Bent American Police & Federal Agents: How to Report Them

The first thing to say, is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of US Citizens who feel hemmed in and trapped between criminal gangs and corrupt or indolent police who will offer no legal relief or redress. They go searching for some way to report the fact that their local police, or someone if their local FBI field office, is in the pocket of the criminals who are persecuting them. They search the Internet.

Now, the official advice, which they desperately need to find, is remarkably dull, boring, unobtrusive and, having been last updated ten years ago, easily missed by most popular search engines. Try this link and see! The procedure outlined here is pretty involved, and requires sending a complaint and supporting documents by post. It is possible to discern from this page that there is a procedure, but also that it hasn't been given any love by those in power since the month before George W. Bush was elected president. That being said, it's the official way, and if you follow the official procedure and nothing happens, you do at least have grounds for complaint or legal action.

America is the land of Free Enterprise (so we're told, but not in the same way as Hong Kong or Dubai) and an entrepreneur has realized that desperate American citizens, their lives threatened by gangsters and corrupt policemen, even corrupt FBI and DEA agents, are looking for much more than a ten year old webpage telling them to write a letter. He has duly created something that looks just like the desperate people are hoping to find, see this link here!

Glossy, friendly, helpful, professional -and completely and utterly bogus. This is the welcoming portal of what amounts to an advance fee fraud at best, and blackmail and stalking at worst. For the would-be complainants, it is the equivalent of those businesses that offer to get your screenplay adopted by a major production company for £25,000 "development seed capital" or those "agencies" that will kickstart your pretty daughter's modeling career by compiling and distributing a "portfolio" for an advance fee somewhere between £250 and £800.

For any corrupt policeman or Federal Agent that the site's owner manages to identify from the complaint, this is the portal to help or hell, depending on how vulnerable they prove to be. If they are in a strong position and backed by frightening people, they will be tipped off about the complaint, and given all the complainant's personal details, gratis or for a very modest fee. If the corrupt officer or agent happens to be out on a limb, though, they will be blackmailed for everything they have, to the point where they might even wish they'd been brought to justice and put in jail.

This link is to a site set up to collate and air the woes of those would-be complainants, who have had their legitimate cases against corrupt law enforcement officials hijacked, their remaining wealth leached away, their phones bugged, their computers hacked -and everything they said about the corrupt officials -and all their private details- communicated directly to those they were trying to complain about. The site at http://policeabuse.com/ is utterly bogus, a mantrap, designed to bleed the victim white and to take perverse revenge against them by betraying them to their persecutors. It has been made possible by the fact that Federal officials and politicians have completely sidelined the issue of police and FBI corruption for a decade, till all the official avenues of redress are choked with dust and a whole new field of criminal endeavour has sprung up exploiting this.

For the record, policeabuse.com connects to the "Police Complaints Centre" website, which is not an official organization, and, though all its addresses and phone numbers give the impression of it being in Washington DC, the phones are answered (eventually), mail opened and cheques cashed, in Florida, by an unlicensed private investigator. The only honest way to describe a private investigator who cannot get licensed, even in Florida, is a conman.

So, what should people do about corrupt police in America?

Well, if you're a victim, steer clear of the policeabuse.com site, and anything else like it. The real thing is dismal and boring, the con sites are glossy, inviting, and just what you are desperately hoping to see. Look at the official DoJ webpage again, and try your best with the procedure there. You cannot complain about the procedure not working if you don't try, and if you do try and nothing is done immediately, at least your complaint will still be in the system when public pressure forces the politicians to shake the dust off it and make it work again. Also, see below, for another way to put American organised crime under pressure.

If you are not a victim, it's your public duty to bend the ear of your elected representatives on behalf of your fellow citizens who are victims of police corruption and misconduct. Until they either take effective action or their ears bleed, poor things. Make your Congressman and Senator look at the official page for reporting corruption and at the conpage for fleecing anyone who is trying to be a good citizen and report corruption. Make them ashamed that this is happening!

Meanwhile, there is another way.
Very little organised crime in America completely lacks an international dimension, and no matter how much corruption and indolence are choking America's response, any intelligence on large-scale criminal dealings and connections will be read with interest if communicated to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Pretty much regardless of what country is involved, because most of the world's money-laundering crosses one British jurisdiction or another at some point in its journey. If you've got something to say about drugs, arms, money or trafficked persons being moved around, say it there.

It is also worth knowing the following:
Any item of criminal intelligence placed on the UK's police national computer, the computers of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, or even MI5, has to be accompanied by a risk statement, which helps determine who can be allowed to see that intelligence and who cannot. Therefore, when reporting anything, even if you're doing it anonymously, and you know about a risk involved, say what the risk is. (This rectifies a major failing of most American criminal intelligence, and indeed, military intelligence, handling.) If you report criminal X, and you know that policeman Y is in his pocket, say that there is a risk if policeman Y knows that criminal X has been reported. And so on. Just list the risks. You're making it easier for the officer who reads your information to put that information on the system in the proper way.

And the HMRC page does allow you to leave information via the internet, on a secure server, that is outside all American jurisdiction and untouchable by corrupt American officials, whether they are in the Baldwin County Sheriff's Department, or the White House. It's not appropriate for everything, but it'll be interested in a lot of stuff and it's a start.

Update:
The official, but very long unmaintained, DOJ page on reporting police corruption, on the link above, has recently had all its content removed, although the link isn't totally dead.
This is probably a good thing, because it looks as if it were hacked several years ago, to include links to the bogus confidence trickster's site. A serious criminal offence was committed by whoever did that, although the DOJ was negligent in that it doesn't appear to have checked its own page between the last month of the Clinton Administration and the publication of this post, a decade later. It is unknown how many people have been conned in the meantime, or precisely when the DoJ page was hacked to include official-looking links to an entirely bogus site. Probably, some time after it became obvious to the conmen that nobody in the DoJ was maintaining the page.

However, the number "three hundred" tends to crop up in other cases involving pathological liars who are keeping a number of victims on a string, and it may be that this is the maximum number they can keep track of and string along at any one time. Scams with larger numbers of victims are done on a "fire and forget" basis.

Where Aircraft Park: Qantas In the Dust

Despite the inevitable hysteria from those American journalists and politicians who want Rolls Royce "to be the next BP" (Medawar thought this honour was supposed to be bestowed on GSK anyway), there has to be an environmental factor at play in the failure, on two successive days, of two Rolls Royce engines on the left side of two different Very Large Aircraft as they climbed away from Singapore on two successive days.

The first VLA was a new Airbus 380, the second a middle-aged Boeing 747. The first engine was a new Rolls Royce Trent 900, the second a mature Rolls Royce RB211. Whilst the Trent is the technical descendant of the RB211, there are huge differences, and the Trent in many ways resembles its Engine Alliance rival more than it does the RB211. In any case where material failure is being suspected or alleged, the age of the parts concerned is a very pertinent factor, and this pertinent factor was very different, making such a convergence in timing of the two similar factors most unlikely through causes internal to the two different, in design, size and age, engines.

Factors that are convergent, are the failure being on the left hand side, and the distance between the centreline of the undercarriage as the aircraft were parked or taxied, and the engine concerned: number 2 engine on the (larger) Airbus and number 1 engine on the Boeing.

The manner of the failure was somewhat reminiscent of the kind of hot section "glazing" failure we were warned to expect, but never actually saw, when British airspace was affected by a volcanic ash cloud earlier this year ("visit Iceland, before Iceland visits you") and there is indeed a volcano, spewing ash, in the general direction the aircraft were traveling towards. But other aircraft have not, apparently, been affected and in both cases the failure was on the left side of the aircraft. Unless other engines were affected nearly as badly but didn't quite fail, this would seem to make any airborne dust at altitude a somewhat unlikely. Airlines other than Qantas have reported no trouble, so far, either.

Furthermore, the evidence from the Icelandic ash cloud is that, in cruise configuration at least, volcanic ash or dust affects modern engines a lot less than had been feared. If it was volcanic ash or dust, then there must have been a factor, perhaps the cloud being at a lower altitude where aircraft were still climbing under full power, to amplify the effect. Which hardly explains why it should happen both times on the left hand side.

Any foreign object much bigger than dust (not present in the engine before startup), would have had most impact on the fan and compressor stages of the engines, which did not in this instance fail. If a significant foreign object was in the engine at startup, neither aircraft would have got into the air, much less fifteen minutes into their flight, before a loud bang was heard.

How, then to explain this?
Well, the failure mechanism when volcanic ash goes through a turbofan engine, is that the ash melts and turns to glass, coating turbine blades and combusters, until the engine "chokes" or, more accurately, glass-coated blades start to hit the surrounding structure, causing vibration and eventual failure. It can be quick, but it's not entirely symptom-free.

But if the dust was some other sort of dust, especially if it contained metallic aluminium or titanium, then the failure mechanism would be different: the dust would melt and stick, as with ash, but it would be chemically reactive, both with the air/exhaust gas and with the steel and Inconel alloys of the hot section. This would cause extra heating on those surfaces, as well as chemically attacking the alloy of the hot turbine blades. The measured net temperature of the exhaust gas might rise a little, and the engine's Full Authority Digital Engine Control would attempt to control this, but the temperature on, and importantly, inside, the blades would rise a lot more.

Turbine blades operating at hot section temperatures are very intricate components, because they are internally cooled by air taken from the compressor stage of the engine. A small proportion of any dust ingested by the engine, would pass through the insides of turbine blades. If it were ash dust, not a lot extra would happen, but if it were potentially reactive metal dust, the blades could be chemically weakened from within, even as they were being cooked from without.

Engine containments are designed to contain a failure by one or even several turbine blades in one disk, not the failure of an awful lot of blades at once -and any reactive dust would have weakened the first layer of containment, too.

Investigators and airport authorities need to do the following:

1/ Trace out, for both aircraft, the path of the worst-affected engines over the ground, everywhere they went at the airport prior to the affected takeoffs. Especially where that's something sticking out over grass or airport light structures as the aircraft turned to its right. Look for sources of dust, especially metallic dust, under the engine's path, every foot of the way.

2/ Trace every use of an angle-grinding tool on airport buildings and infrastructure, that was nearer the left side of the two aircraft than it was to the right side.

3/ Review every metal-cutting operation that has taken place near the aircraft, or where their engines have been taken for maintenance, in the past month or so.

4/ Review any and all CCTV of the aircraft on the ground, for signs of someone cutting metal nearby, or for signs of metal dust arriving by more deliberate means. This is a potential sabotage method and one which might easily occur to someone who understood metallurgy and engine function, or to any lower-grade functionary who had ever been given a bollocking for cutting metal near an engine.

5/ Search every waste bin and skip on the airport for discarded disk cutter and angle-grinder blades with aluminium or titanium traces on them.

Medawar suspects that somewhere, somehow, by accident or just possibly malicious design, a Trent 900 and an RB211, both ingested dust on the ground. Unless it was a gross amount, dust from soil, sand or ground concrete, would not have done enough harm. Only a reactive metal dust could have done enough harm in a quantity small enough not to be a pretty obvious cause of trouble at the time.

Steel and similar alloys dissolve in melted aluminium. Burning titanium can melt even Inconel.