Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Update: Cops Definitely Giving Out Drugs

I wrote a bit last week about the somewhat explosive allegations that police had been picking people up at Peavy Plaza in downtown Minneapolis (where our wing of the occupy movement has set up), giving them drugs (often pushing people into taking them), then bringing them back to Peavy Plaza still clearly under the influence. As I wrote at the time, while it is standard police practice to learn what people under the influence act like, it is far from accepted practice to pull random people off the streets, cajole them into getting high, and then dropping them off in public while still clearly under the influence.

Not too surprisingly, pretty much every law enforcement agency in the state quickly scrambled to say they weren't involved and besides, there's no evidence this was going on, strongly implying it was being made up. But as usually happens in such cases, that lack of evidence soon became plenty of evidence, and the state public safety commissioner has announced the program is being suspended for now and investigations are underway.

There's not a ton more to say at this point (though it will be quite interesting to see what these investigations turn up, although when police investigate themselves, they have a tendency not to find too much), but it's still hard not to be fairly incredulous over the extreme stupidity on display here. It's almost enough to push someone to say we need some police reform around these parts, but I don't want to be overly critical...

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