Paul Abel says someone punched him while he was stopped at a red light. So he drove around the neighborhood trying to find the man. Abel, who'd been drinking, saw Kaleb Miller and thought he was the man who hit him, so he struck him on the back of the neck with his handgun. The gun went off, striking Miller on the hand. At trial, a judge declared Abel's actions "inappropriate, impudent and ill-advised," but acquitted him of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and DUI. Why? Abel was an off-duty cop, and he says he was trying to arrest Miller, who witnesses say wasn't the man who struck him. He says he had to use force when Miller refused to obey his commands.
At about 7 a.m. one morning, Darryl Harris heard a loud thumping at his front door. When he answered it, someone stuck a gun in his face, and handcuffed him. Meanwhile, several Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies began searching his house. They pulled out his four sons and forced them to sit in the porch in their underwear. Every time Harris asked one of the deputies what they were looking for, they just told him to shut up. Only after they found his badge, and verified his was a probation officer, did they tell him they were looking for his brother-in-law, a man who has been in prison since the 1990s.
Security screeners at an airport in Columbus, Ohio, couldn't tell what was in a sealed can inside some luggage they were inspecting. The woman who owned the suitcase insisted it was pickles, but they didn't believe her. They got a bomb squad to blow up the can and found it contained pickled mangoes.
It was a pretty cool idea for Father's Day. Give dad a flight on one of just two B-24 Liberators still flying. So photographer Danny Hurley went out to Texas' Addison Field to shoot the plane and the dads. He'd been taking pictures all morning when an Addison police officer approached him, pulled out his gun, and handcuffed him. Even though the plane's crew had radioed the tower to let them know he was supposed to be there, the officer detained him for standing on the tarmac. He eventually let him go, but not before telling him he'd committed a federal felony and should expect to hear from the Department of Homeland Security.
What should a police officer do when a 14-year-old boy allegedly knocks a younger boy off his bike and punches him? He probably shouldn't threaten to sodomize him with his baton. But that's allegedly what Senior Constable Matthew Lake did in Australia. The boy secretly recorded Lake telling him if he heard of him doing anything like that again he would shove the baton "so far up your a—you won't know what day it is."
Anton Cataldo lost a couple of paintings after he placed them on his car, forgot about them and drove off. So he put up some posters asking people if they had found them. He stapled some of the posters to trees, which earned him a £75 fine from England's Brighton and Howe City Council for causing harm to the trees. "You appear to have little understanding that trees are living things," a council official told him in an email.
The Denver, Colorado, police department has suspended an officer for allegedly flashing his badge and pointing his gun through a McDonald's drive-through window. The officer, who was not named in press reports, reportedly was upset with how long it was taking to fill his order.
City officials in Bozeman, Montana, seemed to think that city employees should have nothing to hide. On employment applications, they demanded that prospective employees list their user names and passwords to "personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc." After local media reported the demands, the city backed down.
Tom Feddor has gotten some 170 parking tickets from the city of Chicago. Feddor has managed to get most of them dismissed, but he was spending an awful lot of his time in traffic court, and city officials didn't seem interested in finding out why he was getting so many bogus tickets. So Feddor went to a local newspaper, which found that parking enforcement uses his license plate number, which is simply 0, to test ticketing equipment. City officials now say they will correct the problem.
The Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes has sued the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, demanding it stop harassing those collecting signatures for a petition to stop a proposed trolley. Police officers and other government officials have reportedly tried to force petitioners off public property or threatened to arrest them for collecting signatures without a permit, something that is not illegal.
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSS
