To Serve and Protect?

Oh, dear...Have our Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) gone off the deep end? Is this now policy to NOT DO THEIR BLOODY JOBS?!?

Read on, dear readers...

911 Operator Resigns In Face Of Criticism

Posted: Feb 11, 2008 08:06 PM EST

The 911 dispatcher who took the frantic call from kidnap victim Adrian Jaimes' sister last week -- and was criticized for his curt manner with the child -- resigned his job on Monday.

Dispatcher Victor Cervantes was a 22-year veteran of the job. Zuleima Jaimes, 10, called 911 and spoke with Cervantes after her brother, Adrian Jaimes, was snatched out of the family car.

Police Chief Art Acevedo expressed concerns with the way Cervantes dealt with Zuleima on the phone when he briefed the media on the Amber Alert to find Adrian Jaimes.

Here is a partial transcript of what was said between Cervantes and Jaimes:

Jaimes: "We were going to school and a man opened the door and took my brother."

Cervantes: "He took your brother?"

Jaimes: "Yes."

Cervantes: "Let me talk to someone else, I can't understand what you're saying. Who took him, that's what I want to know."

Jaimes: "I don't know. They just took him."

Cervantes: "Quit crying, because I can't understand you. The more you cry, the less I hear what you're saying."

"It was time for him to move on and that he realized he did not come across as very professional or very sympathetic," said Assistant Police Chief Leo Enriquez of Cervantes.

Enriquez said Cervantes had done his job by dispatching a patrol unit to the scene while talking to the 10-year-old, but he added the victim had already been traumatized and did not deserve to be spoken to in that manner.

"We are going to look at the training that the dispatchers receive and see if we can upgrade that a little bit," Enriquez said.

Enriquez said he believed Cervantes had been reprimanded in the past for his job performance.

Okay...story number two:

911 Operator Errors During Double Murder Call

There's a new investigation connected to a double murder that took place in South Bexar County Sunday night, and a 911 dispatcher is at the center of it.

The Bexar County Sheriff's Department is questioning how the dispatcher handled the first calls for help from the scene of the murder. Administrators said it appears the dispatcher didn't follow procedures while handling the call.

News 4 obtained a copy of the 911 tape. The first 911 call from a bloody murder scene in Von Ormy lasted 6 minutes and and 45 seconds. Investigators said the dispatcher got the address wrong, among other things.


Dispatcher: "Bexar County Sheriff's Office."

Caller: "Yes ma'am, we need a police officer and ambulance out here to 14081 IH 35 South #3."

Dispatcher: "140-what, sir?"

Caller: "081 IH-35 South."

The 911 call for help came from a man at the Las Penitas Mobile Home Park, who described himself as the manager's son. The man told the dispatcher the home of Jose and Esmeralda Herrera was a bloody scene.


Caller: "I think these two people, they were murdered. I don't know if they are dead or not."

Dispatcher: "Okay, sir. Hold on. You need to calm down a bit. Okay?"


The man had already given the dispatcher the couple's address twice, but a 1 minute and 22 seconds into the call...


Dispatcher: "What's the address again?"

Caller: "It's 14081 IH-35 South #3."


It was the 3rd time the dispatcher was heard asking for the address of the Herrera's, who had both been stabbed with a hunting knife more than 25 times.


Dispatcher: "Just hang on with me. Don't hang up. Okay?"


Soon after a minute of dead air, the dispatcher tells the South Bexar County caller, she needs to call a city dispatcher for help. The dispatcher then rings the San Antonio emergency system.


S.A. Dispatcher: "San Antonio Police. Can I help you?"

Bexar Co. Dispatcher: "I have a caller on the line whose address is 4081 IH 35 South Apartment 3."

S.A. Dispatcher: "4081? That's not even a correct address."

Bexar Co. Dispatcher: "That's the address he gave me. 4081."

S.A. Dispatcher: "Is he on the line?"

Bexar Co. Dispatcher: "I'll put him on the line."

S.A. Dispatcher: "Thank you."

Bexar County investigators told News 4 they are disturbed about how the dispatcher handled the call.

Administrators said the 911 dispatcher sent emergency crews to the wrong address and was too slow and incorrect in gathering information from the caller.

"Quite frankly we were all a little disturbed on the response of that call. We can't tolerate that. It's very important when we get the call. We have to get the response to the people, to the public as soon as possible," said Chief Ronald Bennett of the Bexar County Sheriff's Department.

Bexar County investigators want to get the dispatcher's side of the incident. Chief Bennett told News 4 the operator will be interviewed by her supervisors as soon as she reports to work Tuesday night.

Other Dispatchers Disciplined
This is not the first time a dispatcher has been in trouble for not doing his or her job. The Trouble Shooters investigated disciplined dispatchers, and what they found was also disturbing.

The Trouble Shooters reviewed disciplinary records for dispatcher from several 911 call centers in our area. Incidents including dispatchers not sending an officer to an emergency call, a dispatcher falling asleep on duty, and another hanging up on someone to take a personal call.

But probably the most alarming case involved a home invasion with children home alone. That dispatcher told the officer it was a low priority call, and it took over an hour for them to arrive. The kids' mother was angry at the slow response.

"Apparently to them it wasn't important. It wasn't their kids," said the mom. "If you kids are alone, someone is breaking in and they're inside and the police cannot respond to that as an emergency. What is considered an emergency?"

That mom believed the dispatcher should have been fired. But the dispatcher is still handling 9-1-1 calls. Her punishment was a written reprimand.

If you have a problem with a dispatcher, you should put your complaint in writing to their supervisor.

Story number three:

911 Operators Refused Aid to Woman Left to Die
Posted on Friday, November 02 @ 19:23:28 PDT

LOS ANGELES — New 911 tapes released Tuesday reveal that dispatchers refused to send help to a woman ignored by hospital staff as she lay dying on the floor of a Los Angeles emergency room.

Edith Isabel Rodriguez, 43, died after dispatchers on two 911 calls refused to contact paramedics or an ambulance to send her to another facility, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. The second dispatcher went so far as to argue with the caller over whether it was a real emergency.

Rodriguez died of a perforated bowel on May 9 at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. Her death was ruled accidental by the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

In the calls — posted after they were released by the county Sheriff's Department under the newspaper's California Public Records Act request — callers plead for help for the woman left bleeding from the mouth and writhing in pain for 45 minutes on the hospital's floor.

"I'm in the emergency room. My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out," he said in Spanish through an interpreter.

"What's wrong with her?" a dispatcher asked.

"She's vomiting blood," Prado said.

"OK, and why aren't they helping her?" the dispatcher asked.

"They're watching her there and they're not doing anything. They're just watching her," Prado said.

The dispatcher told the man to contact a doctor and then said paramedics won't pick up his wife because she already was in a hospital. Later, she told Prado to contact county police officers at a security desk.

Experts have said Rodriguez could have survived had she been treated early enough. The head of the county's Department of Health Services, which oversees the facility, has called her death "inexcusable."

A second 911 call was placed eight minutes later by a woman bystander who requested that an ambulance be sent to take Rodriguez to some other hospital for care.

"She's definitely sick and there's a guy that's ignoring her," the woman told a different dispatcher.

During the brief call, the dispatcher argued with the woman over whether there really was an emergency.

"I cannot do anything for you for the quality of the hospital. ... It is not an emergency. It is not an emergency, ma'am," he said.

"You're not here to see how they're treating her," the woman replied.
The dispatcher refused to call paramedics and told the woman that she should contact hospital supervisors "and let them know" if she is unhappy.

"May God strike you, too, for acting the way you just acted," the woman said finally.

"No, negative ma'am, you're the one," he said.

"What's real confusing … was that she was at a medical facility," Sheriff's Capt. Steven M. Roller, who is in charge of the Century Station, which handled the calls, told the Times. "That poses some real quandaries."

Roller told the Times that the second dispatcher's tone was inappropriate.

"As a station commander, I don't like any of my employees getting rude or nasty with any caller, regardless, and in that particular case, obviously, the employee's conduct could have been better," Roller said, telling the Times the employee received written "counseling."

Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital formerly was known as Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. The name was changed as part of a reorganization after years of problems including patient deaths blamed on sloppy nursing care and hospital mismanagement that has threatened its federal funding.

Okay...now the story that begat this posting:



911 dispatcher gets pink slip after cursing caller

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- A Nashville, Tennessee, 911 operator has been fired after he was recorded saying that he didn't "give a s---" about what happened to a woman who had just called to report her ex-boyfriend was threatening her.

Emergency Communications Center spokeswoman Amanda Sluss said Wednesday that Frank Roth was in training during the February incident and was fired a month later.

Roth made the comments after promising police would arrive soon for a woman who called saying her ex-boyfriend held her at knifepoint and later was threatening her.

After hanging up with her but while still being recorded, he said, "I really don't give a s--- what happens to you."

Sluss says the incident is not reflective of how 911 operators treat callers and that "a series of errors" led to the delay in response to Sheila Jones.

"Certainly this particular caller didn't receive the service she deserved," Sluss said. "This is not indicative of how our employees treat citizens. It's not something that should have been said. It's not what we train our employees to do."

It took police three hours to reach the scene after the first call.

Nashville TV station WTVF first reported the story after one of its reporters obtained the 911 recording.

Will you all agree with me that this is a very disturbing trend?

This is why the Second Amendment is important. Remember that...

Pot Shrinks Tumors; Government Knew in '74

By Raymond Cushing, AlterNet

The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February, 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis-

The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been administered to tumor-bearing animals; the first was a Virginia investigation 26 years ago- In both studies, the THC shrank or destroyed tumors in a majority of the test subjects-

Most Americans don't know anything about the Madrid discovery- Virtually no major U-S- newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb- 29, 2000-

The ominous part is that this isn't the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors- In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice -- lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia-

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, "The Emperor Wears No Clothes-" In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out -- unsuccessfully -- to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the "high-"

The Madrid researchers reported in the March issue of "Nature Medicine" that they injected the brains of 45 rats with cancer cells, producing tumors whose presence they confirmed through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)- On the 12th day they injected 15 of the rats with THC and 15 with Win-55,212-2 a synthetic compound similar to THC- "All the rats left untreated uniformly died 12-18 days after glioma (brain cancer) cell inoculation --- Cannabinoid (THC)-treated rats survived significantly longer than control rats- THC administration was ineffective in three rats, which died by days 16-18- Nine of the THC-treated rats surpassed the time of death of untreated rats, and survived up to 19-35 days- Moreover, the tumor was completely eradicated in three of the treated rats-" The rats treated with Win-55,212-2 showed similar results-

The Spanish researchers, led by Dr- Manuel Guzman of Complutense University, also irrigated healthy rats' brains with large doses of THC for seven days, to test for harmful biochemical or neurological effects- They found none-

"Careful MRI analysis of all those tumor-free rats showed no sign of damage related to necrosis, edema, infection or trauma --- We also examined other potential side effects of cannabinoid administration- In both tumor-free and tumor-bearing rats, cannabinoid administration induced no substantial change in behavioral parameters such as motor coordination or physical activity- Food and water intake as well as body weight gain were unaffected during and after cannabinoid delivery- Likewise, the general hematological profiles of cannabinoid-treated rats were normal- Thus, neither biochemical parameters nor markers of tissue damage changed substantially during the 7-day delivery period or for at least 2 months after cannabinoid treatment ended-"

Guzman's investigation is the only time since the 1974 Virginia study that THC has been administered to live tumor-bearing animals- (The Spanish researchers cite a 1998 study in which cannabinoids inhibited breast cancer cell proliferation, but that was a "petri dish" experiment that didn't involve live subjects-)

In an email interview for this story, the Madrid researcher said he had heard of the Virginia study, but had never been able to locate literature on it- Hence, the Nature Medicine article characterizes the new study as the first on tumor-laden animals and doesn't cite the 1974 Virginia investigation-

"I am aware of the existence of that research- In fact I have attempted many times to obtain the journal article on the original investigation by these people, but it has proven impossible-" Guzman said-

In 1983 the Reagan/Bush Administration tried to persuade American universities and researchers to destroy all 1966-76 cannabis research work, including compendiums in libraries, reports Jack Herer, who states, "We know that large amounts of information have since disappeared-"

Guzman provided the title of the work -- "Antineoplastic activity of cannabinoids," an article in a 1975 Journal of the National Cancer Institute -- and this writer obtained a copy at the University of California medical school library in Davis and faxed it to Madrid-

The summary of the Virginia study begins, "Lewis lung adenocarcinoma growth was retarded by the oral administration of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabinol (CBN)" -- two types of cannabinoids, a family of active components in marijuana- "Mice treated for 20 consecutive days with THC and CBN had reduced primary tumor size-"

The 1975 journal article doesn't mention breast cancer tumors, which featured in the only newspaper story ever to appear about the 1974 study -- in the Local section of the Washington Post on August 18, 1974-

Under the headline, "Cancer Curb Is Studied," it read in part:

"The active chemical agent in marijuana curbs the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice and may also suppress the immunity reaction that causes rejection of organ transplants, a Medical College of Virginia team has discovered-" The researchers "found that THC slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent-"

Guzman, writing from Madrid, was eloquent in his response after this writer faxed him the clipping from the Washington Post of a quarter century ago-

In translation, he wrote:

"It is extremely interesting to me, the hope that the project seemed to awaken at that moment, and the sad evolution of events during the years following the discovery, until now we once again draw back the veil‚ over the anti-tumoral power of THC, twenty-five years later- Unfortunately, the world bumps along between such moments of hope and long periods of intellectual castration-"

News coverage of the Madrid discovery has been virtually nonexistent in this country- The news broke quietly on Feb- 29, 2000 with a story that ran once on the UPI wire about the Nature Medicine article- This writer stumbled on it through a link that appeared briefly on the Drudge Report web page- The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times all ignored the story, even though its newsworthiness is indisputable: a benign substance occurring in nature destroys deadly brain tumors-

Raymond Cushing is a journalist, musician and filmmaker- This article was named by Project Censored as a "Top Censored Story of 2000-"

Bulletin from MySpace (thanks, fellows!)

Pot Shrinks Tumors; Government Knew in '74

Okay...a video that is pretty much right to the point (be warned - language is QUITE direct):



My bud convinced me that this video isn't over the edge...but if you want something more elegant, H.L. Mencken said it best:

"It is one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs... that the government of the United States, in both its legislative and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting... that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity... that the foreign policy of the United States, its habitual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe, is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable... that the American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages."

Some quick headlines and ranting:

Heart expaerts warn that tasers are deadly - now tell me something I DIDN'T know...

Lou Pearlman, creator (?) of boy bands The Backstreet Boys and N'Sync Sentenced to 25 Years for Scam - yeah...the scam not withstanding...he should be put in the stocks for unleashing that crapfest upon our senses.

Last but not least: Depleted Uranium Shells Used by U.S. Military Worse Than Nuclear Weapons - oh, that first picture is gruesome...I have NOTHING FUNNY to say here...

I found a great link at CannabisNews:

Iran/Contra was all about two things:

1. Getting the Black population addicted to the new wonder drug, CRACK - this was created by the CIA, FBI and other agencies (I'd appreciate some verification - any takers?); in order to destabilize the Black communities who were coming to awareness of the similarities with every other community coming of age in America. The agencies were successful with the Black Panther Coloring Book and smears against celebrities such as Jean Seberg; the next step was to divide and conquer...but how to do so? Cocaine was entirely too expensive, and freebasing was considered too industrious...so a cheap, addicting smokable form was created, and introduced into the Black communities - goodbye, Black Panthers! Who has money for causes when they're chasing that "hit"?

2. The "War On Drugs" is a complete oxymoron, like "military intelligence". Kevin Ives and Don Henry were murdered by the operators of the Mena Drug Ring, overseen at one point by the then-governor of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton. When the operation was discovered, the boys were murdered, and their murders were covered up by coroners and officials stating that the kids were playing on train tracks and had gone to sleep, which led to them being run over by a train. The operation was then moved to Afghanistan, where our soldiers are putting their lives on the line for the next crop of opium and heroin.

The War On Drugs is actually the War Against AMERICANS.

Sign the petition at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth - I did.

R.I P. Jim Mooney (1919 - 2008); Out-Of-Control LEOs

Okay...Jim Mooney was the preeminent artist of SUPERGIRL for DC Comics, but that was not my first exposure to Jim's work. I, like many other kids growing up, was a Spider-Man aficionado. He inked AMAZING SPIDER-MAN over John Romita, Sr. and John Buscema. He also alternated between penciling and inking PETER PARKER: THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN. He also provided the art for the flashback story in SUPREME #47, starring Sally Crane, Ethan Crane's sister and secretly SUPREMA, the Maid of Might! It's actually a great story (and with Alan Moore as the writer, you get nothing less!), with Satana as her evil nemesis and a great twist on the Devil in the Lord Sin, who is a gestalt of the seven deadly sins in one being. Read it - you'll like it!

Jim, I fondly remember PPTSS #s 32-34, featuring the Lizard-Iguana battles, and the first indication that some lizardliness would come Spidey's way...which it did in PPTSS #s 39-40 (39 drawn by John Romita, Jr. and inked by Jim!) - a great battle which displayed not only Peter Parker's courage, but also his scientific acumen. This is one of the things I felt I had in common with the quintessential bookworm, Peter Parker. Jim...you made those adventures shine for me, and you will be remembered fondly.

Now for the bad stuff:



Looks like a half-field soccer game, eh?