Officer Bob

Down in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the water coming outta de ground ain’t the only thing too hot to handle. There’s also a chronic crime problem captured on this video. I forget which terror alert color it is when kids ride skateboards down a street, but this video’s got one of Hot Springs’ finest right on top of the problem, grabbin’ it by the throat in fact. Back off and let the hero do his work.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: Internal Affairs, as you probably know, is the office inside a police department charged with rooting out criminal cops. So what happens when IA guys, instead of busting bad cops tip ‘em off about how to avoid getting caught? What happens is called business as usual, my friend.

In late 2006, a New York City detective was suspected of being involved with illegal drugs, and an Internal Affairs Bureau sergeant was bluntly advising him on how to avoid investigators, according to new court filings in a continuing federal probe of police corruption.

Their profanity-laced conversation was quoted in an indictment issued on Wednesday by a grand jury in Brooklyn.

The new charges in the case accused the sergeant, Sgt. William Valerio, of false statements, bank fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he was the seventh person — and third police officer — indicted in the investigation since 2006.

The bank fraud charges stemmed from accusation that Sergeant Valerio was involved with Detective Luis M. Batista in producing a false termite inspection certificate required for a mortgage for a $412,000 house sale in Elmont, Long Island. The indictment also accused Mr. Batista of altering a receipt for the inspection, raising the cost to $1,000 from $100.

The wiretap excerpts, with obscenities deleted, attributed to Sergeant Valerio the comments cautioning Detective Batista. “Be very careful when you’re coming and going, because the [expletive] will follow you,” Sergeant Valerio was quoted as saying. “Look over your [expletive] shoulder 100 million times.”

JERUSALEM - Over in Israel, they know what to do with the local malcontents.  And they don’t let a little thing like being handicapped get in the way of justice, either. Hell, one time, they shot a missile from a helicopter at a guy in a wheelchair - now that’s what I call gettin’ the job done.

This week, those uppity handicapped are at it again, and it took Israeli cops to bravely face ‘em down

Alleging police brutality by officers on the scene, and lamenting a lack of much-needed aid from the state, a dozen wheelchair-bound citizens continued their protest in the sweltering heat outside the Welfare Ministry in Jerusalem on Sunday, telling reporters they will not leave until their demand for help is answered.

But the most troubling complaints from protesters were that police officers had abused them physically, throwing them out of their wheelchairs and preventing them from using the bathroom.

A man with fresh gashes on his head told The Jerusalem Post he was hurt when he fell out of his wheelchair as police tried to force him from the entrance to the Welfare Ministry on Saturday night.

“We were originally near the entrance,” another man said, “and after Shabbat, a decision was made by the police to clear us out. About 40 of them came up, not in the blue uniforms, but in the black ones [of the Yasam elite anti-terror unit], as if we were Hamas, and they just started lifting us up and tossed us out into the street. People were hurt. We asked them to stop, but they kept going. It’s forbidden to touch someone in a wheelchair at all - who knows what kind of problems they may be suffering from.”

STATEN ISLAND, NY:  A fake police-training school was busted this week.  An ex-cop and his partner ran the school and did pretty well with it if you believe the story.

A Staten Island man was busted Tuesday morning for allegedly running a fake federal law enforcement training school out of his house — and distributing some 3,000 fake badges to his students.

Police say 49-year-old Robert, or “Roberto,” Neves was charged in federal court with distribution of law enforcement federal-style badges and identification.

A co-conspirator, Ralph Rios, was reportedly also arrested in Miami.

Police say Neves is charged with running the “U.S. Recovery Bureau” school, which offered three-day courses in Passaic, Brooklyn and Washington Heights.

After the training, students were given phony police badges, adorned with a United States seal.

He allegedly distributed more than 3,000 badges to his students, who were charged $860 for the course. But the students were never given background checks.

Neves was a police officer in the mid-1990s, but was fired for filing false police reports,

Lemme see, dat’s around $2.5 million paid by thousands of guys who want to get out there and push people around wit’ no authority to do so.   Somethin’ don’t add up.

What I don’t believe is that none of those 3,000 came back to the “US Recovery Bureau” school to shake down their trainers a little bit.  I mean, c’mon - even a fake cop has got to figure out what’s up every now and then.

South of de border down Mexico way, the cops have had their hands full lately. Coupla weeks ago, a bunch a people got trampled when the police tried to clear out a overcrowded disco fulla teenagers. I don’t know why the Mexican kids are so skittish, isn’t everybody used to a buncha riot cops showing up in an enclosed space and and shoving people around to the front door?

Well, trouble takes no siesta for the federales, it seems. This week, it’s news of what dere calling “training” videotapes showin’ up with Mexican cops torturing suspects. When are these people going to learn about the dangers… of videotape? Never, I guess.

Two of the videos — broadcast by national television networks and displayed on newspaper Internet sites — showed what Leon city Police Chief Carlos Tornero described as training for an elite unit that must face “real-life, high-stress situations,” such as kidnapping and torture by organized crime groups.

But many Mexicans saw a sinister side, especially at a moment when police and soldiers across the country are struggling with scandals over alleged abuses.

“They are teaching police … to torture!” read the headline in the Mexico City newspaper Reforma. Watch parts of the video »

Human rights investigators in Guanajuato state, where Leon is located, are looking into the tapes, and the National Human Rights Commission also expressed concern.

“It’s very worrisome that there may be training courses that teach people to torture,” said Raul Plascencia, one of the commission’s top inspectors.

Episode #5 finds Officer Bob in history class, teaching the lessons of police surveillance through the ages.

 Officer Bob Episode #5 - Cops through da Ages: Download (19)

So the word is the Amnesty International has got its undies in a bundle over de Chicago Police. They’re sayin’ that Chicago cops have a record of brutality and dat they’re considering protesting the International Oympic Committee about it.

Normally, their opinion would matter about as much as, well, ordinary Chicagoans’ opinions about the cops - little to none, thank you very much. But since the great City Dat Works is looking to host the 2016 games, and dat’s a lotta scratch thinking about coming to town, well, we’re all gonna pretend we care about brutality for a few months til’ this blows over.

Using Chicago’s Olympic bid as a pressure point and the alleged 2006 harassment of a gay man as evidence, Amnesty International turned up the heat on Mayor Daley today to fix, what it called the city’s “flawed approach” to investigating police brutality.

At a news conference outside the mayor’s office, civil rights activists reiterated arguments they made last summer, when the City Council approved Daley’s plan to sever the Office of Professional Standards from the Police Department.

They argued that the landmark ordinance is undermined by a union contract tailor-made to protect rogue officers.

The contract bars the agency now known as the Independent Police Review Authority from investigating anonymous complaints about “anything short of criminal conduct”—even though many victims “fear retaliation” from police—and limits the use of past complaints needed to establish a “pattern of conduct, said Wendy Park, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.

I guess up in Lakeville, MN, they got a whole different idea of policing. A guy named Troy Molde was sleeping in his bed at 3 AM and woke up to the sight of two cops in his bedroom. Why? Because they wanted to tell him his door was unlocked.

Just goes to show, if you don’t treat your home like a prison and nail down every little thing, suspicious characters’ll come by and make you regret it.

LAKEVILLE, Minnesota (AP) — A Lakeville man says he feels violated after two police officers woke him up at 3 a.m. to tell him his door was unlocked.

Their surprise visit was part of a public service campaign to remind residents to secure their homes to prevent thefts. Usually, officers just leave notices on doors.

But they went further in Troy Molde’s case on Thursday. Police entered the house where four children under 7 were having a sleepover, and then went upstairs to Molde’s bedroom.

The officers told Molde his garage door was open, the TV was on, the keys to his truck were left in the ignition and the door to his house was ajar.

A police spokesman says the intrusion was justified because the officers’ initial door knocks went unanswered, and they wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.

He says the kids inside — Molde’s two sons and two nephews — were afraid to wake their dad, so the officers went upstairs.

Oh sure, nobody likes the police.  But there’s always somebody looking to be the police, even when they don’t have no badge, no paycheck, and no right to be knocking down doors.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s guys who pretend to be cops.  There’s a fine line between being a runaway cop and being a runaway fake cop.  This guy in a little town called Gerald, Missouri who called himself “Sergeant Bill”  was no real cop.

Sure, he had the attitude, and he liked to shove people around.  And he was so good at it, he even convinced the local real cops that he was legit.  The mayor, too.

When it turned out he was just a convicted sex offender from the town down the road, three real officers lost their jobs.

The people this guy busted protested when he came into thier homes, talkin about a search warrant.  This guy, he cracks me up, he says “I don’t need no search warrant, I’m a federal agent”

Oh man, I gotta remember that one.

GERALD, Mo. - Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Jakob, 36, is the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law-enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

Even ol’ Officer Bob likes to have a laugh now and again. This police training movie clip from the fifties demonstrates how an officer of the law is supposed to look around for evidence of marijuana use. The funny thing is, dere’s a bag of weed in this movie that’s got more lumber in it than the state of Oregon. Frankly, I wouldn’t even confiscate it unless I needed kindling for a campfire.