The Washington Examiner is leaving out several salient facts.
- the Police Officer's Association address was used to ship out packages to customers in the US, and Segovia operated her drug business partly out of the office; there's photographic evidence for both, taken from her whatsapp communications (which she turned over to investigators)
- she discussed police business with her supplier(s)
- at least one of her customers died of an overdose
- after she was first contacted by investigators, she carried out an elaborate attempt to frame her housekeeper
> after she was first contacted by investigators, she carried out an elaborate attempt to frame her housekeeper
Not only that, but she continued to make purchases! For all the dumb things she did prior to that contact (using her own addresses and a phone that's trivially associated with her), continuing to make buys while you know damn well you're being watched is just breathtakingly stupid. I don't get it.
The idea is that continuing to make purchases adds plausibility to the framing.
You appear as if you are cooperating fully, and innocent (because a guilty person who knows they are being investigated stops doing the illegal thing).
If it was the housekeeper doing the crime, they wouldn't know bout the investigation so they would keep criming.
Since you don't know how long you've been monitored prior to learning of the investigation you don't want to suddenly change the routine either... Same reasoning as the first point.
The only real move you have is to hope hope the evidence points at the housekeeper and the frame-up tricks the investigators.
Im not saying i agree with any of the above, but it's the type of reasoning behind the actions.
I can't believe I didn't think it through like this. I reverse my judgement here.
There are two ways this can play out for the accused: (1) The misdirection works and she's off scot-free, or (2) it fails, and she's in roughly the same amount of trouble as she would have been had she not continued making the purchases.
So youre telling me, all I need to do to get a seat on the San Jose California Police Union, is to not frame my housekeeper for my illegal drug smuggling empire, which certainly NEVER involved any of the upstanding cops in the actual police dept?
-
My father was a cop in Oakland in the '70s... He resigned after he witnessed OPD murder several people.
His famous quote was "Once you're looking for 'bad' everywhere - pretty soon, thats all you can see'"
--
When I grew up in the 80s in Lake Tahoe (we moved from Oakland to Tahoe in 1979) -- the cops were known to have been outcasts from San Jose CA for being the worst offenders, and were pushed back to Tahoe as 'punishment' (in the same way that Catholic priests are 'punished')...
We knew that the Tahoe cops were jerks, and it was widely known they were all San Jose rejects...
Anyway, I got caught in a bit of legal trouble in 7th grade (was taking boats out for joy rides and leaving them on beaches)...
And the 'detective' who found me was later found out as being on Escobar's pay roll....
In the 1980s, Escobar was flying in tons of cocaine to truckee and south lake tahoe, and this cop, and the dad of a kid I went to school with were the guys who were funneling all that coke to Vegas and Reno...
I've been pulled over for minor traffic infractions almost exclusively by bored cops in rural or college towns, and I live next to a city who's narcotics division is presently being sued by the US DOJ. I'm white though.
interesting -- an old man that built Casinos and lived in .. Sparks.. had a son who was a good-enough skier and definitely local to Tahoe in the 80s. The son had an "ad agency" which turned out to be a front for this activity. "You have to make a thousand a day" he was rumored to say.. that means a thousand in your pocket each day in good times, or just cash moving when things are slow. What you say about Escobar and local flights, that fits. Miami Vice was a TV show at that time, not entirely fictional!
I live in city with a pretty squeaky clean police department.
They are extremely paranoid when hiring - especially “experienced” officers who often turn out to be rejects.
Recently the BLM folks were able to get a big say in police hiring.
They’ve been demanding more Black officers.
It’s hard to get any officers at all, and the city doesn’t have many Black residents.
So they’ve been pushing to change the rules about hiring officers with “previous experience” - basically turning “previous experience” from a negative to a positive.
> They are extremely paranoid when hiring - especially “experienced” officers who often turn out to be rejects.
> So they’ve been pushing to change the rules about hiring officers with “previous experience” - basically turning “previous experience” from a negative to a positive.
It's crazy. You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of reality.
It's also extremely common. Like more than you could possibly imagine, including other forms of crime.
I'm not sure if the reasoning is fairly complex, or boils down to a couple factors, a few I can name:
1. People inflate their lifestyles to depend on crime income, and the financial situation doesn't exactly improve when they get caught; you get new expenses
2. Pathology... ie. they just can't help themselves. If you've known a klepto, or pathological liar, you know they are often addicted. It's bizarre to see behaviors like stealing in the same way as drug addiction, but they can be.
3. They simply think they'll get away with it. Good chance they thought they wouldn't get caught in the first place. So now they just got to tweak the method, or figure it will take the same amount of time to catch up with them; by then they'll be out of it (and in prison)
You can see this kind of thing with white collar crime and almost everything. Even with sex criminals. There was a guy that committed many sex assaults by intentionally attempting to infect w/HIV, through deception... (said he was using protection). Kept doing it after getting caught.
Guess it doesn't make sense to question why a criminal would act like a criminal.
It's such a self own she handed over her phone without a legal fight or attempting to delete her totally unencrypted message history (of course another crime but it seems like the lesser from her legal point of view) with her drug sources with a phone apparently located in India.
It won't altogether surprise me if she fields a defense saying that she was so frustrated by the lack of federal action that she decided to mount her own elaborate sting operation to take down the trafficking network. She's probably going to prison for many years anyway, might as well fleece the rubes on the way out and get free money sent to her commissary account.
> at least one of her customers died of an overdose
Isn’t fentanyl so dangerous that even a regular dose could kill? Idk, I’m not into fentanyl
Edit: A cursory refreshing on the subject indicates that fentanyl is extremely potent, and that therefore it is difficult to dose correctly. I maintain that “overdose” is misleading in the context of fentanyl because it connotes user error. When in fact I think the blame lies on the suppliers, who may have sold fentanyl to users without the users being fully aware of what dangerous things they were really buying.
Yes, the recent increase in deaths aren't due to overdoses as we usually think of them. These are accidental poisonings. Mexican drug cartels are manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs containing fentanyl. They have bad quality control and sometimes just put in too much. There is only a tiny difference between a recreational dose and a fatal dose, even for opioid addicts who have built up a high tolerance.
I had an ex from podunk midwest and one of her town's claims to fame was that the sheriff chaired the local DARE chapter until he got arrested for running a meth ring.
I guess life is easier when you can arrest your competitors instead of just shooting them, but I don't have any idea how nobody narced on him to the feds (or at least their lawyer) for that long.
But then police were organized crime before police were police. To this day I don't know why the Pinkertons still exist as a corporate subdivision name instead of being fully absorbed to distance from that profound emotional baggage.
(Opinions colored by roommates' future BIL being murdered by cops in broad daylight in Chicago for DWB+autism, then moving to and dealing with Seattle PD's corruption/brutality problems)
Hollywood is smack in the middle of one of the most notorious sheriff's departments in the United States [1][2] with lots of ongoing prosecutions and a history of federal convictions. They know exactly how bad the police are and show a idealized version in media that's very fictional.
If the writers introduced the so-called good guys as the Grim Reapers or Compton Executioners [3], the viewers wouldn't believe it.
I should have "not nearly as fictional". I know some of it's true, some of it's 'ripped from the headlines', some is rumor, but nothing Hollywood does is ever entirely accurate. Even the documentaries (maybe especially the documentaries)
When I went to high school in the early 80s our in school security / dare officer was known to just take half of whatever he "found" and everyone just walked away with no problems. Unless he didn't like you, then you got tossed under the bus. And I know that mine wasn't the only high school with this issue in the area.
Black + autistic + in Chicago is a bad, bad combination.
Illinois has more problems than Mississippi wrt to racial justice. For a blue state that's pretty fucked up, but then it's only about 55% blue.
I think Chicago is currently winning the competition with NYC for number of convicted mayors as well. Clearly not something anyone should be proud of, but here we are. That whole Eliot Ness/Capone kerfuffle was Chicago, not NYC. See also Valentine's Day Massacre.
> others have said that members of the Chicago Police Department who allegedly wanted revenge for the killing of a police officer's son played a part. - Wikipedia
> For a blue state that's pretty fucked up, but then it's only about 55% blue
fun fact, that's pretty normal. That's why all this talk about a national divorce is boneheaded-stupid. The only reason we have red states and blue states is because of FPTP and winner-take-all voting. But even in a place like california, democrats only outnumber republicans by about 2-1.
Divisions are also fractal. The outskirts of large cities are more conservative than the dense downtown. The center of a small town is more progressive than its outer streets, even in towns as small as a couple thousand people. This isn't the American Civil War of state vs state, it's (relatively) high density vs (relatively) low density.
If we have a wide outbreak of violence it will probably look closer to Rwanda than the organized Union vs Confederacy fighting.
Last I checked New York had fusion voting. Chicago had fusion voting until the 1990s.
California had fusion voting as late as the 1940s - not sure when it ended.
So it’s not as simple as “winner takes all.”
NB: fusion voting is where candidates are endorsed by multiple parties. So you can be a Democrat and a Libertarian.
> All States, except for Maine and Nebraska have a winner-take-all policy where the State looks only at the overall winner of the state-wide popular vote. Maine and Nebraska, however, appoint individual electors based on the winner of the popular vote for each Congressional district and then 2 electors based on the winner of the overall state-wide popular vote.
That is only for presidential elections. I assume the original comment covered elections in general. Washington state, for example, has single primaries (top two advance to general election regardless of party) rather than a partisan primary for every election except presidential.
Would you just drop the stereotype that Democrats care about black people any more than Republicans do? It's staring you in the face, you admit it and somehow cling to this lie.
As it was explained to me, most of the justice problems are in the Greater Chicago Area, so if anything that sidebar by me is being charitable about how fucked up it is.
It’s important to parse the language and understand the domain.
Major party affiliation of red + blue usually only adds up to about 60-80% in most regions. Not everyone is eligible to vote, registered to vote, or votes regularly. If people look at the percentage of the vote that Biden/Trump got in the most recent election, they are looking at the narrow end of the funnel. The “55% blue” is likely a cross-section closer to the beginning of the funnel.
Also worth pointing out that Chicago has a 100+ year old “political machine”. I don’t remember the specifics, but each neighborhood has extremely powerful local politicians that hold a party office, but not a government office. It is not typical for American cities.
Chicago (Cook County) went 83% for Clinton in 2016, 74% for Obama in 2012, 76% for Obama in 2008, 79% for Kerry in 2004 and 68% for Gore in 2000. Biden's 2020 numbers were on the low side of average for a Democrat candidate there, probably didn't involve an unusual number of independents or disaffected Republicans...
St. Louis City went 82.71% for Obama for context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia... so higher than cook... but the city of stl is generally even more blue and was one of the highest rates for obama nation wide. STL took it as a point of pride to vote more for obama than chicago where obmama is from.
Would you just drop the stereotype that Democrats care about black people any more than Republicans do? It's staring you in the face, you admit it and somehow cling to this lie.
True, because many of those smugglers also smuggle military-grade firearms back to Mexico. It's very risky, but also very easy money. Sometimes there are enhanced controls to detect smuggling, but I'd bet anything they have well-bribed moles who warn the smugglers when that happens.
Most of the guns smuggled into Mexico from the United States are status guns. Think unique guns you'd find in popular video games, gold plated, old west revolvers and antiques, etc.
Practically it is much easier for cartels to buy thousands of rifles from Africa or the Middle East than to try and get them across the border from the US. Handguns are trivial to source directly from Chinese factories producing Glock and 1911 knockoffs.
Heck, you can order every part individually to assemble a Glock directly from Wish.com if you know what to search for.
Not true in the slightest, it's extremely easy to smuggle guns out of the United States. Glocks, AR-15s, AKs, Barrett .50 cal rifles, etc. [1] 60% of firearms trafficked are bought without a background check from gun shows in border states. Cartels continue to purchase weapons this way because it's so easy.
> 60% of firearms trafficked are bought without a background check from gun shows in border states.
Is that from the page labeled 9 of that PDF? That's wrong on 2 counts.
The first is that that graph is showing a breakdown by destination (i.e. 60% of requests to trace a gun that was later traced to a gun show came from Mexico, not that 60% of guns in Mexico are from US gun shows).
The second is that an FFL still has to conduct a background check, even if the sale occurs at a gun show. All of those guns either had a background check, or the dealer is going to jail. The "gun show loophole" only applies to normal people trying to sell a couple of guns. As soon as the ATF thinks that someone is "engaged in the business of dealing firearms" they are required to be licensed as an FFL, and must do background checks regardless of where the sale occurs. It's all in https://www.atf.gov/file/100871/download
The report you point to has some self selection bias, it is a report only covering guns coming from the US.
Mexico only initiated 32k traces in 2021, which lends further support to my point that the majority of guns are not coming from the US. That number is incredibly small compared to the net new volume of guns cartels get on a yearly basis.
“Most cartels buy in bulk, and the weapons are coming from places like Nicaragua and other South American countries. Also Asia and some from the Middle East,” a Tijuana-based police authority who requested anonymity explained. “And, another factor is the CNC machines making uppers in clandestine shops in Mexico.”
https://www.foxnews.com/world/mexico-guns-black-market-tepit...
I'm not sure you understand the ATF report you're trying to cite. It doesn't say a lot of things because they don't fall under ATFs jurisdiction and they don't have any data on it. My information comes directly from law enforcement sources on the ground.
No, they really get most of their guns from the USA. No shipping on a boat (China doesn’t even have a gun industry for consumers, Russia and Brazil are the only producers of note with production comparable to the USA in size, and Brazil has that Dorian gap that makes smuggling difficult), cheap, and America makes a lot more guns than it needs. The statistic that 30% of Americans have 5 guns each is skewed because many of those guns were smuggled out to Mexico and Central America.
One of the reasons Republicans were so eager outraged that the Clinton admin ATF was trying to track gun smuggling from the USA into Mexico was that it was such a bad look for them.
The cartels have used Americans as mules since cocaine took off. Americans are less likely to be searched, and while more expensive to be bribed, this is usually better than getting the shipment lost.
The offer could have been $220 plus his kids were given the opportunity to “live another year” by the cartel. You don’t know what other “incentives” existed. Just because someone appears stupid doesn’t mean they are: you lack the relevant facts to judge.
>The offer could have been $220 plus his kids were given the opportunity to “live another year” by the cartel.
It's more likely to have been $220 plus some sort of profit sharing. The cartels are probably smart enough to align incentives instead of an over reliance on violence where it can be avoided.
The wrong way to think about bribery is as a calculated payoff. Instead it's a spur of the moment thing.
You are headed home, tickets already paid for, and then someone asks if you want to make a quick $200 real easy.
This isn't always how it goes down, but you can imagine how an impulsive person may over react to a monetary reward and thus accept very little compensation. If you run the risk assessment, you aren't going to take the deal!
I guess. I'd be instantly suspicious, but he doesn't seem like a person of good judgment to start with. It's sad that he didn't have the wit or the character to plead guilty and try to straighten his life out for the sake of his family.
It’s their job to get extremely good at being less suspicious. The more rejections they get, the more they refine their approach, their appearance, their story, etc.
I try to avoid giving credit to my ego for not falling for a scam/con (yet!) when capitalism and evolution are both optimized for finding efficient workarounds for any hurdle. Given enough attempts and enough time, capitalism will corrupt anyone and everyone.
It says he trafficked 15kg of fentanyl. $220 is basically gas and per diem money. Allow me to present the conspiracy theory that this guy owed the cartels a favor for whatever reason, and the payment was purely enough to let him deal with the costs of performing it. This has the looks of a man who painted himself into a corner, rolled a bad dice roll, and then had no way out.
>It's sad that he didn't have the wit or the character to plead guilty and try to straighten his life out for the sake of his family.
That won't overcome the fact he now owes 15kg of goods to the cartel, and probably has no way to pay it, and he's staring down the barrel of being in prison full of people who have nothing but time to settle the debt. I think this guys death warrant was signed as soon as he got caught, and probably halfway written by the time he was even asked for the favor. Quite possible he did the best thing for his family.
Might be stepping up efforts? Just came back to the US from Mexico (Yucatán) with partner and kids, had to make a drug dog walk (you walk at a steady pace as the drug dogs are exposed to you during the 10 meter walk) in the terminal.
Have had to do the drug dog walk the last few times I flew out of JFK. It seems to move lines much quicker and allows laptops, etc. to stay in bags going through the scanners. Think it's something we'll see more and more of, which is fine by me but they don't make much allowance for children who have no idea what is going on, in my experience (try telling two young kids that they have to walk side by side at a set pace and not touch the doggy)
Why are you fine with strong armed, authoritarian policies that target vulnerable populations while leaving the architects of death unharmed?
The problem with poisoned drugs was created by doctors, corporations, the police, and politicians. Cartel king pins, plus smaller "mom & pop shops" (~$10ks-millions operations) play their role, but the vast majority of people caught will be stupid and/or desperate smucks, who have done practically nothing.
These will be the people doing life sentences. The cartels leaders almost always get away (until maybe they die). The "mom & pop" shops I mentioned, often quite large in their own respect do get busted from time to time... however the majority of time in prison will be done by pawns, especially from these types of busts.
Then the government spikes the ball and does a victory dance, while most of society is "fine" with it... yet things consistently get worse. More violence, more dirty money, corruption, overdoses, etc.
Not sure that's a drug dog. More likely simply a dog trained to sniff explosives. I know this because I've been made to walk the dog walk while unknowingly carrying things I should not have been carrying. The dogs never suspected a thing.
They're really stepping up. Last year they dragged me into a hospital in cuffs and told the doctors to "inspect" inside my GI tract. That was a better part of a day affair along with a federal warrant and the works. A dog never even alerted (and even verbally told so by CBP, although the warrant lied and said otherwise). They also have a network of hospitals with staff openly hostile to tourists, who are fine acting even without a warrant or consent and a complaint to the state board results in the medical professional boards telling you that a patient has no right to deny consent even without a court order.
Few hours walking around in a border town and eating lunch from what I recall. When I crossed back there were a whole team of people working me over and HSI got involved. No idea what triggered them. When they found nothing they sent the debt collectors chasing me for the hospital bill, obviously that won't be paid so I look forward to the lawsuit.
edit: to note I don't know If I'm actually going to be sued, just will definitely find it humorous if they do so.
I would guess that the very temporary nature of your trip looked like you were just there to collect something and come right back. None of which justifies the subsequent outcome. Good luck in your lawsuit.
And elsewhere on order. Although Portland is within 100 miles, they were sent under a post 9/11 statutory authorization that would have enabled them to perform certain (not border/customs related) federal law enforcement actions anywhere.
I actually thought the economics worked out that lost shipments were kind of irrelevant. There was so much south of the border and so little (percentage-wise) needed to make it through to sate demand.
No, the relevant stat would be % likelihood of being caught for Americans vs non-Americans.
Even if 90% of the people caught are Americans, if the number of Americans actually doing the smuggling outnumber non-Americans 20x, then that means they're lower-risk.
I had a young relative I chased around to try and get clean for years before he OD'd on opioids in a bay area Air BnB with his girlfriend. He would order laminated 'diving certificates' with drugs encased in them by mail, and other postal deliveries that were clearly really drug shipments. There is little reason for mules when 18 wheelers are bringing in hidden drug shipments from Mexico and the postal service are delivering deadly drugs from India as was the case with the San Jose police union dealer.
Or maybe Americans are overwhelmingly trying to smuggle across border crossings because traditionally Americans get less inspection than non-americans, whereas non nationals choose other methods(tunnels, drones, boats, other non-border zone crossings, mail/parcels, etc).
People are strategically focusing our outrage. Political tribes need simple monsters/bogeymen. Their leaders (politicians, government officials, corporate leaders, and even police union executives) each use PR in different ways to focus their constituents’ attention.
You can't claim by that stat that 90% of the fentanyl is brought in by American citizens through regulated ports of entry. By the very nature of illegal smuggling via illegal border crossings, you can't even know what percentage of fentanyl smugglers or fentanyl supply is captured.
> SJPOA spokesperson Tom Saggau ... was shocked to learn about the allegations swirling around Segovia, who he has known as a beloved figure in the office for over 20 years.
> “She was looked at as the grandma of the POA,” he said. “She’s the one who planned all the funerals when we had officers killed in the line of duty...
"Joanne is a professional and competent manager and contact. She is always informed of conditions which effect her group," a recommendation on Segovia's LinkedIn profile reads.
The grammar police haven't been doing their jobs lately either...
This towns police dept has long been an incompetent lot (while not anywhere nearly as bad as say, NOLA or Baltimore, they are still fairly boorish and prone to overreach) and prone to such stellar missteps as how it handled the Floyd protests in town (e.g. https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/sjpd-maims-activist-who-t...)
I live in SJ, have police in my family, and have talked to police neighbors.
SJPD has fewer officers per resident than any other major city. We have somewhere between 30% - 50% the number of sworn officers as San Francisco. SJPD is underfunded and surrounding cities are all better paying for officers. The officers that continue to work there mostly live many hours away and are required to work pretty high overtime hours.
My personal assessment is California Prop 13 (from around 1979) is at fault. It has starved the city’s funding, which makes SJPD uncompetitive against neighboring cities. Additionally, the city is a residential base for lots of the companies in the neighboring suburbs.
In the late 2000s, the mayor at the time was very worried about the retirement costs of the department and made the comp package much less appealing/competitive for new hires/transfers than existing officers. This creates an exodus of experienced officers and means that we get worse recruits than other cities.
Not trying to justify the unprofessional actions, but to add some factual color behind the recent history that got us to where we are.
Then it begs the question, if SJ is so underfunded and police overworked, how it manages to be a comparatively safer city than other comparable metro areas? It almost begs the question about not needing more Police, but better supporting services adjacent to it to address the things cops aren't trained sufficiently and/or otherwise suited for.
I've known plenty of great LEOs growing up in the area, but I've encountered (especially in the last 20 years) an almost caricatured level of clowns wearing the uniform. It's soured me on LEOs in general, and certainly the police management in SJ as a practical thing. After the utter bungling of the protest handling, including the refusal to fire Jared Yuen and the keystone kops moment with the Sanderlin rubber bullet shooting, it just became impossible to defend this circus.
As far as funding goes, SJPD in recent years got a 41M punch up, so I'm not sure how it's so underfunded.
> if SJ is so underfunded and police overworked, how it manages to be a comparatively safer city than other comparable metro areas?
My personal theory is that crime has little to do with policing and mostly related to how people feel in a society and whether they can meet their economic needs. Throwing money at police departments improves neither unless the department focuses on those ends.
SJPD’s use of Community Service Officers takes low urgency work away from sworn officers for less than half of the cost of a sworn officer and requires fewer trigger-happy people to interact with the community. The numbers I mention are sworn officers, excluding CSOs, so I suspect that augmented force helps each dollar go further.
In my hometown when I was growing up, the longtime sheriff was convicted of drug trafficking. It made me wonder how often law enforcement is directly involved in the drug trade.
Most likely, she is family of police. Officers don’t trust muggles.
I have police in my family. Every vendor they employ (dry cleaner, tax assistance, plumber, locksmith, etc) comes from recommendations within the policing community. They don’t take a risk to trust strangers.
Maybe, but she might be just a solo entrepreneur. It's not hard to find dark markets if you're technically savvy, even before having the inside knowledge of someone adjacent to/involved with law enforcement.
Charged, not convicted. And we're (supposed to be) innocent until proven guilty in the US, so I'm guessing that's likely why she's on paid leave and not terminated.
Why is that whenever a woman (be it a scientist, politician or any other profession) achieves something, the gender is always mentioned in the headline. E.g.
If she had single handedly caught the biggest smuggler, the headline would be "Female executive director of San Jose police union blah blah blah". But when it's something like this, the gender is often omitted.
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses. -- RATM
I'm in favour of near-full legalization. It's should be my right to get as high as I like. And seeing how many in public officials do drugs and do not voice in favour of legalization is just showing the how two-faced they are.
This of Biden's son. Total tweaker. While his dad signed super tight anti-drug laws, that cause the imprisonment of many (mostly blacks): why is his son still free?
However, the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Northern District of California said from July 2019 onward, officials intercepted and opened five of the shipments
So one shipment a year? It took four years to make a case? I know police cases take time but...this seems less like justice and more like she didn't pay off the right person.
> She is alleged to have had at least 61 shipments mailed to her home from October 2015 to January 2023 from countries/regions, including Hong Kong, Hungary, India, and Singapore. The mailing documents were labeled as “Wedding Party Favors,” “Gift Makeup,” or “Chocolate and Sweets.”
TBH, this sounds like most electronic gizmos I order off aliexpress et al.
But I think detailed records are only kept by customs on int’l courier packages, not postal service parcels.
I've been a cigar hobbyist since the early 90s. Cuban cigars have been mostly to completely illegal in the US for the entire time, but with the advent of the widespread use of web pages, we started to get better and better access to the Cuban supply via overseas retailers.
These retailers know full good and well that these cigars are contraband here in the states. But some of them were extremely lazy and would just ship entire pallets of merchandise. I'd guess that about 70-80% of the product bought overseas and shipped here actually got to the buyer. The rest were virtually all on these pallets where you'd have to be a complete idiot not to spot them.
I would be astonished if customs even finds it useful to appropriate any budget for seizure of Cuban cigars. It wouldn't surprise me if they let them through because it's less work than filling out the seizure paperwork. Everyone knows it's a measure that achieves nothing, and not even the rabid anti-drug people are going to give them an attaboy for finding tobacco, and the political will to do anything meaningfully further with the embargo is withering.
I know that I've never lost a single item to customs in all the years I was procuring cigars internationally, and most retailers would send out a second shipment if the first was seized for whatever reason. Even the gray market retailers, who would buy in volume from companies with actual Habanos licenses and then sell at a discount to customers would do this. I think you're right and it was only cases where they made it extremely obvious would customs ever do something about it. Of course, it didn't hurt that the elites on both sides of the political aisle enjoyed the product.
Right, but they had intercepted and notified her by mail of seizing kilograms of controlled substances on several previous occasions. She had even written back to acknowledge at least one of the notices and formally abandon her ownership interest in the package.
Why would the DoJ share that someone had a medical problem? People could become sympathetic. Better to focus the public interest on the greed and abuse of office aspects.
I read a lot of legal filings in criminal cases, and while you make a valid point my experience is the feds usually include whatever excuse/explanation people offer when they're caught. Culturally federally investigators more about 'here are the facts and how we collected them to establish probable cause' and leave the moralizing to prosecutors.
Please don't read this as a blanket endorsement or suggestion that federal investigators are always ethical, I don't believe that to be so.
> "To what degree should we defund the police? And how else might we limit their power?" are perfectly germane ways forward with a discussion.
You're completely correct, and it's a topic that the US urgently needs to have a serious, non-inflammatory discussion about. And that's why when you start off with shouting slogans:
> ACAB. Defund the police.
you get a response which is not one of the "perfectly germane ways forward with a discussion." Because the way you began things doesn't sound like you want a discussion. Maybe lead off with something that still gets at your point in a more productive way, e.g.:
> "To what degree should we defund the police? And how else might we limit their power?"
This part is a bad idea, imo. If malpractice insurance is required and (presumably) privatized then we've handed a great deal of control over the monopoly on violence to private enterprise. Imagine the power $yourLeastFavoriteBillionaire would have if they decided to start buying up insurance firms that offer malpractice. VP got a DUI? The officer will forget all about it unless they want to lose coverage and be fired.
I'm not against levying financial penalties, but I think privatized insurance is the wrong way to go at it.
It wasn't hostile. I was pointing of the futility of the saying in the general. There are useful discussions to be had on the subject, but they don't start with "ACAB".
I don't think your tone affects anybody who isn't emotionally reactive. It's not the first time I've seen an outburst on the internet, so please don't spend too much time concerned for my well being.
To your point: sure, I would posit that the police officers who stopped the Nashville shooter would not qualify as bastards based on their publicly available work.
The ONLY thing that will EVER stop the cartels, and the overdoses, is LEGAL SUBSTANCE purchasing.
The few modern efforts, of say Oregon, only eliminate criminal charges for posession. This will do NOTHING to defund the cartels, or stop the overdoses due to unknown strength/dosing.
I don’t think legalization is better for everyone, though. I live in Oregon and I’ve been very disappointed with the impact of decriminalizing possession. Cases are no longer clogging the courts, instead we have people using in my neighborhood park and on public transit. I stopped taking the train after a ride where we had to evacuate because someone was smoking fentanyl (apparently even the second-hand smoke can affect a person). It was, apparently, not his first time.
You seem to support it, how would you address the externalities?
FWIW, OP said they think legalization would stop the cartel, and you're describing the local effects of decriminalization. These are different things. Personally, I don't think either makes sense without having support systems already in place, like easily available SIS, rehab, readily available naloxone and a lot of other general welfare that we're missing in the US, like support for the homeless, mental health care, etc.
Just as sort of an analogy to what I'm saying, citizens of all the states had access to some gambling addiction hotline even before gambling was widely legalized.
> I stopped taking the train after a ride where we had to evacuate because someone was smoking fentanyl (apparently even the second-hand smoke can affect a person).
This is obviously proscribed under most localities' current regulations, since we mostly ban regular tobacco smoking indoors. Legalization advocates are not advocating for tolerating involuntary exposure or other externalities. Enforce the existing laws against second hand smoke, DUI, etc.
> we have people using in my neighborhood park
Annoying for sure. In my neighborhood, dog shit and hobo piss are omnipresent sidewalk hazards. But I don't think there's a solution to the dregs of society being a highly visible/smellable nuisance - real estate tends to be stratified by class, and I'm not financially equipped to insulate myself like the upper ones. Until we decide to actually deal with the economics that produce these frictions, it's just a fact of life.
I'm with you. "Legalize everything" stops working when addictive substances are involved.
To play Devil's advocate for the opposition though, perhaps we need Fentanyl Island where we send people that want everything legal. Okay, not a serious proposal ... or maybe I'm channelling Brave New World — a book I have come to believe was in fact supposed to represent a Utopian future after all.
> "Legalize everything" stops working when addictive substances are involved.
I dunno. We tried making alcohol illegal for a while in the US. Alcohol is pretty addictive, isn't it? And we ran into the same problems we have with other illegal drugs, for the same reason.
> "Legalize everything" stops working when addictive substances are involved.
I don't really think that's the case. Prohibition is what enables all the evils we hate. If all of these drugs were legal, and cheap, and sold at or below cost by the government, _and all other sales were illegal_, then guess what would disappear overnight? Dealers, smugglers, junkies supporting an expensive habit by fencing stolen goods.... and most overdoses. Actual deaths. You still have your addicts, and maybe you get _some_ new ones - but they're getting safer drugs from a place where there are also resources for getting yourself clean. It really, really sounds like a win/win/win.
It’s not a win win because you’re spreading the drug use. And this had health consequences and social ones. I think the culture needs a shift, there are many countries with harsh punishments for drug dealing and the culture around drug usage just does not exist like it does in the US. Some places will even shun addicts and not help them with their addiction. And remarkably, these societies don’t have as many drug problems!
> It’s not a win win because you’re spreading the drug use.
Am I, though? As the fundamental claim behind your dismissal of all the other benefits, including the massive death tolls, it behooves you to back this one up.
> there are many countries with harsh punishments for drug dealing and the culture around drug usage just does not exist like it does in the US
Oh, they're harsh here, too. Can you show that the harshness of the penalties has led to a reduction in drug use?
> Some places will even shun addicts and not help them with their addiction
Cruelty and brutality can certainly influence peoples' behavior. So can compassion and understanding. I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree about how morally righteous it would be to just crush and brutalize anyone involved in the illegal drug trade. Whatever "illegal" is defined as, based on our government's criteria (and disregarding groups like the AMA).
Please go to other countries and see how much cleaner, safer, and peaceful they are without accepting the terror of drug crime in public. There are clearly cultural and contextual differences, but it really goes to show that we do not have to tolerate open crimes and accepting criminal behavior to be forced on the public.
> Please go to other countries and see how much cleaner, safer, and peaceful they are without accepting the terror of drug crime in public.
Nobody thinks drug crime is good. I discussed a solution that would instantly end drug crime, because I think drug crime is a horrible, unacceptable problem.
> but it really goes to show that we do not have to tolerate open crimes and accepting criminal behavior
It really feels like you didn't understand the fundamental concept of legalizing drugs. That doesn't mean legalizing crime. And it doesn't have to mean legalizing public intoxication any more than legalizing alcohol did.
Another haha-only-serious plan would be for the government to stop seizing drugs at busts and instead covertly intercept them, lace a certain percentage with ultra-lethal poison, and send them on their merry way. As the body count rises, it becomes way too dangerous to buy anything through illegal channels.
Or just deputize Duterte and let him execute every addict and dealer he can get his bloody hands on. Genius idea, I wonder why no one else thought of the utterly psychopathic solution?
I don’t live in Oregon but complaints here about drug use on transit—and antisocial activity in general—have also increased sharply since the beginning of the pandemic. So, I suspect if there is actually a causal relationship between legalisation and antisocial behaviour, that it is currently heavily outweighed by other more significant changes that have occurred in the same period of time.
There’s a value somewhere in the horrors of untreated addiction getting first-hand visibility. The true cost of policing, prosecuting, and jailing end-users must be enormous, maybe it will rally people to demand those resources get put toward direct outreach to try to address the root causes of the issue.
Maybe it’s a feature, not a bug.
If that's a feature, it's a costly one, at the expense of ceding the public square to the substance abuse crowd. This LA Times story about the decline of the Metro system since the pandemic almost brought me to tears. I've enjoyed the lines and stations mentioned in the story, and I can see why they're deserted now.
> we have people using in my neighborhood park and on public transit. I stopped taking the train after a ride where we had to evacuate because someone was smoking fentanyl (apparently even the second-hand smoke can affect a person).
This happens regardless of the legality. The big question is whether they can be encouraged to take their usage to safe sites, which is why the whole encampments thing that people don't want was key to a plan involving decriminalization. That's to say, the big picture matters in harm reduction, not the individual steps. We have a large system of incentives that drives the industrial prison complex that have all been in place a long time. You won't see material improvements with one law passed.
> You seem to support it, how would you address the externalities?
The first step is getting our police count up; we had 300 cops for the entire city and were only answering active violent calls. They've hired 300 more. The next step is getting the people who are ready to get off the streets off by opening up the transitional sites that the city and county are fighting over. After all that, we need to invest in non-12 step recovery centers for anyone battling chemical addiction. What you're left with after that is manageable.
I say all of this as someone who has lost a lot of friends to the opioid crisis and has watched Portland's meth problem first hand. I watched heavy-handed policies fail time and time again, deity-focused 12 step programs try to shame people into recovery and fail, and watched as forces of power used those failures to fuel a drug war and prison complex that rivaled no other country on Earth. This isn't just about doing things differently; it's about stopping the hard-nose crap that got us here with no end in sight and actually addressing the problem. The journey will be painful as the journey to here has been painful but it'll be worth it.
> I say all of this as someone who has lost a lot of friends to the opioid crisis and has watched Portland's meth problem first hand.
Sorry to hear that. I’ve been fortunate not to have friends or family caught up in it, but we lost a neighbor last year.
I hope you’re right that things will get better.
In the meantime, it feels disingenuous to act like the impact so far has been positive for everyone, or like legalizing and hard-nose crap are the only options. I think it undermines trust and pits different parts of Portland against each other. It’s easy to get a laugh or an eye roll from my neighbors on the north side of town when I pass along some of the ”obvious” solutions my friends and colleagues from the west side have shared with me. Please consider our perspective: even if we double the police force and start addressing crime more promptly, our neighborhood is still worse off because we have more crime. Other parts of the city don’t seem to appreciate that.
> it feels disingenuous to act like the impact so far has been positive for everyone
I definitely didn't mean to give that impression. They are not positive times; my point was that these times were expected. An entire system has been built around the industrial prison complex that compounds these issues. We won't see improvement for a bit.
> Please consider our perspective: even if we double the police force and start addressing crime more promptly, our neighborhood is still worse off because we have more crime.
100%. Money was diverted away from neighborhood groups and given to racial identity groups years ago. That's when this decline started; just this week that money has been reallocated to neighborhood groups. The county has picked up funding of the racial identity groups; if you notice, those donations come from one person and most of these organizations help that person get elected materially.
> Other parts of the city don’t seem to appreciate that.
I'm still newish to Portland, but if it's any comfort I live in SouthEast. These points aren't just forum talking points to me, they are the very way I understand my immediate world and experiences.
Well it's not legal to smoke it on the bus either. Not to mention, this was going on well before decriminalization in OR, and it's happening up here in WA too.
Treat it the same as drinking in public. Fentanyl should be legal for anyone to buy and use, but that doesn't mean it's ok to do it in public and expose others to it.
People need paths to help (recovery / redemption), integration in society, and happiness. Everyone, including those who would seek to escape with drugs (which should be legalized, taxed, and regulated so they are used responsibly), and those who need a direction to walk to reach success.
Cartels, and predatory businesses who happen to be legal, make their money off of the suffering of others. Society, that is the collective will of the people, has the choice of choosing tolerance, compassion, and empathy to dry up the source of the evil poison that corrodes people and the places they live.
Opioids have been a scourge on every society in which they have proliferated. They have their uses but there is no example in history of a place with legal opioids not having overdoses and dependency issues.
It's also not terribly psychoactive, doesn't make you drive unsafely, and can't permanently ruin your brain or change your personality, unlike that other addictive and legal, but often harmful substance that causes plenty of societal issues: alcohol.
And I say this as someone who really likes wine and would drink it pretty much every day, if it weren't for that whole "can permanently ruin your brain" business.
The new meth is as total disaster that can render a consumer indistinguishable from a schizophrenic for up to a year. Rehab for that duration is prohibitively expensive and you cannot tell me that turning yourself into a virtual schizophrenic is an option we need in our society. I'm all for legal marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, maybe even cocaine. But this shit has gotta go!
Opioids have a long history of causing societal issues. That is my point. Society has a long history, and AFAICT, the social impact is positive (more productivity).
The Sackler's were unscrupulous dope peddlers. The whole premise of Oxycontin was a lie: specifically that it lasted longer than it did; combined with actively pushing the medication for cases where it wasn't necessary helped set up the crisis.
That said, there will always be demand and that demand would be better served if not criminalized. These drugs should be made available for legal purchase but we need to find ways to incentivize minimizing the sale and consumption of such.
I fail to see the difference between letting an adult drink themselves to death vs doping themselves into oblivion. The former is both legal and acceptable whereas the latter is not; but they're effectively the same.
Making a substance that is both highly addictive and highly deadly/prone to instant overdose is pushing death.
Addictiveness, long term health detriment and short term OD chance should all be factored into legalization discussions.
Things that should probably be legalized ASAP: Psychedelics, cannabis
Things that may be safe to use occasionally but with high OD risk: cocaine (example). Perhaps with a prescription?
Things that have extremely high risk to long term mental/physical health and overdose: Heroin, PCP, meth, fentanyl
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Point being: No, I disagree, even in a world where the choice of the individual should have high weight, there are some things that should not be allowed to flourish (particularly with profit motives) and must be stamped out.
No the only thing that can stop the cartels and the overdoses is a robust, effective, and non-corrupt law enforcement system deterring the drug dealing and smuggling with severe criminal penalties.
- the Police Officer's Association address was used to ship out packages to customers in the US, and Segovia operated her drug business partly out of the office; there's photographic evidence for both, taken from her whatsapp communications (which she turned over to investigators)
- she discussed police business with her supplier(s)
- at least one of her customers died of an overdose
- after she was first contacted by investigators, she carried out an elaborate attempt to frame her housekeeper
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23732642-segovia-com...