Homeless in Arizona

Criminalizing Children at School

Basically the government schools have become a jobs program for teachers, administrators, and cops and are run for the sake of the teachers, administrators, cops and unions, not the parents and children.

Now the cops seems to want to use recent shootings to turn the schools into a bigger jobs program for police officers. And this article addresses some of that.

Source

Criminalizing Children at School

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: April 18, 2013 13 Comments

The National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation’s schools. But a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, a larger police presence in schools generally does little to improve safety. It can also create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.

Stationing police in schools, while common today, was virtually unknown during the 1970s. Things began to change with the surge of juvenile crime during the ’80s, followed by an overreaction among school officials. Then came the 1999 Columbine High School shooting outside Denver, which prompted a surge in financing for specially trained police. In the mid-1970s, police patrolled about 1 percent of schools. By 2008, the figure was 40 percent.

The belief that police officers automatically make schools safer was challenged in a 2011 study that compared federal crime data of schools that had police officers with schools that did not. It found that the presence of the officers did not drive down crime. The study — by Chongmin Na of The University of Houston, Clear Lake, and Denise Gottfredson of the University of Maryland — also found that with police in the buildings, routine disciplinary problems began to be treated as criminal justice problems, increasing the likelihood of arrests.

Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.

In Texas, civil rights groups filed a federal complaint against the school district in the town of Bryan. The lawyers say African-American students are four times as likely as other students to be charged with misdemeanors, which can carry fines up to $500 and lead to jail time for disrupting class or using foul language.

The criminalization of misbehavior so alarmed the New York City Council that, in 2010, it passed the Student Safety Act, which requires detailed police reports on which students are arrested and why. (Data from the 2011-12 school year show that black students are being disproportionately arrested and suspended.)

Some critics now want to require greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming. Elsewhere in the country, judges, lawmakers and children’s advocates have been working hard to dismantle what they have begun to call the school-to-prison pipeline.

Given the growing criticism, districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.

What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Letter: What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Posted: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:16 pm

Letter to the Editor

Every time I am stopped by the police I tell them I am taking the Fifth and refusing to answer their questions.

I even refuse to tell them my name.

I am not a criminal, but I figure that since the founders died to get me those rights I should use them or lose them.

The next things that usually happens is the cops tell me I don’t have any Fifth Amendment rights in “this case.” I am confused on that because Miranda v Arizona says “If the individual indicates ... he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease”

And of course things then get worse. The cops usually illegally search my wallet, and all my pockets looking for my ID, drugs and guns. I don’t carry an ID, and I don’t use drugs or carry a gun so they never find anything.

Yes, I know Terry v. Ohio allows the cops to give you a pat down search of your outer garments looking for weapons, but a search of my pockets and wallet is clearly illegal per the 4th Amendment and Terry v. Ohio.

Then, I am usually handcuffed and falsely arrested while the police make all kinds of threats on what is going to happen if I don’t answer their questions. After an hour or two the cops release me and tell me I am a jerk for thinking I have “Constitutional rights”.

With that in mind, I can understand where the cops are going in attempting to force Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, to answer their questions without reading him his Miranda rights.

Our Constitutional rights were not created to protect criminals. They were created to protect the innocent from government tyrants, like the police that have a number of times falsely arrested me, illegally questioned me and illegally searched me. I guess I should be glad, because I have not been beaten up, yet, for thinking I have Constitutional rights.

Mike Ross

Tempe

34% of teens say pot improves driving

When I was in high school they fed us nothing but lies about the effects of using drugs and alcohol. They even showed us the movie "Reefer Madness" in an attempt to scare us into not using marijuana.

About the only thing I remember from that stupid movie is that if a Black man smokes a joint, it will cause him to go out and rape 6 White woman. Yea, sure!!!!!

I suspect the one of the reasons the kids falsely think that smoking pot improves their driving skills is because they are used to the government schools feeding them lies about drug use.

I suspect if the government stopped feeding high schools kids the lies they currently feed them, and only feed them factual information about drugs many of these kids would not think that pot improves their driving skills.

On the other hand I will have to admit that driving when you are stoned on pot is much safer then driving when you drunk. Marijuana doesn't wipe out your motor skills like booze does. But even so I certainly don't recommend driving when you are stoned.

Source

Poll: 34% of teens say pot improves driving

By Zachary Tracer Bloomberg News Thu Apr 25, 2013 10:41 AM

NEW YORK — Most teenagers who drove under the influence of marijuana said the drug either improves their performance behind the wheel or is no hindrance, according to a survey by insurer Liberty Mutual Holding Co. and a safety group.

Thirty-four percent of those who have driven while high say the drug makes them a better motorist, and 41 percent said it had no effect, Boston-based Liberty Mutual said. Among teens who drove under the influence of alcohol, 62 percent said drinking affected their driving for the worse.

Teens’ attitudes show that parents need to do a better job of educating children about safe driving, Liberty Mutual and Students Against Destructive Decisions said in a statement Thursday disclosing survey results. They found that 23 percent of teens had driven under the influence of alcohol, marijuana or prescription drugs used illegally.

“We’ve been stressing the dangers associated with drinking and driving, and drugging and driving, for years and years and years,” Dave Melton, who helps oversee safety initiatives at Liberty Mutual, said in an interview. “Our kids are still doing the same kinds of things.”

Parents need to set a good example for their children and enforce driving rules to keep them safe, Melton said.

While there’s a clear association between alcohol and increased car-crash risk, the link between marijuana use and accidents is less certain, according to NORML, which seeks to decriminalize marijuana use by adults. Stoned drivers may slow down and require greater time to respond, the organization said on its website.

“This reaction is just the opposite of that exhibited by drivers under the influence of alcohol, who tend to drive in a more risky manner proportional to their intoxication,” NORML said on its site.

Still, the organization said people shouldn’t drive after being impaired by marijuana use.

Teen drivers say using a mobile phone is at least as distracting as driving under the influence of alcohol, marijuana or prescription drugs, Liberty Mutual found. Three quarters of teens said driving while high on marijuana is at least slightly distracting, and 86 percent said the same of driving under the influence of alcohol.

The data are based on completed surveys from 1,708 11th and 12th graders at 26 high schools across the U.S., according to Liberty Mutual.

Melton said he was shocked by teen acceptance of driving after marijuana use.

“I don’t understand how they think it improves their driving,” he said. “Maybe they think that their senses are enhanced as a result of using a mind-altering drug. I just can’t say, I have no idea.”

$40 million dollar solution for $10 problem???

Arizona education hindered by lack of central data system

This system would cost about $40 for each of the million or so children in Arizona government public schools.

And of course the system also smacks as a 1984 big brother police monitoring system. I didn't know this but according to the article every child in an Arizona school has a government ID number that follows the child around from school to school.

Source

Arizona education hindered by lack of central data system

By Cathryn Creno and Luci Scott The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Apr 29, 2013 12:47 AM

State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal has a high-tech vision for school improvement in Arizona.

With one click of a mouse, he’d like teachers to be able to see whether their students are gifted, whether they have special needs or whether their attendance was ever a problem.

He’d like parents to be able to log in to an Arizona Department of Education website and see immediately how their child’s school is performing, if their kids have been absent, or how they performed on any given day.

He’d also like to better guarantee the accuracy of enrollment and test scores that school districts and charter schools need for school funding and will use for teacher and principal evaluations.

But those wishes are a long way — and nearly $40 million — from becoming reality.

For now, districts are hampered by a lack of access to key information.

The Phoenix Union High School District, for example, has difficulty gathering necessary information on incoming ninth-graders.

“We won’t have the eighth-grade kids’ AIMS scores,” said Craig Pletenik, the district’s public-information officer. “Putting students in the correct sequence of classes is critical to their success, and we need to have that prior information to properly place them so they’re not in a too-hard class or a too-easy class.”

Without the student’s specific history, the district relies on teacher recommendations. It also looks at seventh-grade scores on Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, or AIMS, and does pretesting in the first week or two of class to assess the student’s level, all cumbersome techniques.

“If we’d have that data up front, it would be so much easier,” said Juvenal Lopez, the district’s director of human resources.

Lopez saw the need for real-time data when he was principal at Metro Tech, where 50 or 60 schools were represented in that school’s freshman class.

“It was very challenging to get (data) on special-needs students and English-language learners, among others,” he said.

Funding depends on data

In addition to academic data, keeping accurate attendance records is vital because a statistic known as “average daily membership” determines a district’s state funding.

“Between the numbers we submit and the numbers the state will officially grant us, there always seems to be a discrepancy,” Pletenik said.

“There are over a million students in public education in Arizona,” he added. “We need to do a better job of tracking them.”

Phoenix Union currently has five data systems, which are unwieldy and costly in staff time, said Don Fournier, the district’s division manager of information technology.

Yet another problem that weighs heavily on districts is tracking dropouts because they are penalized for students who are unaccounted for either in other districts or in the military.

“If a student leaves Mesa and goes somewhere else in the state, we don’t have a way of knowing that,” said Joe O’Reilly, head of research and evaluation for Mesa Public Schools.

Conversely, if a student transfers to Mesa from Parker or Prescott, educators in Mesa don’t know the student’s history, and requesting records takes time and money.

In the Scottsdale Unified School District, Chief Technology Officer Tom Clark agrees that a streamlined system has the potential of saving staff time.

“The system that Arizona is using is somewhat archaic and, for use of a better word, clunky,” Clark said. “We would like to be able to receive data back from the state in a more real-time fashion.”

Hodgepodge a burden

Although every student in Arizona has an identification number that follows him or her from school to school or district to district, “that still doesn’t mean you have all the information you’d like to have on that student when they move,” he said. [Maybe they should just tattoo the kids numbers on foreheads. Teachers and cops would love that!!!]

His district spends $110,000 a year to maintain its data system Synergy, used by several districts in the Valley, and an additional $75,000 for portions of salaries of people who handle data.

Having everyone on the system could be a good thing depending on what services are provided, he said.

The current hodgepodge of systems throughout Arizona creates a burden, especially for smaller districts, Clark said.

At one of those smaller districts, Balsz Elementary in Phoenix, Superintendent Jeff Smith said a modernized system is crucial.

“In order to accomplish what we’re being asked to do, we need good, reliable data,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

“We’re talking about student growth and holding teachers and administrators accountable, and that’s a complicated, complex process,” he added.

Smith gave an example of how the right kind of data can greatly improve instruction. Balsz administrators found that data can predict with a high probability how well students will perform on the AIMS test. Those students who are at high risk of not doing well can join tutoring groups and make use of other resources to bring them up to speed.

In the Litchfield Park Elementary School District, Brian Owin, director of federal programs and student evaluation, sees delays in getting information, for example, on whether a new student has been assessed as a candidate for English-language-learner classes.

Although phone calls can be made to the student’s previous district, that is cumbersome because out of 11,000 students in the district, 750 were tested this year for ELL.

Under the current system, it depends on when the student arrives whether the district has the necessary data.

“If a kid comes in midyear but was assessed the first of the year, we’d be able to see that,” Owin said.

Huppenthal, elected to office two years ago, acknowledges the department’s data challenges. At various times, he has called the current data system “a snake pit, “medieval” and a “mutant organism.” He says it requires 200 in-house “data wranglers” and approximately 2,000 school-district technology workers to make it function.

How the tangle emerged

To understand how the education data system got in such a tangle, one must look back more than a decade to when the state created what it calls the Student Accountability Information System to track AIMS scores and other basic student data.

The program worked for a few years, but was quickly overwhelmed in the early 2000s, when the federal No Child Left Behind law took effect. It required states to collect data including race, gender, English proficiency and socioeconomic status so educators could make sure that no group of students was falling behind academically.

Huppenthal said to cope with the growing demands, staffers employed by his predecessors patched together a piecemeal system of data and coding that no longer does the job.

The problem got even worse as officials began to track Arizona’s growing charter-school movement and the large number of students taking part-time online and community-college classes.

Mark Masterson, the state education agency’s chief information officer, said when Huppenthal brought him on board, the computer code being used in the department “looked like a middle-school student wrote” it.

“The software was built here by people who were not IT workers,” he said. “They made it much more complicated than it should have been.”

Since Huppenthal took office, the department has spent $13.6 million on data-system improvements and estimates it will spend $19.5 million more this year.

Although the fixes will continue to be expensive for three more years — Huppenthal says it will take an additional $39.4 million in that period — he says both the state and schools will save money in the long run by not having to employ workers to enter duplicate data on students.

Little money would be spent on computer hardware — the department has relatively new computers, purchased a few years ago with federal funds, he said.

Rather, it would primarily be spent on contracts with software developers who would build various components of the new data system and an in-house support center. Education officials call this new system the Arizona Education Learning and Accountability System.

Toward a better future

Huppenthal says if his funding request is approved, the new system will be fully developed in five years.

The system would contain all the information needed for school districts to enroll new students and get accurate per-pupil funding from the state — plus information about school performance, teacher performance and student data including attendance, grades, standardized test scores and special-education status.

Teachers and principals would have access to student data — including attendance records from every public school in Arizona, AIMS test scores and other measurements, including those for students who are gifted or in special education.

Currently, it can take weeks to track down such information about a student when he or she enrolls in a new school.

A similar “dashboard” would allow parents to log in and see how their kids performed on a test or whether they were in school that day. The public also would have access to parts of the system that show overall school data, such as test scores.

The new system also would allow students, parents and teachers to see state standardized-test scores instantly, he said. Under the current system, AIMS scores are not received until summer — too late for remedial work before the start of the next school year.

“Right now, students and teachers want their scores, but there is a burlap sack over the scoreboard,” Masterson said.

Department of Education officials say that they have looked at data systems in many other states. Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia and Washington, D.C., are said to have well-developed systems.

In Colorado, for instance, parents, students and educators may access information about a school’s finances, classes offered, number of highly qualified teachers, enrollment and student performance on standardized tests on a dashboard similar to the one that Education Department staffers envision.

But Huppenthal says no other state so far has as comprehensive a system as the one he and his staff have planned.

Vision far from reality

While state lawmakers agree that Arizona needs better education data, some think a new system could be developed faster and cheaper by outside contractors.

Sen. Kimberly Yee, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, likes the idea of putting the data system entirely out to bid by private software developers.

Since most other states are developing similar systems in response to demand for school data, why not try to find a program “off the shelf”? she wonders.

“I am absolutely in support of upgrading our archaic system. It is quite broken-down,” Yee said. “But to fix this, we need a system that has already been tested. There may be something available right now.”

Gov. Jan Brewer, meanwhile, likes much of Huppenthal’s proposal but thinks the data system can be improved faster and cheaper.

She included $7 million for data-system improvements in her budget plan this year and would like to see the Arizona Department of Administration manage the funds.

Under her plan, the two state agencies together would select an outside vendor to run a public interface similar to Service Arizona, the state’s system for vehicle licensing.

Rebecca Gau, director of the governor’s Office of Education Innovation, said the Administration Department was selected to team with the Education Department because it has more experience with technology procurement.

Brewer’s plan has the support of Expect More Arizona, a non-profit education-reform group that is supported by a number of major Arizona businesses, said the organization’s president, Pearl Chang Esau.

“Expect More Arizona believes that the $7 million proposed in the governor’s budget puts us on the right track,” she said. “If we don’t have good data in the hands of teachers, administrators and parents, we will never have the accountability we want or see the improvement in education that we expect.”

Huppenthal noted that his staff already is working with four school districts — the Phoenix and Tolleson elementary school districts in metro Phoenix and the Vail and Kingman unified districts outside Maricopa County — to test a “dashboard” that gives teachers instant access to student data.

“It gives a teacher a better feel for the type of student they will be teaching,” said Ed Jung, the Education Department’s chief technology officer and project leader. “At a glance, I can see on the dashboard which students are going to need a bit more of my attention this year.”

Jung noted that the department has spent decades collecting student data that should be put to use by teachers. Walmart, he said, knows more about its shoppers than Arizona knows about its students and schools.

Need quick response

Useful data can be collected, but often its usefulness erodes if it’s not in the hands of teachers and administrators quickly.

This is crucial in evaluating teachers, said Justin Greene, executive director of system services in the Higley Unified School District. State law requires districts to use data that is valid, reliable and timely, and a problem now is with a lack of timeliness, Greene said.

“Students take the AIMS test in the spring after teachers have the kids about 145 days, and we can extrapolate some measure of what the teacher imparted to that student,” Greene said. Teachers have one-fifth of the year left to teach.

The problem is that schools don’t receive AIMS data until the day the teachers leave for summer or the day after they’re gone, and “it becomes a difficult evaluation process,” Greene said. “The state spends millions and can’t give us timely (information).”

Gary Jujino, coordinator of assessment in Gilbert Public Schools, said that this year, the district used the state’s letter grades assigned to schools and assigned those to teachers. So a teacher was rated an A if he or she worked in an A school.

Becoming more sophisticated in evaluating teachers requires addressing certain challenges, especially when a part of it is teacher evaluations by students. For example, some teachers might have up to 150 students and others might have six. One student could have a much greater impact on a teacher’s score from one of the smaller classes.

“We’re trying to address that by using multiple years’ worth of data,” Jujino said, but there can be questions about the data’s integrity.

“The problem is not with the student data that could be tied to teacher evaluations,” Jujino said. “It’s how are we going to tie that with the integrity needed for evaluating teachers.”

Just as important as modernizing the system is making sure it serves the proper purpose, said Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, who says a data system is just a tool.

“Sometimes in Arizona we’ve seen situations where the tool became more important than the system it is serving,” he said. “It happened with the AIMS test in the ’90s, when education was serving the AIMS test rather than the AIMS test serving education.”

Morrill, who taught high-school English 17 years in the Marana Unified School District, said Arizona could commit the same error with a data system if planners believe that simply having data is the same as having a grand plan for what to do with the data.

“At that point,” Morrill said, “we have to ask ourselves: Are we really serving the education system — student needs — or are we serving the bureaucracy?”

Key components

Elements of the proposed $39.4 million state education data system:

- Software that allows school districts and charter schools to collect and analyze information about student attendance and demographics for funding purposes.

- Software that calculates state aid based on the student data.

- Software to let the state administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which will replace AIMS by 2015.

- Software that connects a student with teachers and classes he or she takes as well as allows teachers to look back over a student’s achievement and other data from previous years.

- Dashboards that make data contained in the student-teacher connection software more user-friendly and easier to understand.

- Software to provide support for teachers with test questions, curriculum suggestions and opportunities to collaborate with other teachers on methods to improve student achievement. Administrators can track and evaluate teacher performance and provide feedback and resources to improve teacher effectiveness.

- A security program to shore up the privacy of student data. Teachers and principals could see only their own students’ information; the public would see only aggregated data that excludes student names.

Source: Arizona Department of Education

Phoenix City Council members are gun grabbers

Source

Phoenix police to hold gun-buyback event Saturday

New law soon will hinder similar efforts

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 3, 2013 10:11 PM

Three months before a new state law goes into effect requiring police to sell any weapon they receive, Phoenix officials plan to destroy as many guns as residents bring them.

Those efforts begin Saturday with a gun buyback at three churches in the city, and two more events are scheduled later this month.

After that, gun buybacks coordinated with Phoenix police will likely cease.

A law Gov. Jan Brewer signed this week requires police to sell any weapons they receive, whether the guns are abandoned, lost or forfeited to the agency through a court order. A bill with the same intent — requiring agencies to sell weapons instead of destroying them — was approved last year, but officials in Phoenix, Tucson and other cities took a literal reading of that legislation and determined that it applied only to weapons that departments receive through court-ordered forfeiture.

Police have until the new law takes effect to continue their current practices. In Phoenix, that means destroying weapons.

“There’s been no emergency clause indicating that (the law) is going to go into effect immediately,” Phoenix police Sgt. Steve Martos said of the legislation.

The checks that police want to run on each weapon, which include records queries to ensure that the gun was not reported stolen and a ballis-tics test to determine if the weapon was used in a crime, will take additional time, Martos said.

“Obviously, there’s a little bit of pressure,” said Martos, a department spokesman.

The buyback is anonymous, with no information collected on the donor, and police ask that weapons arrive unloaded and in a trunk or pickup bed where officers can safely remove the guns.

As long as the guns are functioning, they can be exchanged for gift cards.

“It’ll almost be like a drive-through process,” Martos said.

The buybacks should not result in additional costs for police personnel.

The events will be staffed with Phoenix’s neighborhood-enforcement team officers who would already be on the clock and do not typically have “first-responder” duties, Martos said.

A group called Arizonans for Gun Safety donated $100,000 to purchase grocery-store gift cards that will be given out in exchange for weapons, including $200 for assault weapons and $100 for handguns, shotguns and rifles.

That’s far more than police have offered at similar past events, Martos said.

Phoenix police brought in a little more than 200 weapons at the city’s last buyback in 2011, when they had $10,000 worth of gift cards.

“We almost had to start turning people away because we were running out of gift cards,” Martos said.

An event in Tucson in January produced similar results — about 200 weapons for $10,000 worth of grocery gift cards — but came with an unanticipated wave of controversy.

Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik organized the event, which was paid for through private donations he coordinated in about two weeks.

Charles Heller, spokesman for a Tucson-based non-profit that promotes gun rights, said the event was a self-gratifying effort put on by people who want to believe that removing a few hundred weapons from circulation could somehow impact the crime rate.

The new legislation has spurred Tucson residents into action, Kozachik said.

He added that there is no shortage of ideas about how to get around the new law, including suggestions that the weapons be auctioned with a minimum bid of $100,000 to thwart buyers or sold for 1 cent to artists who will melt them down and use them in installations.

He applauded Phoenix’s effort to beat the legislative clock.

The buyback events will be held at from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Southminster Presbyterian, 1923 E. Broadway; Sunnyslope Mennonite Church, 9835 N. Seventh St.; and BetaniaPresbyterian, 2811 N. 39th Ave.

For more information, call 602-547-0976 or go to www.azfgs.com.

Police officer accidentally shot in leg by fellow cop

Source

Police officer accidentally shot in leg by fellow cop

By Rosemary Regina Sobol and Adam Sege Tribune reporters

7:33 a.m. CDT, May 7, 2013

A Chicago police officer was shot in the leg by a fellow officer who had fired at a charging dog Monday night in the Englewood neighborhood, authorities said.

The shooting happened about 9 p.m. in the 1200 block of West 72nd Place as Englewood District officers were responding to a call of a burglary in progress, according to a police statement.

Two officers and a supervisor went to the second-floor landing of the building, where they were confronted by a "vicious dog," according to police.

When the dog charged toward them, an officer fired a single shot that struck the dog and also hit another officer in the thigh, according to a police source. It was unclear if the bullet struck the officer or the dog first, the source said.

Paramedics took the 42-year-old officer in good condition to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where he was treated and released, authorities said.

Investigators from the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority responded to the scene, spokesman Larry Merritt said.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

San Jose cop frames man for rape with phoney lab report!!!

Next if you are naive as a 3 year old you probably think San Jose Police officer Sgt. Matthew Christian was fired and sent to prison for his crimes. Again don't make me laugh!!!

However, the police officer, Sgt. Matthew Christian, remains on the job and is now assigned to the Traffic Investigations Unit, said SJPD spokesman Albert Morales.

In hopes of extracting a confession, Christian created a "ruse" crime report indicating that Kerkeles' semen had been found on a blanket, while the actual report revealed no semen. Such a tactic is legal -- at that stage of a case.

If you read up on the "9 Step Reid Method" you will discover it is a modern variation of the old "beat em with a rubber hose" method used to get confessions by the police.

Only the physical rubber hose is replaced with a "mental rubber hose", and the physical beating is replaced by a "mental beating".

The "9 Step Reid Method" routinely gets false confessions.

Source

San Jose poised to settle case involving cop and phony lab report

By Tracey Kaplan

tkaplan@mercurynews.com

Posted: 05/06/2013 06:12:00 PM PDT

SAN JOSE -- A local man who was held over for trial on the basis of a phony lab report cooked up by a police officer and presented in court by a prosecutor is poised to win a legal settlement with the city for $150,000.

On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council is expected to approve the settlement with Michael Kerkeles of San Jose. Under the agreement, the city must also pay Kerkeles' legal fees, which could be at least $1 million because the federal civil rights case dragged on for six years and included a hard-fought appeal.

Kerkeles declined to comment, but one of his lawyers said the case has taken a major toll on him. Not only was Kerkeles at work when the sexual assault of a developmentally disabled woman supposedly occurred, the lawyer said, but his wife also was in her home office, steps from where the alleged rape took place.

"It's a significant sum, but Mr. Kerkeles certainly wouldn't trade the money he got for what he went through," lawyer Matt Davis said.

Fake crime report

The evidence that Kerkeles' rights had been violated was bolstered last year when prosecutor Jaime Stringfield admitted she misled the court about the lab report. She was suspended for a month by the state Supreme Court, based on a recommendation by the State Bar, which licenses attorneys. She had already resigned from the District Attorney's Office to pursue a teaching career, but is currently licensed to practice law.

However, the police officer, Sgt. Matthew Christian, remains on the job and is now assigned to the Traffic Investigations Unit, said SJPD spokesman Albert Morales.

The injustice unfolded after Kerkeles was accused in 2005 of sexually assaulting the developmentally disabled neighbor with the mental acuity of a 7-year-old.

In hopes of extracting a confession, Christian created a "ruse" crime report indicating that Kerkeles' semen had been found on a blanket, while the actual report revealed no semen. Such a tactic is legal -- at that stage of a case.

Kerkeles asked for an attorney, so the report was never actually used as a ruse. Instead, it was presented in court after the District Attorney's Office lost two preliminary hearings in the case.

'Huge mistake'

On both occasions, the judge found the woman was not a competent witness and there was insufficient evidence to hold Kerkeles over for trial on charges.

But at the third preliminary hearing, then-prosecutor Stringfield elicited testimony from officer Christian regarding the contents of the ruse report. The officer's testimony was that semen had been found on the blanket, prompting the court to find there was probable cause to hold Kerkeles over for trial.

"In our view, that was a huge mistake," San Jose City Attorney Rick Doyle said, referring to the presentation of the phony document in court and Sgt. Matthew Christian's testimony about it.

There were several indications that the report was false. For one thing, the officer used a phony name for the crime lab analyst. It was also dated within a day of the evidence being seized -- contrary to normal DNA examinations, which take considerably longer to complete. Stringfield had in her file a real report that did not find semen on the bedspread.

"It's a good number ($150,000) to settle the case for," the city attorney said, "given the (legal) risks."

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com/tkaplanreport.

Boy suspended for pretending pencil was gun

Source

Boy suspended for pretending pencil was gun

Tue May 7, 2013 9:02 AM

SUFFOLK, Va. — A Suffolk second grader has been suspended for making gun noises while pointing a pencil at another student.

The 7-year-old boy was suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. He was playing with another student in class Friday at Driver Elementary.

“When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” Paul Marshall, the boy’s father, told WAVY-TV (http://bit.ly/16OVKIL). “It’s as simple as that.”

Marshall, a former Marine, said he believes school officials overreacted in suspending his son.

But Suffolk Public Schools spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw said a pencil is considered a weapon when it’s pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made.

“Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community,” Bradshaw said. “Kids don’t think about ‘Cowboys and Indians’ anymore, they think about drive-by shootings and murders and everything they see on television news every day.”

Marshall said his son has good grades and no history of being disruptive in class. On the suspension note, the teacher noted that the boy stopped when she told him to do so.

He said school administrators failed to use common sense.

“Enough is enough,” said Paul Marshall. “I see it as the tail is now wagging the dog.”

Government bureaucrats elect signs on homes of sex offenders

When a person does their prison time the government should back off an leave them along.

Now "sex offenders" sounds like a really nasty, evil crime, but in Arizona the law says you are a "sex offender" if you have to go to the bathroom really bad and take a leak in an alley. So most of the sex offenders in Arizona, are not the perverts the law makes them out to be. I don't know what the law is in Florida where this article is from.

I wonder how the public would react if the cops decided to post signs in people yards notifying the world that they were dangerous pot smokers or jay walkers.

Source

Home signs warn of presence of predators

Associated Press Tue May 7, 2013 4:42 PM

STARKE, Fla. — Brian Speer thought he had completed all of his obligations when he registered in Bradford County as a convicted sex predator after serving an eight-year prison sentence for child molestation.

But now, in addition to submitting to a public registry for sex offenders, he has a permanent reminder of his crime posted right in his front yard: a bright red sign reading, “Brian Speer is a convicted Sexual Predator and lives at this location.”

The sign is one of 18 the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office erected in mid-April outside the homes of convicted sex predators.

The signs have been praised by many residents in the small rural county southwest of Jacksonville, but some question whether the new measure reaches too far and could be harassment against people who have served jail terms and already submit to the public registry. Neighboring Baker County started a similar program six years ago.

“I think it’s a lot of bull,” said Speer, who was convicted of lewd or lascivious molestation in 2004. “I believe that anybody that has any criminal background should have a sign in front of their house if we have one in front of ours.”

Bradford officials say they are working within the discretion afforded by state statutes, which mandate that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement use the Internet to notify the public of all sexual predators and requires that a sheriff or police chief conduct community notification of a sexual predator’s presence.

It does not specify how that community notification must take place. It traditionally has been done through fliers, print and television media, and websites, but Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith thought his office could do more.

The federal Sex Offender and Registration Act, passed in 2006, sets minimum standards for sex offender notification across the country. There is no central database to track how agencies notify residents, but counties and towns in other states have tried sign programs with mixed success. Judges have ordered signs to be posted outside the homes of specific sex offenders in cases in Texas, Louisiana and Oregon.

Sign placement also has been shot down. In 2009, a Kansas appeals court overturned a judge’s order requiring a sex offender to post signs on both his home and vehicle.

In Bradford County, Smith said that when his chief of jails told him about Baker County’s sign program, he jumped at the idea.

Brad Smith, the office’s chief of operations, said the sheriff cleared it with the county attorney. The sheriff then floated the idea on social media in March, with an overwhelmingly positive response, and the first signs were posted April 16.

“We realized it was not only a good idea, but something important to ensure that a consistent notification was being made,” Brad Smith said. He said residents not living in Bradford County when original notifications go out could be unaware of a sexual predator’s presence. With permanent signs, that is less likely.

He also said cost was not an issue: The signs cost $10 each, and inmate labor is used to erect them. [ie slave labor]

Baker County Sheriff Joey Dobson said he is proud of the new program and happy others are adopting it.

“I know the predators are not real fond of it,” he said. “I understand, but I think it’s important for the community to know where these people live.”

The signs are only for sexual predators, not for all sex offenders, Brad Smith said. Florida defines a sexual predator as someone who has been convicted of a first-degree sex crime such as child molestation or sexual battery or has been convicted of two second-degree sex crimes such as solicitation of a minor or lewd, lascivious, or indecent assault. A judge also can designate a person a sex predator.

Bradford County has 98 registered sex offenders, and 18 were predators at the time the signs were erected.

On the Facebook page for the sheriff’s office, about 1,000 people combined have “liked” a pair of posts about the new signs.

Mike Rowe, 27, recently moved to Bradford County. He said that though he doesn’t have children, he thinks the signs are positive. He said he was “fine with authorities doing whatever they can to notify us where these people live.”

Starke resident Rashonda Green, 26, has three children and lives down the street from sexual predator John Goodman, who has two convictions for lewd and lascivious exhibition. She said that because the community is small, most people were already aware of his status and that the sign was an invasion of privacy.

No one answered the phone at a number listed for Goodman.

“I felt embarrassed for him,” Green said. “It seems like it’s a little too much. Kids living in the neighborhood read (the sign) and are asking questions like ‘What is a sex predator?’ I think he should be able to live in peace at least. It’s a little over the top for me.”

For now, though, the signs aren’t going anywhere.

“If they’re a sexual predator, we’re not going to sugarcoat it or give anybody any preferential treatment,” Brad Smith said. “We’re going to put the sign out there.”

11-year-old arrested for Airsoft gun on school bus

Source

Officials: Prescott Valley 11-year-old arrested for Airsoft gun on school bus

By Chris Cole The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Thu May 9, 2013 5:19 PM

A Prescott Valley fifth grader was arrested on suspicion of interfering with an education institution after he brought an Airsoft gun on a school bus in his backpack on Wednesday, authorities said.

Deputies responded to a call about an 11-year-old student in possession of a handgun on a school bus about 3 p.m., according to the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies, assisted by Arizona Department of Safety officers, had the school bus dispatcher locate the bus in a parking lot near the Arizona 69 and Central Avenue in Mayer, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Inside the student’s bag deputies found an Airsoft gun that looked and felt like an actual handgun, the Sheriff’s Office said.

The student told authorities that he had mistakenly left the gun in his backpack after playing with it over the weekend, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The student had found the gun in his backpack earlier in the bus ride and told the other student that he would show him the gun if the other student didn‘t tell anyone. The student then displayed the gun and told the other student that he carried it “for protection,” the Sheriff’s Office said.

The other student thought it was real and told his father, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The 11-year-old was was released to a Child Protective Services’ case worker for follow-up, the Sheriff’s Office said.

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