Virginia Cop Receives Highest Valor Award for Shooting Unarmed Man

Via downtrend.com What!? A cop shoots an unarmed man and gets an award for it? I thought I’d seen it all, but this one takes the cake in terms of police corruption and mindless bureaucracy.

According to the Richmond Time-Dispatch, Henrico County, Virginia Police Officer Brian K. Anderson shot a motorist in September of 2012. He believed the man was holding a firearm and fired through the window, striking him in the arm. The man survived.

To be fair, Anderson claims he was told the man, whom led him on a pursuit before stopping, was likely armed with a handgun. A handgun was ultimately found in the vehicle, but the man did not once threaten him with it.

Yet, Anderson shot him when he spotted a cell phone in his hand. Of course, any police officer or kindergarten student can discern a phone from a firearm, meaning the officer, at best, let his emotions get the best of him.

Was Anderson charged with a crime or at least reprimanded for his actions? Was his fitness for duty reevaluated after the incident? Not quite.

Instead, he received the Silver Valor award – the highest award offered at the 24th Annual Valor Awards and Ceremony.

While Anderson was understandably on high-alert after being tipped off the man may have had a firearm and the motorist could have prevented this by putting his hands on the steering wheel, this award sends the message that police brutality is not only tolerated, but rewarded in Henrico County. At the very least, his competency should have been reviewed, given his rash and incorrect decision to pull the trigger. Instead, he was the headliner at an award ceremony.

FBI interrogated man after comment about American “Police State” on Facebook

HUMBOLDT, AZ — A man says that within hours of making an impassioned post on Facebook, he was being interrogated by police and the FBI.
Blaine Cooper, 33, contacted policestateusa.com with a concerning story about how his sentiments posted on Facebook had drawn the attention of the federal government. He showed me the comment and told me that within 24-hours of posting it, he was being contacted by the police and FBI.
His colorful comment was in reference to what he believes is an “American Police State,” in which the power of the federal government is growing in a direction which may one day lead people to fight back.

Blaine Cooper (Source: Facebook)

Cooper, who is training to be a wild land fire fighter, said that on August 23, he was contacted by Officer Jason Kuafman of the Prescott Valley Police Department and was told that he needed to come to the police station for an interview with the FBI.

He complied with the request for an interview, which lasted 45 minutes with federal agents present. He was released after apparently being determined to not be a threat.
“They had every Facebook post I had ever made in a huge file, along with all my wife’s information, and parent’s information,” Cooper told policestateusa.com.
Cooper said that he was told that without “defusing the situation” by complying with the interview, his house might have been raided.
“The FBI made mention they came to question me so they didn’t have to kick in my door,”

Cooper’s Facebook comment which got him Federal attention within hours.

It should be pointed out that answering questions from federal agents is an extremely risky idea, especially without the presence of a lawyer. Supreme Court case BROGAN v. UNITED STATES affirmed that it is a federal crime to tell any lie, or misrepresent any fact, to a federal agent. Even an innocent person with good intentions could commit a federal crime by misspeaking during an interview. But apparently the alternative to complying to an interview is getting raided by the FBI. Still feeling threatened, Cooper made a YouTube video on Aug. 23, as a record to the public in case he “disappears.” “[I] hope this doesn’t happen to anybody else,” he said. The rapid response of the FBI could be a result of the federal government’s XKeyscore program, which gives them the ability to collect “nearly everything a user does on the internet.”The irony of the situation is that Cooper’s concerns of the USA becoming a police state were actually validated by the fact that the federal government launched an investigation over his frustrated Facebook comment, showing up with detailed records on his family and their internet activity.

US government-funded study involves paying Mexican prostitutes

From The Daily Caller
If you give U.S. tax dollars to a Mexican male prostitute, will he agree to stay disease-free? That’s what government-funded researchers at Brown University would like to know.
The study is called “Conditional Economic Incentives to Reduce HIV Risks: A Pilot in Mexico,” and uses a grant from the National Institute of Health to pay male prostitutes in Mexico City. The prostitutes were placed in different groups and tested for sexually transmitted diseases. For every six months that they remain clean, they receive a payment that is larger or smaller depending upon their group.
Though the dollar amounts paid to each prostitute are small — they must remain poor enough to continue in prostitution, of course — the study has already cost nearly $400,000.
Researchers hope the experiment will show that financial incentives can be used to deter the spread of HIV/AIDS.
But Drew Johnson of the Center for Individual Freedom wondered if bribing Mexican prostitutes was the best use of the taxpayer’s dime.
“At a time when the federal government is hiking taxes, raising its debt ceiling and drowning in ever-deepening debt, the last thing Washington needs to do is ship our money to Mexico City to give a cash reward to prostitutes for not catching Chlamydia or Gonorrhea,” he wrote. “But that’s not stopping them.”
The study’s leader is Omar Galarraga, an assistant professor of health policy at Brown. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Brown’s website praises the study’s “innovative structural approach.”
Brown is not the only university spending public money investigating the sexual diseases of Mexican prostitutes; the University of California at San Diego has received $3 million from the NIH in order to study infection rates.
The UC-San Diego study does not involve paying prostitutes, however.