Police Behavior and What To Do About It

[LFC]

Oh, boy.

In a video released in early June, just days after his firing from the Bellevue Marshal’s Office, former Idaho police officer Nate Silvester—who got internet famous in April with a viral TikTok mocking LeBron James’ tweet calling for accountability for the cop who killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant — stated that the teen girl’s “death was tragic but it was also justified.” He also chastised his critics’ “radical woke ideologies,” and issued a declaration, or perhaps a warning, that “because I’m not wearing a badge anymore, you’re going to be hearing a lot more from me, so buckle up.”

Now Silvester seems to be delivering on that promise, by launching a police-boosting podcast, writing a book about being a cop that’s slated for release later this year, and founding a nonprofit to give financial aid to police officers who have been unfairly “mistreated.” He’s also expanding his social media footprint to defend law enforcement agents from what he described to me as the “anti-police sentiment… of the left.”

All this is made possible not only by the free time of unemployment, but also because of a GoFundMe campaign for Silvester that has seen the donations roll in. The campaign, launched by Silvester’s friend Gannon Ward on April 28, initially had a goal of just $10,000—money meant to supplement “at least a week’s worth of pay for suspension” from the Marshal’s Office after Silvester’s TikTok went viral and officials put out a statement declaring “this is NOT how we expect our Deputies to act on duty or use city time.” Three days later, the GoFundMe had over $200,000 in donations; less than a week after that, funds topped $460,000. As the pot has climbed, and the organizer has repeatedly increased the target monetary goal, Silvester has thanked donors via short talking-head videos posted on the campaign page. “We’re not going to tolerate being attacked or bullied or vilified in the media anymore,” he told followers in an early clip.

There were also new beneficiaries named as the Go Fund Me donation pile grew. After the campaign surpassed its goal within hours of launching, an update from organizer Ward informed donors that then-officer Silvester “has decided to donate a portion to the charity The First Responders Children’s Foundation, a charity for the families of fallen officers and first responders. Therefore,” Ward added, “I’m upping the goal.” A day later, as funds continued to accrue and the target goal was again raised, a video update from Silvester noted “the additional funds that are coming in…they’re going to be used to make more content to shed positive light on law enforcement.” The next day, a new Silvester clip announced plans to found “a nonprofit organization that’s going to benefit officers” who are “being vilified and demonized constantly by Hollywood, by the media, and we can’t stand for it anymore.” (In a lengthier text update, Silvester indicated that “I will be the CEO of this organization.”) On May 6, Silvester posted footage of himself touting recent TV appearances he’d made since going viral, and declared he’d just signed a book deal to produce a work that would “help educate people like LeBron James and others who have a very limited understanding of police officers.”

Silvester’s Go Fund Me goal has now been raised to $1,000,000, and the campaign has taken in more than $540,000—and climbing. The header on the page was long ago changed from “Please help Officer Nate Silvester recover his pay” to “Please Help Officer Silvester & Other Families.” No doubt, his indications that he plans to spread the wealth, so to speak, have helped the flow of donations continue. When I spoke with Silvester earlier this week, I asked whether he had yet given the promised donation to the First Responders Children’s Foundation (FRCF).

“Well, no,” he told me. “For some reason, they’re very hard to get ahold of, and they initially reached out to me when they found out that I was going to be donating a portion of that GoFundMe campaign to them. And then, there was some brief correspondence between me and the foundation, but I haven’t heard from them since. I’m still waiting to reconnect with the staff at that foundation so that we can discuss that. But that still hasn’t changed. And I’m still going to donate to them, but just waiting to hear back essentially.”

I got a hold of staff from FRCF in a few hours and with relative ease, and talked via phone and via email with spokesperson Dan DeMello. In a written message, DeMello told me that after Silvester “declared the proposed donation via the media,” an FRCF staff member reached out to him and an “enthusiastic” exchange occurred. However, recently, the agency has been awaiting Silver’s next move.

“Last contact the foundation actually had with him was in late April. We reached out on May 3 and then again later in May (on Go Fund Me) in the hopes of confirming an exact amount, but haven’t heard back yet,” DeMello wrote to me. “We’re hoping he’ll come through on the donation because the funds would mean a lot to these children whose parents were lost in the line of duty.”

Grifters gonna' grift.

[LFC]

Of all people police officers should know not to make public unfounded accusations. The officers who claimed that they were poisoned with bleach at a Shake Shack are now being sued for doing just that.

Remember when three NYPD cops claimed they were victims of a nefarious plot to poison their Shake Shack milkshakes last year — until it was later learned the officers weren’t poisoned and the entire non-incident was mostly rooted in hysteria?

Well, now those officers, along with several NYC police unions and other NYPD cops who were involved in the mess, are getting served a defamation suit by the Shake Shack manager who claims in the suit officers took him into custody and questioned for two hours.

“Throughout the interrogation, the Detectives taunted [Gilliam] about putting bleach in the milkshakes,” the lawsuit alleges.

The three officers, who were taken to the hospital after allegedly tasting bleach despite showing no symptoms of illness, are identified in the court document as “Officer Strawberry Shake,” “Officer Vanilla Shake,” “Officer Cherry Shake,” and a fourth officer as “NYPD Sergeant who stated When Did You Add The Bleach.” Patrick Lynch, the president of the NYC Police Benevolent Association (PBA), is also named as one of the defendants.

The plaintiff, Marcus Gilliam, claims he “suffered emotional and psychological damages and damage to his reputation” both as a result of his arrest and the fact that the police unions had put out “grossly irresponsible” public statements claiming the officers had been intentionally poisoned at the burger joint, the lawsuit alleges. The investigation into the allegedly deadly milkshakes found that the bleach taste of the milkshakes likely came from cleaner fluid that had been left on the machine after it was cleaned — not intentional poisoning.

The incident was part of an eyebrow-raising string of law enforcement officials claiming their food had been tampered with by fast food employees, only for the alleged assault to be revealed as either an honest mistake or flat-out nonexistent.

[Deleted]

Jun 15, 2021 20:48:52 GMT LFC said:

Of all people police officers should know not to make public unfounded accusations. 

Quite the contrary. They run advanced courses on how to lie in police reports. 

[Bact PhD]

This is a pretty depressing analysis of the progress (or lack thereof) since the era in which the term "racial profiling" was introduced.

In 1988, as Joe Collum drove the New Jersey Turnpike to his new job at a local TV news station, he noticed a recurring scene on the side of the highway: White state troopers rifling through the belongings of Black and Latino motorists.

Collum, an investigative reporter, scoured arrest records in dozens of municipalities. Along the turnpike, he found, Black and Latino drivers accounted for the vast majority — 80 percent — of all state police arrests on the turnpike. “Without Just Cause,” his investigative report on WWOR-TV Secaucus, introduced the world to the term “racial profiling.”

“There was this big initiative to stop drugs coming in and out of New York City, and they were transparent about that,” Collum said, “but the troopers individually and collectively, to some degree, decided that the best way to catch people with drugs was to target dark-skinned people.”

Collum’s reporting exposed how troopers’ biases and assumptions about people of color had infected policing along New Jersey’s main artery. State police denied they were targeting minorities. But a group of attorneys, motivated by Collum’s reports, sued troopers, and a state court affirmed for the first time the existence of racial profiling by law enforcement. The Justice Department ordered an end to the practice.

But nearly 30 years later, the most recent audit revealed that Black drivers were still being subjected more often to searches, arrests and uses of force after traffic stops by state police.

[LFC]

Jun 18, 2021 21:14:38 GMT Bact PhD said:

This is a pretty depressing analysis of the progress (or lack thereof) since the era in which the term "racial profiling" was introduced.

Let's not forget that Attorney General Beauregard Sessions was loudly and proudly all in on studiously ignoring this and any other issues with state and local police.

[LFC]

Trav, I hope you don't mind but I'm moving this over here. It fits well with a recent TNR article on what we know and don't know about the causes of the rise in homicides.

Jun 23, 2021 14:06:11 GMT Traveler said:

Yeah, well it's pretty well acknowledged that the "defund the police" mantra cost a ton of moderate votes, losing what would otherwise be Dem seats. Sullivan points out that the murder spike started right after the reactions to the George Floyd riots with cops resigning en mass. Cops got a lot to answer for, but the alternative of no cops is even worse. Major Dem failing. Refusing to address the lawlessness of looters and shooters.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall discusses an article in The New Republic concerning the causes and actual amount of increased crime. Both are must-reads for anybody interested in what's happening. Josh's final take on the TNR piece.

What I liked about the article by John Pfaff, which I referenced above, is that it was realistic about these realities and also pointed to concrete ways that reformers can affect policy even in a far less hospitable political climate. One of these is creating funding for non-policing public safety agencies without coupling it with budget reductions for police agencies (always a red line for any public agencies) and the political toxic messaging of “defund the police.” It’s a good article and I recommend it. We need to hope – and I’m actually cautiously optimistic on this front – that the crime surge will start to ebb as the pandemic does. If it doesn’t, we will likely be heading into a politics much less friendly than the one we face today.

The TNR piece addresses the oversimplifications of those who are dug in on the status quo of policing.

Perhaps the most important feature of last year’s rise in homicides is just how uniform it appears to be. In 2020, homicides rose in 60 of the 69 major police departments noted above, and in almost all cases at a rate more or less proportional to homicides in 2019. Any one city’s share of homicides was roughly the same as its share in 2019, just appreciably higher. Unlike many previous periods, the spike was not the product of a few cities experiencing an especially bad year (in 2016, around 20 percent of the national increase in homicides was just due to Chicago), but of almost every city suffering in something close to unison.

One important upshot of this uniformity is that there is no evidence that cities with more progressive prosecutors experienced relatively worse outcomes than those with more conventional district attorneys. In fact, two of the eight departments that reported declines in homicides—Baltimore City, Maryland, and St. Louis County, Missouri—are home to two of the country’s most high-profile “progressive prosecutors,” Marilyn Mosby and Wesley Bell. Opponents of progressive prosecution are already invoking the homicide spike to push back against the movement, but the data simply do not back them up.

This should not surprise us. To start, even progressive prosecutors have maintained tough attitudes toward serious violence, especially homicide. In fact, they have often argued that the reason to scale back enforcement of drug and other nonviolent offenses is to enable them to target serious violence more aggressively. When it comes to murder, progressive and punitive prosecutors don’t much differ.

Moreover, the changes that progressive prosecutors have adopted toward violent crime are not the sort to lead to more homicides. In Philadelphia, for example, Larry Krasner has started to charge more homicides as third-degree murder rather than first- or second-, moving the expected sentence from life without parole to a standard minimum of 10 years. While that may seem like a major shift, a 20-year sentence does not meaningfully deter people more than a 10-year sentence, while imposing substantial financial and humanitarian costs. One of the most consistent findings in criminology is that the certainty of a sentence, not its severity, is what deters: detection, not punishment. (So it is worth pointing out that the Philadelphia Police Department, whose union has routinely attacked Krasner, struggles to solve murders; it made arrests in fewer than half those committed in that city in 2020.) The claims that Krasner has been soft on gun charges also appear inaccurate—not to mention that his greater emphasis on diversion may actually reduce overall gun violence.

It is also important to note the inaccuracy of trying to pin rising homicides on efforts to “defund” the police. In a December 2020 press conference, for example, Gregg Sofer, at the time the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, tried to blame Austin’s rise in homicides on the city’s recent decision to cut police funding. The problem? Homicides had started to rise well before the cuts, in no small part because the budget in question did not go into effect until October 2020, so almost none of the proposed cuts would have occurred until 2021 at the earliest—and most of the 2021 cuts involve simply shifting which agencies are responsible for certain tasks. What’s more, Sofer did not acknowledge that the police department’s budget had risen by nearly 50 percent since 2013, while crime rates remained basically flat.

Other invocations of “defunding” have overstated its impact as well. Bloomberg CityLab, for example, reported that while most cities increased police spending for 2021, a few, like New York City, did cut it. The Bloomberg article put the cuts at approximately 15 percent, a number that likely came from the widely reported figure of $1 billion that Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed he cut from the NYPD’s $5.6 billion budget. Except when examined more closely, many of de Blasio’s cuts are based on aggressive budget assumptions and—as with Austin—reductions in police spending that come from moving the jobs to other departments at some future point. All told, the reduction was closer to $400 million—but about $300 million of that depended on projected reductions in overtime pay, and, as of March 2021, the NYPD is on pace to miss that reduction by around $150 million.

If not progressive prosecution or defunding, what caused the surge in homicides? It will be years before we have a clear answer, but the two leading explanations are the chaos wrought by the Covid pandemic and some product of the protests that have taken place against police violence. (Other factors surely mattered, too, such as an unprecedented uptick in gun purchases.) Both theories are valid, but in complicated ways.

The pandemic certainly made plenty of people crazy, or at least triggered their latent craziness, and I think discounting this requires ignoring a full year of news stories.

As for it being a "product of the protests" we have to look at what exactly that product is. If it's anger among officers feeling they can no longer function the way they used to well then that's not something that's negotiable unless we just shrug our shoulders, throw reform under the bus, and accept they can do whatever they want. With so many PDs fighting even the most milquetoast of reforms it's tough to come up with an approach that doesn't come with an enormous amount of officer replacement. At that point it's extremely important that new officers be trained and monitored differently. The "warrior cop" ethos needs to go.

Jun 23, 2021 14:06:11 GMT Traveler said:

Sullivan points out that the murder spike started right after the reactions to the George Floyd riots with cops resigning en mass.

Let's revisit the high crime spike of the 80s and 90s. Many cities, like NYC under Giuliani, went full blown "tough on crime." He crowed about his success when crime fell except the reality was that it fell everywhere, not just in cities that increased their "toughness" (i.e. violation of brown people's civil rights). There's little to no evidence that the approach of more policing and more officers really worked at all. The data really shows that the rise and fall of violent crime was uncoupled from how policing was performed.

The TNR piece notes that cities, irrespective of several factors, are showing remarkably uniform rises in their homicide rate. Unless cities also have uniform resignation rates then it looks like a rather poor correlation. I think Sullivan has the heavy lift of explaining why his statement is correct if the numbers don't actually correlate well. He also needs to explain how the reduction of police who are mostly response oriented, something that has been posted here several times, caused the increase in homicides. It would make more sense if the accusation was a decrease in solved crimes due to fewer officers to work them but how much of an impact does the mere existence of officers have on homicides which occur "in the moment?"

This is why I gave up on Sullivan a while ago. He used to be good about acknowledging all sides, pointing out the gray areas, and then making his case without dismissing those things he disagreed with out of hand. He seems to have become much more of a pundit who regurgitates talking points but writes more nicely than most. If he slips any further he might be able to find a berth at TAC.

[AnBr]

Jun 23, 2021 17:44:06 GMT LFC said:

The pandemic certainly made plenty of people crazy, or at least triggered their latent craziness, and I think discounting this requires ignoring a full year of news stories.

Also a lot people lost their jobs due to the pandemic so the desperation of poverty drove some of it. Eliminate poverty and a large part of crime would go away.

[LFC]

Jun 23, 2021 23:53:40 GMT AnBr said:

Also a lot people lost their jobs due to the pandemic so the desperation of poverty drove some of it. Eliminate poverty and a large part of crime would go away.

Silly anbr. Don't you know that this will just make them dependent? Because, you know, having the gov't help people get jobs is just a handout.

[pnwguy]

Jun 24, 2021 0:27:37 GMT LFC said:

Jun 23, 2021 23:53:40 GMT AnBr said:

Also a lot people lost their jobs due to the pandemic so the desperation of poverty drove some of it. Eliminate poverty and a large part of crime would go away.

Silly anbr. Don't you know that this will just make them dependent? Because, you know, having the gov't help people get jobs is just a handout.

A good Capitalist government (unlike the Marxists there now) would see the efficiency of rounding up potential criminals and moving them to jails in advance.  Criminals are easily identified by party affiliation, religion, income level, and melanin level.  

We just need to get a Businessman back in the White House, who understands economic success.

[LFC]

Jun 24, 2021 1:15:39 GMT pnwguy said:

Criminals are easily identified by party affiliation, religion, income level, and melanin level. 

[LFC]

Derek Chauvin sentenced to 22.5 years.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 25, 2021 19:59:59 GMT LFC said:

Derek Chauvin sentenced to 22.5 years.

I wonder what sort of facility is he being sent to?  And when is parole?

[jackd]

He'll probably be isolated from the general population. He has to serve at least 15 years.

[LFC]

What's the big deal, officer? I mean if you haven't done anything wrong then what are you afraid of?

A confrontation Tuesday between a police sergeant and member of the public didn’t start out unusually. James Burch, policy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), was standing outside the Alameda Courthouse in Oakland, California when an officer approached him and asked him to move a banner. As the two argued, the sergeant noticed he was being filmed. Then, he pulled out his phone and started playing “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift — in an apparent play to exploit copyright takedowns and keep the video off social media.

“You can record all you want,” he said, according to a video obtained by The Verge. “I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.”

I guess it doesn't sound so convincing when you're on the receiving end.

[pnwguy]

Jul 2, 2021 15:14:02 GMT LFC said:

What's the big deal, officer? I mean if you haven't done anything wrong then what are you afraid of?

A confrontation Tuesday between a police sergeant and member of the public didn’t start out unusually. James Burch, policy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), was standing outside the Alameda Courthouse in Oakland, California when an officer approached him and asked him to move a banner. As the two argued, the sergeant noticed he was being filmed. Then, he pulled out his phone and started playing “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift — in an apparent play to exploit copyright takedowns and keep the video off social media.

“You can record all you want,” he said, according to a video obtained by The Verge. “I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.”

I guess it doesn't sound so convincing when you're on the receiving end.

I imagine it would be easy enough to filter out the background music, by anyone savvy in audio/video editing.

[LFC]

Jul 2, 2021 16:56:53 GMT pnwguy said:

I imagine it would be easy enough to filter out the background music, by anyone savvy in audio/video editing.

Oh, yeah. This guy isn't exactly Officer Rhodes Scholar.

[LFC]

Another man-baby in uniform with power who would casually destroy somebody over being butthurt. This man is not mature enough to wear a badge. Hell, he's not mature enough to work the counter of a convenience store. Read the last sentence to see just how much this pathetic boy in blue is playing the victim. What a sniveling little shit.

Lauren Gibson was in a caravan of friends heading from their camping spot in Panguitch, Utah, back to California last week when one of the cars was pulled over for speeding. The stop took place near a gas station in the small town of less than 2,000 people.

Before the day was over, the 19-year-old was on her way to facing hate-crime charges in what critics describe as one of the more absurd examples yet of aggrieved cops unduly likening themselves to marginalized minority groups in a country rife with hate crimes.

Gibson said the Garfield County Sheriff’s Deputy who pulled over her friend's car was aggressive and eventually wrote her friend a ticket for speeding. After watching the interaction, she said, she was upset and picked up a rusted “Back the Blue” sign that she said her friends had found on the side of the road and kept in one of the cars. (The deputy would later suspect that it had been stolen from the gas station and even went inside to check, but learned it had not been.)

After the deputy finished writing his ticket, she told The Daily Beast, she waved the sign at the officer, stepped on it, and threw it in the trash.

Gibson, a California college student, said she wouldn’t describe herself as “anti-police,” even though she does believe some tend to abuse their power. The display of emotion, she said, was due to her anger over how her friend was treated and the effect the traffic stop seemed to have on her.

“I just wanted to, I don’t know, make her feel better or something or stand up for her,” Gibson told The Daily Beast.

Instead, Gibson was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy and charged with disorderly conduct and criminal mischief with a hate-crime enhancement for her attempt to “intimidate law enforcement,” according to a probable-cause affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast.

The charge was a shock to Gibson. And hate-crime experts familiar with Utah’s laws say they also believe it is a stretch at best.

“This doesn’t really seem to meet the criteria for what we would generally consider a hate crime, nor the specific language of the statute,” said Seth Brysk, a Utah regional director with the Anti-Defamation League.

The Garland County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Gibson’s arrest. The Garfield County Attorney’s Office also did not respond to repeated requests about whether and how Gibson would be prosecuted on the charges she faces.

In the affidavit, the responding deputy reported that Gibson stomped on the “Back the Blue” sign, crumbled it up “in a destructive manner” and threw it into a trash can—“all while smirking in an intimidating manner.”

[LFC]

Another story of a cop who still has a job, and a promotion, after shuffling from department to department.

When Joe Klingan hired Jon Geiger to be a police officer for the tiny police department in the tiny town of Nunn, Colorado (population 500), he believed the 52-year-old was providing a complete picture of his background.

Yes, Geiger—a former cop from another tiny police department in the Denver suburb of Georgetown, 120 miles away—had pleaded guilty to a harassment charge in 2018 after grabbing a man out of a holding cell and wrenching his arm behind his back. And yes, he had been decertified by the Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) board, a state agency, as a law-enforcement officer after his conviction in that case.

But by the time Geiger was applying for the position in Nunn, the decision by the board had been reversed on appeal, and Geiger had a valid license to be an officer of the law.

“Everything sounded legitimate,” Clingan told The Daily Beast of hiring Geiger.

It was a decision he’s come to regret.

As the Denver Post reported on Monday, Geiger was supposed to be barred from being a police officer because of his past, which included checkered stops in previous police departments in addition to his conviction in Georgetown. Clingan said it was the first time he learned about Geiger’s previous law-enforcement experience in other small towns in Colorado, as well as a small town in Kansas.

In interviews, current and former officials told The Daily Beast Geiger left those departments under the cloud of sometimes vague internal investigations. His re-emergence and rise to new power has shocked many who are familiar with him, a saga that speaks to larger issues in the state and in the country when officers bounce between departments.

Geiger did not respond to requests for comment for this story, nor did officials from the town of Nunn.

Clingan said that if he knew then what he knows now about Geiger, he never would have hired him. Instead, Geiger joined the small force in Nunn in April, and when Clingan retired as chief of police in May, Geiger—with less than a month on the job—was named as his interim replacement. The promotion came against Clingan’s wishes, the ex-chief said.

It’s just the latest stop in what former employers and others familiar with Geiger describe as a disturbing career.

[LFC]

I wonder if Andrew Sullivan, who quite clearly blamed the supposed rise in violent crime on police leaving the force, will face the new facts that show that in general there is no rise in crime. There is a definitive rise in murders. This makes the whole situation a lot more complex than the ultra-simple "conservative" case he made.

Last year, the US saw the biggest increase in the murder rate in decades. The estimated total number of homicides rose to levels not seen since the late 1990s, even as the overall crime rate declined. So far, the spike has continued into 2021: Murders are up nearly 15 percent so far this year compared to the same period last year, based on data from US cities collected by crime analyst Jeff Asher.

That’s what we know. What we don’t really know yet is why.

The rise in murders, along with a rise in shootings, is reflected not just in the statistics but in real events. Over the weekend, the sound of gunfire sent baseball players and fans into a panic at the Nationals stadium in Washington, DC. The night before, DC’s mayor condemned a drive-by shooting that killed a 6-year-old. Meanwhile, a total of 12 mass shootings from coast to coast left 11 dead and 49 injured in the US.

Year-to-year fluctuations in crime and violence can and do happen. But the size of the murder spike has led to broader national attention. The increase is now part of an ideological proxy war — leading to conflicting opinions even within political parties on what to do about the increase in murders, and plenty of finger-pointing over whether the pandemic, protests over police, or guns are to blame.

Well, gun sales have skyrocketed so if you want to play the correlation game well have I got a statistic for you! The rise in murders also doesn't seem to have any correlation with politics.

The increase in murder appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon. While murder rates rose in some developed countries last year, like Canada and Germany, the increases are far below the double-digit spikes America is seeing. That’s especially notable because the United States already had a higher baseline of murders, after controlling for population. Despite claims that Democratic mayors or progressive criminal justice policies are driving the increase, it also appears indifferent to the political party in charge: As Asher and criminal justice expert John Pfaff have shown, murder rates increased in cities run by Democrats and Republicans, progressive and not.

The fact is that the situation is complex, causes are difficult to assess, and solutions are difficult to come up with. Unfortunately that makes for a boring, factual article like this one from Vox rather than simple and sensationalist.

[LFC]

No officer should have immunity for an action like this.

A Philadelphia cop accused of deleting arrest videos from a man’s cellphone is now facing charges for attempted tampering, official oppression and obstruction of justice. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said that Officer Tyree Burnett has been on “restricted duty” since April, and she plans to dismiss him at the end of a 30-day suspension.

A lawyer for Jacob Giddings told CBS Philly last month that Burnett approached his client at a gas station and provided no reason for directing Giddings to get out of his car. Giddings began recording but dropped his phone while getting into the cop car, his lawyer said. Burnett then grabbed the phone and was allegedly caught on his own body-cam deleting the video.

[AnBr]

Burnett then grabbed the phone and was allegedly caught on his own body-cam deleting the video.

Just how dumb is this bastard?

[LFC]

The Pasco County, FL Sheriff's Office has created a broad surveillance program of people they view as potential future criminals, including schoolchildren. I wonder where the MAGAts who supposedly abhor the "deep state" are now?

Last year, a Tampa Bay Times investigation revealed that the Sheriff’s Office creates lists of people it considers likely to break the law based on criminal histories, social networks and other unspecified intelligence. The agency sends deputies to their homes repeatedly, often without a search warrant or probable cause for an arrest.

Targets and their relatives, including four who are now suing the Sheriff’s Office in federal court, described the tactics as harassment and a violation of their constitutional rights. National policing experts drew comparisons to child abuse and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.

The Times also found that the agency has a separate program that uses schoolchildren’s grades, attendance records and abuse histories to label them potential future criminals.

Earlier this year, Sheriff Chris Nocco and the Pasco County school district announced they would scale back some features of the school-data program. But the letter signals a broadening of the core program.

There's a pitch in defense of the program.

In an online video, Sheriff’s Office Captain Toni Roach says being selected is “good news” because participants will “have the opportunity to receive assistance from the Pasco Sheriff’s Office and several community partners.”

And, as expected, there's the reality of it.

The Times found being named a Sheriff’s Office target could have serious consequences. Deputies showed up at homes at all hours of the day and night, writing tickets for violations like overgrown grass and making arrests for any reason they could find.

By 2020, some 1,000 people had been ensnared. About 100 were 18 years old or younger.

[Deleted]

Local sheriff is shallow state, not deep state. A whole different pizza. The best part of all that it's directed against the right group of people.

[RichTBikkies]

Jul 26, 2021 17:15:32 GMT LFC said:

The Pasco County, FL Sheriff's Office has created a broad surveillance program of people they view as potential future criminals, including schoolchildren. 

I bet most of them were Black. 

A non-Like Like.