Earlier today, the Phoenix posted a letter on our website from James Carnell, the racially insensitive editor of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association (BPPA) newsletter, the Pax Centurion. As expected, Carnell has no apologies for anyone who he offended, nor does he respond to the numerous charges of corruption that this publication and others have leveled at his union.

One week after the Phoenix featured the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association (BPPA) and its racist newsletter on our cover, the union responded with a letter on its web site – not just to us, but to the general “media fury” that's exploded since the release of their May-June issue. It is not an apology letter.

Above: video of aftermath of two kids getting arrested on Dewey Square -- and of Boston Police Officers taunting the protesters. According to OBers in the video, the arrestees were goofing around on a jungle gym. Chris Faraone is on the scene and tweeting live updates. Follow @Fara1

First of all, I want to say that everyone feels just awful about the polite woman who lives in Harbor Towers, and who had to sit in traffic for a full half-hour one day last Fall on account of Occupy Boston marching down Atlantic Ave. In a way, she's a bold representation of all the apathetic martyrs who've been inconvenienced by the countless people who are standing up for jobs and civil rights.

Marking an incremental, mostly symbolic, but still notable victory for New Englanders who love to smoke weed, the BPD reports that they did not arrest a soul at MassCann's ludicrously well-attended and collectively-baked 22nd annual Boston Freedom Rally on the Common this past Saturday. The BPD did not give an estimate of the grand total of attendees, but it was clearly well into the thousands.

As you may have read last week - that is if you're one of the few people who pay attention to breaking Friday afternoon news - after months of deliberation Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley found that there was no excessive force used in the controversial 2010 arrest of a 16-year-old male on the campus of Roxbury Community College.

The seven-minute YouTube clip begins with five Boston police officers, crowding a Roxbury Community College entranceway, restraining a face-down suspect. Before it's clear what's happening, a plainclothes cop in jeans and work boots pins the boy's left calf, throws four hammer punches to the back, then switches to southpaw and delivers three uppercuts.

One surefire way to rile activists is to beat a teenager in plain sight, and tell witnesses that they can't record the free-for-all. Needless to say, more than a few folks are furious in the wake of news that Boston Police Department officers jabbed and kicked a 16-year-old inside a Roxbury Community College building this past Friday.

Democratic operatives across Massachusetts are not the only fools concerned about their jobs today. Boston Police Department officer Justin Barrett - whose love letter to Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham got him indefinitely suspended on account of his poor punctuation and famously equating Harvard scholar Skip Gates to a “banana-eating jungle monkey” - appeared in a private hearing earlier this afternoon.

Since the Boston Police Department arrested renowned street artist Shepard Fairey at his ICA opening this past February, the public has been more aware than ever of the perils faced by Boston graf writers. Not everyone is sympathetic, but at least they know that certain BPD detectives have hard-ons for Krylon vandals.

There's some interesting wording in this morning's Boston Globe article about the increased police presence in the Fens lately (and how some allege that it targets gay men). The third paragraph begins: "For the last few weeks, police in cars and motorcycles have patrolled the Fens off Boylston Street for about 16 hours a day, a move that has thrilled many of the gardeners, who want to tend their radishes, tomatoes, and dahlias without encountering debris from some of the more unsavory uses of the park