11-02-01

Dumb Crooks™

Three teenagers in Chile tried to rob a bus without realizing one of their mothers was sitting a few rows back.

When she saw the driver threatened with knives and a baseball bat, she shouted at her son to behave himself and get off.

A police officer in plain clothes was also on the bus in Santiago and managed to disarm the trio with the help of the driver.

The teenagers had demanded the driver's takings. Two of them, including the one with his mom on board, was caught.

The boy remains in police custody and local media reports say his mother is likely to be called as a witness at his forthcoming trial.

Meanwhile, In South Africa . . .

A morning robbery in Cullinan proved fruitless for 15 men who held up a cash-in-transit vehicle only to find the box they had stolen was empty.

Pretoria police said robbers traveling in a Mercedes-Benz car crashed head-on into a Fidelity Guard vehicle on Monday.

Occupants in a bakkie behind the Mercedes then stopped and joined in the hold-up.

The robbers apparently used picks, hammers and crowbars to break into the guards' vehicle.

They managed to steal only one of the three cash boxes - the one without cash in it.

It was found abandoned a few meters from the scene of the robbery.

A drunken Norwegian who pulled a pair of underpants over his face and robbed a post office was awakened by police two days later to find he had tipped them off about his identity.

The 47-year-old drunk charged into the post office and handed over a note saying ``This is a robbery.'' But his wife's name and personal details were on the back of the note.

The man told a court he did not remember the robbery, but admitted he had a suspicion of having been up to no good when he woke up and saw a picture of the be-knickered robber in the newspaper and found a large wad of money in his living room.

We have worked hard to put COP/Crime Prevention programs into effect. They are designed to have a lot of interaction with our various crime watch and other crime prevention groups. We ask that they keep us up-to-date with any possible scams and/or crime trends going on in our county.

We send out alerts and when someone sees something that they think might be important, they call in. If dispatch and deputies listen and correlate it to a CFS and tell the caller that there is nothing they can do for them, the citizen's ego is wounded. They joined up to play on our team. They call us back and say they were brushed off, treated rudely, etc. They probably will not call back. The objective is to prevent crime, so when they call there will not be a crime, YET.

Please take all the information just like it was SOMETHING and forward it to CP Officer Melton, Chief Whitehead or Sheriff Ryan. We will start sending communications a copy of our alerts so you can expect some calls. We want as many eyes and ears out there as we can, so we need to appreciate them, not wound them!

Legal Issues—Search and Seizure

An undercover officer arranged to sell drugs to a suspect. Prior to the arranged sale, the officer contacted local officers and members of a drug task force to participate as backup.

Three vehicles involved in the drug deal were parked in a mall parking lot, including the one in which the defendant was riding with the truck’s driver. The defendant remained in the truck while the driver went to another vehicle to exchange money for drugs.

When the undercover officer gave the “bust” signal, two backup officers ran to the truck with weapons drawn and ordered the defendant to get out. One of the officers ordered her to lie on the ground and put her hands behind her back.

The defendant was handcuffed and still on the ground when she was asked for permission to search her purse. Inside the purse, which had been left in the truck, an officer found pills, drugs, and drug paraphernalia.

Prior to trial the defendant moved to suppress the evidence seized from her purse, claiming that she was arrested illegally and that the items found in her purse were fruits of the poisonous tree.

The State responded that the seizure was an investigative stop, and not an arrest, and that it was supported by reasonable suspicion. The trial court denied the defendant’s suppression motion.

HOLDING: An investigative detention “may be founded upon a reasonable, articulable suspicion while an arrest, to pass constitutional muster, must be supported by probable cause.”

Handcuffing, by itself, does not transform a detention into a custodial arrest. Neither does the officer’s opinion about the nature of the seizure determine whether it was an arrest or detention.

Officers who possess reasonable suspicion for a temporary investigative detention may use the amount of force that is reasonably necessary to investigate, maintain the status quo, and protect the officers’ safety. If officers use excessive force in effecting a seizure, a detention may become a “full blown arrest.”

An investigative detention must be temporary and last no longer than necessary to confirm or dispel the suspicion supporting the stop. It is based on facts that, in light of the officer’s experience, “justify a person of reasonable caution in believing the action taken was appropriate.”

This drug transaction occurred during daylight hours with a total of ten to twelve officers participating. The officers assigned to detain the defendant testified that she was not free to leave while she was handcuffed on the ground , but she was not under arrest.

They also testified that such situations are dangerous; that participants often have weapons; and that there could have been weapons in the truck. The defendant’s proximity to the transaction, connection to one of the drug buyers, and connection to a vehicle used in the deal, justified a temporary detention.

Experience suggested to the officers that persons who accompany drug buyers to the scene of a transaction often possess weapons. This created suspicion that the defendant was armed and dangerous, and should be detained for the safety of the officers.

Under the circumstances, the handcuffing of the defendant did not transform the detention into an arrest. Multiple parties and vehicles were involved, increasing the danger to the officers who were participating.

Also, the officers in this case were certain that criminal activity was intended to take place. They handcuffed the defendant for only five to ten minutes during a situation that was likely to be volatile. The amount of force used by the officers in securing the defendant was reasonable to preserve their safety and any evidence that might be present. They were not investigating additional crimes.

Because the detention was justified by reasonable suspicion, it was not illegal and did not taint the evidence found during the search of the defendant’s purse. Morris v. State, 2001 wl 721049 (Tex.App. - Fort Worth, 6-28-01).

Conflicts

From the Chaplain—Marilyn Featherstone

A man and his wife who were on a long trip stopped at a full-service gas station. After the station attendant had washed their car’s windshield, the man in the car said to the attendant, “It’s still dirty. Wash it again.”

So the station attendant complied. After washing it again, the man in the car said angrily, “It’s still dirty. Don’t you know how to wash a windshield?”

Just then the man’s wife reached over, removed her husband’s glasses from his face, and cleaned them with a tissue. Then he put them back on and behold—the windshield was clean!

Our mental attitude has a great deal to do with how we look at things. The whole world can appear pretty bleak if we have a depressed mental attitude. Yet how bright the world can appear if we have a joyful attitude of hope.

Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do.

Politically Correct

Another urban myth of our times is that the concept of politically correct was invented in the 1990s by conservatives who wished to lambaste liberals. The term and the concept is actually much older.

The original sense was a term used to address mixed bodies of people so as not to offend. In 1798, J. Wilson in U.S. Rep. used the term to distinguish between the phrases "United States" and "people of the United States" (he believed the latter to be politically correct). In 1936, H.V. Morton's In the Steps of Saint Paul referred to the term Galatians as a "politically correct" way to address anyone subject to Roman rule. In 1955, a translator for Czeslaw Milosz, applied the term to orthodox interpretations of the holocaust in the English version of one of Milosz's works.

The second, and current, definition arose in 1970. The Oxford English Dictionary defines as: "a body of liberal or radical opinion, esp. on social matters, characterized by the advocacy of approved causes or views, and often by the rejection of language, behavior, etc. considered discriminatory or offensive."

The first cite of this second sense is in 1970's Black Woman by T.Cade. Other early cites include 1975's P.Gerber's Willa Cather and a Facts on File entry regarding lesbian politics. 1978 saw the National Journal use the term. In 1984 it was the Women's Studies International Forum VII that used the term. 1987 saw the Nation pick it up. 1991 it was the Village Voice and 1993 the Utne Reader. The Oxford English dictionary does not even include a use of the term from a conservative source.

The converse politically incorrect first appeared in 1947, in Nabokov's Bend Sinister . In 1977 the Washington Post used it to paraphrase as statement by the African Liberation Day Coalition.