Chris Swecker, the Assistant Director of the FBI's criminal division, says now it would take "a cartel" to get the FBI involved in a drug bust. The agency, Swecker says, has shifted to terrorism.

Drug crimes largely have been ceded to the Drug Enforcement Agency, while the U.S. Marshals Service now apprehends all but the most violent fugitives. Investigation of bank robberies, once a signature FBI duty, and large swaths of white-collar crime are also largely off the bureau's to-do list.

What's left? Public corruption, civil rights violations, organized crime - including gangs, major white-collar crime and certain kinds of violent offenses. The rationale is simple: The bureau now focuses on crime that might shed light on terror or that no other law enforcement agency can pursue.

Two released sex offenders who were on a registration list available on the Internet have been murdered. A man is believed to have posed as an FBI officer, went to their apartment and shot them.

The man presented himself to the three roommates as a member of the FBI and said he wanted to talk to them about their Level III sex offender status, according to police.

The fake FBI agent told the roommates that one of them was on a “hit list” on an Internet site, according to the police. The roommate who reported the deaths left while the FBI imposter was still there, Ambrose said.

Is this an isolated case of vigilante justice, or will this be the beginning of a trend?

Grits for Breakfast reports:

Texas incarcerates more people for marijuana than any other state, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a D.C.-based think tank, said in a new public policy report. In Texas, "marijuana arrests comprised 56 percent of total drug arrests (48,963 out of 88,053 total arrests). Texas currently has 1,215 people in prison for marijuana as the controlling offense."

...Nationally, nearly half of all drug arrests in 2003 were for marijuana, chalking up $5.1 billion in enforcement, adjudication and incarceration costs for marijuana alone, the group reports. Download the full study here.

The Wall St. Journal today has an article about the mis-direction of the supply-side oriented war on drugs.

...don't be confused by the facts. There's a whole army of Washington bureaucrats paid to fight America's drug habit by cutting off supply. A cynic might even suggest that career drug warriors have an incentive to see the "war" go on forever. One glance around this town and you can see that, barring a change in policy, it probably will.

Reporting from Guatemala, it seems things have never been better for sellers:

StoptheDrugWar has an update on the Utah Rave bust. The promotors of the event are planning a lawsuit and insist they had the proper permits.

Fullmer disputed the sheriff's office statement that he lacked a permit. "They are saying I didn't have my permits, which is a flat-out lie," he said. "I'm not some kid; I'm a businessman and I've been doing these events for 10 years. We were in complete compliance with the requirements of Utah County."

The Utah County Sheriff's Office claimed that the event was not properly permitted because under county ordinance, events with more than 250 people must receive a permit from the county commission. But the sheriff's office was being intentionally misleading, said Fullmer. "The county law says you need the permit if you're going to have more than 250 people and the event is going to last more than 12 hours, but our event was not scheduled for more than 12 hours, therefore we did not need that permit."

Via Sentencing Law and Policy, I see that USA Today has a new article on sex offender statistics that dispels some of the myths created by recent high-profile cases. Among them:

Sex crimes against children have dropped dramatically in the last decade. An online national sex-offender registry was launched in July. And recent research shows doctors can better predict which offenders may strike again....

Dramatic drop in cases. Government figures show the rate of sexual assaults against adolescents ages 12 to 17 plunged 79% from 1993 through 2003, and the number of substantiated sex-abuse cases involving kids of all ages fell 39% in the same time period. [One expert], who has analyzed the data, sees multiple reasons for the decline: Greater incarceration of offenders, more therapy and use of psychiatric drugs, economic improvement in the 1990s and heightened public concern. ...

Treatment helps. Group therapy dropped the recidivism rate from 17% to 10%, according to a 2002 study that [anther expert] co-wrote. He studied 9,454 sex offenders in 43 states.

I wrote about the release of Colorado's first "sexually violent predator" earlier today over at 5280. He was a 20 year old convicted of raping a 17 year old inebriated female he met at a party. He did six years in prison for the crime. The police chief of Fort Collins held a town hall meeting in a packed church to warn the community about the offender's release. What point does this ostracism make?

Here are some more myths and facts about sex offenders from the Department of Justice Center for Sex Offender Management.

by TChris

Loyal TalkLeft readers may recall this post about a New Ipswich police officer who decided that any undocumented alien who set foot in New Ipswich was “trespassing” on town property. New Hampshire’s attorney general has made the sensible decision not to appeal a judge’s dismissal of those foolish trespassing prosecutions.

“Having carefully examined the Court’s decision and the relevant case law, this office has determined that there is an insufficient basis for appeal,” Attorney General Kelly Ayotte wrote in a memo dated Aug. 15. “Accordingly, New Hampshire law enforcement officials should not make future arrests for criminal trespassing based solely on the defendant’s immigration status.”

This should deter other officers from following the lead of New Ipswich, incluing the chief of police in Hudson, NH, who has also arrested undocumented aliens for trespass.

by TChris

To satisfy themselves that the Taser is a safe device to use against individuals who aren't engaged in life-threatening behavior, the police occasionally shoot a volunteer officer with a Taser. The officer rarely volunteers a second time.

In fact, injuries during Taser training have produced litigation against Taser International, including this recent case:

The suit by [Jacob] Herring, chief of police in Hallsville, Mo., says he suffered at least two strokes, loss and impairment of his vision and hearing, neurological damage, a head injury and "significant cardiac damage" after being shocked by a Taser M26 during a class on April 20, 2004.

Taser acknowledges that it has been sued 14 times since 2003 by officers who say they were injured in training.

LA Police Chief Bill Bratton is earning kudos in Los Angeles. This LA Times editorial not only praises him, but talks about a second term.

Bratton is only three years into a five-year contract. It's early to talk about a second term(the maximum allowed), but 10 years under a single effective chief shouldn't be too much to hope for.

It was Bratton, not Guiliani, who reduced the crime rate in New York. I hope his success in LA makes more people realize this.

Don't miss the current issue of Seattle Weekly, focusing on the drug war:

THE DRUG ISSUE

• Jimi's First Experience: A book excerpt by Charles R. Cross MORE
• A Drug War Peace Plan MORE
• The Pot Granny and Sea-Tac Airport MORE
• When In Prison, Just Say Om ... MORE

[hat tip to NORML.}

The surest way to tell a politician is in trouble is when all of a sudden he or she jumps on the "get tough on criminals" bandwagon. They see it as a magic carpet ride to re-election. The latest pol to use the ruse: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. His approval ratings are dropping. His fix: Pander to the public with Tougher sex offender laws.

Tens of thousands of California sex offenders would be forced to wear electronic tracking devices for the rest of their lives under two new bills backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The bills, which also would boost punishment for a wide range of sex offenses, "will give California the strictest laws and the toughest penalties for the worst crimes,'' he said Tuesday....The governor plans a full-court press to garner support for the bill.

If the legislature won't pass the bills, Gov. Arnold says, he'll take it to the voters. Why bother to have a legislature at all then?

Today's New York Times profiles Marc Emery in This Johnny Appleseed Is Wanted by the Law.

Emery Seeds website is out of business now, following the DEA raid. Here's another interview with Marc Emery.