Unreal.

I'm going to post this in its entirety so everyone can marvel at the stupidity.

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No charges against 3 detained at Detroit airport

The Associated Press

Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011 | 4:12 p.m.

Police temporarily detained and questioned three passengers at Detroit's Metropolitan Airport on Sunday after the crew of the Frontier Airlines flight from Denver reported suspicious activity on board, and NORAD sent two F-16 jets to shadow the flight until it landed safely, airline and federal officials said.

The three passengers who were taken off the plane in handcuffs were released Sunday night, and no charges were filed against them, airport spokesman Scott Wintner said.

Frontier Flight 623, with 116 passengers on board, landed without incident in Detroit at 3:30 p.m. EDT after the crew reported that two people were spending "an extraordinarily long time" in a bathroom, Frontier spokesman Peter Kowalchuck said.

FBI Detroit spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said ultimately authorities determined there was no real threat.

"Due to the anniversary of Sept. 11, all precautions were taken, and any slight inconsistency was taken seriously," Berchtold said. "The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not."

The Airbus 318 taxied to a pad away from the terminal, and police took three passengers into custody, Kowalchuck said. The three escorted off the plane in handcuffs included two men and a woman, passenger Ilona Hajdar of Charlotte, Mich., told The Associated Press.

She said she realized there was a problem when the plane's bridge didn't extend at the gate. The plane then rolled to a remote spot on the airfield. After about a half hour, police SWAT boarded.

"Everybody, put your hands on the seat rest in front of you. Don't move," they said, according to Hajdar, 27, who had been asleep for most of the flight and on board with her 2 1/2-year-old daughter.

Passenger Belinda Duggan, from Troy, Mich., said the first time she realized something was wrong was when the plane taxied by the gate and headed for a remote patch of tarmac.

"I said, `Oh my God,'" Duggan said. "All of a sudden, a SWAT team went through and saying, `Please place your hands on the seat in front of you.'"

The police had three dogs with them, she said. After leading the three cuffed passengers away, police asked the remaining passengers to board buses and took them to the Romulus police headquarters for interviews, Duggan said.

Authorities cleared the aircraft at 5:15 p.m. EDT after it was searched, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Kowalchuck said luggage was removed from the plane for inspection by police K-9 sniffer dogs. The remaining passengers were taken by bus to the terminal.

Flight 623 originated in San Diego before stopping at Denver International Airport on its way to Detroit.

In Denver, the FBI said that the North American Aerospace Defense Command scrambled F-16 fighter jets to shadow the plane "out of an abundance of caution." The plane was searched and nothing was found, the FBI said.

Two F-16s were dispatched to shadow the Airbus, said John Cornelio, spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

Wintner says the Frontier flight crew radioed to request police help when the plane landed, prompting responders to greet the flight and question passengers after the aircraft taxied to a remote location at the airport.

Wintner said he didn't know the nature of the security issue.

Also Sunday, the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, NORAD sent two F-16s to escort a Los Angeles-to-New York American Airlines flight after three passengers made repeated trips to the bathroom, officials said. A law enforcement official said it wasn't thought to be terrorism. Flight 34 landed safely at New York's Kennedy Airport.

New York has been in a heightened state of security after federal officials received a credible but uncorroborated tip of a car bomb plot on the anniversary in either New York or Washington.

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Anderson reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Jeff Karoub in Detroit and P. Solomon Banda in Denver contributed to this report.

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Yes, folks.  Apparently these people were guilty of the heinous crime of pooping while ethnic.  I understand that people are jumpy on 9/11, mostly due to the media over-hype and blatant vulture-izing of that national tragedy.  However, there is no excuse for this sort of out-and-out racism.  

Besides, there are enough real conspiracies in the city without people going around and making things up.  

I've been out of touch for a while now because it became unhealthy for me to be out in the open after my last post.  I've been followed, shadowed, stalked, telephone cranked, tire-slashed, and generally haunted by some new friends who don't appreciate my opinions on things.   That's not going to shut me up, though. Someone has to speak out.  

I just hope someone is listening.

Disgraced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was released from Jackson Prison this morning.  He has 24 hours to get to Texas and report in person to his probation officer.  This isn't the end of Kilpatrick's legal troubles, however, as he's still facing Federal corruption charges.  He might end up back in the clink for a third time before this saga is all over.

People think that his only fault was marital infidelity and a misuse of city property for sexting his mistress, then lying about it under oath.  It's the scandalous and flashy part of the story.  The truth of the matter is that he and his cronies were helping to obstruct the proper investigation of a murder.

Tamara Greene was an exotic dancer who was hired to perform in 2002 at one of Kilpatrick's parties in the mayor's official residence, the Manoogian Mansion.  She was assaulted at that party by Carlita Kilpatrick, the mayor's wife.  The assault was swept under the rug and no charges were ever pressed.  A few months later, in 2003, Greene was shot to death while sitting in her car.  The weapon used to killer her was a .40 caliber Glock, which happens to also be the Detroit Police Department's service revolver.  The official story was that she was shot three times, but sources in the Homicide division have said that she was actually shot 18 times, possibly more.  Members of the EMS team who reported to the scene have gone on record saying that Kilpatrick and his bodyguard, along with a few other members of his posse, were at Detroit Receiving Hospital when Ms. Greene was brought into the emergency room.  When Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown attempted to investigate Kilpatrick's connection to Greene, he was summarily dismissed from his employment.

This is not the first time that a member of Detroit's ruling elite have been linked to a death in the D, and not the first time that a person sitting in a car was shot to death with a DPD service revolver.  Some are civilians, like Tamara Greene.  Others, like Sgt. Dennis Williams, whose murder in October 1978 has never been solved, were members of the police force, themselves.  Did they see too much?  Did the people in power have too much to lose if these people lived another day?  On the surface, there would seem to be no connection between Ms. Greene's death and the murder of Sgt. Williams, but look deeper, and the similarities are startling.

The mayor's office and the Detroit city council, as well as many other powerful and wealthy players in the less-visible power elite, have their hands dirty with dozens of deaths just like this.  Corruption is a disease, and it reaches deep.

They think nobody knows what they've been getting up to in the dark.  But we do.  And we have our eyes on them.

Homicides on the rise

According to a new study published in the Detroit Free Press (article here), while most violent crimes have been declining in the D, murder is on the rise.  The DPD has decided to take officers off of desk duty and send them out in the street one day a week.  They're going to try to develop "community relations", which is a fancy way of saying that they're searching for people who are willing to be informants.

This isn't an automatic answer to the problem.  Informants can only be trusted to the extent that they're getting enough out of the deal to make it worth their time to provide valid information.  Those same informants are risking their own lives to work with the DPD, since gang activity is flourishing, and the crack trade is still roaring strong.

Lt. Dwane Blackmon of the Detroit homicide unit was at a public meeting recently, and he indicated that the problem leading to all of these murders was "risky behavior" (see source, here): gang activity, drug dealing, and retaliation.  All of those are a source of concern, but for informants, retaliation is obviously a bigger problem than for most people.

The gangs in Detroit are very active.  The Vice Lords, Latin Counts, Young Guns and Cash Flow Posse, just to name a few, come and go in these streets, bringing violence, drugs and prostitution with them.  It's also seeming increasingly like some of them are also bringing orders from out of town.  I'm not in a position yet to say who's calling the shots, but it seems like some local gangs are doing step-and-fetch-it work for bigger players, possibly from New York, possibly from Chicago.  And I'm talking big players.  National players, players who don't limit themselves to "representing" the 2800 block of some street.  The local boys are spending a lot of time nosing around on behalf of their heavy clients, and they seem to be interested in projects that are connected straight back to the City Council.

Are the gangs and the Council both working for the same party?  Is someone out there, outside the city, calling the shots?  What's the aim?  These are just some of the questions that need answers.

I'm not sure what they want, at least not yet.  But I'm the Motown Investigator, and I have my eyes on them.

The view from outside the D: dirty cops and ruin porn

I'm thinking today about this article from the Detroit News: Gang cop's actions cost Detroit $677,000.

I'm most concerned about the comment by Councilman Gary Brown at the end of the article, when he says that Hughes isn't even the worst cop on the force with these sorts of complaints.  It begs the question: who's covering up for those guys?  If there are other cops pulling even worse violations, then someone somewhere should be talking about it... but they're not.

How much more hush-hush money can this city afford to spend?  How many more under-the-table deals will the City Council make before someone with the ability to stop it takes notice?   Or maybe there's nobody with any ability to stop anything.  That's the most depressing thought of all.

This city can't afford many more settlements like this.  We can't afford this many dirty, abusive cops.  We can't afford the levels of graft and collusion that have come to be part and parcel of Detroit and its city government.  We can't afford it, and yet we keep paying it, year after year after year.  And nobody does a damn thing to make a change.

Things have changed in the D.  We've all seen it.  The world has seen it, since the only tourists we really get these days are nosy Europeans with cameras who come in, spend no money and take out only pictures of the underbelly of the city.  It's decay tourism at its worst, foreigners who come in like vultures to pick at a carcass without bothering to take the time to notice that the victim isn't dead yet.  These photos, urban ruin porn, even had a featured run in a UK newspaper:  the Guardian UK.  This isn't the sort of attention this city needs, and it's not even accurate on the whole.

But there's more to Detroit than rotting buildings, violent cops and abusive officials.  Time was, and time probably still is, that there were good men and women behind the badge here in this city.  There have been and probably still are councilmen and women with good intentions who really do try to serve their constituents more than they serve themselves.  The problem is that those people are mostly silent, leaving the city to noisemakers like Hughes, Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre, and yes, even this blogger to point out all the bad that the city has to offer.

I hope that Detroit can get out from under the weight of its own reputation.

This is not lost on me.  I'm the Motown Investigator, and I've got my eye on you.

City Council Backs Public Bridge Project

On July 8, the Detroit City Council announced that it was supporting the public bridge to Canada, the "New International Trade Crossing", or NITC.  According to one report, the cost for this bridge sits at right about $3.5 million.  That's public money, folks.  Government money.  You can bet that the Council will be wading right into the bidding process again to find bridge construction companies who want to get fat off the coffers of this bankrupted city.

Bidding processes in Detroit have always been, let's say, creative, especially when Councilman Gordon Hosea Jackson is involved.  He's got more friends in the construction and demolition industries than Kwame Kilpatrick has bad debts.  It seems strange to this investigator that one of his best buddies has the demolition contract on five different major buildings that are being torn down.  These are all old buildings, formerly architectural jewels in Detroit's crown, and they're all being pulled down to make room for... what? Nobody knows.  Nobody knows when the bidding process on these demolition jobs got started, either.  What people do know is that when the city planning commission had its meetings with Grand River Construction, the company that got the contract (and which happens to be a big contributor to Mr. Jackson's re-election campaign), the doors were closed.

Jackson is preparing for the 2012 elections already, and nobody thinks that he'll be content with staying in the city council.  He's got his eyes on the prize, people, looking at Lansing and eventually Washington, D.C.   He's got the charisma and the backers to make it.  Just check out the long list of fund raisers that are being scheduled in his honor.  He's planning a big push in the near future, and for that, he needs lots of cold, hard cash.

It couldn't be more obvious.  Jackson and his City Council cronies are just like all the other Detroit politicians who came before them: lining their pockets and the pockets of their friends with money that belongs to all of us.  This bridge is going to be just another prime project that'll land in the coffers of Grand River Construction and other campaign donors.  Jackson and the Council are corrupt, and they've got their fingers in everybody's pies.

This is not lost on me.  I'm the Motown Investigator, and I've got my eye on you.