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Philadelphia Republican mayoral candidate files criminal charges against French cities · 727 days ago

This Republican mayoral candidate, Peter J. Wirs, in Philadelphia has issued a press release from the 59th Republican Ward Executive Committee claiming they’ve filed criminal charges against the French cities of Paris and its suburb Saint Denis for glorifying a cop-killer. Paris named Mumia Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen of the city in 2003, and Saint Denis named a street leading to the largest sports arena in Europe, “Nelson Mandela Stadium”, after him in 2006. Whatever publicity this guy gets is surely going to get his votes from all the cops in the city of Philadelphia, but to waste the court’s time with this crap is offensive to the majority of educated voters.
Blogger Hans Bennett has a 15 minute telephone interview with Peter Wirs about Mumia Abu-Jamal:

Peter: Let me explain why I’m involved in this. I’m a former twice elected state constable out of the city of Harrisburg. My expertise, my law enforcement career is in civil rights investigation.

The US District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania and subsequently the Third Circuit appointed me under the Criminal Justice Act to conduct what became the largest prosecution investigation in the history of the federal courts in Pennsylvania

I am furthermore a 2 time elected board member of the south central chapter of the ACLU. I have great expertise and experience in conducting civil rights investigations—particularly in regard to prosecution and judicial misconduct. That’s one of the reasons a lot of people have asked me to be involved in this.

When you look at the trial, (and i have examined the trial record extensively, and thoroughly, and comprehensively) of course there were instances where the system did not perform at an optimal level of perfection, but as was well noted by the Supreme Court, no one is entitled to a perfect trial, they’re simply entitled to a fair trial. And in this instance, Judge Sabo (not withstanding whatever alleged personal bias or prejudice may be attributed to him) conducted as thorough and as fair of a trial as possible—not withstanding Mumia’s own obstruction of the trial process in the proceedings.

UPDATE: Another Philadelphia congressman is on this anti-Mumia meme now. Outgoing U.S. Representative Mike Fitzpatrick is introducing a bill on the House floor that condemns Saint Denis for naming a street after Mumia Abu-Jamal.

— SWAT Team

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chicagocrime.org Review · 728 days ago

chicagocrime.org is a website that tracks and analyzes all crimes in the city of Chicago reported to the Chicago Police Department. You can search by crime type, address/district, date, ward, type of location (ie. ATM or bowling alley), etc.

The most interesting part of the site is the Blotter, which the site administrators use to tie down police reports within the database with actual journalist reports of the crimes from the Chicago Journal. It doesn’t look like all that many of the incidents found in the database end up being associated with synopses from the newspaper, but I think that just means the Chicago Journal misses out on a lot of crime reported. They are looking for suggestions for other newspapers who would provide synopses of Chicago crime so hopefully the Blotter will improve with time.

The second most interesting part of the site is Crimes along a route, which is a Google maps mashup that allows you to draw a route between as many points as you’d like and search the database for crimes reported along all of the portions of whichever streets you included in the route.

Now, I don’t even live in Chicago, so this is all pretty much novelty to me. However for non-residents of the Windy City, you can waste at least a few minutes playing around with the various features, then wishing they had something like this for whatever city you live in too.

— SWAT Team

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