A 17 year old, Osiris Aristy, has been arrested and charged with threatening police by emojis on his Facebook page.
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Apparently, a police informant made the police aware of Aristy's posting images of himself with drugs, but the clincher was the above emoji with guns pointing at police.
Gothamist reports,
"The complaint claims these postings "caused informant and other New York City police officers to fear for their safety, for public safety, and to suffer alarm and annoyance," and cops showed up at Aristy's home on Sunday. A search yielded a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson firearm and over 25 grams of marijuana, which was packaged in nearly two dozen ziploc bags.
"The NYPD says they've stepped up their efforts in investigating threats against police officers, following last month's brutal slaying of two cops in Brooklyn.
"...Aristy, who has a long rap sheet and pleaded guilty to robbery in October, had bail set at $150,000."
And they did find a gun and 25 grams of marijuana when they arrested him. Just his Facebook postings using drug emojis would probably have been enough.
But he also posted numerous images of himself with joints or bags of pot.
This is a young man who looks like he will have a long relationship with police. But it is worrisome that the use of emoji characters could be given as justification for arresting or even searching someone's home.
I wonder, if the gun emojis had not been used, would the pill emojis have been considered evidence enough to justify searching his place.
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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)