Website and automated forms processes, Copyright
2007, Matthew August LeFande.
All
rights reserved. No claim to original government forms
Website and automated forms processes, Copyright
2007, Matthew August LeFande.
All
rights reserved. No claim to original government forms
AK-47 Robbery Suspect Leaves Behind Huge Clue
Authorities have arrested a man they believe is involved with at least three area commercial robberies. The latest happened Monday at the Hess Gas Station on South Orange Blossom Trail in Orange County.
The suspect entered the Hess Gas Station wearing a mask and holding a rifle case. Once inside the store, the suspect pulled out an AK-47 rifle and demanded money and cigarettes from the clerk. When the suspect fled the scene, he left behind the rifle case which contained a receipt for a firearm with the suspect's name and address on the receipt.
The Orange County Sheriff's Office arrested Eric Cunningham who has been identified as the suspect. He was found at his home where the money, cigarettes and rifle were recovered.
http://www.wesh.com/news/13063107/detail.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 4:16 PM
matt@lefande.com
Machine guns stolen from SWAT van
Memphis police were looking Monday night for the thieves who stole seven weapons from a North Carolina SWAT team van parked in South Memphis.
Members of the SWAT team based in Raleigh, N.C., were eating at Interstate Bar-B-Que, 2265 S. Third, about 3:30 p.m. Monday when they realized their van had been broken into, said Lt. Jerry Gwyn of Memphis felony response.
Taken were three machine guns, two semi-automatic handguns, and two 12-gauge shot guns, Gwyn said.
The officers, who were traveling from Raleigh to Little Rock for training, noticed two thieves driving away in a burgundy Ford Expedition, Gwyn said. A video surveillance camera also caught the thieves in action.
"We’re concerned with getting these guns off the street," Gwyn said. "We have a lot of folks working on it right now."
The theft was reminiscent of a heist in 1997, when thieves stole a Little Rock FBI team’s Suburban. Inside the SUV were grenade launchers, M-16 rifles, submachine guns and other potent weapons, which were found after an intense three-day search.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/local/article/0,2845,MCA_25340_5501442,00.html
posted by Matthew LeFande 10:57 AM
matt@lefande.com
UK police demand payment for investigations.
Motorists whose cars are stolen are being told they must pay the police at least £105 (~ $210) if they want them to recover their vehicle when it is found and check it for forensic clues.
The scheme — being implemented by forces across the country — has been attacked by angry motorists.
Only car owners who agree to pay the fee, which in theory is to cover storage, are assured their cars will be “forensicated” — which means dusted down for fingerprints or swabbed for DNA.
A police letter approved by the Home Office warns motorists who recover their own vehicles that the cars will not be checked for clues. It states: “[The police force will accept] no further responsibility and will be unable to take further action to identify the person who took it.”
Opposition MPs this weekend attacked the charges, which often cannot be recovered under car insurance policies, for penalising the victims of car crime.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “Taxpayers already pay twice for policing, through central taxation and council tax.
“It’s ludicrous to charge them a third time for the police to do their normal job when their cars have been stolen through no fault of their own.”
While victims of car theft will automatically be charged if they want the vehicle taken to a “forensic car pound” for tests, there are no similar fees for any other police services. Victims of burglary are not offered any optional fees to guarantee forensic tests when they report a break-in.
“This is an absolute scam,” said Don Astwood, 54, who is disabled and was levied with the £105 charge and a storage fee of about £100 after his car was stolen outside his home in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. “My car was found legally parked a few miles away where I could have picked it up, but they charged me to take it another 10 miles further away where they checked it for fingerprints.”
Chris Haslam, a travel writer from north London, said he was “flabbergasted” when he reported his Land Rover stolen last week and was told of the “new service”. The alternative was that he would be given the car’s location if it was found and he could “retrieve it himself”.
“That’s free, sir,” the operator told him. The number of cars stolen each year in England and Wales has more than halved in the past 10 years as manufacturers develop more sophisticated security systems. In 2005-06 203,600 cars were stolen, half of which were recovered.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1654994.ece
posted by Matthew LeFande 6:12 PM
matt@lefande.com
Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?
Another rampage massacre, this time the worst ever. Which means another fake attempt at trying to understand this crime -- these interminable rage killing sprees in our workplaces and our schoolyards.
What makes the Virginia Tech massacre more horrifying isn't just the body count but the reaction of the living: The official fake soul-searching is more idiotic than ever, revealing, if anything, a culture that is so insanely delusional and incapable of self-reflection that it almost makes these rampage massacres seem relatively natural.
The footage from Seung-Hui's "media manifesto" has played on cable news on an endless loop for days now, and no one has considered the merits of his grievances -- except to cast them as proof positive that Cho Seung-Hui was one sick guy.
Of all the idiotic reactions, so far none tops an article posted on MSNBC.com, written by an "investigative reporter" with the ill-begotten name of "Bill Dedman." His investigation allegedly revealed that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter, displayed alleged classic warning signs of a rampage shooting. Citing a landmark Secret Service study of schoolyard rampage massacre, Dedman observed, "In more than three out of four school shootings, the attacker had made no threat against the schoolteachers or students. But most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. The attackers posed a threat even though they hadn't made a threat."
In other words, if you think someone's weird, but he hasn't threatened anyone, he's a threat.
There are two very serious flaws in Dedman's investigation. First, if the profile of a schoolyard rampager is someone who doesn't threaten anyone but who raises suspicions, then America will have to open up a new GULAG archipelago to hold all of the millions of kids who fit this description. But the second flaw is even more serious: the Secret Service study Dedman cites draws exactly the opposite conclusion: There is no way to profile a potential schoolyard killer. That was what was so shocking about the report. Everyone who has studied these rage massacres knows it. Everyone but journalists like Dedman, that is.
What Dedman's article reveals isn't just the sloppy work of a typical mainstream hack but, rather, of a culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre -- one that doesn't implicate it in the crime.
It is is far more difficult to deal with the possibility that other factors may have led to the massacre, factors that are still too painful and close to us to consider. For example, how was this nerdy South Korean immigrant treated at his suburban high school and at Virginia Tech? What is the campus life like? What was it about Virginia Tech that made it the setting for the first student-on-student college massacre? And why were there copycat threats at campuses across Middle America over the following days?
Consider the recent history of schoolyard massacres in America, and you'll see why I ask those questions.
Schoolyard shootings got their start in small-town America, making their appearance in 1996. The white, suburban middle-class massacres that Columbine popularized got their start in rural towns like Moses Lake, Wash., West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark.
True, there had already been schoolyard shootings. In Kentucky alone, there were two that occurred before the Paducah massacre, one in Carter County in 1993 and another in Union in 1994. What was new about these modern school rampage shootings was that they caught on and found sympathy with a broader audience.
Never before had people considered that a schoolyard massacre could happen at any white middle-class suburban high school in America. But through the Moses Lake-Paducah-Jonesboro rage massacres, this new phenomenon entered the collective adolescent conscious. They provided a new context for something already felt, already brewing, but not yet expressed.
In his book "No Easy Answer," Brooks Brown, a former Columbine student and childhood friend of one of the Columbine killers, explained how the rage rebellion context reached his school:
The end of my junior year (1998), school shootings were making their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Miss. Two months later, in West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. ...
Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. ...
When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how "it was going to happen at Columbine next." They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.
There are good reasons why the rage craze started in small-town America and moved to the big cities. First of all, rural Americans are a little less conditioned and a little wilder than their highly socialized counterparts on the coasts.
In coastal or big-town white America, if you are a failure, you are more inclined to imagine that it is your fault, that it is some kind of cosmic judgment on your innate base nature. You might accept it more passively, suck it up more, or just quietly end it in your garage with a garden hose and the idle running. But well before you'd snap in suburban California, you'd be giving it your 110 percent over and over and over, constantly convincing yourself and those around you of your optimism and determination, always being positive and trying to make sure that everyone thinks you're just swell. There is no room for eccentric behavior in coastal suburban America -- unless it's the kind of eccentric behavior that's already considered cool in a recognizably safe way.
In rural America, expectations are different. However, the "shootin' the bastards up who done you wrong" solution has a long tradition, and doesn't seem as bizarre a response to injustice as coastal America's cheerful slavishness.
What was significant about these rage murders wasn't that they started in rural America but that they spread to mainstream America. Not that this hasn't ever happened. Other cultural trends, such as in arts and in language, often percolate "upward" from the rural lower-middle class to the wider middle class.
The schoolyard shootings in Pearl, Paducah and Jonesboro in 1997 might have seemed little more than isolated incidents if they didn't already have a context in the office massacres that had been leaving behind blood-spattered workplace corpses for over a decade. The three schoolyard shootings happened one after another, creating a snowball effect that helped propel the schoolyard massacre coastward and into cities, to Pennsylvania and Oregon, and later, of course, to Columbine High in Littleton, Colo.
One way of wrongly interpreting this pattern was to attribute the crime's spread to "copycat" behavior, rehashing the ol' kindergarten question "Would you jump off a bridge if Johnny did?" This fatuous explanation allows observers to write off a profound crime with a simple catchphrase. After reading a newspaper article about a schoolyard shooting in Mississippi, some upper-middle-class suburban goth-brat decides, "Hey, I wanna be just like that hick! I'm going to murder and destroy my life so that maybe one day a hick I don't know will think I'm cool!" You have to willfully forget how you thought or felt as a kid -- what your references consisted of, where you drew your borders -- to accept an explanation as intellectually lazy and convenient as the copycat-made-him-do-it account.
In fact, many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life -- smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.
And now that the media has started digging up the early life of Cho Seung-Hui, the same pattern emerges. Former classmates of Seung-Hui say he "was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy" because of his "shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked":
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] ... recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'"
Luke Woodham, the high school killer in Pearl, Miss., whose murder spree preceded Carneal's by two months, was even more explicit in his rebellion. Minutes before starting his schoolyard rampage, Woodham handed his manifesto to a friend, along with a will. "I am not insane," he wrote. "I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet."
The Columbine killers openly declared that their planned massacre was intended to ignite a nationwide uprising. "We're going to kick-start a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed!" Eric Harris said in a video diary he made before the killings. "I want to leave a lasting impression on the world," he added in another entry. And they certainly did leave an impression, including on Cho Seung-Hui, who referred to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" in his "multimedia manifesto."
If the immediate goal of an armed uprising is to spark wider sympathy and a wider rebellion, then many of these rage uprisings have succeeded.
One of the most troubling and censored aspects of schoolyard massacres is how popular they are with a huge number of kids -- witness the threats issued the day after Cho Seung-Hui's Virginia Tech massacre to the campuses of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, St. Edward's in Austin, Texas, and two high schools in southeastern Louisiana.
The popularity of the Columbine massacre helped spawn several more schoolyard shootings and untold numbers of school-massacre plots, many of which were uncovered, and many of which were the inventions of paranoid adults.
"They said specifically it would be bigger than Columbine," New Bedford Police Chief Arthur Kelly said." -- Associated Press, "New Bedford police say they foiled Columbine-like plot," Nov. 24, 2001
Across America, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris became anti-heroes in the aftermath of their school shooting. In a Rocky Mountain News article titled "Surfers Worship Heroes of Hate," dated Feb. 6, 2000, the journalist details the mass popularity of the Columbine killers: "They made hate-filled videotapes about the day the deed they were planning would make them cult heroes. Now, they appear to have gotten what they wanted -- at least online." The article goes on to quote some of the message boards devoted to Klebold and Harris:
In a Yahoo! club devoted to the killers, a 15-year-old Elizabeth, N.J., girl writes: "They are really my heroes. They are in a way gods ... since I don't believe in 'GOD' or any of that other crap that goes along with it. They are the closest thing we can get to it, and I think they are good at it. They stood up for what they believe in, and they actually did something about it."
A 14-year-old Toronto girl is also cited as belonging to 20 (!) online fan clubs devoted to Klebold and Harris. The point of the article is that the Internet shows just how sick our kids are. It does not consider the possibility that maybe the kids aren't simply evil but have valid reasons for making Klebold and Harris into heroes. Perhaps they are considered heroes for valid reasons, and the Net allows us easier access into the unofficial truth.
The reason Klebold and Harris's hero status is expressed online is obvious: It's the one place where you can exchange ideas with a reasonable hope of maintaining anonymity.
Initially it was thought that Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were drug-addled dropouts, Nazi-enthused homosexuals, children of broken homes, Goth-geeks, Trench Coat Mafiosi, Internet/video game freaks or Marilyn Manson goons. But the truth was far more commonplace, and that's what was so disturbing about their massacre. Both came from two-parent homes, both loved their parents and both were highly intelligent but erratic students. They weren't Nazis or drug addicts. They weren't Goths, Trench Coat Mafiosi, or Marilyn Manson fiends; they weren't even gay, as some had theorized.
The Secret Service report MSNBC reporter Bill Dedman incorrectly cited was an exhaustive -- and failed -- attempt to profile school rage murderers. Some schoolyard shooters were honors students, some were bad students; some were geeks, some were fairly popular; and some were anti-social, others seemed to be easy-going and "not at all the type." Some have been girls, a fact strangely overlooked by most. Like their rage counterparts in the adult world, school shooters could be literally any kid except perhaps those who belonged to the popular crowd, the school's version of the executive/shareholding class. That is to say, about 90 percent of each suburban school's student body is a possible suspect.
And once again, I believe this at the very least suggests that the source of these rampages must be the environment that creates them, not the killers themselves. And by environment I don't mean something as vague as society but rather the schools and the people they shoot and bomb.
It isn't the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled -- they can't be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.
A list should be drawn up of the characteristics and warning signs of a school ripe for massacre:
- complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;
- antiseptic corridors and overhead fluorescent lights reminiscent of mid-sized city airport;
- rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and
- maximally stressed parents who push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.
Schoolyard shootings are too shocking and subversive to forget. They remind us that we were just as miserable as kids as we are as adult workers. In fact, the similarities between the two, the continuity of misery and entrapment from school to office, become depressingly clear when you study the two settings in the context of these murders. Even physically, they look alike and warp the mind in similar ways: the overhead fluorescent lights, the economies-of-scale industrial carpeting and linoleum floors, the stench of cleaning chemicals in the restrooms, the same stalls with the same latches and the same metal toilet paper holders ... Then, after work or school, you go home to your suburb, where no one talks to each other and no one looks at each other, and where everyone, even the whitest-bread cul-de-sac neighbor is a suspected pedophile, making child leashes a requirement and high-tech security systems a given.
If you consider it this way, it means our entire lives, except perhaps college -- and Cho Seung-Hui reminds us that college can be hell for some people as well -- and that one summer backpacking around Europe are unbearably awful. As if our entire wretched script was designed for someone else's benefit. This is too much to handle. So the inescapable suspicion that suburban schools cause murder rampages is rejected with unrestrained hysteria -- and so it will be with college campuses in the public discussion about how to prevent more "Virginia Techs."
Blame is hurriedly focused on the murderer, rather than on the environment. A typical example is an op-ed piece written by Joanne Jacobs for the San Jose Mercury News, published exactly eight months after the Columbine massacre, in which she tried to reassure herself and her readers that, "Evil, not rage, drove these killers." I emphasize her quote because it's one of the most revealing yet widely held explanations among contemporary Americans.
When you use a word as inherently meaningless as "evil" to describe something as complex and resonant as Columbine or Virginia Tech, you are desperately trying to recover the amnesia that once protected you and told you how blissful and innocent your own school years were. The fact is that the schoolyard shooters were clear about their intentions: They wanted to "pry your eyes open." But sometimes we don't like what our eyes see; in fact, we refuse to believe what they see. You'd need to use "Clockwork Orange" eye-tweezers on someone like Joanne Jacobs to make her face this unpleasant fact. Blaming "evil" has worked wonders for President Bush in Iraq, and it's working wonders for Americans in understanding and stopping these massacres.
If you pull back and rethink how you view these rampage massacres -- if you can accept that the schools and offices are what provoke these massacres, just as poverty and racism create their own violent crimes, or slavery created slave violence and rebellions, then you have to accept that on some level the school and office shootings are logical outcomes and perhaps even justified responses to an intolerable condition that we can't yet put our fingers on.
Justified, that is, if you look at these crimes from a future historian's point of view. Imagine a historian 100 years from now, with no emotional investment in our contemporary culture, looking back on how we live today, and thinking to himself, "My god, how could those poor wretches cope with such hell?" It doesn't take a time machine to think this way. Unofficially, today a lot of people look at these murders as justified, as some kind of vindication. Sympathy is all over the Web. It's revealed in black humor, in "wage slave" T-shirts and in the success of movies like "Office Space" and "Fight Club." It's revealed anywhere it can safely be expressed.
http://www.alternet.org/story/50758/?page=1
posted by Matthew LeFande 9:45 AM
matt@lefande.com
Signs of Intelligence?
One of the things that's got to be going through a lot of peoples' minds now is how one man with two handguns, that he had to reload time and time again, could go from classroom to classroom on the Virginia Tech campus without being stopped. Much of the answer can be found in policies put in place by the university itself.
Virginia, like 39 other states, allows citizens with training and legal permits to carry concealed weapons. That means that Virginians regularly sit in movie theaters and eat in restaurants among armed citizens. They walk, joke and rub shoulders everyday with people who responsibly carry firearms -- and are far safer than they would be in San Francisco, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C., where such permits are difficult or impossible to obtain.
The statistics are clear. Communities that recognize and grant Second Amendment rights to responsible adults have a significantly lower incidence of violent crime than those that do not. More to the point, incarcerated criminals tell criminologists that they consider local gun laws when they decide what sort of crime they will commit, and where they will do so.
Still, there are a lot of people who are just offended by the notion that people can carry guns around. They view everybody, or at least many of us, as potential murderers prevented only by the lack of a convenient weapon. Virginia Tech administrators overrode Virginia state law and threatened to expel or fire anybody who brings a weapon onto campus.
In recent years, however, armed Americans -- not on-duty police officers -- have successfully prevented a number of attempted mass murders. Evidence from Israel, where many teachers have weapons and have stopped serious terror attacks, has been documented. Supporting, though contrary, evidence from Great Britain, where strict gun controls have led to violent crime rates far higher than ours, is also common knowledge.
So Virginians asked their legislators to change the university's "concealed carry" policy to exempt people 21 years of age or older who have passed background checks and taken training classes. The university, however, lobbied against that bill, and a top administrator subsequently praised the legislature for blocking the measure.
The logic behind this attitude baffles me, but I suspect it has to do with a basic difference in worldviews. Some people think that power should exist only at the top, and everybody else should rely on "the authorities" for protection.
Despite such attitudes, average Americans have always made up the front line against crime. Through programs like Neighborhood Watch and Amber Alert, we are stopping and catching criminals daily. Normal people tackled "shoe bomber" Richard Reid as he was trying to blow up an airliner. It was a truck driver who found the D.C. snipers. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that civilians use firearms to prevent at least a half million crimes annually.
When people capable of performing acts of heroism are discouraged or denied the opportunity, our society is all the poorer. And from the selfless examples of the passengers on Flight 93 on 9/11 to Virginia Tech professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself to save his students earlier this week, we know what extraordinary acts of heroism ordinary citizens are capable of.
Many other universities have been swayed by an anti-gun, anti-self defense ideology. I respect their right to hold those views, but I challenge their decision to deny Americans the right to protect themselves on their campuses -- and then proudly advertise that fact to any and all.
Whenever I've seen one of those "Gun-free Zone" signs, especially outside of a school filled with our youngest and most vulnerable citizens, I've always wondered exactly who these signs are directed at. Obviously, they don't mean much to the sort of man who murdered 32 people just a few days ago.
http://abcradio.com/article.asp?id=389928&SPID=15663
posted by Matthew LeFande 12:11 PM
matt@lefande.com
Ex-Cop breaks DWI BAC record
A former Seattle police officer returned the highest blood-alcohol reading ever recorded by a Washington state driver, and she was charged with driving under the influence Wednesday.
Deana F. Jarrett, of Woodinville, registered a 0.47 percent blood-alcohol reading after striking two cars April 11, said Trooper Jeff Merrill, public-information officer for the State Patrol. The legal limit in Washington is 0.08 percent.
A blood-alcohol level above 0.40 percent is potentially lethal.
"Someone who is an alcoholic will tolerate a higher blood-alcohol level," said Lynne Freeman, a doctor at Group Health's urgent-care clinic on Capitol Hill. "In someone who is not an alcoholic, they could die somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5."
For someone Jarrett's size — 5 feet 5 inches and 130 to 140 pounds — it would take about a fifth of liquor, 25.6 ounces, in a short period of time, to reach that blood-alcohol level, Freeman said.
"It would be many drinks," she said, and "probably straight alcohol rather than beer."
According to court records, Jarrett also goes by the name Deana Karst, and Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb said Karst used to work for the department. According to city records, Karst began working as a police officer in 1979.
Jarrett, 54, who also was arrested in a traffic stop by Redmond police April 10, faces two counts of DUI. She refused a breath test in that arrest, Redmond police said.
The next day, her blood-alcohol level registered 0.47 percent after she was involved in two traffic collisions on eastbound Highway 520, Merrill said.
Five empty four-ounce plastic bottles of vodka and two empty 12-ounce cans of beer were found on the front passenger seat, according to a trooper's report.
No one was injured in the collisions, which took place minutes apart, Merrill said.
"Most people black out at between 0.35 and higher," said Detective Tim Gately of the Redmond Police Department said.
After the April 10 arrest in Redmond, King County jail records show Jarrett was booked at 4:54 p.m. and released after posting $500 bail at 8:16 p.m.
After the April 11 arrest, Jarrett first was taken to Evergreen Hospital, where she had to be restrained with soft wrist restraints and was combative, according to a Patrol report.
The State Patrol uses guidelines that require troopers to seek medical attention for people who have blood-alcohol readings above 0.25 percent, Merrill added.
She then was booked into the King County jail at 5:43 p.m. and released after posting $500 bail at 12:48 a.m. last Thursday, jail records indicate.
Both arrests now have been combined into a single prosecution, with her arraignment on the two DUI charges set for 8:45 a.m. Monday in the Redmond Courthouse of King County District Court.
Jarrett, who holds a valid driver's license, also faces charges of reckless driving and a hit and run after hitting a vehicle Feb. 23, court records showed. She could not be reached for comment.
Merrill said the State Patrol maintains records on all individuals who submit to a breath test in Washington. Thirty-five of the approximately 356,000 breath tests given since 1998 have registered above 0.40 percent, a records check revealed.
An average of 42,000 to 45,000 breathalyzer tests are given each year by all law-enforcement agencies in the state. No one had registered over 0.45 percent on a breath test, Merrill said.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003672880_webalcohol19m.html?blowthis
posted by Matthew LeFande 5:27 PM
matt@lefande.com
FBI STUDY: Guns used by violent criminals not obtained from gun shows
The FBI recently completed a major study of shootings of police officers. Titled "Violent Encounters: Felonious Assaults on America's Law Enforcement Officers." Since its publication, the existence of the damning report on the five-year study by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about how cop-killing criminals ignore gun laws, and where they get their guns, has not been publicized.
Review the report here:
Chapters 1-3 (4.7Mb)
Chapter 4 (1.8Mb)
Chapters 5-6 (2.8Mb)
Chapter 7 (5Mb)
Chapters 8-9 (2.5Mb)
The FBI research focused on 40 incidents involving assaults or deadly attacks on police officers, in which all but one of the guns involved had been obtained illegally, and none were obtained from gun shows.
None of these criminals who attacked police officers was "hindered by any law - federal, sate or local - that has ever been established to prevent gun ownership. They just laughed at gun laws. In contrast to media myth, none of the firearms in the study was obtained from gun shows."
The report is a smoking gun in terms of revelations about the sources of crime guns and the failure of gun control. It's time for the police officials and political leaders to acknowledge that gun laws don't stop criminals, that they only restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens, and that gun shows are not the 'arms bazaars for criminals' as they have been portrayed.
The FBI's website says that "Violent Encounters: Felonious Assaults on America's Law Enforcement Officers" is available from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program Office, FBI Complex, 1000 Custer Hollow Road, Clarksburg, WV 26306-0150 or by calling 888-827-6427
posted by Matthew LeFande 9:24 AM
matt@lefande.com
