Category Archives: Crime

No kidding: punks school others to be punks

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152316__bad_lStudy describes the failed interventions that bring bad boys together:

“For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold,” says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay, a professor of psychology, pediatrics and psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center.

via Delinquent Behavior Among Boys ‘Contagious,’ Study Finds.

Intruder alert: Milton

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My fellow Miltonians: Lock your doors, draw your blinds. Scam artists, or worse, are about.

From an e-mail, yesterday:

Public Service Announcement
Town of Milton

There have been recent episodes on the south shore of individuals claiming to be Public Works employees in an attempt to gain access to homes.  If someone comes to your door claiming to be a Public Works employee and does not have identification, please do not grant them access.  Call Kathy Bowen at 617.898.4974 to confirm that they are in fact a Public Works employee.

Could be the Travelers, or local druggies.

Milton has hired some shady characters to install updated meters in homes, so it could be those guys, as well, coming around to loot what they consider to be the softer targets in town.

Alas, the town provides no description of the scam artists in the e-mail.

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Christmas fright

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CC/Tamara Del Valle

Photo: CC/Tamara Del Valle

A Milton woman is reportedly wielding a knife, and threatening to hurt herself. Hubby says she’s in her car, heading north to New Hampshire.

Milton police and the husband are trying to talk the woman into returning home, on Woodland Road.

My wife asks, “Is the woman home for a week with a bunch of kids, who aren’t in school?”

Flux Rostrum wants his cat back

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Dharma's bummin.

Dharma

FLASH: Flux reports that Dharma is back on the truck, after Galveston police and residents allowed the reporter to stay in the neighborhood overnight.

Original post:

And Galveston police are making finding Dharma difficult.

Flux went to Galveston to do a hurricane damage story, and his kitty took off.

Flux is unconventional. As a journalist, the man is confrontational as hell. In other words, he still has balls, and is a great storyteller.

In this video, he takes a classic Texas insult, “You look like a coupla old hippies to me” (an attempt to discredit and emasculate Flux and an off camera friend), cold, and quiet-like.

This video will bring you far into a police-to-civilian interaction. You will cringe. (I did, at all of the crying.) Just watch as these men try to outsmart outperform each other!

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1671489&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

more about “Flux wants his cat back“, posted with vodpod

Boston Police back off warrantless searches

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“Police are like vampires,” a Black Panther leader tells the Globe.

Boston’s poor African Americans are rejecting the Boston Police Department’s offer to search their homes for guns, warrant-free.

Startled by the rebuke, the police are scaling back the unconstitutional scheme.
Universal Hub takes the Boston Globe to task for reporting the New Black Panther Party’s opposition to the BPD’s Safe Homes plan, without noting its militant platform. (Images: From the New Black Panther website.)

Boston Police surprised some black people dont like the idea of warrantless searches | Universal Hub
Boston Police surprised some black people dont like the idea of warrantless searches
By adamg – Tue, 03/25/2008 – 7:57am.

So the department has postponed its Safe Homes program again.

Request for the Globe: You mention in the story you interviewed the local leader of the New Black Panther Party twice. Can we hope that this means youll be doing a story on the party for those of us who didnt even know it existed, especially given that part of the partys platform is to organize armed “Black Peoples Militias” and to stop blacks from “snitching” and cooperating with police? See Point 7 in the partys 10-point platform.

"Hoax" prompts cops to terrorize straphangers

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T rider makes false tip, prompting cops to bully a Cambridge man and his visiting friend. Commuters are put on hold.

istock_000005043107xsmall.jpg
(“Terrorist”: In the mass transportation system, everyone is a suspect.)

A hoaxer told police last week that two men wearing fatigues, and talking about drugs and guns, were headed for Logan Airport, according to one of the men targeted by the search.

State police, including one apparent smart-ass, detained the men for half an hour, after surrounding a train with bomb-sniffing dogs.

It took a while to find the men, who were not wearing fatigues, and had not been discussing illegal activity after all.

Almost unbelievably, the Boston transit police chief said he is grateful for the “tip,” because the department prides itself on erring on the side of caution.

A tip from a passenger and a manhunt that followed disrupted the Ts Red Line for about 13 minutes during rush hour Thursday morning, as police surrounded a train with bomb-sniffing dogs. It also forced Watchorn to miss a business trip to Buffalo while he was being questioned by State Police.

“The most disturbing thing about it was the apparent randomness of it,” Watchorn, 50, said. He said he wonders how easy it would be to subject others to what he considers hoaxes and to disrupt the transit system, based on an unsubstantiated tip.

Massachusetts police have repeatedly thrown the city into turmoil over science projects and ad campaigns in recent years.

The Boston Globe wanted to reach the hoaxer, but police would not reveal her identity.

CDC: Widespread needle reuse at clinics

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(RediClinic is one of the “retail” healthcare clinics turning up in malls and pharmacies. Image: RediClinic website)

CDC head Dr. Julie Gerberding tells the AP (excerpt, below) that a recent finding of unsafe practices at a Nevada healthcare clinic “could represent the tip of an iceberg.”

40,000 patients might have been exposed to HIV or hepatitis, due to needle reuse and other unsafe practices at the clinic.

The quickie clinic model, meanwhile, is catching on, for folks who want to get a look-see while waiting for a prescription, or one of the hundreds of vaccine jabs they will get in their lifetimes.

MinuteClinics, for example, are appearing at CVS pharmacy locations throughout the United States.

MinuteClinics is headed by the former CEO of Arby’s. — mb

The Associated Press: CDC Warns of Safety Problems at Clinics
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., met Monday with CDC head Dr. Julie Gerberding, and on a media conference call after their meeting both strongly condemned practices at the clinic.

Health care accreditors “would consider this a patient safety error that falls into the category of a ‘never event,’ meaning this should never happen in contemporary health care organizations,” said Gerberding.

“This is the largest number of patients that have ever been contacted for a blood exposure in a health-care setting. But unfortunately we have seen other large-scale situations where similar practices have led to patient exposures,” Gerberding said.

Invasion of the Baby Snatchers!

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Where there is no threat, and no market, create one.

Got to start ‘em young. Now proud parents can tell their children how RFID kept them safe from evil.
Verichip is again boasting it is saving babies from the (incredibly small) threat posed by baby snatchers in hospitals, and from mom-baby mismatches.
Verichip is best known for its subcutaneous RFID transponder, which some suspect of causing cancer in laboratory animals.
But the Delray Beach-based company also owns Ottawa-based Xmark, whose Hugs RFID ankle bracelets are now being used in more than half of Ohio’s “birthing facilities.”
The Hugs ankle bracelet will make your newborn look more like a parolee then any dumb, printed tag ever could.
If the ankle bracelt loses contact with the baby’s skin, or the device tampered with, an alarm sounds. (Better warn grandpa, as he might be tempted to tickle the kid’s feet.) Alerts also go out to security personnel. Ditto for any perimeter violations, or unauthorized exits.
The Hugs system can also roll the CCTV cameras near a site where a violation has occurred.
The other major part of the Hugs system is an optional RFID-pairing wrist device for moms, called Kisses.
clipped from www.morerfid.com

If a newborn is removed from the ward, if the tag is lifted from the baby’s skin or if the ankle strap is compromised, the system immediately triggers an alarm, alerting hospital security to the situation.
Xmark infant protection systems also protect against mismatching events by affixing matching RFID tags to mother and child. If the mother is given the wrong child, the RFID tag detects the mismatch and activates an audible alarm.

Google's Street Views test Bostonians' privacy

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Service leaves city’s toughest neighborhoods off the map

Not for everybody: Street views highlight downtown, business districts.

Google today added Boston to its growing list of U.S. cities featuring on-the-ground, street level views of people and places.

You can eyeball Newbury Street fashionistas dining alfresco.
But Boston’s roughest neighborhoods, in Mattapan and Dorchester, are not included in Street Views. Those are the areas in which most of the city’s homocides took place in 2007.

– Mark Baard

www.boston.com
Internet users who click on the “Street View” box on Google Maps (maps.google.com), will be able to peek at images from streets in Boston and surrounding communities.
While those might be legitimate uses of Street View, the feature also has the potential to be used for more questionable pursuits, such as compiling digital dossiers on individuals, critics warned.

AT&T's "cloak-and-dagger" room

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Room 641A: NSA spooks pore over the contents of emails that AT&T intercepts (that’s all of them), which are archived here.

AT&T is going out of its way to comply with requests for data that have not even been made. In AT&T’s secret room in San Francisco, NSA spooks can retrieve datat to check-up on U.S. citizens. Now the company is trying to avoid responsibility for helping the U.S. government violate our constitutional rights.

As with water-boarding, and despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, there is no gray area here. AT&T’s actions, alleged by a former company technician, are unconstitutional.

clipped from www.abcnews.go.com

 

Big Brother Spying on Americans’ Internet Data?

 

AT&T Whistleblower Describes Secret Room That Sends Internet Data to Government

As information is traded between users it flows also into a locked, secret room on the sixth floor of AT&T’s San Francisco offices and other rooms around the country — where the U.S. government can sift through and find the information it wants, former AT&T employee Mark Klein alleged Wednesday at a press conference on Capitol Hill.