Free Talk Live

Boston Police arrested about 100 protesters affiliated with the Occupy Boston movement in a swift raid on Dewey Square in the early morning hours on Tuesday.

The arrests were the culmination of a standoff between protesters and police after a weeklong protest in downtown Boston expanded into the northern part of Dewey Square. The protesters have permission to occupy the southern portion, but when they expanded into the northern part on Monday, Boston police decided to take action.

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

Cops & CPS Seize Child From Parents For Mistrusting Government

A family in Williamson County, Austin have lost custody of their 7-year-old son as part of a Child Protective Services investigation because the parents taught their children to mistrust the government, an action that deemed them to be “unsuitable parents,” according to charges leveled by police officers in CPS documents.

A host of new laws—from making it a crime to sell a live animal on any street or in any parking lot, to honoring law enforcement officials killed in the line of duty with a special medal—become effective Jan. 1, 2012.

In 2011, all 50 states and territories met in regular session and enacted close to 40,000 new laws on issues across the board. Laws do not always become effective on Jan. 1, however. State constitutions or statutes usually establish when they go into effect, or sometimes, an effective date is written into the specific piece of legislation.

In 2011, the city of Philadelphia paid out $13 million to people alleging harm from police, largely to alleged victims of excessive use of force. Critics say that the city lacks meaningful oversight of police misconduct and, instead of trying to prevent it, treats payments due to the behavior like a cost of doing business. The city, however, doesn’t see a problem, contending that recession-weary Philadelphians and greedy lawyers are suing the city for a paycheck.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that police can obtain household power records and attach digital recording devices to suspected grow homes to track electricity usage patterns as part of pre-warrant investigations.

Misrepresentation, deception, and outright lying appear to be part of a police officer’s job description, so much so that the term “testilying,” now common vernacular for police falsifications, was actually coined by NYPD officers as something of an inside joke.

“Research studies show that genetically modified crops have harmful effects on laboratory animals in feeding trials and on the environment during cultivation,” Antoniou said. “They have increased the use of pesticides and have failed to increase yields. Our report concludes that there are safer and more effective alternatives to meeting the world’s food needs.”

Retired Police Captain, and LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) co-founder Peter Christ systematically destroys the notion that the Drug War is at all, effective.