Free Republic

Wladyslaw “Wally” Kowalski is a Ph.D. design engineer who lives in Van Buren County. In September, Kowalski came home to find his residence surrounded by police armed with a warrant. Officers searched the home and then hauled away his power generator and many expensive tools. They also froze his bank accounts, leaving Kowalski unable to pay his bills, student loan installments and taxes. Last November, state police raided the home of southwest Michigan resident Thomas Williams. The rural resident spent 10 hours in handcuffs while officers searched his property. When they departed they took his car, television, phone and some...

Today, I stopped caring about my fellow man. I stopped caring about my community, my neighbors, and those I serve. I stopped caring today because a once noble profession has become despised, hated, distrusted, and mostly unwanted. I stopped caring today because parents refuse to teach their kids right from wrong and blame us when they are caught breaking the law. I stopped caring today because parents tell their little kids to be good or “the police will take you away” embedding a fear from year one. Moms hate us in their schools because we frighten them and remind them...

In a heated exchange, PBS host Tavis Smiley told Sean Hannity that“racism is still the most intractable issue in this country, it's a part of everything we do still.”  He made this claim while discussing the incidents surrounding the police handling of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  Mr. Smiley also stated, in refuting President Obama’s remarks on BET that we cannot compare what is happening now with what happened fifty years ago, “It is open season on black men, and it is in many ways as bad as it was fifty years ago.” The meme that Mr. Smiley and...

While many in the nation, from Oakland to New York, rally in protest over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I keep wondering: What about the good cops? As with our military personnel, we are often quick to hang the allegedly corrupt but slow to honor those who serve honestly to protect. According to the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there are more than 900,000 of them who are serving in the United States; about 12 percent are women. The FBI reported that there were 404 incidents of "justifiable homicide" by American police in 2011. That...

Federal investigations of the Garner and Brown cases are just a pretext. Civil-rights investigations in Ferguson and Staten Island? No, what denizens of St. Louis and New York City ought to be worried about right now is . . . the crime wave overtaking Seattle. If you don’t understand why, then you probably thought Obamacare was about covering the uninsured. Like its health-care “reform” campaign, the Obama Left’s civil-rights crusade is about control — central control of state law enforcement by Washington. The deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York are each tragic in their...

Civil-rights investigations in Ferguson and Staten Island? No, what denizens of St. Louis and New York City ought to be worried about right now is . . . the crime wave overtaking Seattle. If you don’t understand why, then you probably thought Obamacare was about covering the uninsured. Like its health-care “reform” campaign, the Obama Left’s civil-rights crusade is about control – central control of state law enforcement by Washington.

TARRANT, Alabama -- A woman caught shoplifting eggs in Tarrant Saturday didn't leave with handcuffs and a court date. Thanks to a Tarrant police officer, she left with food for her family. Officer William Stacy was called to the Dollar General on Pinson Valley Parkway when employees caught the woman trying to steal a dozen eggs, Tarrant Police Chief Dennis Reno said. The woman had her young children in the car. She told Officer Stacy that she was only stealing because she was trying to feed her children. Stacy talked with Dollar General, and they said they wouldn't prosecute. So...

A Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed with a military-style assault rifle late yesterday morning when he confronted a band of robbers who had held up a Bank of America branch at a ShopRite in Port Richmond. "Tell my wife I'll miss her," Schiller Street residents heard dying Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski say as they went to his side.

The St. Louis police chief has asked for the FBI's help investigating what he believes was a hate crime attack against a woman in the same Bosnian neighborhood where a man was beaten to death days earlier by hammer-wielding teens, and where assaults have spiked dramatically in recent months. The 26-year-old Bosnian-American woman told police she was stopped in her car by three African-American teens early Friday morning in the city's Bevo Mill section, where tens of thousands of Bosnians settled following the civil war in the former Yugoslavia 20 years ago. .....

<p>PRINCETON, N.J. -- As controversy continues to swirl about police officers' treatment of blacks, an analysis of Gallup data underscores how much less likely U.S. blacks are than whites or Hispanics to express confidence in the police. The analysis also reveals that blacks living in urban areas are significantly less likely than blacks in non-urban areas to say they are confident in the police.</p>

In the mad rush to blame the police for most of society’s ills during the current rounds of protests and riots, advanced progressive thinkers seem to be lining up quickly in terms of finding a solution. Clearly, they assert, we have too many of the wrong sort of cops. In the fashion typical of those who see every problem as a nail and themselves as a hammer, these same problem solvers rapidly conclude that we need to hire a large number of the right sort of cops and fundamentally transform the ones we already have. This thinking seems to be...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio revealed in an interview on Sunday that he has taught his biracial son to not "move suddenly" or "reach for [his] cell phone" when near police officers, adding that the reality is different for white children. A police union chief responded by slamming the comments as "moronic," and said that they do not help ease the racial tensions in the city. When asked by ABC News on Sunday whether he believes his son, Dante, is at risk from the police department, de Blasio, who is married to an African-American woman, said: "It's different...

I worry that too many Americans fail to respect the police who put their lives on the line to protect them. They are not the enemy. The criminals are. I doubt there was ever a time in America, pre-Revolution and since, that race was not an issue. It was for the framers of the Constitution who, in order to get the southern colonies to accept it, included in Article Two that, for the purpose of taxation, slaves were to be identified as only “three-fifths” of being a person. In Section 9, it was agreed that the issue of slavery was...

Such hypocrisy and reverse-racism is breathtaking. The brutal truth is Sharpton, Holder and Obama will never address this officer’s death because he was white and because they protect the black gangs out there. Officer Kevin Quick was kidnapped and murdered by four black gang members – they belong to the Bloods street gang known as the 99 Goon Syndicate out of Los Angeles. Quick was forced to drive from ATM to ATM to get money, then he was taken out in the woods and executed as a gang initiation rite. It never really made the news and it certainly didn’t...

Delbert Rodriguez Gutierrez, a street artist who goes by the name “Demz,” was in critical condition with a severe brain injury after being struck by an unmarked Miami police car during a chase in Wynwood early Friday. Rodriguez, 21, was spotted by police gang unit members as he was “tagging” a privately owned building near Northwest Fifth Avenue and 24th Street about 2 a.m., police said. When officers began chasing him, Rodriguez fled. Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article4296547.html#storylink=cpy

A tattooed gang of militants declared open season on the NYPD in the wake of the Eric Garner grand jury decision, according to a threat a police union verified Saturday. Ten Black Guerrilla Family members are “preparing to shoot on duty police officers,” Sergeants Benevolent Association President Ed Mullins said.

A simple question to those who protest the grand juries in the police related deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, "What do you really want?" I have been watching--at first from afar--as the protestors in Ferguson, Missouri burned their town to the ground--and I have a hard time determining the message of the protests. Here in New York we handle protests so routinely, the turnout pretty much muted any national interest because the marches went off without any major property damage or fatalities related to the protests. Yes 200 people have been arrested, but to be candid, that's a...

Eric Garner died in July because he resisted arrest, forcing police to take him down the way they take down thousands of suspects daily. Only Garner wasn’t an average suspect. He had allowed himself to become morbidly obese and had diabetes, heart disease and who knows what other self-imposed health problems. Still, he never should have died that summer day. Big government killed Eric Garner. Police were just the weapon. Garner was selling “illegal cigarettes” that day, or “loosies” – individual cigarettes from a pack. Why would anyone buy individual cigarettes? Because government, in this case New York, both city...

In comparison to the Michael Brown shooting, the death of Eric Garner—and the similar decision not to indict the cop who killed him—has drawn outrage from across the political spectrum. Many conservatives, including Breitbart's John Nolte, The Federalist's Sean Davis, and The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis, agreed with anti-police-brutality libertarians and liberals that Garner's killer should have faced charges. The consensus is that the video evidence definitively established wrongdoing on the part of the officer (unlike the Brown case, which relied on conflicting eyewitness testimony). But because that's no fun, right and left had to find some way to tear...

On December 3, supporters who marched in Denver for Michael Brown cheered when a car struck four Denver police officers doing crowd control on bicycles.