Mesa PD will violate copyright and your rights, too, while they're at it

In what wouldn't be the first Twitter-related cop blunder we've cataloged, the Mesa PD -- fresh from the debut of its crime reporting app that might just spy on its users -- may have made another social media boo-boo.

Early Sunday morning, the Mesa PD posted an update to its Twitter feed announcing an addition to the MPD's facebook photo section.

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Clicking on the link in the tweet delivers you to the Mesa PD's photo album, specifically a folder designated "Mesa Police Crime Scene Specialist published her first article".  In this album, Mesa cops have uploaded scans of Christine Lowenhagen entire article, including the front page of the journal.

Is this posting legal?  Is it a copyright violation?  The International Association for Identification is the organization that publishes the JFI.  A search of the IAI website brings up a pdf of official "Publication Guidelines" which mostly deals with style for writers.  However, one part does seem relevant.  It reads, "The JFI is liberal in allowing the noncommercial reprinting of articles from the JFI, especially to the IAI divisions."

While the Mesa PD may be noncommercial, Facebook certainly is not, and that's where the post was made.  Further, the "divisions" cited are regional or state associations of the IAI, so the instructions appear to be granting permission for these sub-groups that run their own independent pages to post articles.  The IAI's website itself has a list of costs for access, which line up comparably with the typically outrageous figures scholarly journals commonly charge for reading to their publications. Subscriptions for institutions, for example, are just over 200 dollars.

We emailed Alan McRoberts, the editor of the Journal of Forensic Identification, and he responded to our request for more specifics on their policy, writing, "All requests to reprint must be specific (i.e., naming the paper to be reprinted) and specify where it is to be reprinted. Each request will be considered individually."

The question then becomes whether this permission was granted.  The posting of scans suggests not.  We followed up, asking if the organization had specifically received a request for permission to post from either the Mesa PD or Christine Lowenhagen.

Mr. McRoberts replied this afternoon and provided this clarification:

Two years ago, our board of directors approved a policy regarding reprinting material from the JFI. Part of that policy indicates that "Only JFI articles that are at least six months old at the time permission is requested will be considered." The recent publication (May/June 2013) of the article from Ms. Lowenhagen is not eligible to be considered for reprinting until the end of the year. At that time, I would have to evaluate the venue (e.g., IAI division newsletter, webpage, blog, or facebook) for reprinting before making a decision regarding permission.

Going by this response, it certainly seems reasonable to conclude that the MPD did not get permission and if they had, such wouldn't have been granted for at least six months. 

When you think about it, the Mesa PD appears to be violating copyright law in the same exact way that an information activist like Jason Swartz did, activism that led the police and Feds to crack down on him quite harshly.  In fact, it was these kinds of high charges and artificially limited access common for professional journals that drove Swartz to download for online release thousands of JSTOR documents in 2011. 

This act of protest in turn led the US government to charge him with several serious crimes, levying the threat of many decades in prison against him.  His supporters cite this overly-vigorous prosecution as what drove him to suicide.  One might even go further, and invoke the arrest and imprisonment of Jeremy Hammond, the Antisec militant recently sentenced for releasing Arizona police documents in protest of racist policing.  Police in Arizona were not too keen on forgiving his internet breeches of legality.

This selective enforcement of the law, where the Mesa PD gets to decide just which laws it will enforce as well as which laws it will obey, is a problem that can't be ignored.  Just as we see it in their online activities, we see it likewise reflected in the very real world recent arrest and brutal beating of Matatangi Tai (see also: here, here).  Mesa cops have a lot of leeway when it comes to enforcement of law, but in the case of Tai, the cops were not interested in being forgiving, and so what amounted to a trespassing call, thanks to needlessly aggressive policing, turned into a violent attack on a someone who very-likely was mentally ill and unable to understand even that he was violating the law.  Tai, after all, was in a convenience store claiming he was there for his medication.  Police, however, know exactly what they are doing.  Or they should. 

Mesa police were also not in a very forgiving mood when they stunned Joseph Moreno with a taser for taking too long to surrender.  After they put him in the back of a patrol car for 45 minutes, he began slurring his speech and sweating.  When the Fire Department showed up, he was taken to the hospital, where he died.

Moreno's sister put it this way:

"I feel there was other ways of doing it... I understand, from the police point of view. But, if there was more than 40 of them, or however many, and he was in a car. He wasn't running. He wasn't in the front seat of a car trying to run off. Their way of resisting (interpreting resisting) was that he wasn't responding."

In other words, the Mesa PD has two standards: one for itself and one for the rest of us.  The law is for us to obey and for them to interpret, and that can mean a death sentence for anyone who crosses their path.  It seems copyright isn't the only thing they'll violate.

Video shows Mesa cops responding to a trespassing call by beating the crap out of a confused man at Circle K

Proving yet again that there is no interaction that a cop can't escalate into a violent confrontation, a video causing waves today shows a Mesa officer responding to a trespassing call at a Circle K and winding up in an all-out brawl, including tasering, pepper-spraying and punching a man in the process of arresting him.

The victim, identified as Mantagi Tai by the police, had been inside Circle K claiming he was there for his medication.  According the cops, the officer demanded identification from Tai and ordered him to sit down.  When Tai refused the officer pulled out his taser and started making aggressive moves and swearing loudly, telling Tai "to sit the fuck down or you're gonna get tased".

From there, all hell broke loose, and after a very violent struggle the officer, with some help from an off duty cop passing by, a plain clothes office and an elderly security guard, managed to take Tai down hard to the ground, where they then proceed to pummel, knee and tase him violently.  At one point there are three officers, all of whom appear to be white, attacking one man of color, with a white security guard joining in at various points.  The officers knee Tai in the back violently and strike him repeatedly in the face while he is on the hot blacktop.  So far the news has ignored the obvious question of whether the officer would have reacted the way he did if the suspect had been white.

The discussion online and in the media has broken down along the lines of whether this was justified force or not.  People commenting on the raw video on YouTube seem to be mostly taking the side of the officer, but plenty assert that the video shows cops out of control and going too far.  The Mesa PD spokesman, Sgt. Tony Landato, makes sure to point out that the off duty officer who joined the fight (after crashing his truck into a light pole and possibly injuring someone) lost his pistol in the fight, and cites that as a reason for the viciousness of the cops.

But it seems this all misses the real point, which one YouTube user summed up like this:

So? None of that would be material if the cop stepped back, and used his radio, instead of revealing that he fights like a wuss. I'm not billy bad ass, but I did wrestle in high school. Pretty much any high school wrestler would have been on top of that cop.

Exactly.  Whereas ABC15 ended their coverage with some dimwitted anchorman remarking how "it does show how dangerous an officer's job is on a daily basis," in fact what the video shows is how dangerous it is for other people when a police officer shows up.  The officer is the one responsible for this whole situation.  It's his escalation, threats and then violent attack that transformed this from a simple case of removing someone from private property into a potentially life-threatening battle.

What we have here is a cop over-reacting and escalating an encounter when someone merely doesn't comply with an aggressive and rude demand for identification and an order to sit down.  An order that it's entirely possible that Tai doesn't even understand.  After all, extrapolating from his reference to medication and confused behavior, he may well be mentally ill.

Surely there was another solution to this problem.  But Mesa PD, as with police in the Valley generally, continue to demonstrate their aggressive and adversarial nature, as well as their dedication to violence and bullying as their preferred method of problem-solving, especially when dealing with people of color.

Spier beware: Is the Mesa PD's new snitch app actually spying on you?

Is the new Mesa Police Department's new mobile app spying on the very "good citizens" it purports to gather tips from?  If the permissions section of the Android download page is to be believed, it very likely is.  But just how it might be spying on you depends on which app you download, and it's not clear from the cops' webpage which one you're getting.

The MPD announced the other day that they have a new app for taking tips on crime in Mesa, paid for with funds raised through RICO seizures.  Interestingly, clicking on the Android link on their website actually takes you to an application called TipSubmit.  If you are foolish enough to download it, not only does the program track your location very specifically, but it also has full access to the camera on your phone, which it can use "at any time without your confirmation."  Quite disturbing.

But if you go to Google Play, however, and do a manual search for "mesa police Arizona", what you get is a link to a different app, presumably the new one.  Of course, this one, too, has access to your location, but it also has the ability "to call phone numbers without your intervention".

A search for that specific permission brought up a Geek Squad article titled "How to spot a bad Android smartphone application",  which labeled the ability to directly call phone numbers as "[v]ery suspicious".  Indeed, the app itself notes in its own description that this permission "doesn't allow the app to call emergency numbers" -- ironically probably one of the main functions one would expect from such an app.  So who is it calling?  And what does it need those numbers for?  Does this power extend to turning on the microphone?  Certainly, this ought to give any potential user pause before downloading.  Apparently the Mesa PD didn't think these issues were important enough to address in their press conference -- or maybe no reporter thought to ask them.  Certainly users deserve to know.

The Mesa PD has been quite purposeful in its adoption of policing technology over the last few years, recognizing it as a potential force multiplier in its war on the poor.  In a recent Fox 10 article, Chief Frank Milstead said, "We're a very lean department so we have to use technology to make up for deficiency in staff."  At the same press conference in which he rolled out the new snitch app, he likewise touted the MPD's new mobile identification system and on the spot ticketing system.

Clearly the Mesa PD is dedicated to the 1984-ification of policing, and their new snitch app should be seen in this light.  It masquerades as a tool for making everyone safe, but it's really just yet another Big Brother weapon in their arsenal -- an arsenal that is aimed squarely at us.  It's not intended to make us safer, it's meant to make us more easily controlled, to sow the seeds of distrust and turn us against each other.  To turn us all into potential snitches.

What's more, these police apps bombard us with crime news from our neighborhood and city.  Mesa PD's app promises a paranoia-inducing "crime maps" feature, in which we can  "[v]iew real-time crime maps of activities in your neighborhood or across the city. Explore the details behind the crimes."

Chief Milstead put it this way: "People accusing us of misuse of force. I think our officers are safer because people realize they're on video and they're actually being held accountable by videotape for their actions."  In a January interview, Mesa PD Sgt. Tony Landato described the application of their new fingerprint system.  He said, “Our officers stopped a subject who matched the description who was acting very suspicious. ... We ran his fingerprint. It was not our suspect in the domestic violence. It was a homicide suspect.”  They arrested him.  He had been caught in a very wide virtual and physical dragnet.

The Mesa PD wants to watch us at all times, and it's not about making us safer.  In their unblinking eyes, we are all suspects, especially if we are poor or if we're not white.  We're all suspicious in their eyes.  And where gaps in their surveillance exist, they expect us to do the work for them.  Milstead summed it up in a recent NPR interview: “If we don’t use the public’s eyes to help not only to report crime but to help solve crime, we’re going to miss things."  This app is meant to fill in those gaps by reporting on everyone.

Valley cops go on a weekend killing spree: "We're all living in fear in our own homes." (UPDATE)

Cops kill with impunity this weekend in Phoenix

Valley police agencies went on a hell of a killing spree this weekend, shooting dead four five people (see update below) between Friday and Sunday morning.  Are there more still to come?

Following a police chase Friday, cops took a 54-year-old man into custody on the on ramp of 19th Avenue and I-10.  After they handcuffed him, "the suspect began to complain of being hot and not feeling well. Officers removed the suspect from the car and became concerned about his appearance and the way he was acting."  Paramedics showed up, and police further restrained him when he became delusional.  He went into cardiac arrest and died.

Then, in Mesa, cops trying to arrest a man on a warrant opened fire, killing him.  Officers aren't sure how many cops shot him or how many bullets were fired, but neighborhood residents were not happy.  One shocked woman described the chaotic and dangerous situation when police starting shooting, disregarding the safety of locals and their kids: "When they started shooting I ran outside to grab my children and we ran to the living and we sat down on the floor. We heard other gunshots go through our kitchen."

She went on to describe her frustration at ongoing reckless police behavior in her neighborhood, saying, "It's unsafe to be out of your house now because you don't know when the cops are just going to have a shootout with somebody. Where's the warning for us. We're all living in fear in our own homes."  Friends of the man killed described him as "a good person" and "a good friend" who was well-loved, but that he was depressed and didn't want to go back to jail.

Meanwhile, in Phoenix, police killed a man who they say pointed a gun at them.  Initial reports weren't so clear, saying that police merely "believed" he had a gun.  Media initially seemed content to leave it at that, as if the mere belief by officers was justification enough to kill someone.  Later, this news report phrased it a bit oddly, saying that the man "was seen grabbing something near his waistband before stepping out of the vehicle and pointing a gun at the officers", at which point cops opened up on him, killing him.

Finally, Sunday morning Phoenix cops responded to a call about a man damaging mail boxes and threatening neighbors.  Police say he refused their orders, grabbed them and picked up a table leg, at which point they shot and killed him.  Sounds like a proportionate response! 

In every case, cops have a convenient excuse for their murderous actions, but Valley cops have a dubious record at best when it comes to violence, so there is ample cause for skepticism, and accountability is near zero for cops that kill.  Take the recent case of 16 year-old Alexander Wilson as a prime example, although there are countless more. Is it really good for a society to have armed men who feel free to act as judge, jury and executioner on our streets?  Unfortunately, the media rarely asks critical questions, serving more often than not as a megaphone for their excuses and justifications.  This leaves it up to us to demand justice and investigate.


UPDATE:
It's a sad commentary on the state of policing in Phoenix that I could have written a piece about a killing spree by Valley cops that took four lives and yet I still overlooked one.  Friday afternoon Phoenix police were serving a warrant in a business complex at 43rd and Olive.  According to to police (and as dutifully reported by the news), the man they were looking for "turned toward the officers and pulled out what officers perceived was a weapon", so they shot and killed him.

So, again, we see this pattern where the media treats police perception of a weapon as just as good as actually having a weapon.  And, of course, given the racist nature of policing, cops tend to perceive weapons more frequently when the target isn't white.  And in the era of cell phones, police have ample opportunity to misidentify a threat.  So that makes five people killed by Valley cops since Friday.  For a point of reference, Valley police killed more people than the Boston bombers did.  If this was done by anyone other than the police, the media would be going crazy.

UPDATE 2:
Friends and family held a vigil for Travis Trisoliere Sunday, daring to stand up against the police and their unaccountable violence.  Trisoliere's mother vowed, "This is wrong. I'm not just going to sit back and let this go away. My son deserves better."

Julie Martinez denounced the police and the way their reckless behavior put herself and her children at risk.  Police bullets hit her house.  Her kids were outside playing at the time of the shooting.  Martinez told ABC15, "When I came to the window is when they let out the second round and hit here. So I went like this (ducks), 'cause I was scared and I yelled, and that's when I ran to the front door to get my kids."

Enough is enough.

NEW TIMES: WHO APPROVED THE "WHITE BOY" AND WHITE POWER APPAREL BOOTH AT THAT DAMN SHOW?

A number of people attending the Phoenix New Times and KUKQ's annual "That Damn Show" punk festival took to social media on Saturday night to denounce the decision of the event organizers to allow a vendor with white pride and white power apparel to set up a booth and sell their items.

The show featured a national anti-racist punk rock act, and attendees of the show were angered by the presence of a vendor selling "white boy" t shirts with confederate flag and Nazi motifs. The Phoenix New Times has made a reputation over the last decade for it's coverage of the immigrant movement and the racist opposition aligned against it. So we join those who are wondering, "How did this happen, and does the New Times support this vendor's presence at their event?"