In November, police in Minneapolis and St. Paul, arrested four people for assault after seeing videos they had posted of themselves. “For many years, they’ve had (the television show) America’s Dumbest Criminals,” said Minneapolis police spokesman Jesse Garcia. “It’s people like this that feed that.” People who post such videos do so, in part, because they “believe there is a degree of anonymity on the Internet,” Nashville criminal defense attorney David Raybin said. When he gets a new client, Raybin said, “the first thing I tell them is, ‘You are shutting down your Facebook account.’ ” YouTube prohibits content that is intended to incite violence and videos of illegal activities. The company relies on users to flag violators.

Although the operation is a military one, the greater test of the U.S.-led action will be a civilian campaign to show the people of Marjah  there’s an alternative to poppy cultivation, heroin production and smuggling. If the military and civilian side can coordinate, it could set an example for other parts of the country. U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the international military force in Afghanistan, said, ”When the government re-establishes security, (the people) will have choices [] on the crops they grow, they’ll have the ability to move that produce to appropriate markets, they won’t be limited to narco-traffickers who can force them into” the narcotics trade.

The Justice Department said a majority of the cases nationally and at Nashville’s Woodland Hills facility involved female staffers’ abusing male youths. The Tenessean reported that in 2007, kitchen staffer Luana Settle was convicted of statutory rape after she had given a 17-year-old youth at the center chlamydia, and went on to live with another boy she’d had a sexual encounter with at the facility. Legislators believe “the department investigating itself is not a good policy,” said Nashville Democrat Rep. Sherry Jones, who chairs an oversight committee.

Murray told investigators that Jackson, 50, was a chronic insomniac who had depended for years on propofol — a white liquid the singer called “milk” — to sleep. An anesthesiologist told the coroner she knew of “NO reports of its use for insomnia relief.”  The setup in Jackson’s bedroom did not include proper monitoring or precise dosing equipment, and an oxygen tank at his bedside was empty. Whether Murray was negligent in administering propofol to Jackson will probably be the central dispute in his involuntary manslaughter prosecution. Prosecutors do not have to prove Murray acted with malice or intent, only that the death occurred during an “unlawful act not amounting to a felony” or during a lawful act performed “without due caution and circumspection.”

Capt. Peter Brown, who commands the U.S. Coast Guard in the Caribbean, said smugglers are back at work after a brief break after the Jan. 12 quake. On Jan. 26, a Coast Guard cutter helping with relief found 360 pounds of cocaine and 46 pounds of marijuana on board a Haitian freighter. The 5,000 convicts who escaped the National Penitentiary in Haiti threaten to boost drug activity. About 1,000 of the escapees are members of gangs with drug ties, said Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group, a Belgium-based research foundation. “The chaos and desperation that have set in provide an opening that trafficking organizations will undoubtedly seek to exploit,” said Cindy Arnson of the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

A whole section of Oakland’s downtown has willingly taken on the nickname “Oaksterdam” (a play on the name of Amsterdam, where pot use has been legal since the early 1970s) because of its array of dispensaries and marijuana-related products and services. City Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan said a political sea change began last year, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that federal drug officers no longer would target the operators or customers of legitimate medical pot dispensaries. Then an April 2009 Field Poll showed that 56 percent of Californians support full legalization, regulation and taxation of the drug. “That decision plus the Field Poll has had a dramatic impact on how we look at pot in California these days,” said Kaplan.

City officers pulled 1,121 guns off the street last year. A more telling figure is the number of arrests for illegally concealing guns: the force made 659 arrests in 2009. Three officers were suspended with pay last week while the city investigates a teenager’s claim that they beat him. The trio made nearly 20 percent of the city’s illegal firearms arrests. Undercover officers must be vigilant in their search for telltale signs that a person is concealing a weapon. They are often aggressive, and their techniques make them prone to lawsuits and complaints of excessive force. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl asked the Office of Municipal Investigations to wrap up a probe into the case by March.

One of the first questions he posed to a top department official was, “Do you have community policing in Baltimore?” After years of cops believing that wholesale arrests were the way out of an epidemic of violence, Baltimore police returned to community policing with neighborhood walks and more outreach to help regain the trust of a distrustful citizenry. Paradoxically, they did it by disbanding the community policing unit. Police official Anthony Guglielmi had a difficult time explaining the concept, and Mosawi couldn’t understand how Baltimore embraces the same concept but without a division of officers to implement it. Guglielmi explained that every officer in every car needs to be a community cop, not just those officers in one small group. Under the old plan, residents disdained the officers with the cuffs and embraced the officers playing ball with the kids.