Penny Dean and Your Rights

In 2011, Daryoush Taha’s friend alerted him to something shocking: Taha’s photograph and personal information on the website Mugshots.com.

Taha, then 40, had been arrested 13 years earlier in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and had spent one night in jail. He later sued the police department for what he alleged was a wrongful arrest. Despite maintaining his innocence, he agreed to complete a one-year probation program in exchange for having the arrest expunged from his record.

Wichita police will begin placing alerts on addresses where potential swatting targets could be living, the department announced Friday.

The program is voluntary and open to any person who thinks they could fall victim to swatting, a false report to law enforcement meant to draw a large police presence to a particular address. The practice has been growing in popularity on the fringes of the online gaming community, including a case in Wichita that ended in tragedy.

The Trump administration is considering a proposal that would use Google, Amazon and Apple to collect data on users who exhibit characteristics of mental illness that could lead to violent behavior, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The proposal is part of an initiative to create a Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA), which would be located inside the Health and Human Services Department, the report notes, citing sources inside the administration. The new agency would have a separate budget and the president would be responsible for appointing its director.

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"Now, I am a handgun owner, with a proper up-to-date pistol license, all correctly registered at county police headquarters, according to local ordinances. A complaint like the one filed against Junior apparently triggers some automatic computer search against the database of pistol license holders. So my name came up, and I got a letter from police HQ demanding I surrender my handguns.

[excerpted] Even though Wagshol has denied having any intent to commit a mass shooting, several news outlets have reported that Wagshol made a Facebook post about wanting to commit a mass shooting, including CNNand The Washington Post.

So, what was this scary Facebook post that led to Wagshol’s arrest?

Good question. There doesn’t seem to be one.

The “concerned citizen” reported a Facebook post regarding buying 30-round magazines. However, no post has surfaced stating Wagshol wanted them for a mass shooting.

Just days after a Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility was shot up in what the FBI called a "targeted attack," Bernie Sanders unveiled a new plan on Sunday that would create a "registry of disreputable federal law enforcement officers," and provide "financial support" for similar lists at the state level.

Sanders' freewheeling proposal would also "ban the prosecution of children under the age of 18 in adult courts" for all offenses, apparently including even rape and murder, and would prohibit youth from ever facing prison time for misdemeanors.

This should serve as your periodic reminder that the case that Jeffrey Toobin lays out here — that the Second Amendment was never intended to protect an individual right — is an outlandish conspiracy theory that contradicts the text; the history; all of the contemporary commentary; the views of the drafters of the 14th Amendment, who incorporated it; and the actions of the states, almost all of which protected the individual right to keep and bear arms both before and after the drafting of the Second Amendment.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California says facial recognition technology isn't ready to be used for law enforcement. This comes after a test of Amazon's Rekognition software wrongly flagged 26 California lawmakers as criminals, according to the ACLU.

An Alabama police officer staged a shooting last month to make it look like he was under attack, a police chief said Thursday.

Birmingham Police Chief Patrick Smith said that Officer Keith Buchanan made a distress call early July 21 while patrolling an isolated area. Shots could be heard in the background, and an abandoned police car was later found with a bullet hole. He was later found moaning on the ground.

The police chief said investigators determined the event was staged after they, "found nothing to support the officer's account of this incident."

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A 33-year-old felon accused of killing four people and wounding two others in a stabbing spree in two Southern California cities “savagely attacked” his victims seemingly at random and unprovoked, police said on Thursday.

The suspect, Zachary Castaneda, was taken into custody on Wednesday evening outside of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Santa Ana, California, moments after stabbing to death a security guard there, police said.