A California-based privacy activist who has filed hundreds of public records requests to learn about how cell-site simulators are used nationwide had a request denied earlier this week by the Indiana State Police.

However, the reason for the denial is a bit strange—the department seems to claim that releasing the requested information constitutes a possible risk to terrorism or even "agricultural terrorism."

A man was shot by police when they responded to the wrong house in an incident that also saw the homeowner’s pet dog killed.

Police in Dekalb County, Georgia, USA, received a call about a suspicious person and rushed to what they thought was the house in question.

Having gone round to the back of the property, they found an unlocked window and door and believed the intruder to be inside.

However, after making their presence known, there was an exchange of gunfire that resulted in the homeowner being hit and his dog killed.

One of the police officers was also shot in the thigh and is said to be in a critical condition, while the homeowner’s condition is not known.

Director of public safety, Cedric Alexander, admitted that the police went to the wrong house.

9 hrs · Atlanta, GA · Shaking trying to type this right now. I was out walking my dog Diego. I live on a dead end street, walking towards the cul-de-sac. There is a man a ways in front of me (saw him walk into the neighborhood) that walks to the farthest house at the end of the street, knocks on the front door, and then kind of just stands in the front yard for a few mins. Seems a little sketch considering I have seen the house owner before and it was't him and there have been several reported break-ins down that way. I gave him the benefit of the doubt however (maybe he walked to the store, locked out, etc) and turned around and started walking back towards my house. Diego stops to sniff something and I turn around and now the guy is nowhere to be seen. I then hear a loud sound and then dogs barking. I stand around a second and don't see anyone come out.

Kind of concerned at this point I call 911 and describe the house at the end of the cul-de-sac as well as the 50 year old black male and what he was wearing. I also told them that I wasn't sure anything was actually going on, and I wasn't trying to get anyone in trouble, but I felt like something wasn't right.

A few minutes later I am getting back to the house (opposite the cul-de-sac, towards the entrance of our street) in front of my front door, when I heard 5 or 6 gunshots very close by and heard a woman screaming. Turned around and saw blue police lights already flashing and people yelling. I fumbled my keys and went inside, terrified. About a min or two later I peek my head outside and see one of my neighbors about 3 houses down (opposite direction from my walk) holding his leg and yelling something to the effect of "You killed my dog!" and "You shot me in my own house! Meanwhile the wife of the man was clutching their one year old child, hysterically walking down the street to a neighbors house.

More cops come in, shotguns blazing. Cops running everywhere at this point. Meanwhile the wife is crying and telling the neighbors across from me what had happened. The frantic young wife was obviously furious and scared as she described cops coming in their back door and shooting her husband and shooting and killing their dog. An officer stayed with the man (white, young 30s) while he was still up the street in his own driveway, clutching his leg where he had been shot by the officer. According to neighbors during the chaos, an officer accidentally shot another officer.

Both were taken away from the scene in an ambulance. I was later interviewed by a detective and provided them my full testimony since my 911 call was the call that the police were responding to. The Associated Press who requested to talk to me on the phone. (They were able to reach me because Ronnie my girlfriend was not able to get home after work and was talking to me on the phone outside of the neighborhood and the reporter asked to talk to me.) I did this because already on the news they were spinning the story. There was a report of a "manhunt" and a search for a "suspect".

The "suspect" (or at least the suspicious person I called the cops on at the other end of the neighborhood) came walking back up to the crime scene shortly after. After speaking to him I realized that he was the person I had seen and he said he was trying to get someone to pay him for cutting their grass.

I feel awful because I explicitly said on the 911 call that I was unsure if anything was actually going on but I had a bad feeling after hearing the loud noise and dogs barking, especially with all the recent break-ins. The cops actually never interviewed him (which at that point I don't think it mattered because it seemed pretty clear he hadn't stolen something or done anything wrong and walked up the street to a crime scene to talk about it).

I am writing this partly as catharsis because I feel terrible that this all happened as a result. I'm also writing this because the news and media are already spinning this story to say that a police officer was shot in the line of duty while responding to a burglary call. While I give them credit for owning up to the fact that it was the wrong house (albeit presumably after I had given testimony to Associated Press), what they fail to highlight in this clickbait link is that this man who was sitting in his own house watching a movie with his wife was shot in the leg and his dog was murdered in his own house with his new baby in the house. The story is not "Let's all feel sympathetic for the cop that just killed a family's dog and and shot the unarmed homeowner in his own home."

I want to say first off that I know a cops job is very hard and I respect the job and the men and women serving when they do it the right way. This was NOT the right way. I explicitly said a house at the end of the cul-de-sac yet the media said the house "matched the description". I never even gave them an address. If you hear news telling you different they are manipulating the story.

On June 22, 2013, Mr. Mercado was arrested in Brooklyn after allegedly trying to sell a small amount of heroin to an undercover police officer. He was taken to Rikers and, within 15 hours, died of complications of diabetes.

In this jail surveillance video obtained by The New York Times, he is seen walking unsteadily and carrying his vomit in a plastic bag. At one point he collapses on the floor and is left lying there for three minutes while correction officers step over him. Rankin & Taylor, a law firm representing Mr. Mercado’s family, is in settlement negotiations with the city.

On April 29th, 2015 El Paso Police were responding to a burglary on the block that Erik Salas Sanchez lived on. Police encountered Sanchez at a home which was not the one burglarized, but the one where he lived with his mother. She claims that police arrived at their home and asked her to come out. At this point, for reasons unknown, Erik began to yell at the police.

Police claim that during his tirade, Erik threatened them with a ‘metal object’, and they had no choice but to attempt to subdue him with a taser. They said that when the taser failed and Sanchez began charging at them, they had no choice but to fire on him. Their bullets struck him three times and he later died from the injuries.

ABC7 has obtained a copy of the eight page report of Sanchez’s autopsy. The three bullets struck him on both sides of his back and once in the buttocks. All from behind.

A former U.S. Secret Service agent who was part of a team investigating illegal activity on the online drug market Silk Road has pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice, prosecutors announced Monday.

Shaun W. Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Md., pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in San Francisco. He used his position as a special agent with the Secret Service to steal more than $820,000 worth of bitcoin digital currency from Silk Road accounts in 2013, prosecutors said.

The overlooked baggie of cocaine and crack pipe were bad enough.

But when Courtney Pickering found a gun tucked under the front passenger seat of her car, accessible to her three-year-old son, she frankly lost it.

So confesses the 26-year-old single mom, who was already dealing with the headache of a stolen car and a bank account drained by the same thieves, when she discovered evidence of what she claims was poor police work by Calgary’s finest.

“The gun was sticking out, right where my son sits, right in front of him, and he climbs into his car seat on his own — that’s just scary,” said Pickering.

“If he’d found the cocaine, there was enough there to have killed him.”

The allegations are now with the Calgary Police Service Professional Standards section, after Pickering filed an official complaint about the condition of her stolen Dodge car when officers returned it to her.

Not the dashboard smashed by crooks when they stole the car from behind her Mayland Heights home on August 24 — that she expected, after police called to say they’d recovered the vehicle, and it would be released to her following a forensic audit.

It was what was inside that horrified Pickering, after she got the call to collect the vehicle from the impound lot.

As soon as she climbed in, Pickering says she realized no cop had ever bothered to look inside the car for evidence.

Searching around for her own registration, Pickering says she opened the glovebox and found four pieces of ID, none of which belonged to her.

Then, inside the cupholder, Pickering says she found a small bag of what appeared to be cocaine.

Upset, she got out, and with the impound lot attendant watching, she opened the back door — the rear window was half open — and immediately saw a crack pipe, sitting in plain view on a seat.

That wasn’t all, says the angry mom.

Inside the front passenger side door was a knife, and on the floor, a length of heavy pipe.

“It was all blatantly obvious,” said Pickering.

Thinking a mistake must have been made, Pickering says she decided to leave the car in the lot, after taking a video of the contents for reference.

“My honest first thoughts were that the impound staff had accidentally called me too soon and the police hadn’t finished their investigation,” she said.

“Clearly items used for the purpose of a crime and actual hard drugs did not seem like something the police would release back to an unknowing civilian.”

Pickering says what followed is what convinced her to report the investigation to Professional Standards.

First, she says, there was the abrupt officer who grumpily agreed to have someone check the car’s interior for any further hazards, and then the cop who called from the the impound lot to say, “I don’t have much time for this, like, three minutes, so what am I looking for in here?”

In between, there were excuses, with someone from the non-emergency line saying police will never remove things from stolen cars, even as Pickering argued the weapons and drugs were there in plain view.

Still, when the officer with only three minutes to spare told her the car was now “good to be released”, Pickering says she trusted him — which is why the gun made her really furious.

“Having a chance to now inspect the vehicle in daylight for the first time, I looked more thoroughly around and under the drivers and front passenger seat,” she said.

“I pulled out a men’s flipflop and noticed a hammer was also under there. As soon as I touched it, I noticed the butt end of a gun.”

The gun, as it turns out, was a pellet gun — but the fact it was still there, along with all the other evidence, convinced Pickering to file an official complaint.

“Maybe I can stop this happening to someone else,” she said.

“To say I am disgusted with the apparent ‘policies’ that the police abide by is an understatement to say the least.”

Police said they were aware of the allegation, but they have yet to officially respond.

I was ordered to step out of the car for having a flat tire. The conversation escalated and it quickly became an interrogation about my whereabouts and personal business... This is not the Soviet Union...

he Columbia Police Department says they've fired an officer who was involved in a fight and shooting at a Richland County nightclub.

Officer Tracey Hudson, who was off-duty during the incident, has been let go for neglect of duty offenses, willful violation of policies and procedures, improper conduct offenses, use and handling of weapons, and carrying of handguns off-duty.

The incident broke out in a nightclub parking lot in northeast Richland County near Hard Scrabble Road. The club used to be called Serenity, but there was little of that in the parking lot around 11:30 p.m.

Richland County Sheriff Deputies say when they got to the club on a side road called Rice Meadow Way, they found two men with gunshot wounds. The fight starting inside with an argument that turned physical.

Hudson is said to have gone out to the parking lot to get a gun. Investigators say as the argument continued in the parking lot, Hudson retrieved a gun from his vehicle.

Sheriff deputies say Hudson first struck the victim in the face with a closed fist, and the two then got into a physical struggle, where Hudson allegedly struck the victim in the head with the gun.

When the two continued fighting, the Sheriff stated, the gun subsequently went off, striking both the victim in the arm, and Hudson in the leg.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott says Hudson will be placed under arrest, once he is released from an area hospital, on charges of Assault and Battery of A High and Aggravated Nature, and Pointing and Presenting a Firearm.

Hudson had been with the department since 2008.

A dog rescuer was recently harassed by local police for walking his dogs in a public park. When a video of the encounter went viral, agents from the Department of Homeland Security were sent to his home, because of alleged “anti-cop” posts that were seen on his Facebook page.

Independent dog rescuer Damion Trakas has been taking dogs off the streets for years and has had great success training them to be well-mannered and friendly. Many of the dogs that Damion rescues are pit bulls. Unfortunately, although the dogs are well-behaved, there is still a social stigma against the breed, and he has faced regular persecution for taking his dogs to the Cione Park near his house.
image: http://tftppull.freethoughtllc.netdn...amiondogs2.jpg

damiondogs2

On one recent occasion while walking his dogs in the park, Trakas says he was approached by a threatening man who was attending a nearby children’s soccer game. The man made comments about pit bulls and made threats to both Trakas and his dogs. Damion responded by telling the man to mind his own business and said that he had just as much of a right to be in the park than anyone else. He also told the man that it would be a very bad idea to follow through on those threats and attack one of his dogs. He then walked off, but moments later decided to walk back and make peace because they all have to share the park. He was brushed off by the man, who told him that he had no desire to hear anything that Trakas had to say.

As this conversation was happening, police began arriving on the scene because they were called at some point earlier. Damion talked with the police and displayed how well-behaved his dogs were. Surprisingly the police sided with him and told everyone that he had just as much of a right to be in the park as anyone else does. The next time he went to the park, Damion spoke with other regulars there and learned that the people who threatened him and called the cops on him were actually off-duty police officers themselves.

The soccer team in which these alleged off-duty officers are involved with their children meets every Sunday, and Damion continued to take his dogs to the park throughout the week without any troubles. However, when the next Sunday rolled around, the police were called on him again. This time they were obviously there on a personal vendetta, and they were not nearly as understanding about the situation. When the police became aggressive with Damion he took out his cellphone and began to record the encounter.