Police Behavior and What To Do About It

[Bact PhD]

Sept 19, 2021 12:42:40 GMT andydp said:

Sept 19, 2021 12:19:44 GMT Traveler said:

BTW, Do you all have real ID? I just realized I don't, and my passport is expired. Ugh.  Cannot board a flight after October 1!  

Fortunately we do. Have had them for several years.

Same. It’s been SOP for long enough here that both kiddos needed the documents when they got their learner’s permit (parent has to provide the needed residency docs) and both Chem PhD and myself had to do it when our DLs renewed in the mid-2010s.

[AnBr]

Sept 19, 2021 17:15:59 GMT goldenvalley said:

They usually don't have a utility bill or a lease to show.

Or even older people. Paperless billing is only going to become more ubiquitous.

[Traveler]

Sept 19, 2021 17:19:30 GMT pnwguy said:

Sept 19, 2021 12:19:44 GMT Traveler said:

BTW, Do you all have real ID? I just realized I don't, and my passport is expired. Ugh.  Cannot board a flight after October 1!  

You've got more time.


www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline

That date is what the PA website has been saying for months.  Dont know where this Oct. 1 deadline came from.  Turns out I have Global Entry anyway, so I am good insofar as air travel goes.  That is a pretty deep background check.  Interviews with TSA etc.  Question is whether Pa honors that as proof of US.  

[LFC]

Republicans continue to "bargain" in bad faith and cover for police at every turn. It's amazing how cops who bully, harm, falsely arrest, and even kill blacks and Hispanics are revered but those who protect our actual democracy at the Capitol are reviled.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday criticized Senate Republicans after the bipartisan talks around overhauling policing laws broke down without a deal, critiquing the GOP for rejecting even modest reforms.

In a statement, Biden thanked Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rep. Karen Bass of California for their work on the bill, and heaped blame on the GOP for the legislation dying after months of negotiations.

"Regrettably, Senate Republicans rejected enacting modest reforms, which even the previous president had supported, while refusing to take action on key issues that many in law enforcement were willing to address," Biden said.

Booker had earlier made clear in a private conversation with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chief Republican negotiator on the issue, that bipartisan policing talks are over.

[LFC]

Killings by police have been wildly undercounted for a long, long time. In fact a study found less than half are contained in official government data. How do you "lose" 17,000 dead people?

More than half of all police killings since 1980 do not appear in official government data, according to an explosive new study in The Lancet, a top medical journal. The researchers reveal how “systemic misclassification” in the federal database that tracks the causes of death in America has produced, over four decades, an undercount of more than 17,000 deaths at the hands of police. The proportion of undercounted police killings of Black Americans is even more extreme, the research shows, rising to 60 percent.

The Lancet study casts American police, unequivocally, as a threat to public health. The risk of death-by-cop for an American man in 2019, according to the paper, was higher than the risk of death by testicular cancer, appendicitis, or sexually transmitted disease. These dangers weigh disproportionately on the Black community, as the study emphasizes: “The police have disproportionately killed Black people at a rate of 3.5 times higher than white people.”

The research for The Lancet paper was conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which is housed at the University of Washington Medical School, and which catalogs global disease and injury, studying more than 200 leading causes of death.

In an exclusive interview with Rolling Stone, IMHE researchers said they were motivated to resolve “inconsistencies” in public counts of deadly encounters with police. Independent groups like Mapping Police Violence — which rely on open-source data including news reports of police shootings — have long tallied higher numbers of killings by police than those recorded in the federally funded National Vital Statistics System. NVSS includes an exhaustive database of American causes of death, compiled from death certificates filled out by doctors, medical examiners and coroners. It has tracked deaths from law enforcement since 1949.

“Last year, after the murder of George Floyd, we reviewed our police-violence data, and we found other literature that supported that NVSS was undercounting,” says Eve Wool, a co-lead author of the study. “And we went and sought other sources to correct it.” The IHME researchers selected high-quality open-source datasets on police violence, including Fatal Encounters and The Counted, and compared those studies to the federal record, building a statistical model of killings by police over time. This effort yielded — as The Lancet touts in an accompanying editorial — “the most accurate and comprehensive assessment of deaths attributable to police violence in the USA to date.”

The results of the study are staggering: Over the last four decades, nearly 31,000 Americans died at the hands of police, while fewer than 14,000 of those killings were properly recorded by the government — meaning the federal data “did not report 55.5 percent of all deaths attributable to police violence.” For police killings of Black Americans, the undercounting was greater still, with “5,670 deaths missing” from official federal statistics, “out of an estimated 9,540 total deaths.”

Despite recent scrutiny of police violence, federal underreporting of killings by police remains acute. In 2018, the most recent year of federal data studied, more than half of police killings were not accounted for, with “642 deaths missing out of 1,240 total estimated deaths.” The Lancet study also reveals that the prevalence of police killings has increased sharply during the timeframe of the study, jumping by more than 38 percent between the 1980s and 2010s, on a per capita basis.

[LFC]

F***ing Alabama. It really is a backward cesspool.

It took Alabama lawmakers just five days last week to move a plan to build more prisons—in part, thanks to $400 million in COVID relief dollars—from a bill to a law.

For years, Alabama’s prisons have been among the country’s most inhumane, marked by “an excessive amount of violence, sexual abuse, and prisoner deaths… on a regular basis,” according to a 2019 report from the Department of Justice. The well-documented human rights abuses in Alabama’s prisons have only worsened as the state has registered one of the highest coronavirus death tolls in the nation.

But instead of addressing the disastrous conditions that typify its treatment of incarcerated people, Governor Kay Ivey and state legislators fast-tracked a prison construction project that is likely to exacerbate over-incarceration—and which misdirects coronavirus rescue funds to boot.

“The only thing that this special session accomplished, other than wasting a lot of money, is establishing that Alabama really doesn’t have the political will necessary to actually address the problems within our criminal justice system,” Democratic House Rep. Chris English told me. “The only thing they could come up with to do is pass a bill to build two prisons that they know won’t address the problems at all.”

Rep. English’s reference to just two new prisons—instead of the three the bill projects will ultimately be built—reflects his skepticism that the project will ultimately be fulfilled in its entirety. Technically, the $1.3 billion bill Gov. Ivey signed on Friday includes plans to construct two new men’s mega-prisons, each with 4,000 beds, both of which will be “much larger than any of Alabama’s 14 current prisons,” in its Phase I. The construction of a new 1,000-bed women’s prison to replace the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, the state’s oldest facility built in 1942, and to undertake renovations on three other currently operational prisons isn’t slated to begin until Phase II.

Raiding the state’s $2.1 billion COVID relief fund allotment will help provide the money to get the first phase rolling, but Rep. England says it’s unlikely the state will have the money to begin Phase II without borrowing money. In the rush to build yet more cages, there seems to be little foresight, or true concern, about actually undertaking the plan’s “best” aspects, such as fixing up buildings that have been neglected and falling into uninhabitable disrepair for decades.

[LFC]

One group that has fought any and all moves towards accountability for police just got raided by the FBI. Why am I not surprised?

Federal agents on Tuesday raided the Manhattan headquarters of the New York Police Department’s Sergeants Benevolent Association to execute a search warrant in an investigation, a law-enforcement official confirmed to The Daily Beast.

The raid into the Worth Street office of the SBA, the city’s second-largest police union, with more than 10,000 active and retired sergeants, was “in connection with an ongoing investigation,” an FBI spokesperson told The Daily Beast. The agents also searched the Port Washington home of the union's controversial president, Ed Mullins, the FBI added.

“All I have been told is the FBI has raided the SBA headquarters and it’s in connection with an ongoing investigation,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said during his morning COVID-19 briefing. “I don’t know the specifics, I don’t know who it’s directed at. I want to really hear the details before I comment further.”

Neither Mullins nor the union's lawyer, Andrew Quinn, immediately responded to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.

The details of the investigation are unclear, but no arrests have been reported from the Tuesday morning incident. According to The New York Times, the SBA’s headquarters were searched as part of an investigation by the public corruption unit in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI.

The raid is also the latest controversy to surround Mullins, who is known for fiercely criticizing NYPD leadership and de Blasio. Last year, the SBA made headlines after tweeting out de Blasio’s daughter’s arrest report after she was arrested during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

[LFC]

Sick, sick, sick.

Minneapolis police officers tasked with restoring order and defusing tensions amid the city’s George Floyd protests last year made a sport of “hunting” demonstrators, newly released bodycam footage shows.

The footage, released at the request of a defense attorney for a St. Paul man who was cleared of all charges after he fired back at Minneapolis SWAT team members in an unmarked vehicle, shows officers treating protesters more like enemy combatants—all because they were out after curfew.

“Fuck these people,” Minneapolis Police Commander Bruce Folkens can be heard telling one officer who said it had been a “busy night.”

“It’s nice to hear that we’ve moved to—tonight it was just nice to hear ‘We’re gonna go find some more people.’ Instead of chasing people around… you guys are out hunting people now. It’s just a nice change of tempo,” Folkens told the officer, per the Minnesota Reformer.

The “busy night” saw officers unleash rubber bullets on demonstrators out after curfew on May 30, 2020, just five days after the police killing of George Floyd sparked infuriated protests. Jaleel Stallings was among those to come under attack by officers firing marking rounds without warning.

After police in an unmarked van fired rubber bullets at Stallings, striking him with one in the chest, the Army veteran returned fire with a handgun he was licensed to have. Stallings later said he had no idea the occupants of the van were law enforcement and that he had fired back in self-defense.

The bodycam footage released Tuesday by his attorney, Eric Rice, shows Minneapolis police officers punching and kicking him as they took him into custody, with one calling him a “piece of shit.” He appeared to try to explain the misunderstanding to the officers, repeatedly saying “Listen, listen, sir,” as they pinned him to the ground.

He faced a slew of charges in the wake of that incident—including second-degree attempted murder, first-degree assault, second-degree assault, and second-degree riot—but he was cleared on all counts at a July trial.

The footage also showed Minneapolis police officers puncturing vehicle tires while out on the prowl, and unleashing rubber bullets at a gas station owner and several ordinary citizens who were simply guarding the gas station.

After a SWAT officer pepper-sprayed a Vice News reporter directly in the face even after he had displayed his press credentials, officers railed against the media, with one complaining that “they think they can do whatever they want.”

Lt. Johnny Mercil joked about the encounter, saying, “Hold on a second, let me check your credentials, make a few phone calls to verify…”

“There’s a [expletive] curfew,” he said.

Members of the press were exempt from the governor’s curfew order amid protests.

In the wake of the video’s release Tuesday, Garrett Parten, a spokesman for the MPD, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune an internal-affairs investigation had been launched.

Wow, an "internal-affairs investigation." I'm sure that will make a difference in this violent, lawless, racist police department.

[AnBr]

.

Attachments:

[LFC]

This is beyond horrifying. It's like the images of sharia law that the right loved to bring up but since these are officers and a judge in Tennessee it's been allowed to go on for decades.

In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which children to hold.

The judge was proud of what she had helped build, despite some alarming numbers buried in state reports.

Among cases referred to juvenile court, the statewide average for how often children were locked up was 5%.

In Rutherford County, it was 48%.

Davenport runs the juvenile justice system, appointing magistrates, setting rules and presiding over cases that include everything from children accused of breaking the law to parents accused of neglecting their children. While the county’s mayor, sheriff and commissioners have turned over, she has stayed on, becoming a looming figure for thousands of families. “She’s been the judge ever since I was a kid,” said one mother whose own kids have cycled through Davenport’s courtroom. One man, now in his late 20s, said that when he was a kid in trouble, he would pray for a magistrate instead of Davenport: “If she’s having a bad day, most definitely, you’re going to have a bad day.”

While juvenile court is mostly private, Davenport keeps a highly public profile. For the past 10 years she’s had a monthly radio segment on WGNS, a local station where she talks about her work.

She sees a breakdown in morals. Children lack respect: “It’s worse now than I’ve ever seen it,” she said in 2012. Parents don’t parent: “It’s just the worst I’ve ever seen,” she said in 2017. On WGNS, Davenport reminisces with the show’s host about a time when families ate dinner together and parents always knew where their children were and what friends they were with because kids called home from a landline, not some could-be-anywhere cellphone. Video games, the internet, social media — it’s all poison for children, the judge says.

Davenport describes her work as a calling. “I’m here on a mission. It’s not a job. It’s God’s mission,” she told a local newspaper. The children in her courtroom aren’t hers, but she calls them hers. “I’m seeing a lot of aggression in my 9- and 10-year-olds,” she says in one radio segment.

She encourages parents troubled by their children’s behavior to use over-the-counter kits to test them for drugs. “Don’t buy them at the Dollar Tree,” she says on the radio. “The best ones are your reputable drugstores.”

Scrutinizing the inner workings of Tennessee’s juvenile courts can be difficult. Court files are mostly off-limits; proceedings can be closed at a judge’s discretion. But on the radio, Davenport provides listeners a glimpse of the court’s work. “I’ve locked up one 7-year-old in 13 years, and that was a heartbreak,” she said in 2012. “But 8- and 9-year-olds, and older, are very common now.”

Davenport has lots of favorite sayings. “God don’t make no junk,” she says to kids, to instill self-worth. To instill fear, she will say, “I’m going to let you be young and dumb — one time.” There’s no jury in juvenile court, so Davenport decides the facts as well as the law. “And that is why I should get 12 times the pay,” she likes to joke.

[LFC]

Here's the original story about the out of control judge in Rutherford County, TN. Same text but it has this graph.

She's Judge Smails in drag.

[LFC]

The shit appears to be hitting the fan. Of course we are talking about Tennessee sooooo...

​​In the days after ProPublica’s investigation of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, one state lawmaker wrote that she was “horrified.” Another called it a “nightmare.” A third labeled it “unchecked barbarism.” A former Tennessee congressman posted the story about the unlawful jailing of kids and tweeted, “The most sickening and unAmerican thing I’ve read about in some time.” The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called for a federal civil rights investigation. A pastor, in his Sunday sermon in Nashville, said: “We can’t allow this madness to continue. These are our babies.”

And on Tuesday evening, four days after the story published, the president of Middle Tennessee State University notified faculty and staff that Donna Scott Davenport, a juvenile court judge at the heart of the investigation, “is no longer affiliated with the University.” Davenport had been an adjunct instructor at the school, which is based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. For many years, she taught a course on juvenile justice. In 2015, she was one of the university’s commencement speakers.

Davenport did not respond to a request for an interview sent Tuesday evening. She declined to be interviewed for our previous story. On Friday, ProPublica published a detailed account, in partnership with Nashville Public Radio, about Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system, which Davenport oversees. The story chronicled how the county had illegally arrested and jailed children for years and in June settled a class-action lawsuit, agreeing to pay up to $11 million.

On Wednesday, a Rutherford County spokeswoman said in an email that she had not yet had the opportunity to consult with Davenport about the interview request. She provided a written statement from the county’s mayor, Bill Ketron, which said in part, “I share our community’s concerns over a news story that was recently released involving Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system.” The mayor’s statement said that because of ongoing litigation in federal court, the county is “very limited in what can be discussed.”

[LFC]

Uniformed thugs. Of course the union will protect this guy to the hilt.

A maskless NYPD officer shoved a man through the emergency exit of a Manhattan subway after an apparent confrontation over face coverings, video shows.

A subway rider captured footage of an officer shoving a masked rider in the 8th Street station in Greenwich Village around 8:50 a.m. The person who filmed the incident said police were “harassing this passenger who asked them to put on masks.”

Under NYPD guidelines, all officers are required to wear face coverings when interacting with members of the public, regardless of vaccination status. A police spokesman said the incident was under internal review.

The man in the video, identified on Twitter as Andy Gilbert, said he was on his way to work and had just gotten off the train when he noticed two officers without masks.

“I’ve taken to filming them whenever I see them doing this in the subway, so I walked over and asked them why they weren’t masked,” he told PIX11 News. “The male officer kept pretending he couldn’t hear what I was saying, he told me ‘I can’t hear you through your mask.'”

[pnwguy]

Oct 21, 2021 15:06:05 GMT LFC said:

Uniformed thugs. Of course the union will protect this guy to the hilt.

A maskless NYPD officer shoved a man through the emergency exit of a Manhattan subway after an apparent confrontation over face coverings, video shows.

A subway rider captured footage of an officer shoving a masked rider in the 8th Street station in Greenwich Village around 8:50 a.m. The person who filmed the incident said police were “harassing this passenger who asked them to put on masks.”

Under NYPD guidelines, all officers are required to wear face coverings when interacting with members of the public, regardless of vaccination status. A police spokesman said the incident was under internal review.

The man in the video, identified on Twitter as Andy Gilbert, said he was on his way to work and had just gotten off the train when he noticed two officers without masks.

“I’ve taken to filming them whenever I see them doing this in the subway, so I walked over and asked them why they weren’t masked,” he told PIX11 News. “The male officer kept pretending he couldn’t hear what I was saying, he told me ‘I can’t hear you through your mask.'”

It's been an unfortunate and ugly side to American unions, which is to defend any member to the hilt, regardless of how heinous their behavior is.  Trade unions have condoned stealing from the job sites, horrible racism and sexism, thuggish behaviors during strikes, and many other actions that are indefensible.  IMO, it's part of why so much of the middle class began to turn against the union movement, even though it was the only institutional push back against exploitive employers.  And since authoritative a-holes have naturally gravitated to police departments around the country, their unions back the thugs.  It doesn't help that so many unions have organized crime ties, where thuggery comes with the territory.

[LFC]

Nope, no racism here. It's just a coincidence.

The Beverly Hills Police Department has been accused of racial profiling along Rodeo Drive, with new records showing Black people have been disproportionately arrested in the famed luxury shopping district.

“The demographics show that there are not many Black people who live in Beverly Hills,” civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who is overseeing a lawsuit against the city and members of the department, said at a press conference last month. “You had to be intentional to try to arrest those many Black people in Beverly Hills.”

Records obtained by the Los Angeles Times showed that 90 people were arrested by a special unit within the department, dubbed the Rodeo Drive Team, in the two months after its creation in summer 2020. Of the 90 arrested, an eye-popping 80 were Black. Police have yet to explain why Black people have been disproportionately apprehended.

[LFC]

OMG, the entire system covered up the fact that this guy wasn't even a legitimate officer? W...T...F???!!! This is fraud designed to destroy somebody's life. Every person involved needs to be prosecuted. There's no possible valid excuse. Welcome to rural Texass.

In October 2019, Patrick Taylor drove home to Cooper, Texas, in rural Delta County after visiting a friend one night. The 37-year-old Black man parked in his driveway and was about to enter his home when, he said, Zachary Williamson appeared.

According to Taylor, Williamson—a white, 16-year veteran police officer who has bounced around nine small North Texas law-enforcement agencies—represented himself as a member of the Delta County Sheriff’s Office and shouted at Taylor, “Why did you run from me?”

Taylor told The Daily Beast he was confused, because he didn’t notice Williamson following him, and never saw Williamson flash police lights. Then, in a matter of moments, he claims in a lawsuit filed in federal court obtained by The Daily Beast, Williamson grabbed him, put him in a shoulder lock, and slammed him to the ground.

While Williamson waited for another deputy to arrive, Taylor alleged in his suit, Williamson placed him in a chokehold. “It was mind-boggling to me,” Taylor said.

Williamson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Taylor was soon arrested for driving while intoxicated, according to the suit, but he alleges that the arrest was based on Williamson’s “personal observations,” insisting that a breathalyzer or blood alcohol test was never performed. Incident reports were not produced by the Delta County Sheriff’s Office, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment prior to publication of this story. Taylor declined to discuss whether he’d been under the influence that night; when asked about a prior driving under the influence conviction in 2011, he said, “That’s a thing in my past.”

But it’s what happened next that makes Taylor’s story so unreal.

After the encounter with Williamson, Taylor was taken to the Delta County Jail. Over the next year, Taylor said, he lost his job, saw his family lose their home, and was sent to a court-ordered rehab center before his charges were finally dismissed in August. It was then, he said, that he learned that at the time of the arrest, Williamson was not certified to be a peace officer—a fact that he and his attorney claim was covered up by local officials including County Judge Jason Murray, County Attorney Jay Garrett, and former County Sheriff Ricky Smith.

In other words, according to Taylor—and two officials his lawsuit cites as having given statements at least partly backing up his account—he found out the cop who purported to bust him was uncertified, and the entire system came crashing down to cover its tracks. Experts described the saga as the sort of uniquely brazen episode that could fuel distrust in the criminal justice system—particularly in sparsely populated rural areas like Delta County.

“This only increases the cynicism of society against law enforcement,” Kalfani Ture, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Mount Saint Mary’s University and a former police officer in Georgia, told The Daily Beast.

And all the corrupt Bubbas go silent.

Murray, the county judge, did not respond to a request for comment. Garrett, the county attorney, and Smith, the former sheriff who was replaced in a 2020 election, declined to comment when reached by The Daily Beast.

The current sheriff of Delta County, Charla Singleton, whose office is also named in the suit, likewise did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the lawsuit Taylor filed this month, in October 2019, while he was still in jail, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Archie Crittenden learned Williamson—who the suit claims had been hired by the Delta County Sheriff’s Office in September 2019—did not have an active Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) peace officer certification. This meant all the arrests he’d made, including Taylor’s, were illegitimate and should be dismissed, Crittenden argued.

“I was extremely concerned that Officer Williamson was allowed by Delta County to continue to arrest members of the public and issue citations,” Crittenden wrote in a declaration as part of the lawsuit.

[goldenvalley]

I wonder if the bouncing around 9 different law enforcement agencies was because the agencies figured out he wasn't certified. So when asked for references they just didn't mention that part as the guy sought new employment in other agencies.

[LFC]

At all levels they do protect their own, even when they murder people. Remember that this is the same federal enforcement agency that the Democrats want to reform and the Republicans want to protect. Welcome to fascism ... again.

Border Patrol has special, secretive units that work to cover up any wrongdoing when agents kill someone or otherwise use force in potentially problematic ways, according to a letter sent to Congress on Thursday calling for an investigation.

These "shadow police units," the letter says, have been operating since at least 1987 and without any actual authority under federal law. They do not appear in Department of Homeland Security documents as official entities.

The letter, written by the Southern Border Communities Coalition and Alliance San Diego, condemns the use of these units, which documentation shows have different names depending on their location, and suggests that the agents who worked for them could even be charged criminally with obstruction of justice.

The units "have allowed border agents to get away with nearly everything, including murder," the letter says. It was sent to leaders of Senate and House judiciary, homeland security and oversight committees.

There are three entities with authority from Congress to perform criminal investigations. They are the FBI, the DHS Office of the Inspector General and the Customs and Border Protection Office of Professional Responsibility. These Border Patrol units are not among them.

"Their stated mission is to mitigate liability for agents," said Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, quoting from a presentation created by San Diego's Border Patrol unit and obtained by a journalist, John Carlos Frey. "In other words, their mission is protect agents, not the public."

When asked about the units, a spokesperson with Customs and Border Protection who declined to be named on the record said that the agency has a "multi-tiered oversight framework in place to address allegations of misconduct involving agency personnel."

"The U.S. Border Patrol maintains teams with specialized evidence collection capabilities across the southwest border," the unnamed spokesperson said. "These teams consist of highly trained personnel available to respond around the clock to collect and process evidence related to CBP enforcement activities as well as critical incidents. In the case of serious incidents involving CBP personnel, members of these teams are sometimes called upon to assist investigators from CBP OPR and other local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. This is a vitally important capability as many critical incidents involving CBP operations occur in remote locations where other agencies may be unwilling or unable to respond."

The letter to Congress is the product of months of research and analysis, Guerrero said, and wouldn't have happened without information that surfaced in a San Diego case.

[LFC]

Where the hell is the power to at least put this guy on leave? At least he can no longer easily lie in court without being torn to shreds by the defense.

A Washington State sheriff, who is facing criminal charges for lying about a confrontation he had with a Black newspaper carrier, has now been blackballed by local prosecutors.

But Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer is still, unbelievably, refusing to go.

On Friday evening, the Pierce County Prosecutor’s office determined Troyer should be added to a list of witnesses with credibility problems. The decision was made by a 10-person committee that routinely reviews officer honesty affairs—and means that Troyer is officially on the “Brady List” that is often used to identify officers with problematic behavior that would compromise their ability to testify in court.

It comes just days after the Washington State Attorney General’s Office charged the Troyer with misdemeanor counts of false reporting and making a false statement to a civil servant after he tailed the newspaper carrier on Jan. 27, then called emergency dispatchers and claimed the carrier had threatened to kill him. But later, when questioned, Troy admitted there had been no threat—before flip-flopping again.

The bizarre incident prompted a response by multiple agencies. A probe by the former attorney general, done at Gov. Jay Inslee’s request, found this week that Troyer showed an “improper bias,” and violated departmental policies on conduct, community engagement, bias, and off-duty intervention. He has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges.

Now, a committee has determined that Troyer “will be added to the list of recurring witnesses with potential impeachment information,” a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said.

Being “Brady listed” is often viewed as a scarlet letter in law enforcement circles. It stems from a landmark 1963 Supreme Court ruling that ruled prosecutors must disclose exculpatory information to defendants about officers.

Simply put, it means that if the Troyer was called as a witness in any criminal trial, prosecutors would be forced to share his credibility issues with defense lawyers—who in turn could use that information to question the validity of his testimony in court.

[LFC]

This case out of Florida is just horrifying. He has a long history of all sorts of abuse and piles of complaints lodged against him and yet he's a captain that is pretty much untouchable.

In a police department with a history of brutality, Captain Javier Ortiz holds a special distinction as Miami’s least-fireable man with a badge, a gun and a staggering history of citizen complaints for beatings, false arrests and bullying.

Over his 17 years on the job — including eight as the union president of the Fraternal Order of Police in South Florida — 49 people have complained about him to Internal Affairs as he amassed 19 official use-of-force incidents, $600,000 in lawsuit settlements and a book’s worth of terrible headlines related to his record and his racially inflammatory social media posts, many of which attacked alleged victims of police violence.

Yet Ortiz has repeatedly beaten back attempts to discipline him. He returned to work in March from a yearlong paid suspension during which state and federal investigators examined whether he “engaged in a pattern of abuse and bias against minorities, particularly African Americans … [and] has been known for cyber-stalking and doxing civilians who question his authority or file complaints against him.” The investigation was launched after three Miami police sergeants accused him of abusing his position and said the department had repeatedly botched investigations into him.

But investigators concluded their hands were tied because 13 of the 19 use-of-force complaints were beyond the five-year statute of limitations, and the others lacked enough hard evidence beyond the assertions of the alleged victims. The findings underscored a truism in many urban police departments: The most troublesome cops are so insulated by protective union contracts and laws passed by politicians who are eager to advertise their law-and-order bona fides that removing them is nearly impossible — even when their own colleagues are witnesses against them.

The story of Ortiz shows the steep public costs of the way elected officials of both parties use the police to keep themselves covered politically: They can demand justice for victims after especially egregious acts of brutality, even while they support contracts and laws that protect officers accused of abuse. They can soothe the victims and at the same time enjoy the benefits of supportive police unions.

Ortiz’s reinstatement in March was no surprise to the many people in Miami who have watched him escape any meaningful punishment for years.

“I’ve known Javi for 15 years. One thing I realized: Wherever he is, you want to be nowhere near him. He’s done nefarious things,” says Miami Police Lt. Jermaine Douglas, who once starred in the true-crime TV series “The First 48,” and more recently accused Ortiz of unfairly disciplining him, a complaint that was upheld by a civilian investigative panel.

[LFC]

Cleveland police are whining and howling that they might actually be held accountable for their actions.

On Monday morning, Jeff Follmer, president of the largest police union in Cleveland, Ohio, held up a picture of Kareem Hinton, a Black activist from the city. His T-shirt read: “No tears for dead cops.”

“This is one of the petitioners that is for this campaign,” Follmer, who is white, told the cameras.

He went on to argue that Issue 24—a city charter amendment that would create a civilian-led police commission to serve as final arbiter on police discipline and set policy for the department—was really about revenge, not accountability.

“This group does not like the police,” Follmer told The Daily Beast in an interview on Monday.

Since the summer of 2020, threats of officers leaving cities in droves and crime rising in their absence have hung over conversations about police reform and in some cases led to cities like Atlanta and even liberal Burlington, Vermont, seemingly backtracking on their efforts. Now, a desperate police union in Cleveland is throwing the kitchen sink at what amounts to a seismic reform on the ballot Tuesday, even as activists say a department with a history of horrific brutality needs to quit the fearmongering and accept reality.

“Many of the problematic veterans are going to retire, which is fine,” Hinton, an organizer for Black Lives Matter Cleveland and a member of Citizens for a Safer Cleveland, told The Daily Beast.

Hinton explained that his T-shirt was meant to get at a larger point about the lack of empathy often shown toward victims of police violence by the police department. (He claimed that the back of the shirt read: “Till they value black lives.”)

So just how bad has that police department been? Pretty damn bad.

The local police department entered into a consent decree with the Department of Justice in 2015. A DOJ investigation at the time found the city’s department featured “structural and systemic deficiencies and practices” and concluded cops there used “unreasonable force,” and had “insufficient accountability, inadequate training, ineffective policies, and inadequate engagement with the community,” according to a findings letter.

[goldenvalley]

Too bad the revulsion for "Defund the Police" concepts has reduced people's ability to recognize that the Thin Blue Line contains some pretty awful people.

[LFC]

Here we see the problem with qualified immunity in all its rancid glory. This was a conspiracy to deprive somebody of their freedom. The criminal in uniform who did this should be jailed. Instead some smaller police department will pick him up because of his "experience."

A detective with the Raleigh Police Department in North Carolina has been fired after he allegedly planted heroin on a group of Black men, CBS17 reports.

Officer Omar Abdullah "was terminated from the Raleigh Police Department on Oct. 28, 2021," Raleigh police said in a statement on Monday.

Abdullah, along with the city of Raleigh, were sued for allegedly planting the heroin on the men and then charging them of drug trafficking. The subjects faced over seven years in prison over the false charges, and spent two years in jail before the charges were dismissed.

The case was settled for $2 million.

"I think for advocates, we've always wanted this," police reform advocate Kimberly Muktarian told ABC11. "This is something we dreamt of. So for them, I still believe that -- this is not a reality that they commonly see."
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But Robin Mills, whose son was arrested by Abdullah and put in jail on a $450,000 bond, said the firing is not enough.

"They did what they needed to do from a civil perspective. But now we're talking about criminal," Mills told ABC11. "And there's no way the kidnapping of over a dozen black men is not criminal."

[AnBr]

“This group does not like the police”

I wonder why anyone would not love the police? Hmm...

[LFC]

Nov 3, 2021 2:33:06 GMT AnBr said:

“This group does not like the police”

I wonder why anyone would not love the police? Hmm...

"We're going to harass, falsely arrest, and beat you until you love us, dammit."