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Crime Tag

Last month, Kemberlee asked, What in the world is going on with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department?, and this week we learn that Broward Country school officials and at least one sheriff's deputy recommended in September 2016 that the Stoneman Douglas High School shooter be involuntarily committed. In an almost unbelievable twist, the sheriff's deputy who recommended Nikolas Cruz be committed for psychological evaluation under the Baker Act is none other than school safety officer Scot Peterson.  That's right, the same Scot Peterson who was forced to resign after reports surfaced that he hid outside the school while Cruz carried out his bloody rampage unhindered.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate, an illegal immigrant who had been deported numerous times and was a convicted felon, was acquitted of murder by a San Francisco jury in the July, 2015 fatal shooting of Kate Steinle while she was walking along the city's famous pier with her father. The small solace that many of us had after this travesty of justice was that the federal government immediately unsealed an arrest warrant that included violations related to the charges of a felon in possession of a firearm, involuntary manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon. He was remanded into the custody of the U.S. Marshals to be transported to the Western District of Texas pursuant to the arrest warrant, and remains incarcerated.

Reading reports of so many high-profile murders by teenagers, it's not unusual for people to assume that there's been a big increase in killings by young people, both murder and suicide. But statistics tell a much more complex story. To the question of whether there been a rise in teen suicide, the answer is both yes and no (the following quotes are from an article dated November 2017):
An increase in suicide rates among US teens occurred at the same time social media use surged and a new analysis suggests there may be a link.

The New York Times has experienced an amazing epiphany: Sweden's open-door policy to refugees from Muslim countries has created a crisis of violence and crime in Sweden.  While they myopically attribute this crisis to "gangs," they do dabble with the idea that integration of foreign nationals into the existing socio-cultural framework of the host country may be desirable after all. This is a remarkable shift given the NYT's attempts to cover up the escalation of violence, rape, and crime perpetrated by refugees in Sweden.  Remember their feigned shock when President Trump last year pointed out, quite rightly, that Sweden was feeling the negative affects of letting hundreds of thousands of refugees flood their country?

The latest Florida school shooting is not just tragic, but as one reader pointed out, atrocious. Atrocious because every law enforcement agency involved ignored eleventy billion (approximately) red flags. As more information becomes available, it's looking more and more like there are some serious problems within the Broward County Sherrif's department. We've chronicled several of those here, here, and here.

A former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, has been charged with "unlawful retention of national defense information." Lee allegedly had in his possession notebooks containing the details and identities of current CIA operatives and is suspected of identifying both spy recruits and CIA agents to the Chinese government. The New York Times reports:

A former C.I.A. officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants has been arrested, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. The collapse of the spy network was one of the American government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years.

Unregulated migration may be responsible for the rise in violent crimes in Germany, a study commissioned by the German government claims. The researchers used the state of Lower Saxony to examine the correlation between the refugee arrivals and violent crimes between 2014 and 2016, a period during which such crimes surged by 10.4 percent. More than 90 percent of these additional crimes were attributed to the newly arrived refugees.

As a teenager, one of the books I recall reading during that formative phase in my life was Helter Skelter, written by killer cult leader Charles Manson's determined prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, who won death sentences for Manson and his band of butchers. The tenacious lawyer, who passed away in 2015, was interviewed by Time Magazine about his book in 2009 about his book and the country's continued fascination with the cult. His explanation centered on the era in which the slaughters occurred.

Last November, a Pennsylvania couple's home was raided by police who mistakenly believed the couple's hibiscus plants to be marijuana.  The couple is now reportedly suing Buffalo Township and Nationwide Insurance for "excessive force, false arrest, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy in their lawsuit." The couple's ordeal began when Nationwide Insurance sent an agent out to assess a claim; the agent took pictures of the couple's hibiscus plants and sent them to local police as evidence of the illegal planting and growing of marijuana.  Buffalo Township police reacted by raiding the couple's home and leading a partially-dressed and barefoot Audrey Cramer, 66, out to their patrol car.  Her husband Edward Cramer, 69, was met with drawn guns and arrested upon returning home while his wife was still sitting, handcuffed, in the cruiser.

The Harvey Weinstein scandal has given actor Corey Feldman an opportunity to revisit an issue he has been talking about for years. Feldman claims he is a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of pedophiles who hold powerful positions in Hollywood. He has also repeatedly said that the problem is worse than anyone knows.