Marijuana Smell Not Reason Enough To Search Car, Votes IL Senate
Good!
Traffic stops in the United States are, well, a pretty bad time, especially if you are a Black person who would prefer not to die or lose custody of their kids over nothing, or a woman of any color who does not wish to be sexually assaulted. There are far less dangerous ways to accomplish the goal of traffic safety — for instance, not arming traffic cops, better road design, speed limits more in line with how fast people are going to actually drive, and limiting stops to actual emergencies, while just mailing people the ticket for things like an out-of-date inspection sticker. It's clear that it's a serious problem and that someone needs to do something about it.
Luckily, legislators in Illinois are gonna try a thing. Last week, the state Senate passed Senate Bill 125, introduced by Democratic state Sen. Rachel Ventura, which would would remove pot smell odor as probable cause to search a car, its driver or any passengers therein. This would apply both to raw and burnt marijuana odor.
“People – especially people of color – are unnecessarily pulled over far too often,” Ventura said. “The odor of cannabis alone shouldn’t be one of those reasons. Cannabis is legal in Illinois and it’s a pungent scent that can stick to clothes for extended periods of time.” Yes, it certainly can. It can also stick to your clothes whether you personally have been smoking it or not.
The legislation would also get rid of the requirement that passengers keep their weed in an odorless container.
The bill was modeled on a 2020 court case, in which a judge in Whiteside County, Illinois, determined that the smell of raw cannabis was not a reason enough to search someone's vehicle or arrest them, as there were many legal reasons that smell might be there — including the defendant's situation, in which he had been prescribed medical marijuana. The passenger — not even the driver — was arrested even after showing a state trooper his medical marijuana card.
Two other states, Colorado and Vermont, have had similar court decisions, but Illinois could be the first to put it into actual law. It will now be sent to the House for consideration where it will hopefully pass and then be signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker.
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Chicago Police Union President: Vote For Cop-Endorsed Paul Vallas OR DIE!!!
Ah, Chicago!
Next Tuesday is Chicago's run-off election for mayor. Current, soon-to-be-former Mayor Lori Lightfoot came in third during February's first round of voting, and the two remaining candidates are Paul Vallas, a former public schools executive, and Brandon Johnson, a county board commissioner.
A recent poll shows Vallas leading Johnson 46 to 41 percent with 13 percent of voters undecided. Vallas is the "tough on crime" pro-cop Democrat with an endorsement from Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police. He actually has a little more than a mere endorsement, though.
PREVIOUSLY:
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Loses Re-Election Bid, So Which Sucker Will Replace Her?
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Will Never Kiss Enough Cop Ass To Satisfy Them
John Catanzara, who retired from the police force in 2021 to avoid disciplinary action, is the powerful police union's president because that sentence somehow reflects reality. He told the New York Times — a major newspaper most of the time — that he "predicts" 800 to 1,000 Chicago police officers would leave the force if Johnson wins. This kinda sounds like gangster talk: "Nice city you have here, shame if the police self-defunded."
“If this guy gets in we’re going to see an exodus like we’ve never seen before,” he said, predicting “blood in the streets.”
At least Catanzara had the self-restraint to call Johnson, who's Black, "this guy" and not, you know, something else. So, if I'm understanding Catanzara, and I wish I weren't, Chicagoans must vote the way he wants or cops will walk off the job in sufficient numbers to willingly endanger the public. I'm pretty sure that's a reign of terror.
Nonetheless, the Times describes Catanzara like the lovable goof on a 1980s sitcom. He's Sheriff Lobo but with more racism and fascist sympathies.
Still, there is nothing quite like Chicago’s relationship with the Fraternal Order of Police, especially with its president, John Catanzara, who expressed sympathies for the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, called Muslims “savages” who “all deserve a bullet” and retired from the police force in 2021 rather than face potential disciplinary actions. He punctuated his retirement papers with a handwritten note, “Finally!!! Let’s go Brandon,” a stand-in phrase for a more vulgar insult against President Biden.
Regarding January 6, Catanzara insists, “There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property. It was a bunch of pissed-off people that feel an election was stolen, somehow, some way.”
It's a shame there's no live footage of the January 6 insurrection ... oh wait, there is:
White-washing the January 6 doesn't seem very "tough on crime," but as Chris Rock said, it's all right, if it's all white.
Catanzara loathes Chicago's teachers union, which supports Johnson, who he considers its “Manchurian candidate.” Johnson has endorsements from other non-thuggish unions, including service workers, nurses and government employees.
Vallas has been careful to avoid direct association with Catanzara and he's said he's "not beholden to anybody." However, he openly enjoys support from former Black Panther Bobby L. Rush, who recently completed a 30-year tenure in the House of Representatives. During the summer of 2020, Rush called Chicago's police union “the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness by police in the land” and suggested the police union and the KKK are "like kissing, hugging and law-breaking cousins." (He's not exaggerating. The police union has an extensive racist history.)
Rush still has no patience for union leadership, which he "detests," so why is he backing Vallas?
“I had my son killed by street violence," he said, referring to his 29-year-old son's fatal shooting in1999. "I cannot be anti-police.”
Surely, the police can do better than John Catanzara ... in theory, at least.
Not securing Rush's endorsement is objectively bad news for Johnson, and it gets worse: Former mayoral candidate and City Council Member Sophia King, who serves as alderman from the fourth ward, is also expected to endorse Vallas. On the upside, Martin Luther King III, son of the late civil rights leader, endorsed Johnson this week.
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Kansas City Cop Blows Whistle On Department's Jim Crow Policing
Shocked! We are shocked!
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once said a world without police would look like white suburbs. She was roundly criticized for this, because we all know a world without police is like Mad Max where everyone drives large vehicles with heads on pikes.
It's also been argued that people in minority neighborhoods desperately want cops, but what they actually want are cops who will protect them from criminals, not just beat the crap out of them and otherwise treat their communities like open-air prisons.
Edward Williams, a 44-year-old white Kansas City, Missouri, Police officer with 21 years experience on the force, blew the whistle recently on a systemic and deliberate pattern of racist policing. William alleges in a discrimination lawsuit filed against the department that then-Chief of Police Richard Smith held a mandatory meeting in 2018 where he complained about a drop in traffic tickets. The command staff acknowledged that ticket quotas are illegal, but they still set a requirement of 1,820 tickets annually for each officer.
The suit alleges “…all KCPD cared about was the money generated by the tickets issued,” and claims the practice continues today.
Williams's suit further claims that officers were told to meet their ticket quotas in minority neighborhoods because it would be “easier to write multiple citations on every stop." Noting that minority residents might feel cranky about all the over-policing, the command staff allegedly advised to “approach every car with the mindset to be ready to kill everybody in the car."
This is repulsive but not surprising, especially if you're Black or meaningfully engage with Black people, and it gets worse: Officers were further instructed to only respond to calls in north and south Kansas City's white neighborhoods. Command staff claimed the white residents there "are actually paying for the police," and cops shouldn't bother even constructively policing in minority areas north of Bannister Road, west of Interstate 435, and south of the Missouri River. The Black residents who live there apparently "do not vote the same way as the people out south, east, and north," the suit alleges. Yes, voting "wrong" is a crime and Black folks are repeat offenders.
You know, if cops are shaking down minorities exclusively to meet their ticket quotas, it's probably only fair to solve at least a couple burglaries for them.
Current KCPD Chief Stacey Graves, responding to Williams's claims, insisted, “We do not direct enforcement activities based on demographics. We do direct traffic enforcement in high crash locations as well as citizen traffic complaint locations.” She pinky-sweared that her department is totally devoted to fair policing and that she would remind the traffic division to “operate and enforce laws appropriately.”
Former Chief Smith was forced into retirement in 2022 after he was accused of soft pedaling excessive force cases involving minorities and unleashing a militarized police response to Black Lives Matter protesters. He was later — no joke — hired as a consultant at another Missouri police department.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker wrote a public letter in 2021 stating that the Kansas City Police Department had lost the community's trust and probably should stop already with all the excessive force.
Last December, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the KCPD's alleged racist hiring practices. This occurred not long after The Kansas City Star published a series of stories revealing that there was "no thin line for Black officers." According to the Star, "the number of Black officers was lower than it had been decades ago, that Black officers were disproportionately disciplined by KCPD, and at least 18 officers had left because of racist treatment over a 15-year period."
Williams accuses the command staff of making racist statements in his presence, assuming he'd be OK with it because he was white. Man, it looks like we've found ourselves yet another racist police force that's obviously an "outlier."
It seems like the Kansas City cops could tell the difference between pleasant suburban peacekeeping and the brutal occupation of minority communities. Meanwhile, Black people are still waiting for our Andy Taylor-style policing. We certainly pay enough in traffic tickets for it.
[KCUR]
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Should A Blunt And A Minor Traffic Violation Cost You Your Kids?
Everybody you've ever seen driving in the left lane without passing? Yeah. That.
Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee are demanding that the Department of Child Services return the five children they took from a Black Georgia family traveling through the state back in February after the parents were told in a juvenile court hearing on Monday that the state would not be returning them for the time being. The children — a breast-feeding infant and 2-, 3-, 5- and 7-year-old kids — have been in state custody for over a month ever since their parents were charged with misdemeanor possession of five grams of marijuana and a blunt.
On February 17, Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams were traveling with their five children from Georgia to Chicago for a funeral when they were pulled over in Tennessee by a police officer for “dark tint and traveling in the left lane while not actively passing."
Wanting to be safe, in light of the way traffic stops often go for Black people, they pulled into a gas station parking lot rather than on the side of the road. Immediately, the cops demanded Williams get out of the car and go sit in the back of the police cruiser, while Claybourne and their children were escorted into the gas station while the cops tore through their vehicle, even bringing around "drug sniffing dogs" to smell all of their bags and possessions the cops had taken out of the car ... which cannot possibly be the usual protocol for pulling people over for "traveling in the left lane while not actively passing." Okay, clearly we mean cannot as in must not, because unfortunately it very much is.
Drug sniffing dogs, by the way, are not a real thing. Like, yes, they can "smell drugs" but there's no way to tell what a dog is reacting to or why it is doing whatever it's doing, because it's a dog and it can't talk. It's all up to the interpretation of the handler, which tends to be pretty unreliable.
The cops, however, did find a blunt and about five grams of weed, which seems like a medium amount of weed to have on one's person.
So the cops drove off to the police station with Williams and Clayborne and her children followed after, assuming they would get things taken care of and be on their way to Chicago. They got to the station's parking lot and were immediately approached by two Department of Child Services (DCS) workers and a trainee, one of whom asked Clayborne if she has family in Tennessee.
“I asked why and she said it was because I’m taking your kids,” Clayborne told the Tennessee Lookout. “I was like, what for? Because I’m not understanding this. I said I haven’t been smoking. I said I breastfeed my kid.”
Cut to: Six hours later.
“The mother became very defiant and locked herself and the children in the vehicle,” court records said. “Officer Crabtree then placed spike strips around the vehicle so the mother would not leave the premises.”
Eventually a bunch of cops came out and circled around the family, clearly scaring the crap out of the children.
“Then my baby started crying so I reached for my son, and as I’m reaching, a man held me and told me, ‘don’t touch him. He’s getting taken away from you,’” Clayborne said.
The other cops grabbed the other children and brought them inside and refused to give Clayborne or Williams any information about what was going to be done with them. While she had been waiting, DCS had placed an "emergency order" to put the children in state custody, claiming that they were being neglected.
Six days later, Williams and Clayborne came back to the station to take urine tests, with Williams testing positive for marijuana and Clayborne testing negative. Clearly these were not the results the cops wanted, so they did a rapid hair follicle test which magically produced positive results for "methamphetamines, fentanyl and oxycodone in both parents."
Hair follicle tests are notoriously inaccurate — and the darker your hair is, the more inaccurate they are likely to be. The particular test used in this case is not even admissible in court because it produces too many false positives and is not administered by actual lab technicians, but by random people who work in the court building.
Still, the test results made the DCS workers decide to deem the children not only "neglected" but "severely abused." Of course, no one else can examine the drug tests, because they threw them out immediately afterwards.
Both parents are, understandably, traumatized and furious — and we don't even know how traumatized their tiny children are. Again: It has been over a month since they were seized. Clayborne says she's not even producing milk, which is not a good sign. Williams is on the verge of bankruptcy due to the legal proceedings and travel costs.
He said he was furious the state had “kidnapped” his children — an attitude that DCS has since cited in limiting his access to his children because supervisors of the visits felt threatened, DCS emails reviewed by the Lookout said.
In addition to claims of severe abuse, DCS’ petition — filed a week after the children were taken — also say “the children made disclosures about the father being the ‘Weed Man.’”
The Feb. 23 DCS petition says that “they then showed (a caseworker) how to roll a joint and stated that the parents take them with them to ‘sell the weed.’”
“It’s absolute lunacy,” Williams said in an interview this week. “There’s nothing like that. We never put things like that around the kids; we love them.”
Well that all sounds very believable. What's next? Will the children reveal that they conducted child sacrifices in tunnels underneath their home? This is an odd thing to say, but after years of researching the Satanic Panic, I have a really strong ear for what it sounds like when kids make things up to appease CPS workers, police or psychologists, and this fits the bill. No one is calling anyone "the Weed Man," least of all to their children. No one says "C'mon kids, let's go sell the weed!" That's ridiculous.
Let's just break down what the cops actually have on these people, shall we?
- Tinted windows
- Driving in the left lane without passing
- A blunt
- 5 grams of weed
- One positive urine test for marijuana, which is legal in 21 states and decriminalized in 10 more.
- Two extremely unreliable hair follicle tests that are not admissible in a court of law
- Some extremely suspicious sounding child interviews.
When they initially took the kids, they only had the first four. These are not reasons to take anyone's children, especially children who are not even residents of that state. The first two aren't even a good reason to search a car or put someone in the back of a police vehicle. I'm not even certain that they are good reasons to pull anyone over in the first place. I didn't even know the left lane thing was something you could be pulled over for.
You do not take people's children and keep them in a state where they do not live over any of these things. It's deeply, deeply traumatizing.
Studies have repeatedly shown that not only do routine traffic stops not make us safer in general, they are not even the most efficient way to deal with speeding and other traffic-related issues. A 2022 study determined that police have killed nearly 600 people at these traffic stops since 2017. At this point, we have the technology to just send people tickets to their homes for minor traffic infractions and reserve actual traffic stops for people who are clearly threatening public safety and should stop driving immediately. Which is not the case with people driving around with tinted windows or spending too long in the left lane.
"I just have to believe if my clients looked different or had a different background, they would have just been given a citation and told you just keep this stuff away from the kids while you're in this state and they'd be on their way," the family's attorney told the Lookout.
She's not wrong.
The state is now looking to prosecute Williams and Clayborne for speaking out publicly about the incident and "breaking court confidentiality rules" — because apparently they are supposed to be allowed to steal people's children in secret.
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