CRIME REPORT

TALKING TO THE HAND

Talk to the Hand

Now before I get off on my tangent I want to say that I was a Psychology Major and have a great respect for the science of psychology. But as with any other profession scientist can be just plain stupid, ill-informed, lazy and somewhat crazy.

Recent conversations regarding events dealing with criminal acts and behavior have made me shake my head in disbelief. The common excuse used to justify violent acts of aggression and criminal activity has always been, "the criminal came from a poor, abusive household," as if this is to explain away the rape, murder, torture, etc., that was committed by the person against an innocent victim.

All too often this excuse has been heard by folks too lazy to do the research to combat such idiotic rhetoric. Sure the poor and abuse and neglected commit crimes. But not all of them. Just like fat people die of heart attacks, but not all of them.

The logic is that if children are not raised properly then they will become criminals. So why is it that so many criminals are male? I mean I would assume that poor young female children receive the same sort of maltreatment that males do and yet the numbers are skewed dramatically towards males. Likewise in middle class households. Males commit more crimes of violence. So why not focus on hormones. Why not focus on heredity? Genetics?

The other thing that bugs the crap out of me are the idiotic social workers and therapist that are crazier than the person they are counseling. When I was doing clinical training, a technique used to communicate with unresponsive children was to get the child to talk to a puppet or a doll. This disarmed the child's defenses and brought out truth sometimes when truth was hard to find. But the same techniques used to communicate with adults is idiotic. Therapists have been known to find comfort in using "another voice" to talk to adults. I have seen women therapist that were afraid of men use similar techniques to communicate. The puppet asked the question, not me. The puppet is the one, blame him. The puppet wants you to know your mother loves you. The puppet says it wasn't your fault. The puppet led you astray.

Social workers and therapist that hide behind a limited scope of study in their analysis are lazy and ill-informed. Likewise social workers and therapist that hide behind the persona of a puppet or an empty chair are crazy as bat-shit. The counselor that cannot speak with their own voice has issues too large to deal with others. The use of such techniques with children work because the child believes the puppet not because the therapist believes in it.

Those of you that watch the TV show South Park know Mr. Garrison, the transgender teacher of the South Park, Colorado 4th graders, uses his hand puppet and constant "companion", Mr. Hat, to say and do things he would not ordinarily do. This is comical but in real life it is retarded.

Using someone else's voice to communicate is seen more than in the counseling offices it is also seen in the media as well. When we see a newspaper story that is generated from a press release yammering about vague statistical evidence of a conflicting public opinion or a new exciting "development" that will take you, the readers', eye off the truth, it is just Mr. Hat talking and it is insane.

Do not believe everything you hear or read, especially if it comes from a puppet.

A SLAP IN THE FACE OF JUSTICE

Normally I am the one that editorializes on this blog. My words, my opinion. But my brother Marc wrote an important comment that I want to share with you regarding the accepted plea agreement between a drug agent and Brunswick County's District Attorney that made both of our blood boil.

Brett Hobbs was a narc for the Leland Police Department. "Allegedly" he was a part of a drug ring that was trafficking in cocaine. I say allegedly because as per the plea agreement we will never know what the months of investigation (by local, state and federal authorities) into this corruption would have told us.

What we do know is that he received a minimal suspended sentence except for the 30 days he will have to serve on weekends when he could have served more than a dozen years in prison. Drunk drivers convicted of a second offense can serve more time. People who write bad checks can receive stiffer penalties. But a cop that tips off drug traffickers and keeps the competition in line gets a slap on the wrist that fails in comparison to the slap in the face Lady Justice received by this apparent act of favoritism.

Maybe it is all a bad dream. Maybe in tomorrow's paper it will be explained to me so I can understand it. But for right now I am about to explode with outrage.

I will share with you my brother's comments that I say AMEN to.

I retired from law enforcement after 24 years and for 90 Saturdays since February 2004, I have, as a community service, attempted to bridge the gap between law enforcement and the public by speaking out against corruption and holding those accountable that interfere with justice. In my expereince interacting with the public, I have developed a few important concerns. One of my primary concerns has been the distorted public perception that those engaged in the noble profession of law enforcement hold a tight rank in order to protect fellow officers that have become corrupt or are somehow in violation of the law.

Not one of the dedicated officers that I know supports or even excuses, the deadly illegal activity conspired by and acted upon by Brett Hobbs while he was a narcotics officer with the Leland Police Department. Hobbs is a disgrace to all those that swear to uphold the laws of the State.

However, the Brunswick County District Attorney's Office and Chief Superior Court Judge William Gore have failed miserably to protect the delicate balance of justice in this particular case. How can we point to a teenager caught holding a marijuana cigarette and scold him on the consequences of drug use and abuse and the likelihood of his becoming a resident of one of our prison facilities when he can point his finger at Brett Hobbs walking the streets a free man.

Brett Hobbs not only deserves to be in prison, he should be made to apologize to the men and women of law enforcement that risk their lives to enforce the laws he so brazenly ignored, he should be on his knees before the parents of the children he helped to addict to cocaine, and he should have the money that he received from these traffickers ripped from his paycheck for the next 20 years. He not only disgraced the badge but he disgraced his good family's name.

Law enforcement did their job, they ran a covert investigation and with the evidence obtained by this investigation, they arrested the perpetrator Hobbs while he still wore the badge entrusted to him by this State, the self-sacrificing public citizens did their job by taking time off of work to serve on a Grand Jury to determine if there was enough evidence gathered against Hobbs to warrant a trial, after reviewing the evidence provided by law enforcement agents, these citizens handed down a true bill of indictment against Hobbs, then the Brunswick County Judicial System, all elected officials, let us down miserably when they failed to provide justice by not going for the throat on this one.

This is a cold slap in the face to those of us that have walked the thin blue line with honor and it will not be forgotten come election day, I guarantee it.

Marc Benson

Head'm off at the pass Rosie!

Tactics are frequently used by defense attorneys to confuse the guilt or innocence of their client. Likewise Public Relations Firms use similar tactics to confuse customers over product liability. Does smoking cause cancer? Yes. But don't smokers know this and shouldn't they be responsible for their own actions? Perhaps. But what these PR people fail to tell you is the truth in order to protect profits and shareholders. They will also tell you that they spend millions of dollars and energy persuading people do the right thing when all they are really doing is protecting their position.

The true and right thing for a lot of us is the concept of higher learning, shipping our children off to college as soon as they graduate high school. For many of these students it is their first time away from home. For many of the parents it will be the first time they will "turn loose" their most precious responsibility. For eighteen years parents have kept a careful eye on their children, they know who they hang with, where they are at any given moment. They are certain to the concept that their child will be safe when they enroll on college campus in the fall so they release responsibility, a responsibility that they assume will be shared between the child and those in the administrative ranks at the college the child is attending.

Both the parents of Christen Marie Naujoks, 22, and Jessica Lee Faulkner, 19, were excited that their children were accepted at UNCW. They knew that their children were mature enough to make the journey into adulthood, they knew them to be responsible. They assumed that the University had the rules in place to enforce a safe environment in which their children, their recently adult children, could grow and learn. What they didn't know is that they would be murdered by another student. John Peck and Curtis Dixon each took an innocent life.

Both Curtis Dixon and John Peck enrolled at UNCW perhaps with the same intent as the two they murdered. But Curtis Dixon and John Peck did not gain entrance into the school the same way the two girls did. They both lied their way in and no one knew any better, except their parents. Curtis Dixon's father was charged and convicted of common law fraud because he lied on Dixon's application. Peck's previous charge of raping and torturing his ex-girlfriend escaped his memory when he filled out his application for admittance. I guess his probation officer didn't know he was enrolled, never called to verify his enrollment if he/she did know. I guess his father was so proud that his son was finally on his way to turn his life around he never admitted anything to anyone either. And I guess when John Peck's girlfriend, Christen Marie Naujoks reported to the UNCW police that she feared him they never looked into his criminal history or called his probation officer muchless called to see if he even had a probation officer.

But no fear, UNCW Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo wants you to know that this could have happened anywhere. The campus is safe. No reason to suspect anything otherwise.

Nice try!

If you look at their own website you will see that they do not even have an honest accounting of the murders. The purpose of this web page is to give parents a means of judging the safety level of a school they intend to ship their child off to. This is federally mandated in the Jeanne Clery Act because of a woman whose daughter was also murdered on another college campus.

The Department of Education has a website that will allow you to search over 6,000 educational institutions in the US and it's territories to discover the acts of crimes committed against students. I searched to see how many murders took place in these 6,000 institutions and discovered that in 2003, the year prior to the two UNCW murders, there were 3 murders in a Residence Hall and 18 murders off campus on public property. 3 murders in over 6,000 colleges.

It could happen anywhere? The odds would be 2000 to 1. The odds against your ever having a devastating fire in your home are also somewhere around 2000 to 1.  So yeah logic says your house could burn down, but are we talking my house, with a fire alarm and sprinklers? Or someone elses house, perhaps a mobile home with a kerosene heater and a drunken sleepy smoker.

Could happen anywhere.

You know what else could happen anywhere? Allowing students with poor school records and criminal backgrounds of violence against women to enroll in a college because of favoritism and influence. That could happen too.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington has sent tens of thousands of letters and emails to students, parents, faculty, staff and alumni in advance of ABC's Primetime segment, airing at 10 o'clock on November 17th, about the murders of the two students last year.

I was told by a reporter that ABC did not get cooperation from UNCW and yet Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo wrote in the letter that "We have cooperated with the producer in providing information, but, of course, we have no control over how the information will be presented," .

The letter went on about how these kids, the students enrolled there, felt comfortable. But did the survey ask them what happened, did it ask them if they know why these young women died, or ask them to tell you the circumstances surrounding the history of both Dixon and Peck, then did it ask them if they knew anybody that was sexually assaulted while attending UNCW. But in the Chancellor's statement to the tens of thousands of folks that pay for the swimming pool and tuition she did a little spinning, a little PR work when DePaolo said,  "UNCW students have consistently said they believe UNCW to be a safe campus. On student surveys both before and after the murders, from 90-95 percent of UNCW students indicated they felt safe at UNCW. Data in our campus crime reports consistently back up the reality of this perception. Although one of the murders occurred on campus, UNCW is a safe campus, and, sadly, what happened to Jessie and Christen could happen anywhere."

It could have happened anywhere.

But it didn't, it happened here. Admit it!

Links to sites of interest

First Murder

Second Murder

Why

UNCW Crime

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?

Carlie Brucia, 11 was abducted Super Bowl Sunday, on Feb. 1, 2004. Her abduction was caught on tape as she took a short cut behind a car wash. The man who abducted her is on trial now, Joseph Smith, 39, a man with a long criminal history and, himself, a father of three daughters, is hoping defense attorneys can spare his life.

Where would this case be without the surveillance camera capturing the abduction? A woman that lived with Smith turned him in after seeing the replay. She was certain it was him. Smith's mother and brother were both told by Smith that he killed young Carlie. He also told them that he pitched the body at a church. Later Smith called the brother's cell phone and directed him to the exact location where Carlie laid.

Watching the trial briefly today I suspect that the defense is going to infer that Carlie was a runaway and that she may have gone willingly with Smith, perhaps even saying that she might have been a willing sex partner in a "rough sex" act taken too far in the heat of the moment.

Anything to save the life of a child killer is perversely fair for these defense attorneys, including the right to infer that Carlie was somehow a participant in her own murder. They have no shame.

The main complaint by the defense team is that the confession was obtained illegally by the FBI. They insist that the brother and mother of Smith acted as agents when they questioned Smith about his involvement with Carlie Brucia and that because they were acting as agents for the FBI they should have disclosed that information to Smith's lawyers. Perhaps if this is true and the family was acting on behalf of the FBI then all informants should also tell the suspect that anything they say and do maybe held against them in a court of law. Absurd.

Joseph Smith, like so many other child killers, was within the grasp of authorities long before he killed his victim. Probation violations, sentences cut short, irresponsible judges and juries and people too ignorant or too corrupt to say what they know, keeping these poachers on the streets and basically permit them to do as they will.

Several websites go into detail the feelings and thoughts I have about this and I encourage you to click on the links and read, as I have, to help understand why it is that so many children die at the hands of men that should be locked up somewhere.

Probation failures

Congressman from Texas addresses the problem

Understatement

New Hanover County has, at this moment, 2 sex offenders that have failed to register, 8 that have failed to verify their address, and 2 that have failed to register their change of address. The Sheriff's Department has no idea where these people are.

Why is it that Fed-Ex can tell me, at any given moment, exactly where my package is but when a sex offender, a child rapist, is released from prison we have to search the bushes for them? We basically rely upon the Sheriff of New Hanover County to do a couple of things for us. We ask that he issue gun permits, we ask that he patrol the out lying areas for us and we ask that he provide care and security for the inmates awaiting trial in the jail. We also ask that he enforce the video poker laws and keep tight reigns on the sex offenders living among us. We ask that he do his job correctly, without prejudice and in a manner in which we can all live more securely. We do not ask him to take authority over the Department of Social Services, we do not ask him to interfere with the progress being made by the Wilmington Police Department and we definitely did not ask him to broker a million dollar land deal between the County and his Church. We want a safer jail, a less costly administration, we want drug dealers/traffickers arrested, we want illegal video poker establishments closed down and the owners arrested and their machines seized. We want 27 year olds having sex with children arrested, not social workers who are the ones in charge of aiding the victim. We want to know why the number of sex offenders that are missing in New Hanover County frequently outnumber any other county in the State.

And we want to know why Patrick Crawford's death was determined, by your office, to be an accidental drowning when the State Medical Examiner failed to find any trace of water in his lungs?

So why does this happen?

It is exactly this sort of dereliction of duty that allows crime to run rampant, taxpayers to dig deeper into their pockets, child sex offenders to go about undetected and killers to lurk in the shadows. It is the public's apathy that fails to hold accountable the short comings of an ineffective campaign to combat crime.

And it is exactly why there is a radio show that calls attention to this potentially dangerous situation.

INTERNET STINK

You might not know it but at any given time 50,000 sexual perverts are on the Internet prowling for children and the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children tells us that one in five children online have been solicited for sex. AOL, Yahoo and other Internet Providers have, in the past, turned a blind eye to the problem saying it is up to the parents to keep their kids safe. Meanwhile they have allowed various chatrooms to exist with titles such as dad4daughter and boycrazymen. The purpose of these types of rooms is to set up conversation with young, underage, curious, teens with the goal of becoming sexually involved with them either by erotic conversation over the internet or phone or swapping sexually explicit photographs or all of the above including a "face to face" meeting.

The website Perverted Justice (pervertedjustice.com) helped NBC's Dateline Television catch a few perverted men on camera in an extremely eye opening hour long segment on Friday Night.

In the quick little bit that I saw on MSNBC I believe they caught 19 men over a two day period of time. No arrests were made but Perverted Justice has had several successes in catching folks, literally with their pants down, while authorities locked them up afterwards. Bravo!

One of the men featured Friday at 8 on NBC is a Rabbi that thought he was meeting a 13 year old boy for sex but instead was greeted by cameras and reporter.

I encourage any parent that has children on the internet to spend an hour learning about who is out there prowling around for their children.

The sad advantage many of these hunters of children have over most people is the ignorance of the parent as to what their child is actually doing while online. Children are naturally curious and combine that curiousity with their immediate desire to be "older" and experience the adult world in adult terms, the two make for a potential disaster. Just think of how alcohol use is rampant in high schools and being experimented frequently in middle schools. Most of the kids that fall prey to such men are the "good ones" the ones that stay home, do their homework, the ones that aren't as popular or as you see asked time and time again by these perverts, "are you home alone?", "your mom and dad separated or divorced?" Good questions. Easy targets.

Let's agree for one-second that the odds are slim that someone is going to abduct your teenager from a chance meeting on the internet. But there is an extremely good chance that the internet may introduce your child to a world of sexual fantasies that would make Hugh Hefner blush. Do you really want your children learning this sort of trash, seeing it graphically exposed in living color, hearing it from a 40 something year-old man in explicit, hushed tones?

Tune in Friday night on NBC at 8. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9878187/#051103a

HE SAID THAT

Can it be possible that someone can speak about killing an entire group of people, an entire race and suffer no punishment? Can the spokesman be fired for saying what is on his mind, for promoting the extermination of a culture?

I mean come on, we went through this with Hitler right? We have heard this rhetoric on tapes released from caves in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever.

But seriously when someone says an entire race should be exterminated is he serious? Does he have an army ready to march on his command? Should we be afraid?

I guess another question is does his comment reflect on the others around him, the shy, the scared. Does his words carry support and mean something to a threatening group of others?

Perhaps it is the grand scale of the target. Perhaps instead of saying I want to kill everyone I simply said that I want to kill (My conscious will not even allow me to put in a fake name much less a name we can all recognize, even though I would be using it just to make a point) But don't you think I'm right? We can identify with someone we know that it targeted and defend him/her on some personal level. We might even be able to arrest the person if there is some serious planning to kill an individual. If someone said that they were going to kill me, that person could be charged with assault or communicating threats or even conspiracy to commit murder. If I felt threatened enough I could shoot to kill. But what about killing an entire race, even a small group of people?

I nearly crapped my pants when I read what Bill Bennett said about aborting all black babies to end crime. Wouldn't I be hung up by my thumbs for saying such inflammatory comments?

So where is the outrage when a university (NC State, UNCW, St. Augustine) professor, Dr. Kamau Kambon, said that all white people should be exterminated?

Kambo said, "And then finally I want to say that we need one idea, and we're not thinking about a solution to the problem. We're thinking about all these other things, but we're not dealing with a solution to the problem. And we have to start to think about a solution to the problem so that these young brothers and sisters who are here now, who are 15, 16 or 17, are not here 25 years later talking about these same problems.
Now how do I know that the white people know that we are going to come up with a solution to the problem. I know it because they have retina scans, they have what they call racial profiling, DNA banks, and they’re monitoring our people to try to prevent the one person from coming up with the one idea. And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem. *tepid applause* Now I don’t care whether you clap or not, but I’m saying to you that we need to solve this problem because they are going to kill us. And I will leave on that. So we just have to just set up our own system and stop playing and get very serious and not be diverted from coming up with a solution to the problem and the problem on the planet is white people."

All white people? Come-on are we all really that bad?

READ MORE ABOUT THIS