Stupid people of the week

I’m told there’s a ‘Vette in this picture, but I can’t find it

Police chase ends with state trooper in handcuffs after stop sticks deployed

A police chase in late September ended with a state trooper in handcuffs after officers used stop sticks to flatten the tire of his bomb squad truck.

The problem: the truck wasn’t fleeing police. It was an Indiana State Police bomb squad vehicle responding to an emergency call.

The chase began when an Austin police officer helping a broken-down car near a gas station spotted an unmarked white truck with a camper shell pass by with red and blue lights and sirens.

“White truck with a camper, unmarked just passed us with red and blues and sirens going west, can you advise, we have absolutely nothing on our cad,” an officer said over the radio.

Dispatchers told officers all state police at meeting

Officers asked Scott County dispatchers to call state police. Dispatchers reported back that all Indiana State Police units were at a meeting at the post.

“Austin units, ISP advises all their units are at a meeting at the post its not them,” a dispatcher said.

Austin police started chasing the truck just outside town. The pursuit continued north on Indiana 39 as Jackson County sheriff’s deputies and Brownstown police joined.

Officers read the license plate, which came back registered to the Department of Administration in Indianapolis. The truck was a fleet vehicle, but neither officers nor dispatchers understood what that meant.

“I looked it up, but it just says they help purchase vehicles,” a dispatcher said.

Stop sticks deployed at sharp curve

A Brownstown officer set up stop sticks at a sharp right-hand turn on the highway.

Trooper Rick Stockdale saw police lights in his side mirror and radioed to his own dispatch.

“Do you know what Jackson County has? They seem to catch up to me running hot,” Stockdale said.

The stop sticks shredded the bomb squad truck’s front tire. Officers drew their weapons and ordered Stockdale out of the vehicle at gunpoint, handcuffing him on the side of the road.

“I’m not, I’m a state police officer, bomb squad, going to a call,” Stockdale said.

“We’ve already made contact with ISP, and they said nobody was supposed to be doing anything,” said one of the deputies, “I just called them and they know I’m going,” Stockdale said.

State police dispatcher realizes mistake

Police eventually connected the dots.

“Hey, this is Christi with state police. I just figured out it is one of our guys going to a bomb call,” said the state police dispatcher to Scott County. “OMG,” said a Scott County dispatcher. A second dispatcher could be heard on the recording, “She literally called them twice, why would they not tell us?”

Officers realized what had happened.

“Sorry for the big mishap,” one Austin officer said.

“I just spiked a f***ing state cop,” another said.

“We were thinking somebody stole a truck,” an officer said.

Trooper insists lights and sirens were on

State Trooper Mark Naylor arrived to investigate. Stockdale changed the tire while Naylor interviewed every officer involved.

Stockdale told the Austin officer to make one thing clear in his report.

“Make sure you get the right thing in the story. Lights and sirens. They were on. That’s the biggest thing, is that lights and sirens were on,” Stockdale said.

“We suspected it to either be a stolen vehicle or impersonating an officer. So, that’s what brought us out to here,” an officer said.

“I’m not trying to turn this into a huge mess. Any more than it has to be,” Naylor said.

Stockdale left after changing the tire, with lights and sirens. He arrived at the bomb call two hours after the suspicious device was first reported.

None of the police departments agreed to on-camera interviews. Jackson County Sheriff Rick Meyer said the department can hear local channels but can’t listen to all. Indiana State Police said the same, explaining it was impractical to listen to every channel as it would drown out their own radio traffic.

No department answered whether they could hail each other on the radio.

The bomb squad did not file a report. The suspected pipe bomb was not an explosive device.

“Let’s all get out of here and forget this mess,” Naylor said.

Source; WAVE3

Mark Robinson admits ‘I lied’ about CNN story

Well, duh!

Former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson admitted he lied about a bombshell CNN KFile investigation during the final months of his 2024 gubernatorial campaign, uncovering his extensive history of posting inflammatory and racist comments on a pornography website.

Robinson initially denied the report and sued CNN for $50 million that fall as he marched on with his gubernatorial campaign. Robinson eventually lost to current Democratic Gov. Josh Stein by more than 14 points.

Now, in a recent podcast interview, Robinson has acknowledged his deception and that he had an “obsession” with pornography and sex. He says he lied about the CNN report to protect those around him, including President Donald Trump, because it was “the most expedient thing to do.”

“I won’t say that I completely lied, some of the things about the whole story. Some of it — there’s some truth to it,” Robinson said on Thursday.

But “if I had to ignore the truth at that moment for their expediency, I felt like it was the right thing to do,” said Robinson.

“I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election. Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election. I guess there may be some people that feel like that I did,” he said.

CNN’s KFile reported in September 2024 that Robinson made a litany of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board a decade earlier, in which he called himself a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery. The comments were made under an alias, minisoldr, that CNN was able to link to Robinson by matching numerous biographical details and a shared email address.

Robinson strongly denied the story to CNN in an interview at the time. “This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” Robinson said.

Despite pressure from Republicans to drop out of the race, Robinson remained in it and his staff quickly fled the campaign.

After leaving office, Robinson dropped the defamation lawsuit against CNN and vowed to retire from politics.

During a 90-minute interview on “After the Call,” a podcast hosted by Florida-based pastor Josh Hall, Robinson delved into his childhood, his struggles with his obsession with sex and pornography, and copped to some of the reporting in CNN’s story.

“More than anything, you know, allegations that I watched pornography and was involved with people that watched pornography, and that that was absolutely true,” Robinson said.

Robinson said he was speaking out about his pornography “obsession” because he believes people like him, who struggled and came back from it, are the best messengers to help others struggling.

“The only shame in it is staying in it,” he said.

Robinson also suggested that some things his online alias, minisoldr, posted were falsely attributed to him. “I don’t deny the fact that at some point, I said enough salacious things where they could certainly make it seem so.”

It is unclear what comments Robinson is referring to.

He also maintained that had he followed his instincts and replaced his staff in the summer before the election, he could have survived the scandal.

“I should have changed campaign teams in the summer and took my campaign in a completely different direction. And if I had, I believe even with the CNN scandal, I believe I still would’ve won that race,” he said.

When asked by the host if he could go back to that time and make that decision or own up to the story, Robinson didn’t hesitate.

“No, I’d do the exact same thing,” he said, adding that the story was “never about me.”

“For the other, for the people who were doing it to me, it wasn’t about me. It was about a cause bunch bigger than that. And they knew that they could use me to destroy, the people around me, up to and including the president, they would do it. And so I’d make the exact same decision.”

Source; CNN

Police got tip about ‘dirty cop’ helping trafficker 15 years before Winnipeg officer’s arrest: warrant docs

One of the first red flags about now disgraced Winnipeg officer Elston Bostock came 15 years before he was arrested, when an informant warned police about a “dirty cop” helping a drug trafficker, search warrant documents obtained by CBC News say.

But the investigation at the time into Bostock, who is now in prison for corruption and other offences, was suspended because there was no corroborating evidence.

Over the years that followed, other information continued to come in through police sources — and, in one case, an unrelated wiretap investigation — about an officer believed to be Bostock selling and using drugs, sharing police information and associating with people involved in crime.

That included a tip about an officer named Elston hanging around two drug traffickers in Winnipeg, who described themselves as having “a cop in their pocket,” the documents said.

But it wasn’t until 2024 that police started the investigation that ultimately ended in Bostock being removed from the force and sent to prison.

The search warrant documents also describe an earlier unsuccessful attempt by police to monitor Bostock’s cellphone, and minimal details about some internal actions taken against him before his eventual arrest, for an altercation with another officer and sharing information with a person of interest in a missing person investigation.

They also detail what officers found when they searched Bostock’s home after his arrest — including a dead man’s private journal and a box of Ozempic with someone else’s name on it, both believed to have been taken from police scenes.

Bostock, 49, was sentenced in January to seven years in prison, after pleading guilty to a long list of crimes he committed over the last eight years of his career.

The offences he admitted to included fixing traffic tickets, sharing police information, selling drugs and making lewd comments about a photo he shared with two other officers of the topless body of a woman who’d fatally overdosed.

While prosecutors have told court that reports about Bostock from the police service’s professional standards unit dated back to 2009, further details about those reports included in search warrant documents could not previously be shared because of a publication ban.

The ban on sharing information revealed in those hundreds of pages of documents — which shed light on what police knew about Bostock and how early they knew it — was lifted after CBC News successfully fought it in court.

‘Great business move’

The earliest tip implicating Bostock in the search warrant documents came from a Brandon Police Service informant, who said in 2009 that the “dirty cop” they’d heard about in Winnipeg lived in Waverley Heights and was named Elston.

While there were two Winnipeg police officers living in that neighbourhood at the time, there was only one named Elston, the search warrant documents say. But without other evidence, that investigation ended.

A few years later, another source told police about two brothers who trafficked drugs in Winnipeg and who talked about having a “cop in their pocket.”

The source said in 2013 that one of those brothers called it ”a ‘great business move’ to party with a cop because Elston could provide protection from other drug dealers as well as ‘from being popped by the cops,'” the search warrant documents say.

“[He] also stated that if they do get popped, they have dirt on the cop, and if ‘Elston’ was involved in the arrest or tried to turn it around, they have proof that he is a dirty cop because he ‘snorts’ with them.”

That same source also described another officer who was a friend of Elston and had been seen “smoking weed and partying” with the drug trafficking brothers — though the documents say the identity of that officer was unknown.

Request to monitor cellphone denied

By 2018, police got information from confidential sources that took them as far as asking a judge for permission to record data from Bostock’s cellphone.

One of those sources described a Winnipeg officer named Elston who was friends with one of two men importing GHB — also known as the date rape drug — to the city, and who would do computer checks to “let them know who police were ‘looking at.'”

The officer had also sold the source MDMA, or ecstasy, three times in the past, the documents say.

Around the same time, another source gave police information that mirrored what they’d been told in 2013, about an officer who “hangs out” with the drug trafficking brothers and uses cocaine and MDMA.

But a provincial court judge at the time denied the application related to Bostock’s phone, saying she wasn’t satisfied there were grounds for her to grant what police asked for.

Information about Bostock continued to come in the following year, when officers in the homicide unit doing a wiretap investigation listened in on a 14-minute phone conversation between two people they described as being involved in organized crime.

‘Wildest guy’

At one point, one of the men on that 2019 call talked about two police officers he said he was “OK with” — including one named Elston.

“Elston is the wildest guy you will ever see in your life, he’s nuts,” the summary of their conversation in the search warrant documents says.

“[The man heard on the call] doesn’t even know how he’s a cop … [and] has no clue how he maintained his gun and badge.”

That man also told a story about running into the officer in uniform at a party where an underage girl was in attendance, who the officer referred to as “some underage p—y,” the search warrant documents say.

“Elston took a massive bong rip in uniform and then took four of the partygoers in the back of his cruiser car and drove them to OV Nightclub with the lights on.”

Eventually, information about Bostock was even coming from other police officers, the search warrant documents say. In 2022, an officer covertly documenting organized crime members at the Summer of Sound music festival saw Bostock “in a VIP area with various [people who they] believed were organized crime members and drug traffickers.”

‘F–ked up on Molly’

Another officer who was working crowd management at the festival the same year said Bostock approached him and told him he was “f–ked up on Molly,” or MDMA, and having a great time, before returning to a group that included people police said were involved in organized crime.

The next year, information from another source provided more details about an officer sharing police information — including that the source was once warned to “stay away” from a drug trafficker, after someone’s “police buddy” saw the trafficker on a list of names, the documents say.

That source said the officer in question would notify members of a drug network of police check stops, and use cocaine with his group of friends.

‘Where’s the party?’

In 2024 — the year of the investigation that resulted in Bostock’s arrest — police continued to get tips about the officer, including from one of the same sources who gave them information the year before.

That source said the officer they talked about would do collections for drug traffickers for a fee, take money to do searches on police computer systems and stop at house parties and use cocaine while on duty with his partner.

While the source identified that officer as “Easton Brostack,” the officer who wrote the search warrant documents said he believes “this is a typo or mis-pronunciation and the officer is actually Elston Bostock.”

The same year, police started monitoring Bostock’s phone as part of their investigation — intercepts that included conversations of him sharing police information and trying to convince other officers to drop traffic tickets.

In one intercepted conversation, Bostock asked another officer if there were any checkstops that night. When the officer said there weren’t, Bostock messaged someone else “No checkstops all night sir” and “Coast is clear.”

The person who got those messages replied and said they weren’t drinking that night, but it was “great to know.”

“I know you aren’t but others appreciate the info,” Bostock replied. “Where’s the party?”

Journal, Ozempic found

When Bostock was finally arrested in November 2024, police searched his home and found drugs, brass knuckles, nunchucks and several iPhones — plus a journal and a box of Ozempic that the search warrant documents say seemed to have been taken from scenes where police had responded to sudden death calls.

The journal appeared to belong to a man whose death Bostock and several other officers were dispatched to in 2023, the search warrant documents say, while the Ozempic was prescribed to another man whose sudden death police responded to in 2024.

While Bostock is currently serving a prison sentence for the offences he’s admitted to, three other officers who were charged alongside him still have cases before the courts.

Matthew Kadyniuk has pleaded guilty to breach of trust and theft under $5,000, after the pair stole cash and other items they believed to be evidence during a 2024 “integrity test” conducted by police. He is awaiting sentencing.

Two other officers’ charges are still before the courts and have not been proven.

Jonathan Kiazyk is accused of unlawfully entering a residence during an investigation and obstructing a police investigation with Bostock in 2022.

Vernon Strutinsky is charged with entering a residence without authorization for the purpose of evicting its tenants with Bostock in 2023, which police said involved leaving notes threatening the tenants with arrest if they didn’t comply.

Source; CBC

Category: "Teh Stoopid", Crime, Police, Stupid Criminals