Columbus “Vice” Squad in Action: Somehow the Columbus Police missed evidence over the years that their chief spokesperson was into kiddie porn, but they did manage to put together a major sting operation to arrest stripper Stormy Daniels at the Sirens Gentlemen’s Club for brushing her breasts against two undercover cops. Email obtained by CNN indicates that Columbus police officers targeted Daniels for arrest here in Columbus.

If you think Stormy Daniels’ arrest was a set-up for political reasons, the history of the Columbus Police suggests you are absolutely right.

In our city there’s been a long-standing operational link between the police vice squad and those who investigate political crimes. Free Press Editor Bob Fitrakis wrote a series about this in 1999 in an anthology called Cops, Coverups and Corruption. Then-Columbus Police Commander Curtis Marcum used the so-called “police intelligence unit” to spy on and blackmail local politicians and political radicals.

CNN found that Officer Shana Keckley used her personal email account two days prior to Daniels’ arrest to send a video to her work account of Daniels in West Hollywood and link to a NBC4 story announcing the stripper’s upcoming Columbus performance. According to the Fayette Advocate: “Keckley sends a series of messages from her personal email account to her work account. Inside are pictures of Daniels with President Trump, pictures of Daniels in lingerie, and a map to the club where she would be performing.”

There are hundreds of strip club performers on any given night in Columbus. The county sheriff’s department indicated there had not been an arrest in Columbus in ten years of a stripper touching a club patron. In fact, lap dances are routinely solicited in these clubs. The only thing that set Daniels apart from the scores of other performers in the city that night was that she is suing Donald Trump. So was Daniels targeted that night? Of course she was, and if it sounds like blundering 1950s-style buffoonery, welcome to the Columbus Police who’ve never evolved.

It’s the Black Cop: The Columbus Free Press obtained a list of all Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) complaints from 2001-2017. Some of the statistics stood out for us. There were 208 complaints on racial profiling. Using tactics only known to the Columbus IAB Police, they determined that solely one complaint was valid, inexplicably with a black police officer as the offender.

Here are some more highlights of the public record:

The legendary “have mace, will spray” police had 179 “use of mace” complaints with merely one sustained. Out of the 2537 complaints filed that the police were using excessive force, only 32 were sustained.

Recall that the Fraternal Order of Police President appears regularly on TV justifying head stomping, kicking and general gouging as acceptable police arrest tactics. Many of you recently saw a man maced and beaten by Columbus Police because he had earlier had a cup with alcohol in it outside a bar.

Here’s the takeaway. If you condone the Columbus Police kicking the shit out of people, it becomes the new norm.