In 2003, a team led by J. Correll flashed random photos of white and black faces, some superimposed with guns, others with harmless items such as cell phones and wallets. They asked college students to press one key indicating "shoot" the suspect, and another indicating "don't shoot." The students were more likely to mistakenly fire at black faces that were unarmed compared to unarmed white faces.

But what about police officers? With their special training and rules about when to fire, perhaps they will do better. A study by E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested police officers on a similar task.

...

48 mostly white police officers who volunteered to participate in the project were told only that the study was about "decisions to shoot." They had 630 milliseconds after each face was displayed to press the "shoot" or "don't shoot" button on the computer running the test. As the test began, results were the same as with college students: Police officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot black suspects holding harmless items than white suspects holding the same items. They made an average of 3.63 errors over 20 trials when the suspect was black, but only 2.65 errors when the suspect was white.

But an interesting result occurred as the test continued. After another 80 trials, about 40 of which included the key situation of a person holding a harmless object, the disparity between reactions to white and black suspects disappeared. During the second half of the experiment, the average number of errors for black suspects diminished to 2.60, statistically indistinguishable from the rate for white suspects.

A Memphis police officer is accused of beating up someone under arrest. The person seen being attacked on the tape is a transexual. She says the attack is a hate crime.

Now the FBI is investigating. One officer is off the job, and another is on desk duty.

Duanna Johnson says the officer beat her up after calling her all sorts of names and making fun of her sexuality.

On the videotape you see Johnson being attacked. One officer is holding Johnson back, while another throws punches.

Basil Parasiris was acquitted on Friday by a 12-person jury at the Longueuil courthouse, on Montreal's South Shore.

He was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Const. Daniel Tessier, who died after being shot three times last spring after he entered Parasiris's Brossard home with a battering ram during a botched drug raid.

The verdict means the jury believed Parasiris's self-defence argument was enough to raise a reasonable doubt about the charges.

The father of two insisted he believed his family was being attacked by home invaders when a police team swarmed their house on March 2, 2007.

Overman said that while he was taking photos, an officer put up a police-tape boundary behind him. Overman said that when Lacey detective David Miller told him to move outside the boundary, he complied.

He said that as he walked away, he overheard the detective tell another officer that Overman should be arrested immediately if he crossed the police line.

Overman said he turned around and approached the detective.

"I just wanted to understand why he was singling me out when I had complied with everything he asked me to do," Overman said Saturday.

"I wasn't angry," he added. "I just don't like seeing the media singled out and picked on."

Overman said that the two walked toward each other and that the detective screamed at him.

They got so close that their noses briefly touched, Overman said; he says he was shoved backward and arrested.

Overman was detained, cited and released, Suessman said. Overman said he was handcuffed and spent about 30 minutes in the back of a patrol car.

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

...

The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

An Atlanta police officer has been sentenced to 4 years and six months in prison for lying to investigators after a drug raid ended in the death of a 92-year-old woman... Kathryn Johnston died in a hail of bullets after narcotics officers burst into her northwest Atlanta home on November 21, 2006, using a special no-knock warrant to search for drugs.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit -- meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon -- eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

...

Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, "You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country."

Another agent eventually told her to go home because Mr. Salerno was being detained as an asylum-seeker.

"The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy," she recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. "Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?"

Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy.

Last Saturday night, a group of about 20 D.C.-area libertarians headed down to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial for some flash mob fun. The prank was harmless revelry: To ring in Jefferson's birthday, we would meet on the steps of the memorial at 11:55pm, wearing iPods, then dance for about 10 minutes, capture the whole thing on video, and leave.

I had planned to participate, but was about 10 minutes late. By the time I arrived it was already over. The National Park Police broke the whole thing up just a few minutes in, punctuating their lack of a sense of humor by arresting one of the dancers, a friend of mine and a regular at reason events (she's asking her name be kept private until she can speak with an attorney). She was cuffed, taken out to a paddy wagon, then booked and held at a Park Police station. Everyone I spoke with says there was no noise, there were no threats, and no laws broken. The woman who was arrested was stone-sober, wasn't aggressive or threatening, and the dancers weren't trespassing--the Memorial is open to the public 24 hours. Even if one were to assume this was a "demonstration"--a stretch, anyway--permit are required only for 25 or more people. There were about 20 at the Memorial.

...

Of course, the real irony here is that all of this happened at the Jefferson Memorial, in observance of Jefferson’s birthday. Go out to celebrate the birth of the most hardcore, anti-authoritarian of the Founding Fathers, get hauled off in handcuffs.

Clearly if you dance, you're a terrorist.

Immigration agents systematically entered homes and made arrests without proper warrants during raids to round up immigration fugitives in New Jersey, according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday.

The lawsuit, brought by lawyers at the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, will provide a constitutional test of law enforcement methods often used by immigration agents since May 2006 when they began operations across the country to track down and deport immigrants who had been ordered to leave by the courts.

The suit, against officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on behalf of 10 plaintiffs, including two United States citizens, contends that teams of ICE agents used "deceit or, in some cases, raw force" to gain "unlawful entry."

...

One plaintiff in the lawsuit, Maria Argueta, has been a legal immigrant since 2001. During a predawn operation in January at her home in North Bergen, N.J., the lawsuit claims, ICE agents persuaded Ms. Argueta to open her door by telling her they were police officers searching for a wanted criminal. Ms. Argueta was detained and held for 36 hours.

Another plaintiff, Arturo Flores, a United States citizen, said ICE agents showed no warrant when they forced their way into his house in Clifton, N.J., in November 2006 and conducted a search. A third plaintiff, Veronica Covias, a legal immigrant in Paterson, N.J., said agents pushed open her door in March 2007 even though she demanded that they show her a warrant.

As part of a recent CNN special called Black in America much new information came to light about the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., information that should stand as a stark warning of the dangers of allowing one branch of government to engage in surveillance of American citizens without oversight from another.

That is precisely what happened in the 60s under J. Edgar Hoover, who kept up a relentless and obsessive campaign to eavesdrop on King and use anything he found to discredit the civil rights leader, all in blatant violation of the 4th amendment prohibition on unlawful searches. The 4th amendment requires that all searches and surveillance on American citizens be undertaken only after showing probable cause and getting a warrant from a judge, yet the only person who authorized the bugging of King's home and the tapping of his phones was Robert Kennedy, attorney general at the time.

After King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech in Washington in August 1963, the FBI began to focus enormous institutional attention on him. One FBI memo from just after that speech declared King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country," while another called for a meeting of department heads to "explore how best to carry on our investigation [of King] to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the Bureau." Left unsaid is any legitimate reason why the FBI should be investigating King at all, a man clearly being surveilled solely because he advocated ideas the government didn't like.

One month after that famous speech, Kennedy approved a request from Hoover to allow the FBI to break into King's home and place recording devices. There doesn't appear to be any concern at all for the legality of the operation; Kennedy's only concern was for the "delicacy of this particular matter" and he wanted to make sure that the agents didn't get caught planting the bugs. The chief law enforcement officer in the nation, sworn to uphold the constitution, had given permission to the FBI to flagrantly break the law and violate the constitution by bugging the home of a man who had broken no laws whatsoever, a man who had done nothing but engage in perfectly legal protest against laws that are universally viewed with disgust today.

...

We've already weakened the probable cause requirement, allowing the executive branch to issue National Security Letters that certify that a given request for surveillance is part of a national security investigation. And we now know that the FBI has abused that authority literally thousands of times over the last few years, according to a Department of Justice report. We've already set up a secret court to hear such warrant requests to insure that no sensitive information will be released, and we've already passed a law that makes it a crime for anyone who is under surveillance to be informed of that fact.

But even these already weakened safeguards are too much for the Bush administration. They insist that the president has the unilateral power to authorize the FBI, the CIA and the NSA to listen in on any phone conversation or intercept any email, even those to or from American citizens, without ever asking for a warrant even from the secret FISA court. No need to meet the probable cause standard, or any other standard, because no one outside of those agencies will ever know who is being surveilled or why. In short, they insist that they have the omnipotent authority claimed by J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s.

Could they be using that power to do what Hoover and Kennedy did, to dig up dirt on political opponents that can be used to keep them compliant? Does that sound paranoid to you? It shouldn't. Those who ignore history, remember, are doomed to repeat it, and this is a lesson we should have learned long ago. If we allow the government to operate with impunity, to ignore the safeguards set up to protect our liberty, we cannot be surprised when we find that liberty imperiled.

The entire aricle is very well written.