Elected Official Files Business, Trademark Registrations Using Name Of Website That Frequently Criticized Her

from the way-to-represent-your-constituents,-jerkface dept

Lots of government employees and officials would love to shut their critics up. The problem is that most methods they come up with don't work (at best) or are unconstitutional (at worst). That doesn't stop them from trying. The amount of hours expended trying to find ways to silence critics sits well above zero, making these efforts fraudulent as well as potentially unconstitutional.

Never underestimate the creativity of the criticized class, as Tony Webster reports.

Carol Becker, an elected official on the Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation, confirmed Friday night that she was behind an effort to file business and trademark registrations for Wedge LIVE!, the name of a blog that has been critical of her.

Wedge LIVE! is run by John Edwards, who has covered urban planning and related political issues in depth for the last four years. He has gone after Becker a number of times in his reporting and blog posts. He's even attempted to take her job.

In the peak months of former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges’ 2017 re-election campaign, Becker filed a civil lawsuit against the Mayor, claiming she had violated the City’s charter in the budgetary process. After Becker had claimed victory before any final disposition of the lawsuit, a judge found there was no violation and dismissed the case.

“When she sued the mayor, it felt like a stunt,” Edwards said, “I just felt like she was using her office to take political shots at people. She’s a perfect representation of a certain kind of politics in Minneapolis that I’m not a fan of.”

Edwards decided to run a last-minute write-in campaign against Becker, which he described as being a “half-joke” and doomed from the start. Becker won, but a surprising 1,539 voters wrote Edwards’ name on their ballot.

Becker has gone after Edwards and Wedge LIVE! as well, claiming the site is funded by "realtors" using "dark money." The contentious relationship has escalated in recent months, with the formation of an activist group by Edwards that opposes the policies and zoning changes Becker would like to institute. Edwards also asked readers to comment on proposed plans during the public comment period, leading to Becker receiving negative responses by readers of his site.

All of this has now culminated in an intellectual property war without the knowledge of one of the participants. A public notice of a business registration was spotted by a Wedge LIVE! Fan while reading the analogue version of the local paper. This was passed on to Edwards, who had no idea his site's name was being turned into a business by a subject of his criticism.

In the days after the public comment period ended, Becker went to the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State and filed business documents—name reservations and certificates of assumed name—for both “Wedge Live” and “WedgeLive,” the name of Edwards’ blog. Becker also filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to obtain a trademark on the name “Wedge Live,” stating under penalty of law that she believed she was entitled to use the mark in commerce, that nobody else has the right to use the mark, and that she had a bona fide intention to use it herself.

Becker wants to pretend this is all a coincidence.

Reached by phone, Becker admitted—proudly so—that she filed the business and trademark documents, paying at least $355 to do so.

“There were no legal entities using that name, and I think it would be an awesome name for a podcast. And so since no one else is actually legally using that name, it seemed like a good thing to do,” Becker said, stating that she intended the podcast to discuss ‘wedge issues’ and to do so ‘live’ instead of attacking others on social media, something she felt Wedge LIVE! Does.

[...]

Becker continued to insist her “Wedge Live” business and trademark registrations were a separate, independent matter from her concerns regarding Wedge LIVE!, the blog. “Two great minds coming up with the same name isn’t a bad thing,” Becker said.

There is a non-zero chance this is true. But it's so small, it's a rounding error. Becker admits it could be viewed as "retaliatory," but says no one would really care if she retaliates against an "illegal business" and "tax fraud." [!!!!]

As for the whole "podcast" claim, Tony Webster notes the trademark registration appears to describe the Wedge LIVE! website and its offerings, rather than refer to anything of a podcasting nature. It also appears Carol Becker may have been instrumental in getting items removed from Wedge LIVE's Teespring store.

This statement, though, is probably the best/worst response Becker gave to Webster.

Becker said she would not have been able to register the names had Edwards registered them first. “If it wasn’t me, it could have been someone who is an asshole,” Becker said, going on to say that she wasn’t out to hurt anyone.

Instead of letting someone else be the asshole, Becker stepped up to be the asshole. Congrats.

Of course, this is also not how trademark law actually works. You don't have to register to hold a common law trademark. You only have to use the name in commerce, meaning it's likely that Edwards could be considered the common law trademark holder over "Wedge Live" and Becker's attempt at registering the same name would almost certainly flop.

The good news is it appears Becker greatly overestimated the public's tolerance for assholery from their elected officials.

As of Monday morning, an outpouring of support for Wedge LIVE! resulted in a 27% increase in Patreon donors for the site, and records at the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office showed cancellation of the assumed name and trademark filings, but no cancelation of the name reservation was recorded.

This means Wedge LIVE! retains the name… for now. Becker has promised to try again in another six months if Edwards doesn't make a move. But she might have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for a local resident still reading the news in printed form.

Filed Under: carol becker, censorship, john edwards, minneapolis, politics, trademark, wedge live

Cops Are Telling Paramedics To Inject Arrestees With Ketamine. Worse, EMS Crews Are Actually Doing It.

from the horrific-behavior-by-all-involved dept

Something strange and disturbing is going on in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cops have been instructing paramedics to use certain drugs to subdue arrestees, which is about as advisable as allowing paramedics to instruct officers on use of force. Cops don't know what's best for arrestees in terms of medical care. The fact that paramedics have been following their instructions is the most disturbing fact of all. As the Star Tribune reports, cops telling EMS personnel what to do has put people's lives in jeopardy.

Minneapolis police officers have repeatedly requested over the past three years that Hennepin County medical responders sedate people using the powerful tranquilizer ketamine, at times over the protests of those being drugged, and in some cases when no apparent crime was committed, a city report shows.

On multiple occasions, in the presence of police, Hennepin Healthcare EMS workers injected suspects of crimes and others who already appeared to be restrained, according to the report, and the ketamine caused heart or breathing failure, requiring them to be medically revived. Several people given ketamine had to be intubated.

The paramedics are fully complicit in this horror show. They're overriding their own knowledge and medical training with catastrophic results. This atrocious behavior was exposed by a report from the Office for Police Conduct Review. The report showed ketamine injections increased from three in 2012 to 62 in 2017. It wasn't until this report was delivered to police that anyone decided to do anything about it. The Minneapolis Police Commander has now forbidden officers from instructing EMS crews to sedate a subject.

Ketamine is a dangerous drug. The police know this. They classify it as a "date rape" drug, capable of putting people into deep sedation and altering their memories. Healthcare providers know this, too, which is why they're often hesitant to use it as a sedative if the subject has preexisting breathing problems. Ketamine can kill under these circumstances. When used as a first response in the sedation of detainees, medical histories aren't available and the outcome can be death.

Allowing police to "prescribe" sedatives is a horrible idea. The report shows Minneapolis cops nuked arrestees with a powerful sedative just because. In many of the cases examined, there appeared to be no reason to escalate to a dangerous sedative.

To evaluate how the sedative was being used, the Office of Police Conduct Review investigators looked for mentions of the word in police reports, and then reviewed body camera footage from those cases.

“Multiple videos showed individuals requiring intubation after being injected with ketamine, and [police] reports indicate that multiple individuals stopped breathing and/or their hearts stopped beating after being injected with ketamine,” the report said.

The police encounters that led to EMS using ketamine ranged from cases of obstruction of justice to jaywalking, according to the report. One man was dosed with ketamine while strapped to a stretcher and wearing a spit hood.

Unbelievably, the story gets worse. Those dosed with ketamine at the suggestion of police officers suffered rude awakenings at Minneapolis hospitals. Hennepin Healthcare went ahead and enrolled detainees in its ketamine study without their consent. Supposedly consent isn't actually required by law, which makes a sort of cosmic sense when you're studying the effects of a date rape drug. "Enrollees" could opt out afterward, but that offers little comfort when you've been sedated so heavily you need a machine to breathe for you.

This study exacerbated Hennepin Healthcare's ketamine problem. Ramping up dosings at the request of cops had already increased the number of life-threatening reactions to the drug. This incentive allowed this to carried over to day-to-day work, resulting in EMS personnel using ketamine whenever possible, even without verbal shoves from under-educated cops.

Body camera footage from one case showed a woman, after being Maced by police, asking for an asthma pump, the draft report said.

Instead, a paramedic gave her an injection of ketamine.

“If she was having an asthma attack, giving ketamine actually helps patients and we’re doing a study for agitation anyway so I had to give her ketamine,” the unnamed paramedic told a police officer, according to the report.

After receiving ketamine, the woman’s breathing stopped, and medical staff resuscitated her, according to the report.

Of course, there's an explanation for all of this. It comes courtesy of Hennepin Healthcare's top official. And it sounds like something written by police officers, rather than an expert in the medical field.

Dr. William Heegaard, chief medical officer for Hennepin Healthcare, said ketamine can be a lifesaving tool when paramedics encounter people showing signs of “excited delirium,” a condition when severe agitation can lead to death.

When you're fighting a losing battle against negative press, the worst thing you can do is name a condition that originated with the pseudoscience of 19th century insane asylums and was revived by the manufacturer of Tasers to help law enforcement agencies bullshit their way through court cases involving citizens tased to death by cops.

In the past, Taser has hosted seminars and sent out pamphlets on excited delirium to police and medical examiners’ groups across the country; sued medical examiners who listed their stun guns as a cause of death; and even gave law enforcement agencies a ready-made statement for when someone dies after police shock them with a stun gun: “We regret the unfortunate loss of life. There are many cases where excited delirium caused by various mental disorders or medical conditions, that may or may not include drug use, can lead to a fatal conclusion.”

Heegaard's hospital and staff engage in highly-questionable behavior and he's trying to pin it on a condition most of the medical community doesn't recognize as an actual syndrome. This whole debacle shows just how far cops have strayed from the "serve and protect" ideal. This is all about making things as easy as possible for officers accompanying detainees to medical care facilities. They want them knocked out, even if it raises the risk of killing them.

It also shows how easy it is for abusive behavior to spread when it's originating from law enforcement officers. Paramedics know better. They know they're the first line of defense against further injury or trauma. And they're willing to throw that all away just because a cop tells them to dope up compliant detainees.

On top of everything, there's the skewed incentives of Hennepin Healthcare, which has found a way to gather subjects for studies by sedating them so heavily they can't possibly object to anything. There should be a whole lot of people in both fields filing for unemployment. But that isn't how thing work when cops are involved. New policies will be put in place and everyone who fucked citizens with unneeded ketamine injections will just go back to work with a mental note in place reminding them to be a bit more careful when abusing the public's trust.

Filed Under: ems, ketamine, minneapolis, minnesota, police, studies, wtf

Minneapolis PD Issues Questionable DMCA Notice To Bury Its Controversial Recruitment Video

from the the-system-works/fails-again dept

The only way to make "bad optics" surrounding a questionable recruiting video vanish is to make the bad video vanish first, right? That's obviously what the Minneapolis Police Department believes. It has nuked its controversial recruiting video from DMCA orbit, netting citizen journalist Wedge Live a copyright strike for preserving something the MPD would rather just went away.

Twitter user Tony Webster pointed out the end result of the MPD's efforts, which removed the video formerly located here (Update: as this story started to get press attention, it appears that the Minneapolis PD has rescinded its takedown).

Fortunately for us -- and less fortunately for the MPD -- the video has been uploaded to Vimeo by Wedge Live, where it presumably awaits another questionable DMCA takedown notice from the police department.

The MPD used to be quite proud of its video, until it generated some complaints about its aggressive imagery. The video opens with two poorly thought out shots. In one, a man in military gear pointing an assault rifle morphs into an MPD officer… carrying an assault rifle.

The other shows a female beginning to throw a softball, which then morphs into a female police officer… pointing a gun at the camera.

Neither of these opening shots do much to set the stage for the rest of the video, which is the usual assortment of talking heads and officers-in-action shots after that point. Nonetheless, the MPD does not host the video at its own YouTube channel, and on July 13 removed its link to the video from its own recruitment page.

The archived version contains a link to the video. (And the link still works, but it's not hosted at YouTube.)

The updated version does not.

If it wasn't for the MPD's efforts to remove all traces of the video, this might have been chalked up to just a misguided effort to flex copyright muscle over something that was created with public funds and should, generally speaking, belong to the public, rather than the police department.

But, considering the MPD has removed the link from its own webpage, it looks a whole lot more like an agency abusing the DMCA takedown system to remove something it considers to be less-than-flattering, especially in light of the Philando Castile shooting -- in which an officer killed Castile for attempting to produce the ID the officer had just asked for. Castile was carrying a gun, but had a concealed carry permit and had informed the officer of the fact. When he reached for his ID, the officer shot him four times. The aftermath of the shooting -- as Castile died in his car next to his girlfriend and her daughter -- was streamed live to Facebook.

So, it's not surprising the MPD would want its recruiting video to vanish, seeing as it opens up in an aggressive and militarized manner. Unfortunately, the web doesn't forget just because the DMCA process has been abused. The MPD will have to live with its poor decisions for much longer than it planned to.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, minneapolis, minneapolis pd, police, recruiting video

Minneapolis Police Filming Their Own Work To Show Critics

from the good-move dept

We've had tons of stories about police arresting people for filming them. And we've seen plenty of other stories about mobile phone cameras being used to document and share evidence of police overreacting (especially at various protest scenes). However, the folks at On The Media had a great story recently about how the police in Minnesota are filming themselves when they deal with protests and then releasing the raw video footage in response to footage from others.


In the case above, it involved Occupy protestors using video footage of police arresting journalists. However, the police's own footage put the situation in a bit more context, including showing the police clearly reading out warnings to the crowd that if they don't help police remove obstructions in the plaza, that they will need to take enforcement action. Does this absolve the actions of the police? Perhaps not, though it may depend on where you sit. However, it is a really interesting strategy, and one that I think actually reflects a very positive development. Rather than hiding from cameras, the police can (and should) use cameras to their own advantage as well.

Amusingly, however, in the story, the police chief notes that the film in question was done by crime scene videographers, who are a little too focused on closeup shots, not knowing quite how to take wide shots that might show the scene in a bit more detail to provide additional context.

Of course, the police chief, Janee Harteau, isn't fully enlightened. While she does say that officers should always assume they're being filmed (and mentions permanent cameras in the city, as well as squad car cameras), she still complains that people with mobile phone cameras sometimes "interfere with an officer's ability to do their job." She doesn't really elaborate, beyond saying that police have a job to do in protecting the public. She does say that "the officer's word doesn't mean as much as it used to" if there isn't a video. I'm not sure why that's a bad thing. If there isn't more evidence, isn't it only proper to give the testimony less weight? Either way, I do think the overall idea of police filming themselves (and releasing that video) is a definite step in the right direction, and one that I hope other police departments start using.

Filed Under: janee harteau, minneapolis, minnesota, occupy, police, protestors