The Colorado Index

Our Private Motorcycle Gang Exposed

I am almost certain that few in our local motorcycle gang like this.  

I know a bit more about one officer on this list than I can say.  It was no surprise to find his name here.  His transgression is also familiar.

If there is  a lesson to be learned it is that when the blue line covers up conduct it shouldn't, the conduct is repeated.

Did The Gazette Get It Right?

Or Wrong.  It looks like apple polishing to me.

Judge for yourself.

http://www.gazette.com/opinion/makepeace_47846___article.html/alcohol_wine.html

Special Treatment by our Local Motorcycle Gang

Just a few months ago, the Colorado Springs Police Department admitted that while it didn't have "quotas" for traffic stops by police officers, it did have "minimum performance goals."

http://www.gazette.com/articles/colorado_47251___article.html/police_driver.htmlWe wrote about the obvious attempts by the police, including the police chief, to lie their way out of the situation.

It seems that the "minimum performance goals" are set aside when the person being stopped is a former mayor, Mary Lou Makepeace.

Alerted to a report of a possible drunken driver in a silver sport utility vehicle, Pikes Peak Community College police officer Mike Peterson pulled over an Isuzu on Interquest Parkway after seeing it cross the center line three times.

It was about 9:15 p.m. Christmas Eve, and the driver was heading home with her adult daughter and a boy about 4 years old. Peterson noted in his report the woman's eyes were watery and bloodshot and that her breath smelled of alcohol. She acknowledged having had "a couple of glasses of wine with dinner," according to Peterson.

The driver declined to take a roadside sobriety test, which is her right under the law. A breath test found her blood-alcohol content was .077 percent - lower than the .08 percent limit for drunken driving in Colorado, but higher than the ability-impaired limit of .05 percent.

Peterson had checked the license plate and knew who the driver was. He called Colorado Springs police for backup. The city police officer also recognized the driver and called for a sergeant to supervise the investigation.

Mary Lou Makepeace wasn't arrested or ticketed.

It gets better, but we don't want to steal The Gazette's thunder, other than to note that legal experts who specialize in DUI events are questioning why Mary Lou Makepeace wasn't ticketed if she was too impaired to drive.

The most telling sentence in the story comes from the report of an on scene Pikes Peak Community College Security officer:

Makepeace said she would agree to a blood test, but the officers told her they would have to arrest her before they could do that, an action they didn't want to take, according to Peterson's report.

This is the kind of selective policing that should make ordinary citizens feel good about our Police Department.  Or should it?

Edited to add:  The blogging software I use is currently broken in that it doesn't insert links correctly.  My apologies.

The Motorcycle Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight

The Colorado Springs Police Department is really good at writing traffic tickets, but not at all competent when it comes to police work.

Today’s Gazette reports:

A man found dead Sunday outside his Stetson Hill home was shot to death, Colorado Springs police said.

An autopsy Monday revealed that 46-year-old Richard L. Schreiner died of a gunshot wound to the torso.

Neighbors had seen him shoveling snow around his home shortly before his death, police said. Colorado Springs police spokesman Lt. David Whitlock had said Sunday there were no obvious signs of foul play.

Police offered no explanation Monday for the discrepancy

Talk about a “cold case.”  The cops can’t claim in court that they investigated the scene before it was contaminated.  They weren't even clever enough to figure out that it was a crime scene.

If the Colorado Springs City Council actually spent money on policing instead of creating a revenue resource, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.

Everyone Has A Story. Here's Mine

Most who are dissatisfied with legal systm are "sore losers."  I guess, since I "won" my lawsuit, I am a "sore winner."  It doesn't have quite the bite, does it?

My eight year old lawsuit finally came to a conclusion this in June.  I couldn’t begin to write about it in detail until August 26th.  In early September I started shopping the information to various public figures and the media with the condition that they couldn’t write about it until after the election

As I go into retirement, I am many hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer than I should be, and would be if the legal ethics system worked.  I am poorer than I would be if there was any fear of prosecution for perjury or obstruction of justice.  I am poorer than I would be if there was any fear of consequences on the part of a judge when he takes 27 months to make a ruling.

That is a mighty incentive for my doing what I am doing.  It is also why I will keep doing what I am doing.

Read the Introduction first.  It clears some legal hurdles and absolves my attorney.

You can decide if a Colorado Springs home builder tried to set up a scam that exploited the obvious weaknesses in the legal system.  If I were to call him a criminal, he could sue me.  I can, with impunity describe what he did.  I listed 19 different events that made it appear to be a scam, and I had more.

You can decide for yourself the level of competence of the Colorado Springs Police Department.  If you decide that the builder had a self-created motive for burglarizing my house over a period of years, then you might want to ask why the whole Colorado Springs Police Department, from the mayor down was running interference for the cop who was running interference for him. 

 You can decide if Judge Larry Schwartz tried to punish me for writing a 1996 letter and if the punishment fit the “crime,” if you think what I did was a crime.  If the treatment I got was intended as punishment, can you imagine what would happen if I got a traffic ticket?

In many ways, I am doing a public service.  Everything that happened to me could happen to any of you who read this.  Something similar will likely happen to a few of you as you inevitably go into divorce court.

Not long ago, I met with a legislator who got a copy of this as background for the real subject of the meeting.  I was asked if anything would happen to the builder.  Nothing will happen to the builder.  While continued criminal activity (if that is what it was) supposedly renews the clock on the statute of limitations, it would be pointless for me to make a complaint.

Not only will nothing happen to the builder, he will make a claim against his disbarred lawyer’s insurance and likely get everything he spent back.  I’m out about $50,000 in hard money and much more in lost opportunity costs.

Nothing will happen to the cop.

Nothing will happen to the Judge.  Lawyers protect judges, judges protect lawyers, and the general public gets the shaft.

We're Gonna Be More "Helpful"

One of the more interesting things about blogging is that it can be used to make legitimate points in ways that the msm wouldn’t consider.

For example, one of the things I have thought about doing for a while is creating a bunch of “help” essays whose real purpose is to embarrass the system into reform.  The msm would never consider using that tactic.

Suppose, for example, I wanted to embarrass the Colorado Springs Police Department into reallocating its  resources into actually investigating burglaries.  Why not write an essay that lays out a safe way to commit burglaries and avoid prosecution?  While on the surface such an essay might seem not in the public interest, it might generate enough outrage that the police department actually plugged some holes.

That is just one of many “help” projects I have thought of.writing.  To avoid a lawsuit, I need to include a paragraph at the bottom of each essay that spells out the purpose of the essay.

Of course, this wouldn’t be at all helpful if we didn’t occasionally write essays that really did help the public.  Expect to see both kinds of posts here, one kind taking the sting off the other.

Expect this blog to become much more “helpful” in the future.  In fact, as of today, we have a new “helpful hints” category.

A US Attorney Who Hates Blogs

US Attorney for the District of Colorado Troy Eid hates bloggers.  Moreover, he hates reporters who have blogs or who try to compete with blogs.  The Denver Post, has published a not well thought out diatribe by Mr. Eid titled:  "Losing the truth in the depths of the web."

Bloggers do some very obnoxious things that cannot be defended, but on the other hand, so do lawyers, judges, and cops.

His disgust with bloggers who try to out witnesses and try to discourage them from testifying is justified. [Note: As originally written, this said the opposite of what we intended because we left out three words ]  The practice is repugnant, and we wouldn't want to defend that in any way:

Witness protection is a case in point. The Post has understandably written and editorialized about the need to protect the identity of witnesses in criminal investigations. Yet the full name of one such witness recently appeared on The Post's own website, and then in print.

The case itself involved violent gangs that have previously terrorized other witnesses. The danger to innocent people and the justice system is obvious. Not to be left behind, the Rocky Mountain News did the same thing within hours.

It used to be that media "outing" of witnesses was rare. If a reporter called, the danger to the witness could be carefully explored. More often than not, that journalist — drawing on professionalism and experience — would hold or modify their story to inform the public while protecting the witness' identity whenever possible.

That was before Blog Nation.

Now there are entire websites devoted to disclosing witnesses identities and discouraging them from testifying or cooperating with law enforcement.

It's a scary trend, made far more dangerous when mainstream media later amplify this same sensitive information for fear of being scooped.

Then Troy Eid goes off the deep end. 

Far better to take a deep breath, put blogging in proper perspective, and give real journalists and editors the time to do their jobs. In the meantime, those of us in law enforcement and the criminal justice system will do ours — Internet speed be damned.

The problem is that you folks in law enforcement don't always do your job.  This blog, and others exists because either law enforcement or the legal profession or both too often resist doing your job.  This blog exists because the enforcement of lawyer and judicial ethics rules is nothing more than a joke in Colorado.

Not long ago, a Colorado Springs Police public affairs cop claimed in a television interview that the police "always investigated crimes that were reported to them."  By your standards, that must be true because the msm put it out, and they put it out at their leisure.  The problem is that it not only isn't true, the cops in Colorado Springs will use some very distasteful tactics to avoid doing investigations.

Likewise, as the non punishment of the two prosecutors who sent Tim Masters up the river illustrates, Attorney Regulation will go out of its way to avoid punishing lawyers, no matter how outrageous their conduct or how much damage they do.  Does that get reported?  Not here in Colorado Springs, and yet the Gazette had the time to do the reporting.  The Denver Post reported on it but didn't think it wrong.  Only the Rocky Mountain News thought it both newsworthy and wrong.

Blogs do an important service for the public by keeping who earn their living at the public trough honest when newspapers won't.  Sometimes they get carried away, but your complaint is too heavy handed for my taste.

Isn't it interesting that when I wanted to write a piece for the Denver Post about how bad the Judicial Performance Commission system is and how much worse it had become after this year's mangling by the legislature, I was told to keep it to 650 words.  Troy Eid disparages what I do, and he gets 1120 words.

Your essay is another embarrassment to the Denver Post.  Troy Eid should be embarrassed as well.

Somewhere In Copdom Today...Tears are Flowing

When a police officer testifies about a crime or an investigation, the most important thing that he brings to court is his profession's collective reputation for integrity.  Note that I said that he brings his profession's reputation for integrity, not his own reputation.

If a police officer testifies that red is blue or green is orange, his testimony is very likely going to be taken at face value by judges and juries because he supposedly is an independent and trained observer with no ax to grind.  It doesn't matter to him or the jury if his testimony is totally fouled up because he was too lazy, distracted, or whatever to actually make the observations that he wants to testify to.  He will show up and say something, and as a professional witness, he will say it with conviction.

Like any other profession, there are good cops and bad cops, industrious cops and lazy cops, cops with integrity and cops with none.  My experience through life has been that most fall into the former of each of these categories, but there are exceptions.

Sometime before the turn of the decade, I was stopped by one member of the Mayor's motorcycle gang.  I had made a left turn at a stop light in front of him.  The light had just turned and everyone was starting from a dead stop, so he was never in any danger.  I just hadn't seen him because the car in front of him had blocked my view and because of him, the car behind him didn't seem in any hurry to enter the intersection.

Of course, I got stopped, and we had a long pleasant conversation.  When the officer handed me the ticket, it was for a cracked windshield, not the moving violation I deserved.  He asked me why I had treated him so politely.  I owned a retail store and my interactions with the police up to that time had been quite professional.  I had been in the wrong this time and I knew it, so why wouldn't I treat him politely?

It only takes one bad cop and one bad experience to change that attitude, and that happened in 2005.  I had a burglary problem that a certain cop didn't want to investigate.  He took some very obnoxious steps to avoid doing an investigation, steps which call his own integrity into question.  A private citizen has very little power to encourage a police department to do its job, and no power to force it to do its job.  The US Supreme Court has said as much.

Earlier, I exercised the one power that a private citizen has against a cop who compromises his integrity to avoid doing his job.  I wrote a letter to the local DA offering to testify before any jury hearing testimony from this particular Colorado Springs cop just how far he would go to avoid doing his job.  Discovery rules require the DA to share my letter with any defense attorney where this cop might appear.

Never again will a prosecutor be able to wrap this cop in the mantle of the collective reputation for integrity that the police have in general.  Instead, prosecutors have to weigh whether they want their case damaged by this cop's individual actions.

I was able to do that because in 2005 I documented in letter format what was happening, and regardless of the outcome of any investigation the letter(s) might have instigated, I can now say that everything I am willing to testify to is "contemporaneously documented."  I doubt that any investigation took place, which is even more damning.

If readers learn nothing else from what I write, they should learn that contemporaneous documentation in the form of letters is very hard to discount, even if... especially if you receive no reply.

If this cop is close enough to retirement, the mayor will likely allow him to finish out his career cutting four inch pieces of 20 guage wire and bending them into paper clips.

If anyone wonders why I want the city's public safety sales tax repealed, it is because the Colorado Springs Mayor and Police Department can't seem to prioritize burglary investigation higher than revenue generation.  We didn't get more policing with the Public Safety Sales Tax.  We got more buildings.

Note:  I had to chuckle, yesterday, when I saw the form that the labor union opposition had taken to three amendments.  It was a cop on donuts who wanted to be protected from folks like me.  I immediately modified the voters guide to refer to this essay and noted that I had named one file in my letter to the DA "Have another donut, officer."

More Motorcycle Gang Follies

For those who are just catching on,  I am running a campaign against the mismanagement of resources in the Colorado Springs Police Department.  The mismanagement is so bad that the 1/2 percent sales tax granted to the city by the voters for public safety should be rescinded and given to the county.

The city government has so twisted the police department priorities that the police no longer try to investigate or deter crime, they just write traffic tickets.

Need proof?  Check out today's Gazette.  It seems that a motorcycle cop was so intent on writing a ticket that he ignored a woman's report that she had been the victim of a rape:

Police in Colorado Springs are investigating a woman's complaint that she was ignored by a motorcycle officer when she told him she was speeding to get help after being bound, beaten and raped by an acquaintance.

According to the 28-year-old, she was crying, bleeding from her swollen lip and clad in a T-shirt and underwear when she described the ordeal to officer Jon Gustafson during a July 8 traffic stop at Platte and Nevada avenues.

She said she told Gustafson that she was on her way to Pikes Peak Mental Health Center to seek help.

Without asking questions or requesting medical assistance, the woman said, Gustafson ticketed her for going 45 mph in a 25 mph zone and for failing to wear a seat belt.

She said that he told her: "The bad news is you have to go to court. Good luck."

After he let her go, she did go to a clinic.  Her condition as reported in the medical records:

In a series of signed evaluations, clinicians noted obvious injuries, including a swollen face, a "half-closed eye" and blood on her wrists and legs.

One documented that she was pulled over on the way to the clinic, and another mentioned that she was wearing "what appeared to be pajamas."

"(The client) was crying, and her lips and face were visibly swollen," her therapist, Darla Slicton, wrote in her report, adding that the woman said that she would not identify her rapist because he threatened to kill her.

And now the county wants more money.  Let them get it from the city.

Want to be in a Motorcycle Gang?

Colorado Springs has a number of public enterprises that make money for the city, at least sometimes.

There is Colorado Springs Utilities, Memorial Hospital, a sewer enterprise, and so on. 

While not officially listed as an enterprise, the Colorado Springs Police is another source of fundraising for the city council.

They have an 18 member motorcycle gang that spends its time doing nothing but fundraising.  Those cops don't have quotas, they have goals, according to the Chief of Police.

Last night, a local television station announced that the Colorado Springs police was having trouble meeting its recruiting goals.  They even have a facebook entry to help with recruiting.

They are missing a bet.  They could advertise for motorcycle gang members and give them the legal authority to do what motorcycle gangs are often accused of doing - extorting money from honest citizens.  Heck, they could redesign the safety helmets to look exactly like WWII Nazi helmets as an added draw.

Just trying to help, Mr. Mayor.