Police Behavior and What To Do About It

[pnwguy]

Jan 11, 2022 15:14:43 GMT LFC said:

It takes some brass balls to go to court after getting fired for this. The streets of LA are safer with these two asshats gone.

We had an entire federal executive branch of government from 2017-2020 that was doing on-the-job-training.  And worse yet, they were confident in their ignorance.  Which is more dangerous?

[AnBr]

Alvin Bragg Wants to Do Away With Prison Time for Most Crimes

[jackd]

In England, once upon a time, they used to cut off the hands of people who stole bread. It didn't stop bread thefts.

[LFC]

This is sort of a new take (though probably not that new) on the already badly abused act of civil asset forfeiture.

A rural sheriff near the Texas border is under criminal investigation for allegedly having his deputies illegally seize money and a truck from undocumented immigrants during traffic stops.

Last month, investigators with the Texas Rangers and the Texas Attorney General’s Office raided four Real County Sheriff’s Office locations as part of an investigation into Sheriff Nathan Johnson, according to search warrants obtained this week by The Texas Tribune. The investigating Texas Ranger said Johnson admitted to regularly seizing money from undocumented immigrants during traffic stops, even if they were not accused of any state crime, before handing them over to United States Border Patrol agents.

One sheriff's deputy told investigators that “seizing currency from undocumented immigrants and the driver has been standard operating procedure for as long as he has been employed by the Real County Sheriff’s Office,” Texas Ranger Ricardo Guajardo wrote in the warrant requests.

Guajardo accused Johnson of felony-level theft by a public servant and abuse of official capacity, alleging the sheriff’s cash and vehicle seizures were in violation of the state’s relatively lenient civil asset forfeiture laws.

Of course it's Texass and these are brown people from across the border so I can't see this guy getting even a slap on the wrist or being forced to give up the stolen money.

[jackd]

Interesting the Rangers re pursuing it. They're not known for their devotion to diversity.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 12, 2022 16:41:39 GMT jackd said:

Interesting the Rangers re pursuing it. They're not known for their devotion to diversity.

Maybe they figure Rangers are the ones that should be collecting the cash.

[LFC]

Jan 12, 2022 16:41:39 GMT jackd said:

Interesting the Rangers re pursuing it. They're not known for their devotion to diversity.

But are they really? Or will they just make sure they get the "white" glove treatment?

[jackd]

Guess we'll have to wait and see. my point originally was they could have just ignored it.

[pnwguy]

Now imagine if Dr. Brennan had "darker pigmentation". He might have become a Scooby Snack.

news.yahoo.com/york-police-release-video-k-100310287.html

[LFC]

A Pennsylvania grand jury has indicted 3 police officers after blame for their killing of an innocent bystander was placed on those they were shooting at from 140 feet away.

A Pennsylvania grand jury has recommended that the trio of Sharon Hill cops who fired their guns outside a high school football game in August, killing 8-year-old Fanta Bility, face criminal charges for their actions.

On Tuesday, the Delaware County District Attorney’s office filed charges of voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, and 10 counts of reckless endangerment against the three officers. District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer also made the bombshell announcement that his office would be dropping first-degree murder charges against the two teens that police and prosecutors had previously insisted were responsible for Fanta’s death.

In November, three months after the Aug. 27 football game, Stollsteimer made the controversial decision to charge Hasein Strand, 18, and Angelo “AJ” Ford, 16, with Fanta’s murder. Using the murky legal principle of transferred intent, the district attorney argued that by engaging in a gunfight 140 feet away from the officers and by drawing police fire, Strand and Ford bore the responsibility for Fanta’s death, even though it was caused directly by the police.

It is still unknown which of the three officers—Devon G. Smith, Sean Patrick Dolan, and Brian James Devaney—fired the bullet that fatally struck Fanta, who had gone to the game that night to cheer on her cousin. The bullet, which struck Fanta in her back, was too badly damaged to link it to a specific gun, according to the grand jury’s presentation.

To put that distance in perspective I decided to look up the distances used for top-level target shooting competitions. Most takes place at 25 yds. There are events that take place at 50 yds, about the same distance the officers opened fire, but they are slow fire and, of course, at stationary targets. So in the midst of the chaos with multiple people in the area 3 officers decided it was a good idea to open fire at a distance reserved for experts taking their time on a controlled range. Talk about "armed and dangerous."

And how does that make you feel about the gun toting civilians with hero complexes who are going to keep you safe?

[LFC]

Here's a case of a type of police corruption I've heard about for many years. I think I even posted about it in the old TRS when a friend was hosed over a speeding ticket in North Carolina.

Ramon Perez came to court last month ready to fight the tickets he’d been handed by Brookside police, including one for rolling through a stop sign and another for driving 48 mph in a 40 zone.

He swore he’d seen the cop from a distance and was careful as he braked.

“I saw him and we looked eye to eye,” the Chelsea business owner said. “There’s no way I was going to run that stop sign.”

When he got to court Dec. 2, he saw scores of people just like him lining up to stand before Judge Jim Wooten, complaining of penny-ante “crimes” and harassment by officers. He saw so many people trying to park in the grassy field outside the municipal building that police had to direct traffic.

He figured there was no point.

“I saw the same attitude in every officer and every person,” he said. “That’s why I hesitated to fight it. They were doing the same thing to every person that was there. They own the town.”

Perez, it appears, was right.

Months of research and dozens of interviews by AL.com found that Brookside’s finances are rocket-fueled by tickets and aggressive policing. In a two-year period between 2018 and 2020 Brookside revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640 percent and now make up half the city’s total income.

And the police chief has called for more.

The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.

By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.

The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and “making up laws” to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees – or pay for costly appeals to state court – and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.

“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. “We are not safer because of it.”

[Bact PhD]

Are…You…KIDDING…Me!?!!

www.nbcnews.com/investigations/cop-fatally-struck-nurse-actions-crash-shock-victims-loved-ones-rcna12072

A silver Honda Accord zoomed past exit 150 on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey just before 3 a.m. The driver was an off-duty Newark police officer, Louis Santiago. His cousin Albert Guzman was in the passenger seat.

It was the night of Halloween 2021, and Santiago was drunk, according to Essex County prosecutors.

He was staring at a cellphone when his car allegedly drifted onto the shoulder and struck a man who happened to be walking along the darkened stretch of highway, prosecutors say.

Santiago, 25, initially thought he may have hit an animal, according to his lawyer, Patrick Toscano Jr. The victim, Damian Dymka, 29, was still in the costume that he had worn out that night: a black mask with gold antlers and brown fur covering his shoulders.

Dymka would be pronounced dead at the scene — but not until more than two hours later.

In those two hours, Santiago drove home with Dymka’s body in the back seat and then returned to the crash site having never called 911 or attempted to render aid to the man, prosecutors say.

“Put that body back where you hit it,” Annette Santiago allegedly told her son when he showed up at their home, according to prosecutors.

Ummm…Just how wasted WAS this dude??
Worse, I can hear Momma using the same tone of voice for the body as she might for, say, a stash of fireworks…

The story gets no less bizarre as it unfolds.

[LFC]

Jan 24, 2022 14:48:22 GMT Bact PhD said:

Are…You…KIDDING…Me!?!!

I wonder how mean a reprimand he'll get before going back to work. Maybe they'll punish him really hard, fire him, and he'll have to work for another department.

[Bact PhD]

Jan 24, 2022 15:02:40 GMT LFC said:

Jan 24, 2022 14:48:22 GMT Bact PhD said:

Are…You…KIDDING…Me!?!!

I wonder how mean a reprimand he'll get before going back to work. Maybe they'll punish him really hard, fire him, and he'll have to work for another department.

My money is on 21 days of unpaid administrative leave before heading back to work…and that’s only because this story made a national news outlet.

[LFC]

F***ing racist cops. And the union protects these pieces of shit.

Sisters Quashae and Quanae Brown were Christmas shopping in December of 2020 at a Philadelphia mall when they were detained by two officers who accused them of stealing a onesie from Old Navy that cost $6. After the officers searched the women's bag and found no stolen items, the women were allegedly arrested and jailed anyway, The Patriot-News reports.

"The women said they were held in cells several hours before Derry Township police sent them home without filing charges," The Patriot News reports. "This week, the women filed a lawsuit because they said they were harmed by the experience, which was based on an employee’s hunch that they were 'acting suspiciously.' The women 'committed no crime,' yet were detained without reasonable evidence, according to the lawsuit against the police department, five officers and The Gap. Inc."

The women, who are Black, say in a lawsuit that they believe employees at The Gap and Old Navy racially profiled them. Their suit also accuses police of violating the women’s Fourth Amendment rights to a lawful search and seizure, as well as Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection of the laws.

Derry Township’s police chief Garth Warner said “the allegations against our officers and department are inaccurate, baseless, and without merit.”

But according to the sisters' attorney Richard Wiener, there wasn't sufficient evidence to search and detain the women for hours in jail cells.

“There’s no other rational basis that I’m aware of at this point that would have led the store folks to suspect and accuse these girls of shoplifting, then for the Derry Township police to keep running with that ball,” Wiener said.

[LFC]

Another no-knock warrant ends in a police sanctioned murder. I saw this reported on and saw the video. The entire incident from entry to execution of an innocent black man was 10 seconds. There is no way to justify this without suspending the concept of reality.

Locke was asleep underneath a blanket on a couch in a Minneapolis apartment just before 7 a.m. Wednesday morning when a SWAT team burst in, yelling, “Search warrant.” Locke, clearly startled in body-cam footage of the incident, was shot dead within seconds after officers saw a firearm in his hand. His family has said he was entirely within his rights to have the firearm, as he had a concealed carry permit. He had the gun for protection for when he worked as a food delivery driver in the city, relatives told the AP.

Authorities say he was not a target of the no-knock search warrant officers were serving, which was issued as part of a homicide investigation in Saint Paul.

Activists are now demanding an end to all no-knock search warrants, the prosecution of officers involved in Locke’s death, and Frey’s resignation.

“I’m out here, we have to stay out here, because I could be next. I try to stay out of the way. But I have to be in the way. Especially to show my culture that I care,” Derius Burnett, 19, told The Daily Beast at Saturday’s protest.

Frey announced a moratorium on no-knock warrants late Friday, saying the policies would be overhauled with input from civil rights activists and experts. But that was little comfort for residents of a city that has seen what seems like an unrelenting string of police killings in recent years.

It’s messed up that we are this good at organizing. It’s a problem that we’re this skilled at getting people together. Mobilizing after someone is killed is one thing. It takes so much more to organize like this, which speaks to how much police killing is here,” said 29-year-old Lavish Mack.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 7, 2022 20:04:31 GMT LFC said:

Another no-knock warrant ends in a police sanctioned murder. I saw this reported on and saw the video. The entire incident from entry to execution of an innocent black man was 10 seconds. There is no way to justify this without suspending the concept of reality.

Locke was asleep underneath a blanket on a couch in a Minneapolis apartment just before 7 a.m. Wednesday morning when a SWAT team burst in, yelling, “Search warrant.” Locke, clearly startled in body-cam footage of the incident, was shot dead within seconds after officers saw a firearm in his hand. His family has said he was entirely within his rights to have the firearm, as he had a concealed carry permit. He had the gun for protection for when he worked as a food delivery driver in the city, relatives told the AP.

Authorities say he was not a target of the no-knock search warrant officers were serving, which was issued as part of a homicide investigation in Saint Paul.

Activists are now demanding an end to all no-knock search warrants, the prosecution of officers involved in Locke’s death, and Frey’s resignation.

“I’m out here, we have to stay out here, because I could be next. I try to stay out of the way. But I have to be in the way. Especially to show my culture that I care,” Derius Burnett, 19, told The Daily Beast at Saturday’s protest.

Frey announced a moratorium on no-knock warrants late Friday, saying the policies would be overhauled with input from civil rights activists and experts. But that was little comfort for residents of a city that has seen what seems like an unrelenting string of police killings in recent years.

It’s messed up that we are this good at organizing. It’s a problem that we’re this skilled at getting people together. Mobilizing after someone is killed is one thing. It takes so much more to organize like this, which speaks to how much police killing is here,” said 29-year-old Lavish Mack.

And there he was with concealed carry firearm at hand just like the 2nd Amenders like, but the police were in an aggressive mood and he was the wrong color.  

This no-knock shit looks cool in the movies and tv but the potential for mayhem is too great for it to be used except unless the rules for issuing a warrant are stringent and adhered to.

[LFC]

We've discussed this before but the FBI still doesn't want to give up one of its favorite toys, bullet analysis, even if it's responsible for imprisoning people with lies.

The most damning criticism of the field came in a 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST, which found that “firearms analysis currently falls short of the criteria for foundational validity,” and that the studies the field’s practitioners often cite to support their work are poorly designed and “seriously underestimate the false positive rate.”

After decades of deferring to these forensic analysts, a handful of judges started to heed the warnings from scientists, and have put limits on what some forensic witnesses can say in court. Those decisions have sparked a defensive backlash in the forensics community, along with rebukes from law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

Agar’s document is part of that backlash. In the two-page handout, Agar instructs firearms analysts on how to circumvent judges’ restrictions on unscientific testimony. He even suggests dialogue for prosecutors and analysts to recite if challenged. Most controversially, Agar advises analysts to tell judges that any effort to restrict their testimony to claims backed by scientific research is tantamount to asking them to commit perjury.

Agar’s document was so volatile, it was upbraided by the Texas Forensic Science Commission (TFSC). That agency—the only one of its kind—was formed in the wake of revelations that bogus expert testimony likely caused the state to convict and execute an innocent man, and is tasked with ensuring that expert testimony given in Texas courtrooms is scientifically valid. The TFSC called Agar’s advice to firearm analysts “irredeemably faulty,” and stated that it “runs counter to core principles in science.”

“This is just really unbelievable,” Ellen Yaroshefsky, a professor of legal ethics at Hofstra University, told The Daily Beast after reviewing Agar’s memo. “He’s encouraging false testimony and he’s undermining respect for the judiciary. I mean, he’s saying that if a judge says you can’t give unscientific testimony, you’re being forced to commit perjury? It’s just absurd.”

[LFC]

[LFC]

If true then this is a horrific abuse of victims.

San Francisco's police chief said Monday that he is investigating claims by the city's district attorney that DNA collected from rape victims is being used to help identify them as possible suspects in crimes.

The police crime lab "attempts to identify crime suspects" by searching a law enforcement database that includes DNA collected from sexual assault victims, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday.

He didn't identify the database, but said one woman was recently arrested for a felony property crime based on her DNA collected years ago during a domestic violence-involved rape examination.

That could violate the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures as well as California's Victims' Bill of Rights and could dissuade sexual assault victims from reporting crimes, Boudin said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

[LFC]

This is just nauseating.

It took the Bridgewater police officers almost twenty seconds to get to the fight location and head toward the two fighting teens — one of them Black and the other one a white-looking Latino. By time officers arrived, the boys where already full-on fighting on the ground — with the white-looking teen on top of the Black teen.

Then, both officers forcibly yank the White looking teen away, as the boys are still fighting. What happened next is what’s creating a stir: the female officer sits the white-looking teen down on a couch, while her male partner immediately tackles the Black teen, who was already on his back, before handcuffing him.

The female officer then walks away from the teen on the couch — who was not cuffed — to assist her partner. In doing so, she puts her knee over the Black boy’s neck.

“I knew it was wrong, and I knew there was gonna be problems when they did that,” 15-year-old Joey, who was involved in the fight, said. “They didn’t go for me.”

Tuesday night, he told PIX11 News — with his mother’s permission — that he couldn’t believe he wasn’t also placed in cuffs.

“I didn’t understand why,” the teen said. “I even offered to get handcuffed as well.”

[goldenvalley]

Feb 16, 2022 14:47:46 GMT LFC said:

This is just nauseating.

The female officer then walks away from the teen on the couch — who was not cuffed — to assist her partner. In doing so, she puts her knee over the Black boy’s neck.

“I knew it was wrong, and I knew there was gonna be problems when they did that,” 15-year-old Joey, who was involved in the fight, said. “They didn’t go for me.”

Tuesday night, he told PIX11 News — with his mother’s permission — that he couldn’t believe he wasn’t also placed in cuffs.

“I didn’t understand why,” the teen said. “I even offered to get handcuffed as well.”

Hats off to the kid who got the good treatment.  He has more conscience than the police thugs did.

[LFC]

The federal hate crime trial of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers is going on. The defense called just one witness.

To prove the three white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery were not motivated by racism, their defense teams called a collective total of one witness: a random neighbor who did not know the trio.

Lindy Cofer, a 48-year-old resident of Satilla Shores—the Georgia neighborhood where the 25-year-old Black man was chased and shot to death in 2020—was called on behalf of Greg McMichael.

Along with his son Travis (who fired the fatal shots) and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan (who joined the chase), McMichael was convicted in state court of murder. Prosecutors successfully convinced a jury that the men wrongly suspected Arbery of theft and killed him in cold blood while he ran on the street.

Now the trio faces federal civil rights charges in connection with their rogue vigilantism. And Cofer appeared to be Gregory McMichael’s legal team’s attempt to show his vigilantism was color blind.

Her brief testimony focused on a white man she saw under the Fancy Bluff Bridge who was suspected of possible thefts in the area years ago. McMichael, a former cop and investigator for the local district attorney, saw the same man months after Cofer—and called 911 to report him, his defense team said.

However, Cofer admitted that she did not know whether the man McMichael saw was the same as the one she saw under the bridge. She also noted that she did not know McMichael or his co-defendants.

Cofer’s bizarre testimony, which allowed the defense to play McMichael’s 911 call to the jury, represented an attempt to push back on evidence that Gregory McMichael had expressed racist sentiments in the past.

No witnesses testified for the younger McMichael or Bryan, and the three defense teams rested their cases after Cofer’s testimony.

[goldenvalley]

The three by standing cops present at the George Floyd murder were found guilty of federal crimes. 

A federal jury determined that the officers — Tou Thao, 36; J. Alexander Kueng, 28; and Thomas Lane, 38 — had willfully violated Mr. Floyd’s constitutional rights by not providing medical care when he lost a pulse and that two of them were also guilty of not intervening to stop a fellow officer, Derek Chauvin, from planting his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck.

There is some legislation working thru the CA system to require cops to intervene and/or to report when such things happen in front of them.  It makes sense to do this so that cop training can shift from "do what you can while the brotherhood protects you" to "the brotherhood gets charged if they allow you to be a brute" for whatever reason, racial or just generally being an asshat.  

[goldenvalley]

The Washington Post has a long article on its research into how much police misconduct costs by looking at civil settlements and tracing individual cases so they could identify the officers involved.

...The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.

It seems there are repeat offenders and that the cities don't always know that some officer cost them multiple claims.

The Post found that more than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had been the subject of at least five payments. More than 200 had 10 or more.

The repetition is the hidden cost of alleged misconduct: Officers whose conduct was at issue in more than one payment accounted for more than $1.5 billion, or nearly half of the money spent by the departments to resolve allegations, The Post found. In some cities, officers repeatedly named in misconduct claims accounted for an even larger share. For example, in Chicago, officers who were subject to more than one paid claim accounted for more than $380 million of the nearly $528 million in payments.

The Post analysis found that the typical payout for cases involving officers with multiple claims — ranging from illegal search and seizure to use of excessive force — was $10,000 higher than those involving other officers.

Despite the repetition and cost, few cities or counties track claims by the names of the officers involved — meaning that officials may be unaware of officers whose alleged misconduct is repeatedly costing taxpayers. In 2020, the 25 departments employed 103,000 officers combined, records show.

It's an interesting read with a lot of anecdotes of actual events.  The public doesn't often hear about these cases because they are settled with confidentiality clauses in the settlements.  Many of the cases are settled before trial and the officers' personnel files don't note them.