• Officers William Mosher, Joshua Stark, and Thomas Mendiola. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Last weekend, at the Costco in Summerlin, Erik Scott got into an argument with some workers at the store. A Costco employee noticed that he was carrying a handgun in his waistband, so they freaked out and called the cops, then evacuated the store. Three Las Vegas Metro police officers — William Mosher, Joshua Stark, and Thomas Mendiola — rolled up and waited outside the store. When they saw Scott walking out of the store, they came up behind him and grabbed him on the shoulder and screamed at him to get down. He turned around and obeyed less than instantaneously, so the cops opened fire and stone cold gunned him down in the parking lot. The cops claimed that before they lit him up with 7 shots, Scott had reached for his gun in his waistband. Then, later, they claimed that he refused orders [sic] and instead withdrew a handgun and pointed at them.. Most of the witnesses, including a friend who was standing right next to Scott when the police gunned him down, say that he never did. A few witnesses differ — they say they did see him take out his gun but that he never pointed it at the cops. Metro said that Scott was ripping merchandise apart, kind of going berserk, and that they had received numerous 911 calls for his erratic behavior and reporting he was carrying a gun. Turns out that what actually happened is that another customer saw Scott opening up a box of aluminum water bottles putting some in his cart and some on the floor, in order to find out how many would fit in his cooler; when store security tried to confront him about it, Scott’s voice got elevated. A number of later 911 calls, provoked by the store’s panicky evacuation, recorded parts of the cop’s confrontation with Scott; the police have refused to release the 911 tapes. The Costco has surveillance cameras on the parking lot; the police took the tapes, but claim that they haven’t looked at them yet because of technical issues. The investigation of this police shooting by Las Vegas Metro is, of course, being handled by more police from Las Vegas Metro. There will almost certainly never be any kind of public trial; a coroner’s inquest hasn’t been scheduled, but will probably happen sometime in September. (There has been only 1 Clark County coroner’s inquest in 34 years that ever found any Metro police shooting to be neither justified nor excusable.) Meanwhile, the three cops who gunned down Erik Scott have been given a paid vacation from their jobs. The local newsmedia has been all over this story, mainly because Scott shops in Summerlin and used to be a tank commander in the United States government’s Army. Bill Scott, Erik’s father, has said that he hopes this case will draw attention to how many people Metro has gunned down: There are a lot of people who have been killed in Las Vegas, a lot of them by the police. They didn’t have a voice. This time, quote me: they killed the wrong guy.

• Officer Bryan Yant. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. For example, one of the people who has been killed in Las Vegas was Trevon Cole, an unarmed man who police shot in the face with an AR-15 assault rifle in the bathroom of his own apartment, while his 9-months-pregnant fiancee, Sequioa Pearce, was forced to get on the ground and watch. Metro was in his apartment because they had forced their way in in an extremely violent late-night raid to serve a drug search warrant. (Trevon Cole was violently seized and killed because he allegedly might have sold marijuana to an undercover narc, a crime which posed no threat at all to any identifiable victim’s rights.) So late at night while Pearce and Cole were relaxing in bed, a gang of police wearing camouflage and masks smashed in their windows and broke down their door, blitzed into the room holding assault rifles on their terrified victims. Trevon Cole was surrounded by a gang of heavily armed, masked men, was obeying their commands to get down, and had put his hands up in the air, but Yant decided he’d seen a furtive movement, so he stone cold shot Trevon Cole in the face at close range in front of his terrified fiancee. Officer Bryan Yant had already gunned down two other people in his career before he showed up to shoot an unarmed man in the face; An inquest jury into Yant’s 2002 fatal shooting found the officer justified in his actions despite a serious discrepancy between his story and evidence at the scene. The shooting will be considered by another Clark County Coroner’s Inquest on August 20. In the meantime, Bryan Yant, who is being investigated to determine whether or not he murdered an unarmed man, is being given a paid vacation from his government job. Meanwhile, his buddies on the force decided to show up at Sequoia Pearce’s mother’s house in order to mau-mau the only surviving witness and toss the house looking for guns and ammo that aren’t there.

• Officer Luis Norris. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Another cop working for the local government in Las Vegas opened fire on an unarmed man this past Tuesday, for the crime of taking a shortcut through a residential neighborhood while the cop was Investigatin’. The man appeared on the wall while the cop was talking to a local homeowner about a possible prowler. Of course, all kinds of people live in a residential neighborhood (by definition), and all kinds of people pass through, so a civilized person might take this as a reason to shout What are you doing here? but Officer Luis Norris was packing heat and startled so he whipped out his gun and opened fire on this innocent man, who was not the prowler, was unarmed, had committed no crime, and posed no threat to anything other than the cop’s composure and poise. Thankfully, Officer Luis Norris is a bad shot: he missed the man he was trying to gun down in a moment of irrational panic, so his intended target lived through the night long enough for Authorities to later determine he was not a threat. Since Luis Norris just recklessly endangered the life of an innocent man, but didn’t kill him in the process, there will not even be a coroner’s inquest. Instead, Officer Luis Norris’s has been given a paid vacation from his government job, and eventually, his actions will be reviewed by the department’s use of force board, which may hit him with such serious consequences as a written reprimand or even firing him from his job. In case you were wondering, the process is not open to the public.

Las Vegas Metro is full of heavily-armed, twitchy, terrified cops who are easily startled and ready to open fire on helpless or harmless people at even the most furtive motion. Whether you’re resting in bed with your fiancee on Eastern and Bonanza, or going shopping with your fiancee in Summerlin to celebrate your new life together, or just talking a quiet walk through the neighborhood out at Desert Inn and Sandhill, there is a heavily armed force, patrolling 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, constantly ready to come down on you and gun you down at even a moment’s hesitation to obey their bellowed commands, or the slightest twitch that they don’t understand, or just for startling them. If they shoot at you, or even if they kill you, they will almost certainly never be held accountable for their actions; the worst that’s likely to happen is that they might lose their job, and what’s more likely is that they will be put back onto the streets to continue a long and storied career of killing unarmed people. We are told that we need this heavily armed, omnipresent, domineering, hyperviolent, completely unaccountable paramilitary occupation force constantly in our lives and at our throats in order to stop our community from being overrun by small-time possible neighborhood prowlers, by erratic men who take aluminum water bottles out of their boxes at Costco, and from black men who might maybe be willing to sell a bit of pot to willing customers. We are told that we need this heavily armed, omnipresent, domineering, hyperviolent, completely unaccountable paramilitary occupation force in order to keep us safe. But who will keep us safe from them?

Support your local CopWatch.

See also:

• The Police Beat: Officer J. Smith, Las Vegas Metro, Las Vegas, Nevada
• The Police Beat: Shot in the back
• The Metro Police Beat

• How we subsidize fossil fuels. Boing Boing (2010-07-15). The author is mistaken toward the end: all subsidies are evil. But the chart is useful. (Linked Thursday 2010-07-15.)

• The doom of the telecomms carriers. Armed and Dangerous (2010-07-15). Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.) (Linked Thursday 2010-07-15.)

• How We Got So Sprawly. myglesias, Matthew Yglesias (2010-07-15). From Alyssa Katz's excellent profile of the people in the Obama administration working to shift policy away from its anti-urban bias: New measures to reverse the march of spraw may be too little, too late. It took seven decades and trillions in federal investment to create the sprawl that the… (Linked Friday 2010-07-16.)

• one thing i notice about statists, whether liberals or. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-06-29). one thing i notice about statists, whether liberals or conservatives: i.e. everybody. they give an argument. i blow it up, twice for good measure. then they give another, perhaps totally incompatible with the first. i vaporize it. then another. then, remarkably, back to the first as though nothing ever happened…. (Linked Friday 2010-07-16.)

• on the other hand, "politicizing" science is inevitable, and. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-07-11). on the other hand, "politicizing" science is inevitable, and obviously actual science does not directly draw policy conclusions. you sort of get the vague feeling that we could actually be ruled by scientifically discovered facts, or by dudes down in a laboratory somewhere. but ask yourself whether that makes any… (Linked Friday 2010-07-16.)

This is an accurate illustration of an important point in the defense of free culture against Intellectual Monopoly.

It is also deeply disturbing.

Show it to anybody who needs some basic orientation in anti-monopoly arguments against IP. But only if you also want to creep them the hell out in the process.

(Via Kent Hastings 2010-07-15.)

(Via Cerpn @ Google Reader.)

Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

At least, that's what Kansas News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called "i-dosing," which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with "digital drugs" that get you high through your headphones.

And officials are taking it seriously.

Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman Mark Woodward told News 9.

I-dosing involves donning headphones and listening to "music" — largely a droning noise — which the sites peddling the sounds promise will get you high. Teens are listening to such tracks as "Gates of Hades," which is available on YouTube gratis (yes, the first one is always free).

Those who want to get addicted to the drugs can purchase tracks that will purportedly bring about the same effects of marijuana, cocaine, opium and peyote. While street drugs rarely come with instruction manuals, potential digital drug users are advised to buy a 40-page guide so that they learn how to properly get high on MP3s.

Oklahoma's Mustang Public School district isn't taking the threat lightly, and sent out a letter to parents warning them of the new craze. The educators have gone so far as to ban iPods at school, in hopes of preventing honor students from becoming cyber-drug fiends, News 9 reports.

— Ryan Singel, Threat Level (2010-07-14): Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High

So no, in case you were wondering, there is no bottom to this cognitive barrel: absolutely no drug panic so flimsily contrived that narcocratic Officials won’t use it as an opportunity to issue breathless press statements pleading for greater social control, or so obviously manufactured and transparently idiotic that the responsible gatekeepers of the newsmedia won’t gravely report about the Alarming New Trend, the worried reactions of Concerned Parents & Teachers, and the pressing need for Officials and Concerned Parents to be even more proactive in freaking the hell out, obsessively spying on their sons’ and daughters’ pastimes, taking away teenagers’ possessions, and controlling teenagers’ behavior. It’s not just that you don’t need to demonstrate that anybody is suffering, or even could possibly suffer, any kind of physical harm. The drug scare doesn’t need to involve any actual drugs; apparently it doesn’t even need to involve a physical substance. Or anything but the most tangential connection to basic facts of human physiology. A drug scare story without any drugs nicely distils the one really important feature of every drug scare story: all that you need to work up an adult panic is to find enough teenagers in one place (one or two on YouTube will do) who are trying to convince themselves that they’re having a good time without an adult’s prior approval — if some teenager somewhere is experiencing pleasure, never mind the cause, that alone is reason enough to call the narcs and issue yet another story leading off As if parents of teenagers don’t have enough to worry about…

So here, we find a whole gang of Responsible Adults holding positions of community authority — professional narcs, journalists, teachers and parents — all of them freaking the hell out because some teenagers somewhere might be trying to convince themselves that they’re having a good time listening to MP3s of binaural beat meditation music. A new craze? Sure, evidently there is a craze going on here. But who is it that’s acting crazed?

The politics of fear are the most dangerous mind-altering substance on the market.

• rechelon on “With agorist friends like these, who needs class politics?” or “Yo dude, I’ll trade you some land for a pack of smokes!” reddit.com: what's new online! (2010-07-12). If we're going for that kind of snide visual humor, a part of me has always wanted to take a photo of a fat dude in a han solo costume and macro it: "Agorism: Your pot dealer thinks he's Han Solo." (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-13.)

• Police Violence Caught on Tape? Videographers Jailed. www.jesusradicals.com (2010-07-13). In the early 1990s, video emerged out of Los Angeles showing a mob of police officers beating a black man, Rodney King, who was clearly subdued by their power. That was a wake-up call to the nation–particularly white people–that "officer-friendly Mayberry" has never existed for black people. The shocking footage… (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-13.)

• Netflix Tries to Fix One Part of the Patent System – Updated. Groklaw (2010-07-11). There’s a very interesting case, Media Queue v. Netflix, where Netflix is asking the Federal Circuit to revisit the standard for awarding attorneys’ fees. Here’s their appeal brief [PDF]. It would like the court to create parity between plaintiffs and defendants. Right now, the system tilts to help plaintiffs recover… (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-13.)