meantime, what do you know: Yet another shooting of police officers by an angry and paranoid man with a military background. And just like the last one, this one believed Obama was going to come get his guns:

On Sunday, lawmen still were investigating why Joshua Cartwright, a 28-year-old U.S. Army Reserve soldier with a history of violence, killed Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies Burt Lopez and Warren "Skip" York at a gun range in Crestview.

A few minutes after he killed the deputies, Cartwright was himself killed in a shootout with lawmen in DeFuniak Springs.

"None of it's logical, none of it makes sense," said interim Sheriff Ed Spooner on Sunday. "He'd obviously just got something else in his mind."

An offense report filed against Cartwright the day he died outlines an angry husband who threatened his wife, kept guns and knives on hand, was "severely disturbed" that Barack Obama had been elected president, and believed the U.S. government was conspiring against him.

Here's the incident report. Towards the end, this observation is included:

While we were waiting Cartwright told me that her husband believed the U.S. Government was conspiring against him. She said he had been severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.

The extent of Cartwright's military background is yet unclear:

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Scott Noll at WREG-TV in Memphis had a fascinating story earlier this week, following up on last summer's deadly rampage by two sovereign citizens, Jerry and Joe Kane, that left two police officers dead and several other wounded:

Tonight there are new questions about how much the feds knew about an anti-government activist, accused in the deadly attack against police officers in West Memphis.

WREG On Your Side Investigators have uncovered the secret FBI files showing Jerry Kane was the target of a federal investigation five years before that deadly day last May.

The 19 page file was released this week, following our Freedom of Information Act request last June.

Tonight, West Memphis's police chief believes if his officers had known what was inside last May they'd still be alive today.

"I felt like I let this department down May the 20, 2010 when I didn't have the information I should have had," said Paudert recalling the shooting that left his son, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, and Officer Bill Evans dead.

The chief finds it disturbing to know the FBI knew about Jerry Kane years before that deadly day.

Paudert had no idea what was in the file until we showed him.

"You could become very angry very quickly when you lose your son and a fine officer like Bill Evans thinking this information was stored away someplace in someone's file and they didn't want to share it," explained Paudert.

The incident was yet another reminder that one of the most significant ongoing threats to law enforcement officers in this country comes from right-wing extremists of the Patriot/"sovereign citizen" variety -- people who take Republicans' government-bashing rhetoric to its illogical extreme and declare themselves free of federal laws and functionally laws unto themselves. There are constant reminders of this threat -- from the Hutaree Militia to the Richard Poplawskis out there.

Of course, we all were witness to the right-wing shrieking over that Department of Homeland Security bulletin warning police officers around the country about the nature of this resurgent threat. That's because conservatives are more concerned about whitewashing away these embarrassments than they are with the lives of police officers. They like to use dead cops as props to attack liberals while loudly arguing, as Glenn Beck did a couple years ago, that even paying attention to such right-wing threats is a smear of mainstream conservatives.

Ironically, Glenn Beck was nattering at length on his Fox News show this week claiming that left-wing extremists are about to start killing police officers en masse, which is why they need to destroy their unions. Right.

The unfortunate reality is that federal officials are almost certainly not sharing this vital intelligence with police officers because, whenever they do, they're viciously and loudly attacked by right-wing pundits for allegedly smearing mainstream conservatives. Amazingly, no one in the mainstream media seems to have yet cottoned to the fact that this really is a near-outright confession of complicity.

Indeed, domestic terrorism is sharply increasing in the past two years, as evidenced by the 22 incidents and counting we've documented involving right-wing extremists committing acts of violence against "liberals" and government targets.

But because right-wing talkers only want to discuss terrorism as a "Muslim" phenomenon, we're getting a badly skewed understanding of the nature of terrorism. As Rep. Bennie Thompson explained in Politico a few weeks back:

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Has anyone else noticed how little coverage the skinhead plot to assassinate Obama has been given?

Eric Ward has noticed:

While the public, political pundits, and even some law enforcement officials have been quick to downplay the actions of Cowart and Schlesselman using words such as “unlikely,” “unsophisticated,” and “bizarre”, these individuals are making a case for who they believe is an American. I can’t help but think back to 2006 when seven men who thought they were working with al-Qaida (but in actuality an FBI informant) were arrested in a plot against Chicago’s Sears Tower.

I can’t help but to ask if Coward and Schlesselman had been self-proclaimed Muslims would these same political pundits and law enforcement officials find themselves so blasé? Would the public write it off as “stupid kids who weren’t serious?”

Doubtful.

I know the looming election has sucked all the oxygen out of the newsroom. And it's true that the plot -- they wanted to kill 102 black people, 14 of them by decapitation, before they culminated their spree with a frontal attack on Obama -- more resembled a dumb fantasy out of a bad action flick than anything likely ever to become a reality.

But that's what anyone who might've stumbled onto Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols prior to April 19, 1995, likely would have concluded too. And the fact is, these guys were serious, they were heavily armed, and they took concrete steps to begin making their fantasy into a reality.

No, they almost certainly would never have reached Barack Obama. But would they have been capable of killing large numbers of black people before the law caught up with them. Just like the three men caught in Denver before the Democratic National Convention, they weren't likely at all to succeed but they almost certainly would have killed innocent members of the public along the way.

And unlike the Denver tweakers, these two young men not only appeared much more capable and competent, but also much more motivated. After all, they were entrenched in the skinhead scene and heavily involved in the white-nationalist movement that inspired them.

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I don't know about you, but I can't think of any better way to prepare our law-enforcement officers for potential terrorist attacks by teaching them that all Muslims are violent America-haters and that we should just kill them all. Also, President Obama is secretly a Muslim.

That's going to work out splendidly, isn't it?

From Chip Berlet:

This quote is from what one official involved in homeland security said was the theme of a speech by Walid Shoebat at an anti-terrorism training in Las Vegas in October 2010.

Our source had turned around after Shoebat's speech and asked the woman in the chair behind them at the conference what she thought was the solution offered by Shoebat.

"Kill them...including the children...you heard him," was the full response.

Shoebat's Las Vegas speech was described by our source as "frightening."

You may remember Shoebat. Back in 2008, the Air Force Academy brought him in to teach cadets how to hate Muslims. Now he's doing it for law enforcement. As Berlet explains:

Shoebat has said that "Islam is not the religion of God -- Islam is the devil." According to religion writer Richard Bartholomew, "Shoebat is a pseudo-expert on terrorism, Islamic extremism, and Biblical prophecy, and he teaches that Obama is a secret Muslim and that the Bible has prophesised a Muslim anti-Christ." This means for some apocalyptic Christians that Muslims then would be allies of Satan in the End Times battle between good and evil. This battle ends when Jesus returns and with a vengeful God kills all these deemed to be non-believers in Christianity. This bloody and bigoted version of apocalyptic prophesies is rejected and condemned by the Catholic and Orthodox churches and every major Protestant denomination.

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Someone should tell Scott Brown: If he voted with the Democrats more often, this wouldn't be happening in his home state. Of course, I'm assuming this problem is repeated all over the country. No wonder the Taser incidents keep going up:

Massachusetts spends far less than other states on training for police officers, committing less money to its police academies than it did 20 years ago, according to a state legislative report that says the result is a fractured system with an outdated curriculum that fails to keep officers abreast of the latest trends in law enforcement.

Even academy instructors are falling behind on key topics like Taser and pepper spray use, firearms use, defensive tactics, and first aid, says a draft report by the Legislature’s Municipal Police Training Commission.

“There are a number of police officers, because of the lack of money departments have, they’re not getting any [specialized] training at all,’’ said Kenneth Scanzio, legislative director and vice president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police and a member of the commission. “There’s a lot we have to work on to get our police training to better standards.’’

The bloodbath continues in America's heartland and now word is coming in that the People's Liberation Army, the highly trained killers on the payroll of the Communist Chinese government, have crossed into the United States by tunneling through the center of the Earth and have taken over at least two ranches in the Springview, Nebraska area. I am receiving word that the owners of the ranches have evacuated without being harmed.

Founder of the San Diego Minutemen Jeff Schwilk tipped me off to this story and passes along the following information on the location. Schwilk, you may remember, was the incredibly reliable source who tipped us off the this story about our Mexlamofascist overlords starting the reconquista of the Southwestern United States. Anyway, here is what he is telling us:

I can personally vouch that this info came in late last night from a reliable police source inside the Springview PD. There is currently a standoff between the unknown size ChiCom forces and the Nebraska National Guard and local law enforcement. The Chinese have apparently been planning this tunnel for decades and now their vile plan has come to fruition. Upon entering the Heartland, the PLA began immediately setting up restaurants to convert upstanding Real Americans to their heathenistic commie ideology. Reports indicate that dozens of corn-fed Heartlanders are now gorging themselves on General Gao's chicken and delicious spring rolls! The source tells us he considers this an "act of war" and that the military is needed in the Heartland immediately!

WE MUST ALERT THE MANY PATRIOTIC BLOGGERS WHO HAVE BEEN DOING A BANG-UP JOB COVERING THE TOTALLY ACCURATE RECONQUISTA STORY THAT WE ARE NOW BEING INVADED ON TWO FRONTS!!!

Sensing the weakness of our Chicago thug president, America's enemies have decided that now is the time to finally bring our country to her knees! But with the help of True Patriots, we can repel these foreign invaders! All Patriot Bloggers must report with their firearms to Nebraska immediately to defend the Heartland! Or else they can, you know, just do their patriotic duty by providing us with frequent updates while drinking Mountain Dew from the safety of their own homes. Both courses of action are equally brave! TO ARMS, MY KEYBOARDING BRETHREN!!!!

UPDATE: After making a call to the Springview PD, I have since learned that the Chinese have not invaded and that the incident in question was merely the grand opening of a new Panda Express at the local shopping mall. All the same, this does nothing to refute the accuracy of my original report.

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When reality catches up to Arizonans for their passage of their misbegotten police-state immigration law, it's going to be ugly and unpleasant. If other states really are considering passing similar laws, they will want to watch what happens to Arizona -- and they will inevitably wind up thinking twice.

We've pointed out previously -- as have the nation's police chiefs -- that the law is almost certain to in fact increase violent crime and dilute law enforcement's capacity to deal with it in Arizona.

And that will only be the first consequence (and a decidedly ironic one, since this law was sold as being a means to crack down on violent crime). The longest-lasting and most significant, however, will be the economic one: When the Latino workforce flees Arizona, their economy will suffer a dramatic downturn unlike any they've seen in decades.

It's already starting to happen:

Arizona’s hard-hitting immigration law is driving Hispanics out of the state weeks before the controversial law goes into effect.

Although concrete figures are not available, anecdotal evidence suggests Hispanics, both legal residents and illegal immigrants, are starting to flee.

Schools in Hispanic neighborhoods are reporting abnormal enrollment drops, and businesses that serve Hispanics also report that business is down, according to a USA Today report published Wednesday.

The report suggests that the immigration law is compounding demographic trends that have already significantly curtailed illegal immigration during the past two years. The bad economy has been the primary deterrent to many Hispanic immigrants seeking to enter Arizona, says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

“If you have a bad economy and a hostile environment, then that’s likely to cause people to think twice about coming, and possibly even to leave,” Mr. Passel says.

... Any loss, however, will be a loss for the Arizona economy, [David Gutierrez, a professor of immigration history, at the University of California San Diego] suggests.

“Latinos...are a highly flexible, highly exploitable work force, a buffer to economic downturns,” he says. “Many of the industries here – agriculture, service industries, low-end manufacturing, construction – are massively dependent on undocumented workers.

“If I were able to conduct an experiment and pay all of Arizona’s undocumented workers to not work for two weeks, the economy would come to a screeching, crashing halt instantaneously.”

This brought to mind a video forwarded to me from my friend Jimmy at McCranium, an Eastern Washington blog, of a Pasco immigration attorney named Tom Roach giving an informational talk to group of local citizens in Kennewick on May 29.

The talk is excellent, and I recommend watching the whole thing if you're interested. Because Roach effectively drills down to the heart of our dilemma with immigration -- namely, our current laws are so screwed up they have no chance of meeting the nation's economic needs or effectively dealing with natural immigration pressures that are driven by not just the economy, but the American Dream itself:

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Police Scoff At Ashcroft Speech Yahoo! News

A day after Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) told the nation's largest association of law enforcement executives that the Bush administration had made the nation more secure from terrorist attacks and violent criminals, the group lashed back at the White House.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) said that cuts by the administration in federal aid to local police agencies have left the nation more vulnerable than ever to public safety threats. The 20,000-member group also said in a statement that new anti-terrorism duties for local cops - which have come as state and local budgets have declined and historically low crime rates have crept upward - have pushed police agencies to "the breaking point."

The statement reflected the ongoing tension between the administration and many local police chiefs, who believe the White House has saddled them with anti-terrorism tasks without much regard to the cost.

Among other things, members of the chiefs' group have long complained about localities having to pay millions of dollars in overtime costs when the U.S. government issued terrorism alerts. The group also is annoyed that President Bush (news - web sites) is phasing out a $10 billion program begun by the Clinton administration in 1996 to help local departments hire tens of thousands more cops.