Boots & Sabers

The blogging will continue until morale improves...

Category: Crime

Good Samaritan Accidentally Hid Mass Murderer

Wow. Credit to this guy for his kind heart, but he’s lucky he got out alive.

Wisconsin resident who unwittingly let the Christmas Parade ‘killer’ into his home minutes after the massacre has revealed how the ‘nervous’ stranger sat on the sofa, called his mom and ‘lied about everything.’

 

[…]

 

Now local resident Daniel Rider, 24, has told how he was sitting in his living room watching the Cowboys against the Chiefs when Brooks started banging on his door on Sunday night.

 

Doorbell footage showed a frantic Brooks at the door pleading for help, claiming he was waiting for an Uber – just 20 minutes after he smashed his SUV into crowds downtown.

 

Rider had no idea of the carnage that had just unfolded and decided he should let the shivering man into his home, remembering a recent sermon his mother had told him about helping the homeless.

 

‘So I was like, ‘Oh! This was my chance to help somebody. I’m going to warm him up and give him some food,” Rider told CBS.

 

‘I gave him a jacket, made him a sandwich and just watched over to make sure everything was okay,’ he told CNN. He also gave the stranger his phone so he could call his mom.

What the Rittenhouse verdict reminds us about government power

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

The greatest crime perpetrated was that Rittenhouse was ever tried at all. Given the overwhelming evidence from multiple videos and witness testimonies, there was never any doubt that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. Yet, despite that overwhelming evidence, the district attorney and his deputies decided to prosecute Rittenhouse anyway for reasons that can only be explained by their political and personal biases.

 

[…]

 

If you have a healthy distrust, with respect, for our government law enforcement agencies, that is good. You are in the right frame of mind to be an engaged citizen of a self-governing society. Now you must extend that distrust to all of the other government agencies. While a corrupt or abusive police officer or prosecutor can negatively impact your life, so, too, can a corrupt or abusive Department of Revenue agent, game warden, school superintendent, or mayor. We give these people extraordinary power over our lives as the price paid for a civil society, but we must do so grudgingly and with extraordinary oversight. We have been blessed with more than our fair share of superb elected and unelected government officials, but we have also had our fair share of the corrupt and the stupid.

Milwaukee’s Deadly Pro-Criminal Policies Led to Carnage

53 people in Waukesha and their families are paying the price for Milwaukee’s intentionally pro-criminal policies. But even before that, many people suffered at the hands of this monster.

The shamefaced Milwaukee District Attorney’s Office admitted on Monday it was ‘inappropriate’ for convicted felon Darrell Brooks to be allowed out of jail on a $1,000 bond three weeks ago after trying to run over his ex-girlfriend, as he was charged with five counts of murder for the lives he took at the Waukesha Christmas Parade on Sunday night.

 

Brooks, 39, was taken into custody in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Sunday night after police found his red Ford SUV parked neatly in a driveway five blocks from where he drove through crowds of kids and elderly dancing groups.

 

The amateur rapper has a long criminal history dating back to 1999 with more than 15 arrests in the state of Wisconsin alone for charges including possession of drugs, strangulation and suffocation, battery, illegally possessing firearms as a convicted felon and resisting arrest.

Prayers for Waukesha

The unimaginable. Like many, I’ve been in and watched hundreds of parades – including many, many with my children and friends. I can’t imagine the evil that makes someone do this.

Police have said there were “some fatalities” after a car ploughed into a parade in Wisconsin.

Footage posted online shows a red sports utility vehicle (SUV) driving through a Christmas parade in the city of Waukesha, west of Milwaukee, at around 16:40 local time (22:40 GMT).

 

Police chief Dan Thompson said it hit more than 20 people including children.

 

He confirmed people had died but said they would not give details until family members had been told.

 

Mr Thompson said officers had recovered a suspect vehicle and a person of interest was in custody, but gave no further details. He added the investigation was “very fluid” and the injured has been taken to hospital by ambulance, police and family members.

Police fired at the car to try to stop it, he said. The FBI is assisting with the investigation.

Prisons To Stop Delivering Drug-Laced Mail

I’m a little surprised that this is a new thing. I would have thought that prisons would have done this long ago. Using paper as a medium for drug use is not new.

Starting Dec. 6, all Wisconsin prisoners will only receive photocopies of their personal mail — not the originals — because of a new policy aimed at curbing the infiltration of paper laced with a dangerous drug.

The policy was implemented as a pilot at Fox Lake Correctional Institution in April, but is now being expanded to the entire state prison system because of its success in reducing overdoses and violent behavior associated with K2, or “spice,” a mind-altering synthetic cannabinoid. Paper can be laced with K2 and then smoked, which is how the drug was getting through the mail.

And this is a bit too typical.

During the pilot, Fox Lake prisoners said they saw months-long delays in receiving mail, educational materials denied, missing pages and the margins of letters cut off with no way to get the missing material back, the Wisconsin State Journal reported in September. But the Department of Corrections said it has hired an outside company to process the photocopying, which should fix the problems inmates saw with the pilot.

“Hiring a group that specializes in this type of work should minimize any issues with the photocopies,” DOC Division of Adult Institutions Administrator Sarah Cooper said.

Lawless Portland

And some people were saying that passing concealed carry legislation would bring on the days of the Wild West. As it turns out, following leftist policies does that.

At least 100 self-proclaimed anarchists tore through Portland, setting dumpsters aflame, smashing windows and causing $500,000 in damage, but police stood idle because of a new state law that restricts how law enforcement can respond to riots.

 

The city just reached the ‘grim’ milestone of 1,000 shootings through 2021 in what has been a year of destructive protests, violent street clashes and a police staffing crisis.

 

Now police say a recently passed law ties their hands even further as it prohibits police from using crowd control techniques like pepper spray or tear gas. Instead, law enforcement agencies are told to rely on follow-up investigations to hold rioters accountable.

 

[…]

 

Residents frustrated by the violence last Tuesday questioned whether that meant anything goes now in Portland.

 

‘Does that mean we are now like a lawless city? Anybody could come in and just bash around and do all the damage that they want without any repercussions whatsoever?’ Linda Witt asked during the meeting with police.

Yes. Yes it does. And a majority of the folks in Portland voted for it.

Spy Caught

They are caught dead to rights. Firing squad for traitors.

The FBI says the scheme began in April 2020 when Jonathan Toebbe sent a package of Navy documents to a foreign government and wrote that he was interested in selling to that country operations manuals, performance reports and other sensitive information.

 

Authorities say he also provided instructions for how to conduct the furtive relationship, with a letter that said: ‘I apologize for this poor translation into your language. Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. This is not a hoax.’

 

That package, which had a return address in Pittsburgh, was obtained by the FBI last December through its legal attache office in the unspecified foreign country.

 

That led to a monthslong undercover operation in which an agent posing as a representative of the foreign government made contact with Toebbe and agreed to pay thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency for the information he was offering.

 

In June, the FBI says, the undercover agent sent $10,000 in cryptocurrency to Toebbe, describing it as a sign of good faith and trust.

 

Weeks later, federal agents watched as the Toebbes arrived at an agreed-upon location in West Virginia for the exchange, with Diana Toebbe appearing to serve as a lookout for her husband during a dead-drop operation for which the FBI paid $20,000, according to the complaint.

 

The FBI recovered a blue memory card wrapped in plastic and placed between two slices of bread on a peanut butter sandwich, court documents said.

 

The FBI provided the contents of the memory card to a Navy subject matter expert who determined that the records included design elements and performance characteristics of Virginia-class submarine reactors, the Justice Department said.

Classic Straw Man

I was amused by this letter to the editor about my column this week:

Being in my late 70s, I thought I had heard just about everything. Then I read Owen Robinson’s column on Tuesday where he blames President Biden for the 2020 murder rate. “Unbelievable.” If you follow that kind of logic then Biden was also responsible for the insurrection at our Capitol. No need for a second impeachment, and President Obama must have been responsible for the “Great Recession” instead of actually ending it. That takes Bush off the hook and now he wants to take Trump off the hook.

 

Readers of the Daily News needn’t worry about reading revisionist history. Robinson has that covered.

Ummm… OK, but here’s my column. I don’t even mention Biden. I wrote about Democrats, but there are Democrats who aren’t a member of the Biden family. It’s a good example of someone who read what he wanted to read instead of what was actually written.

America’s murder rate soars

Yes, I’m using the word “soars” a lot when it comes to bad things happening under our Democratic regime. It is accurate. Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week

According to FBI statistics, America experienced the highest annual increase in the murder rate last year since the FBI began tracking national crime statistics. In 2020, America’s murder rate increased by about 29% over 2019. That is over twice the increase of the previous record-setting year, 1968. The increase in murders is not accidental. It is the direct result of bad policies being implemented across America as the bloody tip of the Democratic Party’s agenda.

 

Statistics are always dry and do not convey the true horror that they tabulate. For every “1” entered into a database, there is a life brutally ended, a family in mourning, and a community in anguish. But statistics do help us understand the scale of the problem.

 

In 2020, there were about 21,500 murders across the nation. That is the equivalent of the entire population of Germantown being slaughtered in a single year. There were about 5,000 more people murdered in 2020 than were murdered in 2019.

 

Milwaukee was even worse. While the nation experienced an average murder rate increase of about 29%, Milwaukee’s murder rate increased by 93%. More people were murdered in Milwaukee in 2020 than in any other year on record.

 

The reasons are plain to see. There has been an organized effort to demonize and demoralize the police for several years. In reaction to the sometimes real, often contrived, abusive behavior of some police officers, anarchist and Marxist organizations have seized the opportunity to demand collective punishment for individual transgressions. Not content with America’s judicial system that protects individual rights and liberties, these groups have waged war rhetorically and violently in the streets of our communities.

 

With the police’s traditional defenders cowed into silence, many police took a noticeable step back from aggressively enforcing the law. As the blue line faltered, empowered criminals pushed the boundary.

 

The real changes started to happen when Democrats — particularly those who run America’s largest cities — converted anti-police rhetoric into pro-criminal policies. They took the “defund the police” slogan to heart and cut police budgets. They changed policies to make it more difficult for officers on the streets to do their jobs. They gave criminal advocates a seat at the table to oversee police actions. They replaced the bars in the jails with turnstiles with destructive ideas like no-bail policies.

 

We are now all suffering the results of those policies. Democrats will try to claim that overall crime is down even though the murder rate is up. That is a lie. Just because they are intentionally arresting and prosecuting fewer crimes does not mean that they did not happen. If an antifa rioter punches you in the throat and the police do not arrest her, does that mean that the assault did not happen? Of course, it did, even though the assault will not show up in any crime statistics. When the police are prevented from enforcing the laws by policy and lack of resources, that does not mean that crimes are not occurring. In fact, more crime is happening.

 

That is why the murder rate is a key indicator. There is no way to sugar-coat or hide a murder. There is a corpse and someone has to explain why it is there. It is one of the few crimes that is recorded that does not require any action on the part of the police or prosecutors.

 

What can we do about the exploding crime rate? First, we have to collectively decide that we want to do something about it. Politics trail culture and there is a significant cultural movement that not only accepts more crime, but views its destabilizing effect as necessary to drive social change. Until our culture rejects that movement for the cancer it is, there will always be political support for the policies that empower criminals.

 

Second, assuming we actually want to change it, we must drive change in local elections. Most of the decisions about funding law enforcement, use of force policies, prosecutions, etc. are made by local governments, elected district attorneys, elected sheriffs, and elected judges. People make policy and we must elect people who will make policies that protect our communities.

 

Most things that happen are not the result of some mysterious force. They are the result of decisions that we make. Until we decide that we want to have less crime, it will not happen.

America’s murder rate soars

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a slice:

What can we do about the exploding crime rate? First, we have to collectively decide that we want to do something about it. Politics trail culture and there is a significant cultural movement that not only accepts more crime, but views its destabilizing effect as necessary to drive social change. Until our culture rejects that movement for the cancer it is, there will always be political support for the policies that empower criminals.

 

Second, assuming we actually want to change it, we must drive change in local elections. Most of the decisions about funding law enforcement, use of force policies, prosecutions, etc. are made by local governments, elected district attorneys, elected sheriffs, and elected judges. People make policy and we must elect people who will make policies that protect our communities.

 

Most things that happen are not the result of some mysterious force. They are the result of decisions that we make. Until we decide that we want to have less crime, it will not happen.

 

Wisconsin Government Schools Called Police About Students at Above Average Rate

I honestly don’t know if this is a problem or not. We don’t want teachers and administrators enforcing discipline if a student is truly committing a crime like assault or theft. It would be appropriate to call the police. So are Wisconsin’s school employees quicker on that trigger? Is there a higher degree of criminal behavior in Wisconsin’s schools? Is anyone actually doing anything wrong or is this just reflecting the reality?

Public schools in Wisconsin referred students to police twice as often as schools nationwide in 2017-18 — nine students were referred to police for every 1,000 students enrolled compared to the national rate of 4.5, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found.

 

Just three states — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia — reported higher rates of referral than Wisconsin.

 

The analysis of data from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico found that school policing disproportionately affects students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children. Nationwide, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at nearly twice their share of the overall student population.

 

In Wisconsin, students with disabilities and students of color also bore the brunt of school policing. In 2017-18, Wisconsin was more likely than any other state to refer Native students to law enforcement, reporting a rate over three times higher than the rate of referral for their white peers.

Violent Milwaukee

Frankly, until the people in Milwaukee start caring, it’s hard for me to get up the energy. I’ll just avoid going there.

Milwaukee is in the grip of the worst violence in its modern history. There were 189 killings here last year, a 93% increase from 2019 and the most ever recorded.

 

The jump reflects a nationwide trend. In one study, researchers from the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice looked at 34 cities and found that 29 had more homicides last year than in 2019. The overall rise was 30%, though in most places killings remained below their peaks in the 1990s.

 

Among the 19 cities with more than half a million people — including Los Angeles, New York and Chicago — none saw a bigger surge than Milwaukee. With 127 killings through the first half of September, the city is nearly on pace to match last year’s record. Hughes was the 78th person killed this year.

 

[…]

 

Black officers now make up 18% of the force, which has downsized considerably over the last two decades and become much less diverse. The homicide unit has shrunk to two dozen detectives.

 

[…]

 

Milwaukee police have solved 58% of the homicides committed last year, down from 68% in 2019. The rate so far this year is 34%.

Lawmakers Introduce Anti-Riot Bill

Meh. The problem with preventing/punishing riots doesn’t have anything to do with the laws. There are plenty of laws against destroying property, assaulting people, disrupting traffic, etc. The problem is that they happen in liberal cities where the politicians and local police lack the will to aggressively enforce those laws.

Remaining at a protest that turns violent or destructive could result in felony charges in Wisconsin under a proposal from Republican state lawmakers.

 

Sponsors say the plan is partly in response to last summer’s violence and destruction in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. It would create a definition of “riot” in state law and impose new penalties.

 

Under the bill, a riot would be defined as an unlawful assembly of three or more people that includes an act or threat of violence by at least one person that poses a risk or would result in personal injury or property damage, or an act that “substantially obstructs law enforcement or another governmental function.”

 

The proposal would make it a felony to participate in a riot that results in “substantial damage to property or personal injury,” with a minimum penalty of 45 days in jail and a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and up to three and a half years in prison. It would also make it a misdemeanor crime to attend or incite a riot or to block a thoroughfare while participating in a riot, with a minimum penalty of at least 30 days incarceration and a maximum penalty of up to a $10,000 fine and 9 months in jail.

Evers Accelerates Pardon Pipeline

Lovely set of priorities.

Evers announced 71 additional pardons Tuesday, bringing his total since taking office less than three years ago to 263. He’s on pace to issue more pardons in three years than the nearly 300 that former Gov. Jim Doyle did over eight years. Evers has already surpassed the 262 pardons issued by Govs. Tommy Thompson and Scott McCallum over the 16 years before Doyle took office.

Evers, a Democrat, revived the dormant pardons board and made issuing pardons a priority after former Republican Gov. Scott Walker didn’t issue a single one during his eight years in office before Evers defeated him in 2018.

 

[…]

 

Evers signed an executive order on Monday creating an expedited process for pardon applicants. Under the process, the pardon board chair may send an application directly to the governor without a hearing if the person committed a non-violent crime and sufficient time has passed since the conviction.

Also, application pardons can now be sought for multiple felony convictions. Previously, pardons would only be considered for the most recent felony and earlier ones would not be considered.

Schumer Calls for Crackdown on Fake Vaccine Cards

So the same people who want to empty prisons, defund the police, and are cool with fake papers for illegal aliens want to throw you in federal prison if you get a fake vaccine card. I guess that says where we are

NEW YORK — The Senate’s top Democrat says federal law enforcement officials need to crack down on fake COVID-19 vaccination cards being sold online.

 

Sen. Chuck Schumer’s announcement Sunday comes after The Associated Press reported how people are cheating the system and buying counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards online, worrying officials at colleges and universities across the country that are requiring proof students received the vaccine to attend in-person classes.

Victims ignored in defund the police movement

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

Bob’s story is the kind of story happening all over America and in Wisconsin in cities where politicians and activists are tearing down civil order. Under the destructive belief that crime is a symptom of social ills in which the criminals are the greatest victims, the leftist push for deincarceration, no bail release, decriminalization, record expungement, and, most recently, defunding the police is rotting the core out of America’s cities.

 

The crime issue is not about the criminals. It is about the victims. It is about the vast majority of good people who get up every day, follow the rules, go to work, raise their children, volunteer in their neighborhoods, and write out their story in the history of their community. These are the people who suffer when criminals are loosed to savage cities. These are the Bobs who are the heart and soul of their cities and are being forced to consider leaving their beloved cities to the free-range criminal horde.

 

These are the people who Governor Tony Evers forsook when he vetoed the “Fund the Police” bill passed by the Legislature. In a move to push back against the “defund the police” movement, the bill would have simply reduced state aid to local governments that choose to defund their police by the same amount and redistributing the money to other local governments. While it would not have prevented local governments from defunding their police, it would have discouraged it and prevented state taxpayers from subsidizing local government leaders who are actively turning their communities over to criminals.

 

Wisconsin needs strong cities, but no amount of money or public policy can fix a city that has been eviscerated by crime. When the social fabric is rended and civil order collapses, the good people that Wisconsin’s cities need to thrive will simply leave. All that will remain is a wasteland of missed opportunity.

Media Begins Push to Normalize Higher Crime Level

Here we go. This is a good example of how the media works to shape the narrative for the express purpose of swaying elections to Democrats.

A clear majority of Americans believe there is more violent crime in the U.S. today than in the 1990s, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — even though today’s violent crime rate is much lower than it was 30 years ago.

 

This common misperception doesn’t come out of nowhere: U.S. homicides rose by about 25 percent between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase since reliable tracking began in 1960 — and 2021 has seen a similar year-over-year jump, due in large part to gun violence.

 

Yet as disturbing as it is, America’s pandemic-era murder spike has not yet lifted the overall violent crime rate to anything approaching its early-1990s peak, or even the level to which it fell by the end of that decade. The fact that 56 percent of Americans now believe otherwise, according to the poll, underscores how challenging it has become to keep crime rates in perspective at a time when viral media and political polarization are making valid concerns feel like unprecedented emergencies — and how quickly and easily the politics of crime could become untethered from reality in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections.

 

[…]

 

The question now is whether such misperceptions are getting worse — and how that widening gap might distort the politics and policy of crime going forward.

 

[…]

 

The Yahoo News/YouGov poll supports the notion that concerns about violent crime are outpacing its actual prevalence. A majority of Americans (52 percent) now describe “violent crime” as a “very big problem” in the United States — far more than the share who said the same last month about the coronavirus pandemic (36 percent), race relations (39 percent) or the economy (41 percent).

 

Make no mistake: After decreasing for decades, violent crime is up substantially and has become a major issue in a number of places in the U.S., particularly in communities of color. But we’re still far off from the level of violence seen 30 years ago.

There is nothing factually incorrect in the information presented. But ask yourself, “why is this in the news?”

Crime – particularly violent crime – has risen dramatically in the last year or so. This is a problem for Democrats who are up for election this year and next. Not only are they on record supporting idiotic mantras like “defund the police,” they have a decades-long history of supporting soft-on-crime policies, open borders, and the decriminalization of various things. The polls are showing that crime is becoming a serious issue for voters and they largely see Republicans as better on crime issues than Democrats.

In jumps the media to the rescue… the entire point of this poll and the story is to try to tell us that crime isn’t really that bad. After all, it was much worse 30 years ago. We just don’t remember it right and are blowing the issue all our of proportion. Right? You are overreacting if you think crime is a real problem. You should really be more worried about things like global warming, race issues, or any other issue that Democrats like.

No, you are not nuts if you are worried about crime. Yes, crime has risen dramatically. Yes, it was worse 30 years ago, but that doesn’t make it OK. The fact that crime is so much worse than it was 3 years ago is a huge problem. We are going in the wrong direction and we do not need to wait for it to reach the proportions of 1990 before being concerned about it.

Detroit Woman Takes Action Against Crime

This lady is my new hero.

Detroit boutique owner Bianca Chambers took action herself this week after her Mercedes-Benz vehicle was allegedly stolen.

 

Two days after the car went missing, Chambers spotted the suspect inside a local barbershop – so she went in and dragged the man along the shop’s floor by his dreadlocks, FOX 2 of Detroit reported.

 

“At that point, I was like, ‘I’m not letting this man walk again,’” Chambers told the station.

Customers at the barbershop helped Chambers make a citizens’ arrest until authorities could take over, the station reported.

 

Prior to confronting the suspect, Chambers slashed the tires on her own vehicle, parked outside the barbershop, to prevent the suspect from driving away, FOX 2 reported.

 

Before tracking down the suspect, she had called police several times about the allegedly stolen vehicle’s whereabouts – only for it to be gone by the time police arrived, the station reported.

Who Shot Ashli Babbitt?

The veil of secrecy is thick for reasons that nobody is willing to explain.

Bartiromo asked Trump who he thought shot her.

 

“I will tell you they know who shot Ashli Babbitt. They’re protecting that person,” he replied. “I’ve heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official — a Democrat — and we’ll see, because it’s going to come out. It’s going to come out.”

 

[…]

 

That is false, according to a senior law enforcement official briefed on the matter.

 

The official said the officer who shot Babbitt, 35, was not a member of a security detail provided to a specific member of Congress, adding that the officer has not yet returned to duty.

I reordered the linked story to make it make more sense. Here’s what happened… Trump, when asked about Babbitt, made the allegedly false claim about who did it (without naming a name). An anonymous law enforcement officer (again no name) claims that Trump is wrong, but still does not say who did it (still no name).

How insane is it that we are five months removed from the killing and we still do not know who did it? In what other circumstance would we allow this to be concealed? When an officer shoots anyone in the country – justified or not – we know the officer’s name within hours. Why are we allowing them to keep the name secret in this case? Why are we allowing them to cover up this killing? Why isn’t there an inquiry or a trial to get to the bottom of whether or not the killing was justified?

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