Criminal Justice

Daytona Cop Sentenced to 25 Years After Organizing Child Pornography Ring

In March 2022, the Daytona Beach Police Department’s Advanced Technology and Cybercrime (ATAC) unit launched an investigation after receiving a tip about a child porn distribution ring that was being run on a social media app. After doing some digging, Daytona cops made a disturbing discovery—the perpetrator distributing images of child sexual abuse on the app—was one of their own.

In April 2022, Officer Brandon Fox, 23, was arrested and charged with 7 counts of possession and distribution of child pornography. According to police, they received information regarding an individual sharing child pornography via a social media app that included images and videos of sexual acts involving children under 10.

The evidence was so strong against him that he was quickly found guilty, and this week Fox was sentenced to 25 years in prison followed by 45 years of probation.

Fox reluctantly entered no-contest pleas for a staggering 38 counts of possession of sexual performance by a child. With each count being escalated from a third-degree felony to a second-degree felony due to Fox’s possession of 10 or more images, including at least one video, the legal system actually aimed to hold him accountable.

The consequences for a second-degree felony can be as severe as 15 years in prison, meaning that Fox faced the possibility of an astounding 570-year sentence. However, the sentencing guidelines established a minimum sentence for Fox at 63.5 years, demonstrating the intent to ensure justice is served.

During the sentencing, Fox admitted to “being part of the problem” instead of the “solution” when it came to stopping child porn.

“I am someone who should have been acting to arrest and stop child abuse and child pornography,” Fox said. “In my tenure in law enforcement, I was involved in the arrest of sex offenders and people who have sought to hurt children. So, when I came into contact with these items I should have been part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

“Instead of protecting those innocent children from criminal behavior and exploitation, you chose repeatedly to participate in their exploitation and their victimization,” Circuit Judge Elizabeth Blackburn said. “And every single time you open a photograph or video, you, a sworn officer, revictimized that child. Every time you entered that chat room through Kik or any other chatroom that’s designed to share child pornography, you participated in exploiting children.”

During the investigation, police tracked the horrifying images and videos back to Fox.

According to police, Fox had been with the department for two years before he began preying on children.

As we reported right before Fox’s arrest, in August of 2020, former New Mexico State Police officer, Ricky Romero, was granted a plea deal after admitting to soliciting and receiving sexually explicit images from an underage girl on social media. Instead of jail time for this child predator, Romero’s badge granted him blue privilege, and he was given probation.

Thanks to his blue privilege, Romero avoided jail and didn’t have to register as a sex offender. While on probation for sex crimes against children, Romero was arrested again.

According to the United States Attorney’s office for the District of New Mexico, Romero appeared in federal court the following month where he was charged with coercion and enticement of a minor and receiving child pornography—again.

This article was originally featured at The Free Thought Project and is republished with permission.

Cop Arrested After Beating Innocent Man for Not Using Sidewalk

Walking across the street in a manner not fit for the police state can often end in serious injury or death—not necessarily because of a car running you over. Unfortunately, this country’s enforcement of jaywalking laws has gone to the extreme, and a new video of a Michigan State Police trooper proves this point.

MSP Trooper Paul E. Arrowood, 43, was arrested on single counts of common law offense or misconduct in office and assault and battery. The first charge is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

While this officer certainly deserves the maximum sentence, his actions that day are an indictment of the entire system—that considers it just to extort, kidnap, and cage people for entirely arbitrary reasons like walking in a manner not fit for the police state.

On Sept. 4, 2022, Michael D. Wilson, 28, was harming no one, committed no crime, and did nothing wrong when Arrowood targeted him for extortion. However, Arrowood claimed Wilson was somehow committing a crime because he was walking on the side of the road and not the sidewalk.

Walking on the side of the road is not a crime, not even in Police State USA. But this didn’t stop Arrowood from escalating violence against the innocent 28-year-old.

As the video below shows, two troopers exit their vehicle and approach Wilson, with Arrowood immediately grabbing Wilson’s right arm.

“Time out, time out, time out,” Wilson tells the troopers as they try leading him to their vehicle. “I ain’t even doing nothing. I’m not even doing nothing. Ya’ll got your cameras on? Please do.”

At no time do either of the troopers tell Wilson that he is suspected of committing a crime—because he wasn’t. Instead, violence was used to “subdue” the innocent man, and Arrowood smashes Wilson’s face and chest into the pavement.

“Roll the f**k over!” Arrowood yells at his victim, who is screaming for help the entire time.

Arrowood then begins punching his victim in the head while calling him a “little bitch.”

“Put your hands behind your f**kin back,” Arrowood says as he continues punching and kneeing Wilson.

Arrowood suddenly starts talking about some nonexistent gun when other troopers arrive, despite initiating the stop because Wilson was not on the sidewalk.

“I ain’t got no gun, ain’t never had no gun,” Wilson shouts.

“He just beat my ass,” he yells to the other troopers. “You a racist ass b****. Thank you for beating my ass. I hope your camera is on. He whupped my ass for no reason.”

In an attempt to justify their sadistic brutality, troopers charged Wilson with assaulting, resisting, or obstructing police. But only days later, prosecutors—without a leg to stand on—cleared Wilson of any wrongdoing.

Six months after this cop violently attacked and kidnapped an innocent man, he’s finally getting what’s due. But, unfortunately, the taxpayers of Michigan will also be forced to pay for this cop’s actions. Wilson has filed a lawsuit, and his attorney, Joseph A. Albosta, lauded authorities for arresting one of their own.

“I’m glad to see the system is working and police are in fact policing one of their own when they do something wrong and act inappropriately,” he said. “I’m glad to see the Saginaw County Prosecutor’s Office following through with the investigation and eventually bringing charges. I think it’s a step in the right direction.”

“The actions of Tpr. Paul Arrowood fall outside of MSP policy and procedure and they constitute an unwarranted use of force,” stated Col. Joe Gasper, director of the MSP. “The members of the Michigan State Police are committed to treating everyone with dignity and respect, and we will tolerate no less. When we fall short of this standard, we will hold our members accountable.”

Arrowood was released last week on his own recognizance and is set to appear for a preliminary examination at 10 a.m. on March 21.

Below is a video highlighting what happens when masochistic individuals seek out authority to abuse those they dislike.

This article was originally featured at The Free Thought Project and is republished with permission.

Crime and Poverty

“The theory that crime is caused by poverty is not supported by the known facts. The very poor, in fact, tend to be just as law-abiding as the rich, and perhaps more so. To argue otherwise is to libel multitudes of people who keep to decency under severe difficulties, and in the face of constant temptation.”

—H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, 1956

30th Anniversary of the FBI’s Biggest ‘Bomb’

Thirty years ago this past Sunday, the largest terrorist attack in American history up to that point occurred when a 1200-pound bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center in New York City. It was sheer luck that the explosion did not topple the entire skyscraper and kill thousands of people. Politicians solemnly marked the anniversary but dignitaries made no mention of the FBI’s role in that disaster.

On November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated at a New York hotel. Kahane advocated banishing all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and his political party was banned from the Knesset for “inciting racism” and “endangering security.” Kahane was shot by El Sayyid Nosair, a 36-year-old Egyptian immigrant, who was part of an anti-Israeli cabal of Muslims in the New York area. When police searched Nosair’s residence, they carried off 47 boxes of documents, paramilitary manuals, maps, and diagrams of buildings (including the World Trade Center).

No one in the New York FBI office could read Arabic, so those documents—labeled “a road map” to the 1993 bombing—were left in storage for more than two years. A 2002 congressional report noted that the New York Police Department “resisted attempts to label the Kahane assassination a ‘conspiracy’ despite the apparent links to a broader network of radicals” because they “wanted the appearance of speedy justice and a quick resolution to a volatile situation.” Nosair’s legal defense was reportedly financed by Osama Bin Laden.

The trial, which began in late 1991, was “marked by rioting outside the courthouse, death threats against the judge and lawyers, calls for ‘blood’ revenge against the defendant and cries of ‘Death to Jews!’ from his Moslem supporters,” the National Law Journal reported. The FBI placed an informant named Emad Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian military officer, in the midst of the Muslim protesters. Salem insinuated himself and became the bodyguard for Sheik Abdul Rahman, a radical Muslim cleric. Despite stark evidence, a New York jury bizarrely found Nosair not guilty of murder.

In mid-1992, Salem repeatedly warned the FBI that radical Muslims were planning to carry off a catastrophic bombing in New York City. FBI supervisors were convinced he was concocting tall tales and ceased paying him his $500 a week. On February 26, 1993, a massive bomb in a van exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center, killing six people, injuring more than a thousand, and causing half a billion dollars in damage. If the van had been parked a few feet closer to one of the pillars, an entire tower of the Trade Center could have collapsed.

An Immigration and Naturalization Service snafu contributed to the success of the bombing. One of the key plotters, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was stopped at JFK International Airport in September 1992 after an INS inspector recognized that his Iraqi passport was a fraud. Yousef applied for asylum. Because the nearby “holding facility” the INS used for illegal immigrants was full, the INS permitted Yousef to enter the United States. A 1998 ABC News analysis noted, “Yousef was living in a guest house in Pakistan paid for by bin Laden at the time of his capture—a connection that lead the FBI to investigate whether bin Laden was also the mysterious source of money behind the bombing.” Yousef slipped out of the United States immediately after the bombing.

The FBI “cracked the case” when a knucklehead plotter demanded a refund for his $400 deposit for the Ryder rental truck used for the bombing. Time noted that the FBI “looked supremely capable in speedily rounding up suspects in the World Trade Center bombing.” Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy later bragged to a New York jury that the first World Trade Center attack was one of the FBI’s finest hours: “To the rest of the world out there, the explosion in all its tragedy was actually a high-water mark for the FBI.” FBI director William Sessions declared, “Based on what was known to us at the time, we have no reason to believe we could have prevented the bombing of the World Trade Center.”

Bull.

After the bombing, the FBI quickly rehired Salem and promised him a million dollars to develop evidence of additional terrorist plots. Salem didn’t trust the feds to pay so he secretly recorded his conversations with FBI agents. In August 1993, as the case was heading for trial, news leaked that Salem had made more than a hundred hours of tapes of his conversations with FBI agents and handlers. Those tapes portrayed the FBI as co-conspirator with the terrorist plotters.

In a call to an FBI agent shortly after the bombing, Salem complained,

“We was start already building the bomb…supervising, supervision from the Bureau [FBI] and the DA [district attorney] and we was all informed about it. And we know that the bomb start to be built. By who? By your confidential informant. What a wonderful great case. And then he [the FBI supervisor] put his head in the sand and said, oh no, no, no that’s not true, he is a son of a bitch, okay.”

In another taped call, Salem anguished to one FBI agent, “You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom. Lock them up and that’s that. That’s why I feel so bad.” On another tape, Salem asked an FBI agent, “Do you deny your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?” The agent did not deny Salem’s charge. FBI agent Nancy Floyd confided to Salem that her supervisors had botched the case: “I felt that the people on the squad, that they didn’t have a clue…That the supervisors didn’t know what was going on. That they hadn’t taken the time to learn the history.”

So how did the FBI exonerate itself? The New York Times published a “correction” noting that the FBI claimed to be unsure which building the terrorists were going to blow up: “Transcripts of tapes made secretly by an informant, Emad A. Salem, quote him as saying he warned the Government that a bomb was being built. But the transcripts do not make clear the extent to which the Federal authorities knew that the target was the World Trade Center.”

Before the bombing, Salem offered to substitute harmless powder for the deadly explosives and thereby preventing any catastrophe. The FBI spurned his offer. Salem complained to one FBI agent that an FBI supervisor “requested to make me to testify [in public] and if he didn’t push for that, we’ll be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But…we didn’t do that.” “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” headlined The New York Times report on this stunning revelation.

What is more shocking than an FBI informant planted amidst the most deadly terror plot in American history? Two FBI informants in the same plot. As Newsday reported on October 29, 1993:

“The FBI had a second confidential informant who infiltrated the Jersey City mosque where the sheik preached. According to law-enforcement sources, two months before the Feb. 26 Trade Center bombing, the informant was on a military-style training exercise in a New Jersey park with other suspects when he was asked to obtain dynamite for an attack. After the informant told FBI officials, they met for nearly an entire day to consider providing the suspects with inoperative, counterfeit dynamite. But, to avoid the possibility of an entrapment charge, FBI officials instead pulled the informant off the assignment the next day, sources said.”

“Instead of trying to stop it they just waited for it to happen, then swooped in and arrested everyone,” said an investigator. “It was incredible.”

The feds considered Salem credible enough to pay him that million dollars for his 1995 testimony to convict Muslim conspirators before they carried out further attacks on New York City landmarks. Those court victories permitted the FBI to continue pirouetting as national saviors.

But the trial revealed that Salem was far more than a passive collector of dirt. As Time magazine reported just after the trial: “It was Salem who consulted [blind sheik] on possible bombing targets; rented the ‘safe house’ in Queens, New York, where the conspirators gathered (and in which the FBI installed the video cameras); and had the only key to the garage where the explosives were prepared. Moreover, he even bragged to Barbara Rogers, his wife at the time, that he was the leader of the group. ‘I am the shepherd,’ Rogers recalls him saying. ‘They are the sheep.’” The defendants in the trial got fleeced when they tried to claim entrapment.

There were no congressional investigations of the self-confessed role of the FBI informant in the most destructive bombing in American history. Instead, Congress continued boosting the FBI budget, which presumably would solve all the problems exposed in the 1993 bombing case.

In 1997, FBI Director Louis Freeh promised Congress that he would “double the ‘shoe leather” for counterterrorism investigations. But walking was no substitute for thinking.

FBI debacles in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing foreshadowed far worse antiterrorism failures in the following decades. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the FBI again failed dismally to connect the dots of terrorist plotters inside the United States. An FBI agent groused in 2002 that the bureau’s ethos was that “real men don’t type. The only thing a real agent needs is a notebook, a pen and gun, and with those three things you can conquer the world…The computer revolution just passed us by.” The FBI’s gross negligence “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists,” according to a 2002 congressional investigation. The Bush administration suppressed the full details of FBI failures to detect the terrorist plots that left thousands of Americans dead.

Since the 1993 bombing, neither Congress nor federal courts have put the FBI on a leash, and the media continues kowtowing to G-men who serve up juicy leaks. When judging the FBI, never forget comedian Lily Tomlin’s maxim: “No matter how cynical you get, it’s never enough to keep up.”

WATCH: 14 Year Old Girl Held at Gunpoint Over Seatbelt Violation

In the land of the free, if law enforcement witnesses you driving your personally owned vehicle with dark window tint or without your seatbelt on, they will pull you over and issue a citation, otherwise known as extortion. If you refuse to acknowledge this extortion or attempt to resist it, you will be kidnapped and caged. If you refuse to be kidnapped and caged, you can and will have violence brought upon you and can and will be killed. The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous traffic citations over the years, which started with victimless crimes and ended with someone getting beaten or killed.

The family in the video below narrowly escaped this fate recently, as they came just seconds from becoming the next statistic. A 14-year-old child learned the hard way just how far police will go during a traffic stop to extort people for victimless traffic crimes.

In the video, which took place in Mt. Olive, NC, the officer stops the family, claiming that the driver, the 14-year-old’s mother, was not wearing a seatbelt.

One of her daughters, Arianna Amaya was also in the car, pulled out her phone, and posted the video of the incident on her Tik Tok account. According to Amaya, her mother did not have her driver’s license, and after she provided the officer with her name and date of birth, he “ripped” her out of the car.

As the video shows, the officer attempts to arrest the girl’s mother, but the mother disagrees and wants another officer on the scene. When the 14-year-old daughter gets out of the car to call the police, the officer almost kills her.

Arianna Amaya’s TikTok caption explains how the situation unfolded:

“So today in Mt.Olive North Carolina officer Z Price pulled over my mother, under the assumption that she did not have her seatbelt on … He then asked her for identification, and she did not have her ID on her. After she gave him her full name and date of birth, he continues to rip my mom out of her vehicle and failed to tell her why she was being detained. After I stepped out the vehicle to call my stepdad He then pulls his weapon out on me, and my younger sister did not have my mother in jail and he claims her to be an “illegal immigrant” and they also stated that my mother lied about her name being Anna. The officer failed to read her the Miranda rights he also did not have his body cam on and refused to bring a female officer to search her.”

Social media may have identified the North Carolina police officer as Zachary Price. Arianna Amaya started a Angel Link page to help raise money to get her mother home.

Below is a video showing why police enforcement of victimless crimes must end now.

This article was originally featured at The Free Thought Project and is republished with permission.

Podcasts

scotthortonshow logosq

coi banner sq2@0.5x

liberty weekly thumbnail

Don't Tread on Anyone Logo

313x0w (1)

Pin It on Pinterest