Danish Police Arrest Iraqi Asylum Seekers in Church

Al Jazeera English - Europe - Iraqis seized from Denmark church

Danish police have clashed with protesters as they moved to arrest a group of 17 Iraqis who had taken refuge in a Copenhagen church following the rejection of their asylum applications.

Police forced their way into the Protestant Brorson church in a suburb of the Danish capital early on Thursday, pushing past at least 100 protesters who had tried to barricade the building.

Some reports said pepper spray was used as the police tried to clear the protesters, five of whom were arrested.

Video of the operation appeared to show an officer beating a woman protester several times with his truncheon, and other incidents of what critics said was excessive or unnecessary force.

The move drew an angry response from the pastor in charge of the church, Per Ramsland, who said the police action violated Danish traditions of church sanctuary.

"I had never dreamed that something like this could happen," he told reporters.

Denmark's former prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, also condemned the police action, saying it "went beyond the bounds of common humanity and decency".

Denmark's justice Minister, Brian Mikkelsen, however defended the police action, saying in a statement that "the law must be respected" and "one should not count on special treatment even if one occupies a church".

A spokesman for Copenhagen police said the 17 asylum seekers had been taken to a local police station for questioning to establish their identities and if they had a legal right to remain in Denmark.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, police, Denmark, church

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More Weird Law: Woman Arrested for Blogging About the Police?

'Uh-Oh They're Here' - washingtonpost.com

Editorial from the Washington Post

A 34-YEAR-OLD woman, the mother of a 12-year-old girl, has been locked up in a Virginia jail for three weeks and could remain there for at least another month. Her crime? Blogging about the police.

Elisha Strom, who appears unable to make the $750 bail, was arrested outside Charlottesville on July 16 when police raided her house, confiscating notebooks, computers and camera equipment. Although the Charlottesville police chief, Timothy J. Longo Sr., had previously written to Ms. Strom warning her that her blog posts were interfering with the work of a local drug enforcement task force, she was not charged with obstruction of justice or any similar offense. Rather, she was indicted on a single count of identifying a police officer with intent to harass, a felony under state law.

It's fair to say that Ms. Strom was unusually focused on the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement task force, a 14-year-old unit drawn mainly from the police departments of Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia. (Her blog at http://iheartejade.blogspot.com, expresses the view that the task force is "nothing more than a group of arrogant thugs.") In a nearly year-long barrage of blog posts, she published snapshots she took in public of many or most of the task force's officers; detailed their comings and goings by following them in her car; mused about their habits and looks; hinted that she may have had a personal relationship with one of them; and, in one instance, reported that she had tipped off a local newspaper about their movements.

Predictably, this annoyed law enforcement officials, who, it's fair to guess, comprised much of her readership before her arrest. But what seems to have sent them over the edge -- and skewed their judgment -- is Ms. Strom's decision to post the name and address of one of the officers with a street-view photo of his house.

All this information was publicly available, including the photograph, which Ms. Strom gleaned from municipal records. The task force's officers may have worked undercover on occasion, but one wonders about their undercover abilities, given that Ms. Strom was able to out them so consistently. Chief Longo warned Ms. Strom that her blog posts were scaring off informants and endangering the officers and their families, but he provided no evidence. At no point did Ms. Strom's blog express a threat, explicit or otherwise, to police or their sources.

Ms. Strom is not the most sympathetic symbol of free-speech rights. She has previously advocated creating a separate, all-white nation, and her blog veers from the whimsical to the self-righteous to the bizarre. But the real problem here is the Virginia statute, in which an overly broad, ill-defined ban on harassment-by-identification, specifically in regard to police officers, seems to criminalize just about anything that might irritate targets.

It should not be a crime to annoy the cops, whose raid on Ms. Strom's house looks more like a fit of pique than an act of law enforcement. Some of her postings may have consisted of obnoxious speech, but they were nonetheless speech and constitutionally protected. That would hold true right up through her last blog post, written as the police raid on her home began at 7 a.m.: "Uh-Oh They're Here."

Technorati Tags: blogging, arrest, free speech

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FBI Raids Police Offices in New Orleans: Katrina Killings In Question

Raw Story » FBI raids NOLA police over Katrina killings

Nearly four years after the police shootout that took the lives of Ronald Madison and James Brissette on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, the FBI raided the offices of the police investigators who had been looking into the deadly incident.

The bureau’s move suggests that the federal government may be serious about seeing police officers prosecuted over the Sept. 4, 2005 shootout, when Madison and Brissette were allegedly killed by police and four others wounded as they crossed a bridge in the midst of the Hurricane Katrina crisis.

It also suggests the FBI may be worried that New Orleans police are trying — or may in the future try — to destroy evidence of what happened that day.

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Right Question, Wrong Answer

Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter- terrorism powers – simply to provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government's official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had "ample anecdotal evidence" of it happening, adding that such a practice was "totally wrong" and constituted an invasion of civil liberties.

"I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice," he said. "But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches."

link: The Guardian