Category Archives: Crime

Sniffing For Bones, Not Drugs

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Pseudoscience

I’ve long since maintained that drug-sniffing dogs are looking for bones, not drugs. The sight of a working police dog, nose to the ground, looking for whatever it is that humans think the dog is looking for has always seemed ridiculous to me. Sure, dogs have incredible olfactory abilities. But it’s quite a leap to imagine that a dog’s nose can be reliably harnessed to serve human needs.

What do you know? I was right.

As the Chicago Tribune reports, “state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.”

[SNIP; or is it SNIFF]

To make a bad situation worse, sniffer dogs are racist too.

UPDATE III: Jew Bears Christian Witness to Ethnic Cleansing

America, Christianity, Crime, Israel, Nationhood, Racism, South-Africa

The following is from “Jew Bears Christian Witness to Ethnic Cleansing,” my new WND.COM column:

“… America’s solipsistic opinion formers and television program-makers do not provide any serious, ongoing analysis of what’s afoot in the ‘new’ South Africa. …
Indeed, the ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner has failed to cloud pinched horizons in America.

Perhaps it takes a Jew to bear Christian Witness.

As Adriana Stuijt reports, a ‘pro-Boer Israeli human rights activist’ by the name of Avigdor Eskin visited South Africa on a fact-finding tour in October. Mr. Eskin has,

kicked off the Christian New Year by demonstrating in Jerusalem on Sunday against the ANC-regime’s ‘silent genocide’ of the … Afrikaner-Boers in South Africa. He said the Boers have ‘for the past 100 years always been the friends of the Jewish people. We must support and help them in their present plight. What is happening in South Africa cannot be tolerated and we will not remain silent.’

Bravo. Mr. Eskin is living up to the standards of great Israelis past. The Jewish State was perhaps the only friend the old South Africa had. Theirs was a firm relationship forged in the fires of international excoriation and excommunication.

Against the decree of the United States, Israel’s Labor and Likud governments chose barter over boycotts.”…

The complete column is “Jew Bears Christian Witness to Ethnic Cleansing,” now on WND.COM.

My libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, is now available on Kindle.

UPDATE I (Jan. 7): In answer to the reader below. The Afrikaners are a nation. The English of South Africa are not a “tribe” (i.e., a nation) in any meaningful sense. Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, was pretty perceptive when he recently acknowledged, moreover, that only the Afrikaners are true Africans. The English have always held onto that British passport.

UPDATE II: “Invictus,” the grandiose title of a Clint Eastwood idealized film about South Africa, is not the right source of information about that country (for heaven’s sake!). Our reader thinks of Mandela as a cuddly democrat and a Christian! News to me. Need I remind you that Hollywood does not edify and is seldom a good source for reliable data?

My book is, but it’s not yet out. Patience.

TWO OF MY SA ARTICLES:

‘Kill The Fucking Whites’ On Facebook
“War On White South Africa”

UPDATE III: The closest you’ll come to the “truth” about SA in mainstream media: “I only know that my daughter—a world traveler—says South Africa is the scariest place she’s ever been,” writes David Thomson for the The New Republic. Why so scary? He doesn’t say.

O.J.-Like Evidence Could Exonerate Noxious Knox

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Europe, Foreign Policy, Justice, Law

O.J.-LIKE EVIDENCE CONVICTED NOXIOUS (AMANDA) KNOX, which, due to US pressure on the Italians, could well mean that O.J.-like evidence might exonerate her of the murder of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.

At the time I wrote the following:

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a local drifter born in the Ivory Coast and known to Knox, were convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher. CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, on and on—all have united in advocating for Amanda, “An Innocent Abroad.”

Going against the grain of American-style boosterism, Barbie Nadeau of Newsweek stuck with “journalism” to detail the ample evidence against the pair, downplayed or downright suppressed in the American media. For one, “Neither suspect [had] a credible alibi for the night of the murder, and both told a variety of lies about that night.” Knox changed her alibi, not once or twice, but several times. In the process, she accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of the crime. Based on the convincing yarn Knox spun, Lumumba spent time in jail before being released.

After Knox had cast her pal Lumumba aside, she tried to implicate her lover of two weeks, venturing: “I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife. …

“Theatrics aside,” wrote Newsweek’s Nadeau, “the Amanda Knox trial comes down to forensics. … Among the most damning evidence against Sollecito is his DNA on the metal clasp of the bra that was cut from Kercher after she died.”

Also revealed with Luminol was a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matched Sollecito’s. “Key forensic evidence against Knox includes her footprint in blood in the hallway outside Kercher’s room. There [were] also mixed traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared. And a knife was found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and … Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.”

Like the original “Dream Team,” defense attorneys for Knox, “who at one time admitted to being at home when the murder took place,” alleged contamination (even though the crime scene was sealed off in-between searches), character assassination and insufficient amounts of DNA (it’s the type of DNA that matters, not the amount).

[SNIP]

The latest from Perugia, Italy, via CNN is that the “American … has won a major victory Saturday in her appeal of the murder conviction in the death of her British roommate when an Italian appellate judge granted approval of independent forensic reviews on two key pieces of evidence.”

“Why do you need to review the forensic evidence when this conviction is based on much more than the knife and the bra clasp?” Prosecutor Manuela Comodi argued before the court began deliberating.
She then reminded the court that Knox and Sollecito don’t have an alibi for the night of the killing, adding that there was “ample” evidence of a staged break-in.
Francesco Maresca, an attorney for the Kercher family, said he was “disappointed” with the decision, suggesting that the ruling was political in the face of pressure from the United States.

UPDATED: "Rational Profiling: Cabbies Do It Too"

Affirmative Action, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Race, Racism

So I wrote in a column so titled on June 2, 2006:

“According to the authors of ‘Streetwise: How Taxi Drivers Establish their Customer’s Trustworthiness’ (TLS, May 12), it transpires that in deciding whether to ‘stop for a fare,’ cabbies give preference to ‘whites’ over ‘blacks.’ But they also select older over younger passengers; women over men; individuals over multiple passengers, wealthier over poorer; callers over hailers; and ‘friendly and calm over aggressive and agitated.’ As it is in the taxi driver’s economic interest to refuse ‘as few fares as possible, they can no more be guilty of racism than they are of reverse sexism or ageism because they prefer older and female passengers,’ say the authors.”

“Since there is no way of knowing whether those passengers the drivers screened out were in fact dangerous, it’s difficult to assess the effectiveness of these strategies. Still, not even the most ardent rights-violator would dare suggest cabdrivers be penalized for their prudence. For one, it could cost the driver his life.”

And it did. “Chilling video released yesterday by police shows a life-and-death struggle between a gunman and livery driver moments before the thug shot the cabby in a botched robbery in Queens.
The dramatic confrontation was caught on a surveillance camera installed in the gold Chevy Impala being driven by Trevor Bell, 53, in South Ozone Park on Saturday night. Bell was critically wounded in the attack. …”

“The head of the New York State Federation of Taxi drivers is encouraging racial profiling,” reports ABC.COM:

“Sometimes it’s good that we are racially profiled, because the honest to God truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics,’ Fernando Mateo said.”

The law, of course, proscribes the life-preserving measures advised by Mr. Mateo. These poor cabbies are expected to throw open the cab door to the Grim Reaper himself.

UPDATE: As you can see, Mateo, the man advocating racial (or rational) profiling, is a member of a minority as well. The victim, I believe, is black