{"id":23744,"date":"2011-06-06T12:28:53","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T16:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=23744"},"modified":"2011-06-06T12:28:53","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T16:28:53","slug":"stating-speculation-as-fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=23744","title":{"rendered":"Stating Speculation As Fact"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been\u00a0negligent\u00a0on following the Cpl. Guerena story the last couple of weeks due to some crises that have popped up in my life. \u00a0Jonn, as he always does, has been picking up the slack<\/a>. There are however a couple of things I would like to discuss now that I have some time.<\/p>\n

First of all, I saw this article<\/a> today on the KGUN website that makes this statement:<\/p>\n

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik revealed to 9 On Your Side on Thursday that\u00a0Jose Guerena was part of a violent drug ring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice there is no \u201cpossibly\u201d or any other qualifier. They take Sheriff Dupnik\u2019s word as fact, despite his office\u2019s record of distorting the truth in this case. I guess whatever crackerjack journalism school that the reporter who wrote this article attended taught their students to write speculation as fact. The real facts are of course that there is no solid evidence definitively proving that Guerena was part of a violent drug ring. At the worst, it seems Cpl. Guerena was related to some shitty people who were possibly themselves involved in a violent drug ring, but even then those people haven’t been tried or convicted. \u00a0The rest of the article discusses how the Pima County GOP Chairman (Brian Miller, who is a Paultard I might add) is calling for SWAT to change its tactics and I am glad to see the Arizona Republican Party is starting to go after Dupnik in regards to this story.<\/p>\n

Secondly, I want to discuss the arrest of Cpl. Guerena in 2009. Sheriff Dupnik and his minions are using this arrest as definitive proof of Cpl. Guerena\u2019s involvement with a drug ring. This is complete nonsense for obvious reasons and I suspect most TAH readers expect nothing less than grade-A bullshit from Dupnik\u2019s office by this point. It is important to note he was ARRESTED but not CHARGED with any crime. He didn\u2019t receive probation, he didn\u2019t receive a reduced sentence, and he wasn\u2019t sent to a diversion class because HE WAS NEVER CHARGED. I am sure we have readers who have been arrested or simply detained by cops. In 2008, I was detained, handcuffed, and searched by Scottsdale PD after I got out of my car to meet some friends at a bar. They held me for about fifteen minutes and then released. I found out later that they were searching for somebody who was suspected of selling drugs at a nearby nightclub (which I would never be caught dead at) and I matched the description of that individual (even though I wasn’t dressed like a douchebag who would go to said nightclub). Does that mean without a reasonable doubt that I am involved with some sort of criminal conspiracy because I was detained by police officer in 2008? In the eyes of some, I guess the answer is yes.<\/p>\n

Additionally, this arrest occurred in Pinal County, not Sheriff Dupnik’s Pima County. In 2008, Pinal County elected Paul Babeu as Sheriff and James Walsh as County Attorney. Both men ran on platforms of fighting human and drug smuggling, due to the fact that in recent years that Pinal County has become a major corridor for smugglers heading to Phoenix. Many of you have probably seen Sheriff Babeu on FOX News discussing his efforts to fight smuggling and he is constantly in the Arizona media discussing the problem. With these facts in mind, it is pretty reasonable to assume that if there was strong evidence that Guerena was involved with drug smuggling or the sale of illegal drugs that the Pima County attorney would\u00a0vigorously\u00a0prosecute him and Sheriff Babeu would have used the case as an example of the smuggling problem in Pinal County. However, the evidence was weak (a roll of plastic wrap, a gun, and some cash<\/a> as Jonn pointed out) and he was released without even a trial.<\/p>\n

Finally, I want to address the large amounts of cash that were found on Guerena in 2009 and at some of the homes searched by Pima County SWAT. It is pretty common for immigrants (both legal and illegal) from Mexico, Latin, and South America, to keep large amounts of cash in their homes. This is due to their mistrust of banks which have a history of being corrupt or prone to failures in the aforementioned regions of the world.<\/p>\n

As I have continually said throughout my posts on this sad story is that even if Guerena was Tucson’s version of Scarface, there still needs to be an investigation into how the SWAT team performed the raid and their tactics and training need to be changed. Unfortunately, with Dupnik’s new effort to smear the victim I am pretty confident that neither will happen and the SWAT team will continue to bumble along, endangering themselves and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been\u00a0negligent\u00a0on following the Cpl. Guerena story the last couple of weeks due to some crises … Stating Speculation As Fact<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[168],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-guerena-killing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}