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but we already know that
hope to see you be a part
with some stories..
I grew up in a time when cops were considered the good guys and in my 63 years they have done nothing to me to change my mind. I average a couple of roadside chats with them every year because I like to drive fast. I haven't gotten a citation in a very long time and it is at their descretion. I suppose I could contribute more to the state coffers if I were rude and belligerent but why would anyone want to do that.
Thanks gem, I bet you have some good cop stories!
b4
GOOD LUCK !!! Any board that has the guidence of the Famous B4ATF will prosper !!!
He is WISE
My neighbor is a gentle professional baker. He got depressed a couple months ago and called some self help/suicide line that he saw on TV. Before he hung up the phone 3 cops were at his door and dragged him to the hospital for a week. Poor bastich lost his job and things got worse! He then threw a couple raw eggs at the restaurant and got arrested that time. Lost his apartment.
Now he is on probation for a year and in mandatory counseling.
Never ever ever get involved with the legal system.
b4
Luckily his employer gave him his job back!
Hi Vex, if the COPS board gets busy you can add me as a mod. It is critical info and part of the fight against tyranny.
b4
Larry Hohol ~ Judicial Corruption
http://www.theluzernecountyrailroad.com/larrys-blog.php
Police Brutality Worse than Rodney King
The Robert Leone Story
Bronx teen walked calmly inside his home before being shot dead by NYPD cop.
How are 2 LA Police Officers NOT Held Accountable?
LA Cops Shoot 3 Innocent People
Cop arrested in 'honeybees' shooting
Investigators say gunman asked victims odd questions before opening fire
JOLIET, Ill. — A suburban Chicago police officer has been arrested in connection with a series of shootings that killed one man and wounded two others.
Authorities say Lynwood Police Officer Brian Dorian is being held on $2.5 million bail after being arrested on a murder warrant Friday.
Investigators had been looking for a gunman who approached his victims Tuesday, asking them questions about honeybees or construction materials and then shooting them.
Gregory DeBord, a former Will County prosecutor, said Dorian was convicted of speeding in a fatal 2006 accident after his pickup truck hit a car driven by a 17-year-old boy. Dorian was driving more than 80 mph on a road where the speed limit was 55 mph and couldn't avoid the car when it pulled into his path, DeBord said.
The apparently random shootings began about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at a work site in Illinois and ended about an hour later across the state line on an Indiana farm.
One of the victims, Rolando Alonso, 45, of Hammond, Ind., was shot fatally in the head. He was working for a construction company near Beecher, Ill., when the gunman began a conversation, then started shooting.
Later on Tuesday morning, a farmer, Keith Dahl, 64, was wounded near Lowell, Ind.
Garza's great-aunt Peggy Cassoday of Rensselaer, told the Times of Munster that the suspect asked about scrap wood.
"(The shooter) says, 'What about this wood? What are going to do with it?' My nephew said, 'You can take whatever you want.' So the guy took four or five steps away from him, turned around and when Josh picked up the wheelbarrow to move it, the guy turned around and started shooting," Cassoday said.
"He was bent over," Cassoday said. "That was the only thing that saved his life."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39574459/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Friend of mine went to jail and I watched the videos and cannot determine what he did wrong other than "fail to submit to obedience" which is not against the law.
http://www.libertyontour.com/2010/09/20/adamsarrest/
Police fatally shoot dog at Adams Morgan festival
By Matt Zapotosky
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 13, 2010
A D.C. police officer shot and killed a festival-goer's dog amid hundreds of onlookers in Adams Morgan on Sunday afternoon in an incident that was either completely justified or totally unnecessary, depending on whom you ask.
This much, witnesses say, is clear: Sometime after noon on Sunday, two dogs started snapping at each other in the middle of a crowd enjoying cheese fries and funnel cake at the annual Adams Morgan Day festival on 18th Street NW. D.C. police officers soon got involved, and at some point, one of them shot and killed the larger dog, described as either a pit bull or Shar-Pei mix.
The disagreement is in the details.
Aaron Block, 25, of Dupont Circle said he was walking his 2-year-old Shar-Pei mix, Parrot, up 18th Street when the dog suddenly turned around and bit a poodle that was passing by. He said he separated the two dogs -- cutting his hand inside Parrot's mouth in the process -- and was subduing his dog when police arrived.
That's when a D.C. police officer took over, putting his knee in the middle of Parrot's back while he pulled the dog's forelegs behind him, Block said. He said that the officer then grabbed Parrot by his neck and threw him over a banister at the Brass Knob antique store and that just as the dog righted itself, the officer pulled out his gun and fired. Parrot was "a full 12 to 15 steps away," Block said, and was "making no aggressive overtures." The dog, he noted, "doesn't handle stairs well."
"The officer drew his gun in an unnecessary act of cowboy gunslinging law enforcement and shot my dog amidst a crowd of thousands," said Block, who was fostering Parrot while he was waiting to be adopted through the Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. "The problems here are almost too numerous to count."
Block's account is supported by at least one witness, Jennifer Naideth, 29, who was in town from Los Angeles selling cosmetics at the festival. She called the shooting "so unnecessary and so violent," adding that "there was no human life in danger."
Police and others had a different perspective.
Jacob Kishter, commander of the 3rd Police District, said that once the officer pushed the dog down the stairwell, "the dog immediately turns and runs at the officer aggressively." The officer, 25-year-veteran Scott Fike, fired one shot, fatally wounding the dog, which police described as a pit bull.
"It's definitely going to be justified based on everything that we know," Kishter said, adding that police interviewed the officer, the owners of both dogs and other officers on scene.
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The police account also has witness support.
Tony De Pass, 67, a former D.C. police officer who lives in Northwest, said that the dog was charging directly at him when Fike drew his gun and fired and that "if the officer hadn't shot the dog, the dog would have got one of us, either me or the officer."
"What he did, I would have done the same damn thing," De Pass said.
Block, though, said he sees the police's response as an attempt to cover up what he considers the "executing" of his pet. He said that he would walk with Parrot to and from work every day and that he was a "very people-friendly dog, with absolutely no bite history."
The incident unfolded before hundreds of revelers at the heart of the Adams Morgan celebration, disrupting an otherwise peaceful afternoon. Eric Jost, 26, of Cleveland Park said he watched a young girl with a butterfly painted on her face become "hysterical" as she "witnessed it all."
Soleiman Askarinam, the owner of Spaghetti Garden on 18th Street, said the day's revelry was suddenly punctuated with screams and angry dogs barking, then a gunshot.
"For a second," he said, "it was very scary."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/12/AR2010091203938.html
Cop breaks 84 y/o's neck for touching him
Police Misconduct Infographic
http://www.copblock.org/969/police-misconduct-infographic/
FOLLOW UP: Billboard Shows Cops Support For Convicted Officer Who Beat Man Shackled To Wheelchair
http://cbs2chicago.com/local/bill.cozzi.billboard.2.1926752.html
Confession coerced by police leads to death penalty
http://www.copblock.org/973/confession-coerced-by-police-leads-to-death-penalty/
Touching display of affection for cop who beat man shackled to wheelchair
http://www.copblock.org/977/touching-display-of-affection-for-cop-who-beat-man-shackled-to-wheelchair/
Cops shoot chihuahua
By Mike on June 10, 2009
Jack
Little Jack, the 5 pound chihuahua that cops tazed and shot in order to "protect themselves."
Apparently not having been trained to deal with something as scary and vicious as a chihuahua, two idiot Blue Ash, Ohio police officers tazed, then shot and killed a 5 pound family dog.
They didn’t call animal control. They didn’t get a dog treat and attempt to lure the little guy into cage. They didn’t wrap it in a blanket like any idiot dealing with a scared animal knows to do. They didn’t ask someone maybe smarter than them to help, like Paris Hilton or some neighbor kids. They didn’t attempt to contact the owners to help out.
They did none of that. They just bugged out their eyes, pumped out their chests, tazed the little guy at least 3 times and then pumped some bullets into him.
The chihuahua, Jack, did bite the two officers, so the idiot cops claimed they had to shoot Jack to “protect themselves.”
Protect themselves? From a chihuahua? You have got to be kidding me. This wasn’t Godzilla. This wasn’t a pitbull attacking you or an alligator on the loose that had just eaten neighborhood children.
IT WAS A 5 POUND CHIHUAHUA.
I urge everyone to call the Blue Ash police department, ask for the Chief of Police at (513) 745-8555 and let him know these two jackhole cops should not only be fired, but arrested for animal cruelty.
http://wheelsoffliberty.com/wordpress/?p=124
Sheriff's deputies' disdain for Constitution captured by their own recorded comments
(A must see very well produced video.)
http://kccn.tv/
(watch the video at the top, not the youtube videos at the bottom - they have been removed.)
NY National Guard and local police
are running military checkpoints
supposedly searching for drugs and guns
Increasingly, the country is under martial law without it being declared
The Constitution forbids the use of federal military for local police action
Soldiers are supposed to defend the nation, not subdue it..
New “war on drugs” program another alarming sign that America is under martial law
http://www.prisonplanet.com/new-york-national-guard-units-scan-vehicles-for-gun-confiscations.html
Riots break out in Oakland
after police officer who killed unarmed black man is cleared of murder
and convicted of involuntary manslaughter
The officer said he intended to shock the man with his Taser
but drew his handgun instead..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1293295/California-riots-Oscar-Grant-killer-Johannes-Mehserle-cleared-murder.html
Lawsuit: Drunk cop ran over woman, then supervised investigation
By Daniel Tencer
Friday, April 16th, 2010 -- 12:38 pm
Albuquerque police carried out a "fraudulent" investigation into a drunk, on-duty police officer who killed a woman in a hit-and-run after leaving a bar, a lawsuit filed in a New Mexico court states.
On April 6, 2008, Sgt. Andrew Gallegos left an Albuquerque bar where had been drinking while on duty, got into his pick-up truck and ran over 47-year-old Vera Ann Haskell, says the lawsuit (PDF) filed by Haskell's family.
Gallegos then allegedly fled the scene without notifying police or emergency responders. Haskell died soon afterward.
According to the lawsuit, when investigating officers identified Sgt. Gallegos on security camera footage, they notified Gallegos and even granted his request for a five-hour delay in the investigation.
"Sergeant Gallegos was supervising and directing the fatal investigation even after he was APD's primary suspect," the lawsuit states. "This conduct shocks the conscience."
Haskell was allowed to supervise the investigation for more than a day before the matter was turned over to the department's Criminal Investigations Division, the lawsuit asserts. Two days passed before police searched Gallegos' home, and before they formally interviewed him for the investigation.
According to news reports at the time, Haskell had no fixed address and was struggling with an alcohol problem at the time of her death. She was reportedly passed out next to Gallegos' pick-up truck when he ran her over as he left the parking lot.
According to the PoliceCrimes.com forum, Gallegos was charged in December, 2008, with evidence tampering and leaving the scene of an accident. He was suspended without pay pending the outcome.
In April, 2009, a judge ruled that Gallegos had committed no crime in the incident.
But the Haskell family's lawsuit says the sergeant was given inside information that "was used by Sergeant Gallegos to concoct an alibi and defense."
They are suing Gallegos, the city of Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Police Department and the bar where the incident took place.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0416/lawsuit-drunk-cop-ran-woman-supervised-investigation/
Beating of University of Maryland student by police probed by county prosecutors
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Prince George's prosecutors have begun a criminal investigation of three county police officers who beat an unarmed University of Maryland student with their batons after a basketball game last month in an incident that was caught on video and surfaced publicly Monday, authorities said.
County police also ordered an internal affairs investigation of the three officers, Maj. Andy Ellis said. Ellis said the inquiry would also focus on a county officer who filed official charging documents that are contradicted by the video.
"The video shows the charging documents were nothing more than a cover, a fairy tale they made up to cover for the officers' misconduct," said Christopher A. Griffiths, a lawyer for the student. "The video shows gratuitous violence against a defenseless individual."
Police Chief Roberto L. Hylton said that one of the three officers had been identified and that his police powers have been suspended during the investigation. The other two officers will also be suspended as soon as they are identified, Hylton said.
"I'm outraged and disappointed after viewing the video," Hylton said. "That's not the type of professional conduct we promote. Any employee who uses excessive force will be held accountable."
Griffiths released the video Monday after county prosecutors dropped charges against John J. McKenna, 21. McKenna and a co-defendant, Benjamin C. Donat, 19, had been charged with felonies on suspicion of assaulting officers on horseback and their mounts. On Friday, a prosecutor dropped charges against Donat, also a U-Md. student. Griffiths is also representing Donat.
The incident occurred March 3 near the university's College Park campus after the Maryland men's basketball team defeated Duke. After the game, students took to the streets to celebrate. Twenty-eight people were arrested or cited, sparking a debate between police and students over how and when it is appropriate to break up a group of revelers.
At least part of the incident with McKenna was videotaped by another student. The video, which lasts about one minute, is a continuous shot. It was discovered by Sharon Weidenfeld, a private investigator who worked on behalf of McKenna and Donat. The video does not show Donat, although Officer Sean McAleavey's charging documents say the two men acted together.
The video shows about two dozen students milling about on Knox Road near Route 1. About a half-dozen of them are pointing their cellphone cameras at riot police who are gathered between the students and Route 1.
The video shows McKenna on the sidewalk as he skips and throws his arms in the air. He stops about five feet from an officer on horseback, the video shows. In the video, McKenna's arms appear to be in front of him, but he does not appear to touch the officer or the horse. His hands are empty.
McKenna backs up, then two county police riot officers rush toward him from the street, the video shows. The officers slam McKenna against a wall and beat him with their batons. McKenna crumples to the ground.
As McKenna falls, a third county police riot officer strikes his legs and torso with his baton. The video shows the officers striking an unresisting McKenna about the head, torso and legs -- more than a dozen blows in all.
of course there's more - THIS is enough
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/12/AR2010041204377.html
Residents of NJ city say cops worse than criminals
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
Associated Press Writer
updated 4:36 p.m. ET, Sat., April 3, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36159866/ns/us_news/
CAMDEN, N.J. - Josephine Skinner's grandson Dequan was 11 or 12 years old a few summers ago when she says he had a run-in with a Camden police officer who neighbors claim terrorized them for years.
As the youth crossed the street to buy a soda at a store, she said Officer Jason Stetser — known on the streets as "Fat Face" — sprang from his cruiser.
"He grabbed my grandson and said he had $100 of stuff on him," Skinner said. "They tried to lock him up."
For years, residents say some police officers have bullied them in this impoverished city, making cases by planting drugs on suspects, falsifying police reports, and conducting searches without warrants. Now four officers, including Stetser, are being investigated by a federal grand jury.
And prosecutors say they've had to drop charges or vacate convictions in 185 criminal cases because of possibly corrupt police work — meaning scores of criminals could end up returning to drug-infested streets.
Another of Skinner's grandchildren, 15-year-old Artice Skinner, said he witnessed the episode between Stetser and Dequan and saw Stetser hold out his hand, overflowing with crack cocaine that the police officer said came from Dequan's pocket.
Skinner said Dequan was released after an aunt explained that he wasn't the neighborhood child police were looking for.
"The cops were more of a problem than the crime was," said Josephine Skinner.
Their Waterfront South neighborhood has breathed a little easier since November, when Stetser and at least three other officers were taken off the streets as authorities began their investigation.
Stetser's lawyer, Richard Madden, declined to comment.
Among those suspended was 29-year-old patrolman Kevin Parry. On March 19, he admitted in court that he stole drugs from some suspects, planted them on others, bribed prostitutes with drugs for information, conducted searches without warrants, lied on police reports and in testimony, and roughed up suspects. He acknowledged 50-70 acts of police misconduct from May 2007 to October 2009.
Residents say it was not uncommon for some officers to greet locals by punching them, using force to intimidate. The threat of criminal charges was the main police currency.
In Waterfront South, lovingly tended row homes sit uneasily alongside crumbling empty ones and monstrous warehouses loom beyond back yards. The stench from a nearby sewage plant hangs in the air. Daffodils have begun to bloom in a trash-strewn vacant lot.
A church group has painted poetry on sheets of plywood nailed over windows of vacant buildings — like Pablo Neruda's lines, "I want to do with you what the spring does with cherry trees."
The same day Parry pleaded guilty last month, authorities spoke publicly about the investigation for the first time. Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk said several officers were being investigated by the federal grand jury. Only Parry has been criminally charged.
Faulk also revealed that 185 cases had been compromised because of possibly corrupt police work. It's not that all the suspects weren't guilty, he said, but that without using the reports of the officers, there was no more credible evidence.
Lawyers have now begun filing claims notifying the city of their intention to sue based on the actions of Parry and the other officers.
The investigation has cast doubt — at least in Josephine Skinner's neighborhood — over even more drug cases.
Bodega owner Manuel Torres says that he thinks his sons, Jonathan and Sterling, were set up by police for their drug arrests a few years ago. Neither has had his conviction vacated.
The scandal is the latest blow to crimefighting in a city that can ill afford it.
In report after report, Camden ranks as one of the nation's most dangerous cities. Known as the drug marketplace for locals and suburbanites, the city has a constant presence of U.S. Marshals and state police, along with city police.
But, there have been some promising signs. The murder rate began falling in the summer of 2008 when police reworked their schedules and strategies. They started using more sophisticated data to figure out when and where crime was highest. They used that information to make sure they had more officers on the streets at those times.
Residents of Waterfront South said their problems with the police predated those changes.
Among those whose drug convictions were vacated in December was Josephine Skinner's 46-year-old son, Mark. He said he had been arrested in November 2005, just weeks after he was released from jail on a previous drug-dealing conviction.
Mark Skinner said that 2005 arrest came as he sat on the stoop in front of his mother's home, and that police — including Stetser — slammed him against the wall. Police failed to find drugs on him or in the house, then showed up with a trash bag full of small orange bags of crack worth about $4,000.
He said he pleaded guilty to get a three-year sentence, rather than risk up to 20 years with no chance of parole for a decade if he'd been found guilty at trial.
"I did three years for nothing," he said as he stood on the corner of Broadway and Viola Streets, near a new maritime museum — and a well-known drug spot.
The neighborhood has plenty of stories about problems caused by the police in recent years.
Jamar Dorsey, then a 20-year-old student at Camden County College, said Stetser planted marijuana on him in 2007 and threatened him with drug charges if he didn't lead Stetser to more drugs or weapons.
When Dorsey said he didn't know where drugs could be found, he was charged.
He pleaded guilty to drug possession, taking three years of probation instead of risking a stiffer penalty at trial — even though it meant losing his college financial aid and dropping out of college.
"Who were they going to believe?" Dorsey said. "Me or him?"
Another neighbor, Michelle Kellum, said her disabled son, Gregory, was 15 when he went to a corner store with money from his disability check. Stetser threw him in the back of a police car and took the money, she said, a little more than $100.
Kellum said the officer let her son go after she showed a receipt to prove where the money came from.
"Fat Face had everybody terrified," she said. "You wouldn't see anybody walking out here" when he was around.
And in the end, she said, the questionable police work failed its main objective — taking drugs off the streets.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36159866/ns/us_news/
Law Enforcement: Drug Cops Kill Two in Two Days in Drug Raids in Florida and Tennessee
Phillip Smith on Mon, 03/15/2010 - 8:10pm
At least two US citizens were killed in their own homes by American police enforcing the war on drugs in a 48-hour period late last week. One was a 52-year-old white grandmother; the other was a 43-year-old black man. Both allegedly confronted home-invading officers with weapons; both were shot to death. No police officers were injured.
Brenda Van Zwieten
The combination of widespread gun ownership in the US with aggressive drug war policing is a recipe for tragedy, one that is repeated on a regular basis. Gun owners commonly cite protecting themselves from home-invading robbers as a reason for arming themselves, while police cite widespread gun ownership as a reason they need to use SWAT-style tactics, breaking down doors and using overwhelming force against potential shooters. That homeowners would pick up a weapon upon hearing their doors broken down is not surprising, nor is it surprising that police are quick to shoot to kill "suspects" who may pose a threat to them.
The first killing came Thursday morning in North Memphis, when a Bartlett, Tennessee, police narcotics squad serving a search warrant for drug possession -- not sales, manufacture, or possession with intent to sell -- shot and killed Malcolm Shaw, 43, after breaking into his home. Police said they knocked on Shaw's door several times and identified themselves as police before entering the home.
Police said Shaw emerged from a room and pointed a gun at plainclothes officer Patrick Cicci. Cicci fired once, killing Shaw. Cicci is on administrative leave pending an internal investigation.
While the Bartlett Police investigation is ongoing, that didn't stop the Shelby County District Attorney's Office from announcing Monday that Cicci will not be prosecuted. Cicci's killing of the homeowner was "apparent justifiable use of deadly force in self defense," a spokesman said.
Bartlett police said that while the Bartlett narcs conducting the raid were not in uniform, their gear clearly identified them as law enforcement. They wore "high-visibility vests" marked "POLICE" in several spots, police said.
The killing of the well-known neighborhood handyman led to the formation of a crowd hostile to police outside his home. Bartlett police on the scene had to call Memphis police to do crowd control.
Memphis police complained that the Bartlett narcs had not followed law enforcement protocols requiring them to notify the local agency when they were operating in its jurisdiction. They said they were notified only as the raid commenced, and that moments later, they got a request for an ambulance at the address, and moments after that, they got a request that they send a couple of police cruisers for crowd control.
Timothy Miers, who said he was Shaw's brother accused police of being trigger-happy. "How you gonna go in serving a warrant and shoot somebody?" Miers asked. "They already had their finger on the trigger."
The sense of disbelief over the killing was shared by members of the crowd gathered outside Shaw's home. Many complained about the officers' actions.
"My heart fell to the ground," one neighbor said.
"We can't believe it," said another. "Malcolm out of all people."
Family members expressed confusion about the shooting, saying Shaw was not a person they would have expected to threaten officers. "They say he had a gun," said Miers. "My brother doesn't have no gun."
Friends of Shaw said the same thing. "I ain't never seen him with no gun," said Arvette Thomas, a friend of Shaw.
Shaw never bothered anyone, neighbors said. "I think it's wrong to just kill him like they did," said a neighbor, "because he wouldn't hurt a fly."
Less than 48 hours later, members of a Broward County Sheriff's Office SWAT team and its Selective Enforcement Team in Pompano Beach, Florida, shot and killed Brenda Van Zweiten, 52, during a drug raid on her home. Police had developed evidence that drugs were being sold from the residence, and obtained a search warrant. After allegedly identifying themselves as police, they broke through a sliding glass door to a bedroom and arrested Van Zweiten's boyfriend, Gary Nunnemacher, 47, on charges of possessing less than 20 grams of marijuana. Van Zweiten was in a different bedroom, and was shot and killed by deputies when she emerged holding a handgun. According to police, she refused to put down her weapon, so they shot her.
Police reported finding one gram of heroin, four grams of crack cocaine, marijuana, marijuana plants, 40 generic Xanax tablets, $550 cash, two shotguns, and a rifle. Family members said Van Zweiten had a prescription for Xanax, but was not a drug dealer. But police had earlier in the day arrested three people leaving the home who they say had bought drugs there -- although police did not say from whom.
After Van Zweiten's killing, police were unrepentant. "When you approach a police officer with a loaded weapon and don't put the weapon down, there's going to be consequences," sheriff's spokesman Mike Jachles said. "It's unfortunate, but I'd rather be talking about a dead suspect than a dead cop."
Van Zweiten's brother, Bill George, said his sister had recently received threats and was afraid of break-ins. "It was an unlawful shooting," he said. "She's 98 pounds. She was just trying to protect herself. I would come out of my room with a gun too."
As news of Van Zweiten's death spread, friends, neighbors, and family members expressed dismay and disbelief. They called the incident a "set up" and said the blonde grandmother was affectionately called "Mom" by many who knew her for using her home as a neighborhood hangout to keep kids off the streets. Dozens of people gathered in her yard near a flower-bedecked cross put up as a memorial.
"Look at these people," said George. "She helped so many of these young people."
"She was like a second mom to me," said Michael Miller, 18. "She would take in anybody."
"There was no reason for this," said son Rob Singleton, 32.
Van Zwieten had no criminal history involving drugs or violence, state records show.
George said that Van Zweiten had reason to fear intruders because she had been threatened recently by a man accused of stealing watches and rings that were part of a shrine to two of her four sons, who had died within the past three years, one in a traffic accident, one of a drug overdose. She had just installed an alarm system last week, George said. "She was scared."
Singleton showed reporters inside the house, including the small bedroom where she was shot. A large puddle of blood remained on the floor, and the walls and ceiling were splattered with blood -- from his mother's head, he said. "She was probably running into the closet and trying to hide," he said.
As is all too typical in such raid, police also totally trashed the house. As the Sun-Sentinel reported: "Much of the interior of the three-bedroom house looked as if it had been hit by a tornado... Drawers were pulled from dressers, clothes were scattered, a bed was overturned, food and crockery had been knocked from kitchen cabinets." The shrine to her dead sons was also destroyed, Singleton said.
Two Broward County Sheriff's Office detectives are on administrative leave pending an internal investigation. They have not been named.
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/special/drug_cops_kill_two_drug_raids
Don’t Forget That the Cops Are Your Friends
Jul 3, 2008 By Ken. Politics & Current Events Martha Puebla is dead.
She was murdered as she sat on her front porch in Sun Valley, California.
Why was she murdered?
Because the Los Angeles Police Department, in an effort to trick a confession out of a suspected murderer, falsely told the suspect that Martha Puebla had identified him.
“You got the wrong person, buddy,” Ledesma said.
“OK. I don’t agree with you, and I have the evidence to prove it,” Pinner said. “I have multiple witnesses who are going to testify that you were the shooter.”
Pinner told Ledesma he knew the gang member had been on his way to Martha Puebla’s house to visit her the night Vargas was killed outside her house.
To drive home his point, Pinner laid down a “six-pack” — an array of mug shots that detectives often show to witnesses or victims of crimes. On it, Ledesma’s photo was circled, and the initials “M.P.” were written below it. “Those is the guy that shot my friends boyfriend” was scrawled along the margin, followed by Puebla’s signature.
“I don’t even know a Martha,” Ledesma lied.
Pinner kept trying, pressing Ledesma about Puebla and the information he said she had given up. At one point he asked Rodriguez for a photo of the girl to show Ledesma. Nothing worked. Ledesma insisted he did not know her.
“Well, she knows you,” the detective said.
This was legal, at least as to the suspect. Cops can lie to people when they interrogate them. But it wasn’t true. Puebla hadn’t helped them. The six-pack was forged, faked to create an impression on the suspect Ledesma.
Ledesma called his fellow gang members from jail and asked them to kill Puebla.
The next night, Ledesma reached for a pay phone outside his cell. “Cokester,” he said into the receiver, calling his friend Javier Covarrubias by one of his gang monikers, “do you know the slut that lives there by . . . my house? Her name starts with an M . . . I need her to disappear. She is dropping dimes.”
To the gang, Puebla was a snitch and needed to be dealt with.
“Uh huh, like that,” Ledesma told Covarrubias, using a mix of Spanish and English. “But [keep a] low-pro[file]. . . . Stay on your toes, homie. And don’t get caught.”
This call, like all calls out of the jail, was recorded. The detectives could have listened to it at any time.
Not that this mattered.
The jail-cell recording, Pinner said in sworn testimony, was badly transcribed twice by an outside company used by the LAPD. Its contents remained unknown until January 2005, when during preparation for Ledesma’s trial for Vargas’ slaying — more than two years after the recording was made — Spanish-speaking LAPD officers listened to it and learned of the order to kill the girl, Pinner testified.
So Detectives Martin Pinner and Juan Rodriguez told a suspected killer and known gang member that Martha Puebla was a witness against him in a murder case. They didn’t listen to the tapes of his subsequent phone calls. And it appears that they didn’t tell Martha:
But Puebla’s parents, who have recently filed a civil lawsuit against the detectives and the LAPD, said in an interview that no one from the LAPD ever warned their daughter that she might be in danger. And a detailed log the detectives kept of their investigation shows no indication that they had contact with Puebla or her parents after they used the girl to bait Ledesma during the interrogation.
Later Pinner and Rodriguez — the same detectives who set in motion the chain of events that led to Martha Puebla’s death — arrested someone for her killing. Once again, they lied to him about the evidence against him. Once again, it didn’t turn out right.
Before federal prosecutors and the LAPD sorted out Puebla’s murder, however, Pinner and Rodriguez had arrested an innocent man in connection with Puebla’s slaying. Based on bad information from sources, the detectives pinned the slaying on Juan Catalan — Mario Catalan’s brother. Juan Catalan sat in jail for five months awaiting trial until his lawyer turned up video footage showing Catalan was at a Dodgers game at the time of the shooting. A judge threw out the case, and Catalan was awarded $320,000 in a wrongful-arrest suit.
The day the detectives arrested Juan Catalan, they thought they had the right man. They brought him into an interview room in the same North Hollywood station where they had grilled Ledesma nine months before. Once again they switched on a recorder. Catalan begged the detectives to believe him, that he had nothing to do with Puebla’s death. He asked to take a lie-detector test.
But Pinner and Rodriguez weren’t having any of it. Pinner told Catalan that people had seen him shoot the girl. He pushed three six-packs in front of him. His picture was circled. Witnesses had signed their names.
They were all fake. But Catalan, of course, didn’t know that.
“You see,” Rodriguez told Catalan, “the pictures don’t lie.”
Pinner, Rodriguez, and the LAPD may not be legally responsible for Martha Puebla’s death.
But they are morally responsible.
I wonder if they care?
Their story illustrates an unfashionable and unpopular point in post-9/11, cop-worshiping America: the fact that someone wears a badge does not mean that he’s responsible, reasonable, or decent. It doesn’t mean that he’s your friend.
http://www.popehat.com/2008/07/03/dont-forget-that-the-cops-are-your-friends/
N.Y.P.D. Confidential
By AL BAKER and JO CRAVEN McGINTY
Published: March 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/nyregion/28iab.html?hp
CASE file: His night began in the bars of Staten Island, and by 2 a.m., he was buying crack cocaine. Inside his car, he flicked a lighter and inhaled. He picked up a woman; they got high together. She left after he spotted the authorities.
Case file: A Brooklyn man had a hook with organized crime. He and his wife set up gambling operations at six spots in Manhattan and Nassau County. When they were arrested, along with her parents and 11 others, investigators seized cash, slot machines and cars.
Case file: He would lock his mountain bike in a garage in Jamaica, Queens, then enter a nearby bordello. Once, he even arranged a rendezvous in a pizzeria. Tipped off by a prostitute — probably angered that he did not pay — detectives caught it all on audio and video.
These are all relatively minor crimes, the stuff of daily precinct logs rather than ripped-from-the-headlines television drama, but for one thing: In each case, the central character was a cop.
That, by at least one way of reckoning, makes them routine: From 1992 to 2008, nearly 2,000 New York Police Department officers were arrested, according to the department’s own annual reports of the Internal Affairs Bureau, an average of 119 a year.
The rarely seen internal reports were obtained last month by the New York Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Law. They show that the number of tips logged each year by Internal Affairs has tripled since 1992, a trend that top police officials attribute to an opening up of the process and more diligent cataloging of public response to police interactions — including compliments as well as complaints. The number of investigations pursued over the same period has dropped by more than half, which Chief Charles V. Campisi, who runs the unit, called “the truest reflection of the corruption the department faces.”
Most of those investigations involved drugs, theft or crimes like fraud, bribery or sex offenses, on and off the job. Inquiries in these categories have largely decreased in recent years, but cases involving abuse of suspects have risen significantly. The 2006 report noted the “unprecedented” rise and gave an example: several officers followed a woman wanted for petty larceny into a store and one “struck her in the head with his firearm for no reason.”
“History tells us there always will be bad cops, and the department will never be able to completely control that,” said Christopher T. Dunn, associate legal director of the civil liberties union, who has spent weeks studying the documents. “But what it can control, and what it should be held accountable for, is how it responds to corruption.”
For better or worse, the police are left to police themselves, and the reports, which together total more than 600 pages, provide the most comprehensive record available chronicling that imperfect science. They tell a colorful story not only of officers who betray the badge but also of the little-known agency charged with rooting them out.
The bureau has long been a Hollywood fascination, and derided among the rank and file as the “rat squad” since so many cases depend on one cop snitching on another. Officers who work there are, therefore, called “cheese eaters,” while rogue officers have been known as “grass eaters” (those who peddle in low-level but pervasive wrongdoing) and “meat eaters” (who are more aggressive or violent).
It took its current form in 1993, after Officer Michael Dowd and several colleagues were arrested on Long Island on charges of selling cocaine, prompting a disgusted Raymond W. Kelly, in his first stint as police commissioner, to overhaul the internal affairs process.
“I am always concerned about corruption,” Mr. Kelly, who returned as commissioner in 2002, said in an interview. “For me, myself, personally, it is absolutely critical to the good order, to the function of this department, that we have a well-staffed, a well-trained, a proactive Internal Affairs Bureau, and that’s what we have.”
The reports themselves have changed much over the years: from 81 typewritten pages packed with statistics in 1993, to 99 pages of glossy photographs but scant specifics in 2006, to a pair of skimpy 15-page summaries in 2007 and 2008. Year in, year out, they contain head-scratching examples of people sworn to uphold the law breaking it instead
continued....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/nyregion/28iab.html?hp
A POLICE officer who was sacked after begging colleagues for sex has lost her unfair dismissal claim.
Within days of being posted Jessica Parfrey propositioned her supervisor to have an affair because “everyone knows you’re supposed to fall in love with your buddy”.
A month later, after he turned her down, she told him: “Can’t we just f***? I am a 19-year-old girl, what is wrong with you?”
The Industrial Relations Commission in Sydney heard that Ms Parfrey also offered an officer oral sex in a pub toilet and carpark and later propositioned another, saying: “I know you want me.”
She tried to call another colleague 12 times, left six text messages and then offered to help him study for his police exams by stripping off an item of clothing for every question he got correct. He refused.
Unfortunately it wasn’t all barroom BJs and Alicia-Silverstone-in-”The-Crush” propositions of the boss. Parfrey was also accused of being willing to fake evidence (allegedly saying to a partner that she’d claim she saw a suspected drunk driver behind the wheel when she only saw him 100 meters away from the car) and wanting to game the system (she wanted to attend scenes of fatal traffic accidents so that she could claim she was “f**ked up in the head” and file a hurt-on-duty claim).
So we all learned something today. It’s probably not a great idea to get involved with a crazy sex addict who’ll go down on you in a bathroom because she might have deeper issues. And it’s an even worse idea to have a person like that as an officer of the law. Unless you’re a criminal who’s watched enough porn to be prepared for a situation like this. In which case, jackpot.
http://guyism.com/2010/03/19-year-old-female-cop-fired-for-wanting-to-bone-everyone.html
Detective gets 130 lap dances, makes no arrests
March 4, 2010 9:03 p.m. PT
Prosecutors claim prostitution is back at the Colacurcio-owned clubs in a big way
By LEVI PULKKINEN
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
As the march toward trial continues, several of the men indicted following a sting targeting Seattle strip club mogul Frank Colacurcio Sr. now say federal authorities have no business policing vice in the city.
The prostitution and racketeering investigation, now in its fourth year, saw indictments filed against Colacurcio -- operator of Rick's strip club in Seattle and three similar establishments around the region -- and five other men associated with his company, Talents West. In indicting the elderly Colacurcio, his son, Frank Colacurcio Jr., and the others, federal prosecutors alleged all conspired to profit from prostitution at the clubs.
Objecting to a new claim by prosecutors that prostitution is back at the clubs, attorneys for one of the accused now says the government's effort has turned the FBI into "a vice squad." An attorney representing another defendant has claimed that investigatory reports show one undercover officer spent at least $16,835 buying more than 130 lap dances without making a single arrest.
Legal battles continue
The new allegations set the stage for another round of legal wrangling in the case, currently before U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones. Prosecutors have asked Jones to restrict the two defendants still involved in day-to-day club operations -- Steven Michael Fueston and David Carl Ebert -- from doing so.
Restrictions similar to those requested are now imposed on the Colacurcios and others under indictment. Jones previously ruled Fueston and Ebert could continue working in the clubs so long as they did not speak with employees about the criminal case or allow prostitution in the clubs.
Arguing that Fueston and Ebert are in "blatant violation" of the court's order, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Tessa Gorman and Todd Greenberg requested that the men be barred from the clubs in part because of the results of a recent undercover operation at Rick's and Honey's strip club in Everett.
"Several witnesses have provided a relatively consistent account of how, during the few months immediately after the execution of the federal search warrants, the level of prostitution activity at the clubs significantly decreased," the FBI special agent leading the investigation alleged in a Feb. 17 report.
"Over time," the agent added, "these and other witnesses began to consistently report that … prostitution activities had returned to Rick's and Honey's at levels similar to what they were prior to the execution of the federal search warrants."
During eight undercover visits to the clubs in December and January, the agent told the court Seattle police and an FBI agent were propositioned by 10 dancers. Investigators also found that club management was ignoring sex acts clearly visible to the undercover officers.
Similar allegations were made public in June, when federal authorities in Seattle unsealed a grand jury indictment against Colacurcio and his business partners following a massive investigation into the clubs.
In the indictment, federal authorities accused the Colacurcios and their associates of racketeering, using interstate commerce to facilitate prostitution, money laundering and mail fraud. At issue are allegations that the strip clubs -- Rick's in Lake City, Sugar's in Shoreline, Honey's in Everett and Fox's in Parkland -- were used as fronts for prostitution that allegedly garnered the men $25 million in the preceding four years.
The indictment followed a years-long investigation that culminated in June 2008 with raids by Seattle police and federal agents on the clubs and Talents West, a Colacurcio-owned agency that hires dancers for the clubs. Federal prosecutors interviewed more than 200 witnesses, reviewed hours of recorded phone calls, surveillance video and intercepts from listening devices, and went so far as to place an undercover police officer in the club as a waitress.
Key to the prosecutors' case, according to court documents, is the payment scheme in which strippers paid $75 to $130 in daily "rent" to the Colacurcio businesses. Such an arrangement is common in Washington strip clubs, which are not allowed to sell liquor to generate profit.
"The investigation established that prostitution was rampant at each of the four strip clubs," the FBI agent leading the investigation alleged in the Feb. 17 report. "Dancers at the clubs regularly performed sex acts for customers in exchange for payment. Undercover officers posing as customers at the clubs documented scores of prostitution violations."
Defendants deny claims
As they have since pleading not guilty to the charges, the defendants contend they took appropriate steps to prevent prostitution at the clubs and deny facilitating sex there.
Since Ebert took management control of the clubs following raids there in June 2008, there has not one dancer arrested for prostitution, defense attorney Colette Tvedt told the court. Ebert, she claimed, has fired 10 employees for violations of club policies and made changes to discourage prostitution at the clubs.
Writing the court in objection to any new restrictions of her client's activities, Tvedt noted that the recent undercover actions -- like, she asserted, the larger government action -- did not end in any arrests. Had they resulted in some obvious action, she said, her client would have fired the dancers involved.
Tvedt also alleged that one undercover detective visited Talents West clubs more than 160 times during the investigation, paying somewhere between $16,835 and $18,170 to the clubs. The officer, Tvedt claimed, received "over 130 documented VIP dances and an undetermined additional number of undocumented dances."
Those dances, she claimed, did not prompt a single arrest.
"The nature of a strip club is such that offers for sex made by a dancer to a customer -- offers made in private conversation in a noisy, sexually charged environment -- are extremely difficult for event the most alert manager or owner to detect," Tvedt said. "As a result, arrests made by undercover detectives posing as customers serve an important function in notifying club owners about these types of activities."
Attorney Robert G. Chadwell went further, asserting the government has ignored a 47-year-old Court of Appeals ruling cautioning federal authorities to "guard against attempt to convert what are essentially offenses against state law into federal crimes."
"In vigorously expending its tremendous resources on investigating what -- at most -- would amount to misdemeanor acts of vice, the government in this case has blithely ignored the 9th Circuit's longstanding and unequivocal admonishment against the misuse of federal resources for prosecution of a matter of inherently local interest to law enforcement," wrote Chadwell, who represents Fueston in the criminal case.
"The government in this case has transformed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an agency capable of investigating matters of national significance such as capital federal offenses, espionage, and international terrorism, into a vice squad," the attorney continued in court documents.
"But even the simple goals of a vice squad have not been met here. No arrests were made, no summonses were issued, and no misdemeanor charges were filed arising from the undercover investigation in December and January."
Fox's, the club which Fueston manages, was not targeted in the recent undercover operation, Chadwell added.
Tvedt and Chadwell both argued that their clients had taken all reasonable steps to prevent prostitution at the clubs, including taking steps mandated by the court.
Writing the court, Chadwell noted that municipal law has long recognized that prostitution often follows erotic entertainment.
"Historically, prostitution has occurred in and around adult entertainment establishments, regardless of location or ownership," Chadwell said. "Mr. Fueston and the co-defendants are no more responsible for this fact of life than they are for inventing the world's 'oldest profession.'"
Jones is expected to take up the case Thursday in U.S. District Court. None of the accused is currently in custody.
Of the six men initially charged, Colacurcio driver and confidant John Gilbert Conte alone has pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to probation last month.
Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/416240_RICKS04.html
New Mexico State Police Ordered to Write Tickets or Face Punishment
Jeremy Jojola and Taryn Bianchin
KOB.com
March 4, 2010
Eyewitness News 4 has uncovered documentation that indicates some police officers have been mandated to write a certain number tickets per month or face possible punishment.
http://www.infowars.com/new-mexico-state-police-ordered-to-write-tickets-or-face-punishment/
NYPD Officer claims pressure to make arrestsWednesday, March 03, 2010
Jim Hoffer
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=7305356
NEW YORK (WABC) -- An Eyewitness News investigation talks to a police officer who reveals the pressure they are under to make quotas.
When Officer Adil Polanco dreamed of becoming a cop, it was out of a desire to help people not, he says, to harass them.
"I'm not going to keep arresting innocent people, I'm not going to keep searching people for no reason, I'm not going to keep writing people for no reason, I'm tired of this," said Adil Polanco, an NYPD Officer.
Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza's obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their neighborhoods.
"Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them?" said Officer Polanco.
Eyewitness News asked, "Why do it?"
"They have to meet a quota. One arrest and twenty summonses," said Officer Polanco.
This audio recording exclusively obtained by Eyewitness News seems to back up Officer Polanco's assertion of a quota. You can listen to one officer as he lectures his rank and file officers during roll call at the 41st precinct.
"Things are not going to get any better. It's going to get a lot worse," said a police officer.
He lays out clearly that they need to bring in the numbers.
"If you think 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you're going to be doing. You're gong to be doing a lot more, a lot more than what they're saying," said the officer.
In another recording, the 41st Precinct Patrol Supervisor appears to step up the pressure to write more and more summonses:
"Next week, 25 &1, 35 & 1, and until you decide to quit this job to go to work at a Pizza Hut , this is what you're going to be doing till then. Do you understand?" asked the patrol officer.
"He's being clear, the only choice that we have is to do it," said Officer Polanco.
Eyewitness News asked, "Are you telling me they're stopping people for no reason, is that what you're saying?"
"We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota," answered Officer Polanco.
"Yeah, they locked us up for nothing," said Zebulun Colbourne.
The Colbourne brothers say they and three other friends were the victims of quotas. All were arrested a few months ago after one of them had fallen while racing each other.
Eyewitness News asked, "You fell and that's how you hurt your eye?"
"Yeah, and they just wanted to arrest us. I told them I fell but that didn't matter to them," said Elijah Colbourne.
All five were accused of engaging in tumultuous and violent conduct that caused public alarm, given a summons for unlawful assembly and locked up overnight.
Eyewitness News asked, "So you're locked up waiting to see the judge, right?"
"Yeah," answered the Colbourne brothers.
Eyewitness News asked, "Then what do they do?"
"We don't see the judge, they let us out the back door after they kept us for a day and some change," said Elijah Colbourne.
The charges were dropped, but Officer Polanco says the patrolman still got 5 summonses toward their monthly quota.
"At the end of the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number's there. So our choice is to come up with the number," said Officer Polanco.
One Police Plaza declined our requests to interview the 41st precinct commander. But, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said, "Police Officers like others who receive compensation are provided productivity goals and they are expected to work."
Officer Polanco says if they are just goals, why are officers who fail to make them, re-assigned to different shifts or relocated far from home.
It's the consequences of not making the numbers or quotas, he says, that forces officers to give out bogus summonses.
"I cannot be more honest than I've been. There's no reason for me to lie, there's no reason for me to get into the trouble I am, cause I just could've kept quiet and made the money," said Officer Polanco.
If you have a tip about this or any other issue you'd like investigated, please give our tipline a call at 877-TIP-NEWS. You may also e-mail us at the.investigators@abc.com and follow Jim Hoffer on Twitter at twitter.com/nycinvestigates
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=7305356
Clackamas man exercises free speech rights by giving cops the finger
By Steven Mayes, The Oregonian
February 28, 2010, 6:29PM
ekas.JPGThomas Boyd/The OregonianRobert Ekas filed a federal lawsuit to defend what he says is his First Amendment right to express himself by flipping off police officers. “I did it because I have the right to do it,” Ekas said. “We all have that right, and we all need to test it. Otherwise we’ll lose it."
When Robert J. Ekas decided to exercise his right to free speech, he didn't open his mouth.
He hoisted his middle finger.
His single-digit protests, aimed at Clackamas County sheriff's deputies last year, resulted in verbal showdowns, traffic tickets and, ultimately, a federal lawsuit.
Giving a police officer the finger may be a rude and ill-advised gesture, but it is not against the law, legal experts say.
"The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that speech may not be prohibited simply because some may find it offensive," said Ira P. Robbins, a law professor from American University in Washington, D.C. "Virtually every time someone is arrested for this, assuming there's no other criminal behavior ... the case is either dismissed before trial or the person is convicted at trial and wins on appeal."
Ekas, who represents himself, sued the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office and three of its employees, seeking corrective action and unspecified damages. Assistant County Counsel Edward S. McGlone III declined comment on the lawsuit.
Ekas, 46, a retired Silicon Valley systems analyst turned mathematician who lives in the Clackamas area, claims the traffic stops were acts of retaliation that violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights. He also wants the court to rule that the Sheriff's Office fails to discipline employees who "chill citizens' ... free speech rights."
Ekas gave the finger to a deputy in July 2007 while driving near Clackamas Town Center, according to the lawsuit. With the deputy in pursuit, Ekas said he opened his sunroof and again extended a middle finger. The deputy turned on his flashing lights. Ekas stopped and was cited for an illegal lane change and improper display of license plates. He was acquitted of the charges.
In August 2007, Ekas flipped off another deputy. Ekas again was detained but not issued a citation. He claims he was harassed and intimidated by the deputy and a sergeant who was dispatched after Ekas requested a supervisor be sent to the scene.
Ekas said his actions are a political statement and a protest of police violence.
"They kill unarmed people. That bothers me," Ekas said of police officers. He cited the deaths of James P. Chasse Jr. and Aaron Campbell at the hands of Portland police and the fatal shooting of Fouad Kaady by Clackamas County officers.
"What I am expressing is the right to dissent. That is to say, 'Look, the policies that you've implemented ... the things you've done in our community are offensive to me. Here's my response to that offense,'" Ekas said.
"I did it because I have the right to do it," Ekas said. "We all have that right, and we all need to test it. Otherwise we'll lose it."
Ekas's method of expressing himself has a long history.
The ancient Romans called it "digitus impudicus" -- the impudent finger.
Police have been known to retaliate with traffic tickets or making arrests for disorderly conduct, but criminal charges are routinely dismissed. Criminal law "generally aims to protect persons, property, or the state from serious harm. But use of the middle finger simply does not raise these concerns in most situations," Robbins wrote in a law review article, "Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger and the Law."
A Pittsburgh man, David Hackbart, won a $50,000 settlement last year after being cited for disorderly conduct for flipping off an officer. The charge was "retaliatory" and violated his constitutional rights, a federal judge ruled.
The officer's "response to Hackbart's exercise of his First Amendment right" was to charge him with a crime, said U.S. District Judge David Cercone.
In West Linn, Police Chief Terry Timeus took a more diplomatic approach.
After a man's run-ins with police escalated from giving officers the finger to following them on patrol, accusing them of retaliation and shining his headlights on them during traffic stops, Timeus stepped in to try to defuse the situation.
The police chief met with the man and told him the pattern of confrontation and harassment "isn't going to accomplish anything."
Reached at his home, the man said he suffers from anxiety and depression and asked not to be identified. He acknowledged his history of confrontation and grievances with police but said he wanted to move on.
"Chief Timeus has made a difference," the man said, "and I don't want to jeopardize that."
-- Steve Mayes
http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2010/02/clackamas_man_exercises_free_s.html
Woman, 61, arrested for asking 'Why‘
By Rhonda Cook
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Four women, two of them well into middle age, were discussing funeral plans for a friend when an Atlanta police officer told them to move.
Three did but one asked “why.” In answer to her question, Minnie Carey, then 61, was handcuffed, put into a police wagon and taken to jail, where she was held for nine hours.
The Citizen Review Board found that Atlanta Police officer Brandy Dolson had violated APD policies and had falsely arrested Carey.
“I was blown away,” Carey told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I had heard about people in the community being harassed by the police … It really didn’t shock me as much as it probably would have if I had not heard of people going to jail for no reason. I figured I was just another one.
“But I had the right to ask ‘why' I had to move,” she said.
The Citizen Review Board – resurrected after the 2006 fatal police shooting of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her home – voted in a recent meeting to sustain Carey’s false arrest claim and the allegation that the officer had violated the department’s arrest policies.
“This case will illustrate to the public how OPS [Office of Professional Standards] responds [to allegations of police misconduct] … There have been some concerns that OPS has not sustained complaints,” said Seth Kirschenbaum, an attorney who is vice-chairman of the board.
“We know, historically, OPS investigations drag on,” said another board member, Sharese Shields.
Still, the board held back on its punishment recommendation to APD until the board’s investigator could gather more information about Dolson’s history with the department, how many public complaints had been filed against him, what kind of complaints have been brought and the outcome of those cases.
Kirschenbaum said in a hearing last week at least 18 complaints had been filed against Dolson since 2001, but only three – all those traffic issues – had been sustained while three other complaints are pending.
Dolson appeared when the Citizen Review Board called him for an interview last year, but he refused to answer questions. The police union has told all APD officers that the department’s policy only requires that they show up when the Citizen Review Board calls, but they don’t have to answer questions because they may not be protected from criminal charges.
Dolson, reached at his home Wednesday, declined to comment. APD spokesman Lt. Curtis Davenport said Dolson is "suspended without pay for an unrelated incident."
Davenport also said the OPS case had been returned to Zone 5 with questions so the internal affairs case remains pending. APD’s Office of Professional Standards has not contacted Carey since her initial interview last summer, five months after the incident, she said.
“What we have here is an abuse of power. He abused his power of having a badge and a gun,” said Kirschenbaum. “That [now] 62-year-old woman got handcuffed, put in a paddy wagon and held in jail for nine hours."
Carey’s only offense, Kirschenbaum said, was that she “was more boisterous than they would have liked when she asked ‘why’… It was just the police wanted these people to move. That [talking on the sidewalk] appears to be the only thing these ladies were doing. There’s no basis to arrest someone for talking loudly.”
Carey and one of the women who was with her that afternoon said Carey was not loud.
The accounts provided by Carey, Dolson, Dolson’s partner and witnesses are essentially the same, according to records.
Carey met three friends on the sidewalk outside the Boulevard Lotto convenience store mid-afternoon last March 26, and for a few moments they talked about upcoming services for a friend who had died after she was hit by a car in front of the store where they were standing.
Dolson and his partner pulled up and told the four women to “move it.”
All agreed that the women were not blocking the sidewalk and that the women were the only people on the sidewalk.
Three women started walking away but Carey didn’t, asking “why” instead.
An account given by Dolson's partner, Jamie Nelson, was that Carey “yelled ‘why’ with a loud manner and refused to leave after we instructed her several times to do so.”
Carey and one of the women with her, 56-year-old Diane Ward, told the AJC there was no shouting.
All the same, Dolson’s answer to Carey’s question was “because I said so,” according to the file.
“I’m a citizen and I’m a taxpayer and I have a right to be here. I’m merely trying to find out about a sister’s funeral,” Carey responded, according to records.
That's when Carey was handcuffed, her hands behind her back, and put into the back of the patrol car – the only time she has been arrested in the 15 years she has lived in Atlanta.
Forty-five minutes later she was moved to a police wagon with the doors closed despite the heat, where she waited another 45 minutes with others accused of violating city ordinances.
“I was very upset and very angry. Here I am being treated as if I’m not a human, not a citizen of this country,” Carey said in an interview. “I was in this little hot box. There was no air. I was perspiring so much my glasses were sliding off my face.”
On her signature, Carey was released from the city jail around 12:30 a.m. the next day. She took a taxi home to her apartment on Boulevard.
Carey, a diabetic, had gone without food until she got home hours later. She said the handcuffs caused her hands to swell.
Carey had three court dates – the first time her case was not heard because there was no prosecutor and the second and third times it was not heard because Dolson was not in court.
The disorderly conduct charge was dismissed at the third court hearing, she said.
"I had heard about people in the community being harassed by the police,” Carey said. “A neighbor of mine went to jail for sitting on her sister’s car. It was racial profiling because of the community.”
Davenport, the APD spokesman, said it is against departmental policy “to do any sort of racial profiling and any employee doing so will be disciplined to the fullest.” Dolson, the officer who arrested Carey, is black.
Carey said, however, that patrol officers -- regardless of their race -- seem to focus on her neighborhood, and others have had experiences similar to hers.
“It was horrible. It was absolutely horrible,” Carey said. “I couldn’t believe you could just pick people up off the street. It’s a constant problem with the police over here.”
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/woman-61-arrested-for-309285.html?cxtype=rss_news_128746
Victim of police brutality (sodomized with a taser) is awarded six-figure settlement to avoid taking case to court
Police do not admit wrong-doing
Taxpayers pay the fine, while perpetrators escape punishment..
http://carlosmiller.com/2010/02/10/man-sodomized-with-taser-by-boise-cops-will-receive-six-figure-settlement/
Man sodomized with Taser will receive six-figure settlement
February 10th, 2010
By Carlos Miller
The City of Boise wants to make it clear that they are not admitting guilt in the case of a man sodomized by Boise police with a Taser gun.
But they are also dishing out an estimated $150,000 to Gerald Amidon to prevent this matter from going to court.
In some circles, this is called “hush money.”
Details of the settlement were not made public, but the following memo was sent out to officers last week, according to the Boise Guardian:
“On Monday, February 1, 2010 the City reached a settlement agreement in Federal Court in a civil case filed against four Boise Police officers. In his complaint, the plaintiff alleged the four Officers violated his civil rights by using excessive force during his 2009 arrest.
The settlement was reached during a mediation session with a Federal Judge. Present were the Judge, representatives of Boise City, as well as the four Officers.
The settlement agreement contained a confidentiality agreement so all the details were not released. It was agreed that reaching a settlement now would be in the best interest of all parties. The settlement contained a provision that officers were making no admission to violating the plaintiff’s civil rights.”
Although the officers did not admit guilt, a transcript of the tape recording of the incident pretty much confirms the allegations. Amidon also suffered burn marks to his rectum.
Cop: Do you feel this?
Suspect: Yes, sir.
Cop: Do you feel that? That’s my …
Suspect: Okay
Cop: … Taser up your ass.
Suspect: Okay
Cop: So don’t move.
Suspect: I’m trying not to. I can’t breathe.
Cop: Now do you feel this in your balls?
Suspect: I do, sir. I’m not going to move. I’m not gonna move.
Cop: Now I’m gonna tase your balls if you move again.
(A full minute goes by)
Cop: Okay, I’m gonna take this Taser out of your asshole now. Are you going to fight with me?
Suspect: No, not at all, sir.
Cop: (to another cop) So far, for the last two minutes, he’s been cooperative. But then my Taser’s in his ass.
But the incident is far from over. One of the cops involved in the sexual assault has filed a claim against the city for $ 2 million alleging that he was “singled out due to the negative publicity surrounding the arrest incident.”
And for that, I will take partial credit.
Jordan Miles, Teen Violinist: Beat By Police Over Mt. Dew Bottle
PITTSBURGH — The photos taken by Jordan Miles' mother show his face covered with raw, red bruises, his cheek and lip swollen, his right eye swollen shut. A bald spot mars the long black dreadlocks where the 18-year-old violist says police tore them from his head.
Now, 10 days after plainclothes officers stopped him on a street and arrested him after a struggle that they say revealed a soda bottle under his coat, not the gun they suspected, his right eye is still slightly swollen and bloodshot. His head is shaved. The three white officers who arrested him have been reassigned. And his mother says she is considering a lawsuit.
"I feel that my son was racially profiled," Terez Miles said. "It's a rough neighborhood; it was after dark. ... They assumed he was up to no good because he's black. My son, he knows nothing about the streets at all. He's had a very sheltered life, he's very quiet, he doesn't know police officers sit in cars and stalk people like that."
A judge continued the case until Feb. 18 after the officers failed to appear at a hearing Thursday, Miles' attorney, Kerrington Lewis, said.
The police department is saying little as it investigates and isn't releasing the officers' names. Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said that the city is investigating whether the officers' actions were justified and that if they weren't, "they will be held accountable for those actions."
"The incident was very troubling to me, and we're taking it very seriously," Ravenstahl told reporters. "It seems as if there was a tremendous amount of force used."
Miles' family describes him as a studious teenager who plays the viola for a jazz band and the orchestra at Pittsburgh's prestigious Creative and Performing Arts High School.
The confrontation began around 11 p.m. Jan. 12, when the teenager walked out of his mother's home and headed to his grandmother's, where he spends most nights. His mother complimented him on the new jacket he had gotten for his birthday.
It looks handsome," she said, smiling as he walked down the front steps.
As Miles walked up the block, he noticed three men sitting in a white car, "but I thought nothing of it," he said.
The criminal complaint says Miles was standing against a building "as if he was trying to avoid being seen." But he says he was walking when the men jumped out of the car.
"Where's the money?" one shouted, according to Miles. "Where's the gun? Where's the drugs?" the other two said. "It was intimidating; I thought I was going to be robbed," Miles said.
That's when he says he took off back to his mother's house but slipped on the icy sidewalk. Before he could pull himself up, Miles said, the men were at his back.
"That's when they started beating me, punching, kicking me, choking me," he said.
Not until 15 minutes later, when uniformed officers drove up in a van and Miles overheard their conversation, did he realize he had been arrested, he said. Initially, when the handcuffs were clamped around his wrists, he thought he was being abducted, he said.
The police believed Miles, who appeared to have something heavy in his pocket, was carrying a gun, according to the affidavit. The police say they used a stun gun on the teenager.
According to the affidavit, the object in Miles' pocket turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew. But Miles says he didn't have anything in his pocket and rarely drinks Mountain Dew.
"The story just doesn't make sense when you read the affidavit," said Lewis, the teen's attorney.
Miles said the family is considering suing the police department and the officers.
"I knew that he hadn't done anything wrong," his mother said. "That's just not an option for Jordan."
Pittsburgh police have reassigned the three officers and put them back in uniform while the city investigates, spokeswoman Diane Richard said. She declined to say whether racial allegations are part of the probe.
Meanwhile, Jordan Miles says he awaits a physician's approval to return to school and is suffering from nightmares and flashbacks.
Once he's done with school, he says, he hopes to attend Penn State University – and study crime scene investigation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/24/jordan-miles-teen-violini_n_434772.html
Bronx men to file $2M suit against city after cops arrested them for 'crack' that was really candy
BY Brendan Brosh
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Cops accused Cesar Rodriguez and Jose Pena of having crack cocaine in their work van, but it was only coconut candy, they said Friday.
Charges were dropped after tests showed they were telling the truth, but the two men plan to file a $2 million suit against the NYPD.
"I spent five days in jail for possession of coconut candy," said Rodriguez, 33, an ex-con who works as a plumber's assistant.
He and Pena were parked near an Arthur Ave. bodega Jan. 15 when two police officers asked to search their green Chevy Venture van, the men said.
The cops found pieces of the crystalline candy - known as crema de coco and sold in bodegas across the city - in a plastic baggie.
Officer Anthony Burgos of the 48th Precinct arrested the duo for drug possession despite their insistence they were guilty only of a sweet tooth, Rodriguez said.
"I kept telling him it is candy," he said.
Rodriguez and Pena were locked up on a Friday night and didn't see a judge for arraignment until that Sunday, said their lawyer, Neil Wollerstein.
Pena was released after arraignment, but Rodriguez couldn't make the $5,000 bail a judge imposed because of a prior armed robbery conviction. He wasn't let go until this Thursday, the lawyer said.
"This all could have been avoided if they believed us and tasted the candy," said Pena, 48, a father of four boys who works with Rodriguez. "I thought my life was over."
Wollerstein said cops ignored proper procedure.
"They could have called for a field test [on the substance] and let these men go," he said as the notice of claim was filed with the controller's office.
"Either these two officers failed to follow procedure and were completely incompetent or they intentionally arrested these men for possession of coconut candy."
Stephen Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney's office, confirmed all charges were dropped.
"This wasn't a narcotic substance," he said.
The NYPD declined to comment.
The confection at the center of the case is widely available. It comes shaped like a rod and wrapped in plain cellophane.
Rodriguez said he crumbled his into pieces and put it in a Hello Kitty sandwich bag so it would be easier to eat while driving.
He got hooked on the sweet because his grandmother used to make it - and has no plans of quitting his habit.
"It just melts in your mouth," he said. "I eat this every day, and I'm not going to stop because of what I've just been through."
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/01/22/2010-01-22_bronx_men_to_file_2m_suit_against_city_after_cops_arrested_them_for_crack_that_w.html
Officer: I gave favors to Peterson during probe
Testimony reveals details, missteps in investigation of ex-cop’s wife’s death
Jan. 22, 2010
JOLIET, Ill. - The lead investigator in the death of Drew Peterson's third wife said he never collected any forensics evidence from the home where her body was found in a dry bathtub, telling a pretrial hearing Friday he never considered the possibility she was murdered.
Retired Illinois State Police Sgt. Patrick Collins, testifying at a hearing to determine what, if any, "hearsay" evidence prosecutors can use during Peterson's murder trial, also said he granted Peterson favors during the investigation because he was a fellow police officer.
Peterson, a former Bolingbrook police officer, has pleaded not guilty in Kathleen Savio's 2004 death. Officials exhumed her body and ruled her death a homicide only after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared in 2007. He hasn't been charged in her disappearance, but authorities say he's the only suspect.
Collins said he even allowed Peterson to sit in on questioning of Stacy Peterson as investigators inquired about Drew Peterson's whereabouts the day Savio died — something Collins acknowledged was unusual. He said Drew Peterson even spoke up to answer one question to his then-wife about what he and Stacy had eaten for breakfast that day.
Among the potential evidence crime technicians failed to collect from Savio's home was a glass of orange juice left on a counter and the clothes she had been wearing that day, Collins testified. He also never interviewed members of Savio's family.
One of the things that led him to believe Savio's death was accidental was that he found no defensive wounds on her body.
But when someone else at the scene suggested Savio may have received a gash on her head by accidentally hitting the back if the tub, Collins said he never tried to verify that. Collins also didn't attempt to account for why her body was slumped forward when investigators arrived; he said he didn't ask if anyone had touched or moved her body.
Collins also said it never occurred to him that the scene in the bathroom might have been staged. After Stacy Peterson's disappearance, authorities said they did believe Savio's death was a homicide staged to look like an accident.
Collins stopped short of admitting he was ever wrong to believe Savio's death could only be accidental, though he conceded his investigation could have been more thorough.
"If I had to do certain things over, yes, I would," he said.
Defensive on the stand
Both prosecutors and the defense hit Collins with tough questions, with prosecutors trying to show he could have gathered evidence pointing to Peterson's involvement in Savio's death. For their part, the defense appeared to want to demonstrate that the investigation was so shoddy that it would be impossible to discover the identity of any killer now.
On a few occasions, an otherwise calm Collins appeared defensive on the stand, saying at one point in response to questions about the initial Savio investigation, "I'm not going to beat myself up right now."
Although the hearing is intended to focus on "hearsay" evidence, Collins was the latest witness to focus on direct evidence that had nothing to do with "hearsay." Prosecutors haven't explained why they have called such witnesses.
At Thursday's hearing, Peterson's stepbrother, Thomas Morphey, described how he believed he might have helped Drew Peterson dispose of Stacy's body in a large blue barrel. She has not been seen for more than two years.
He said Peterson suggested when they talked on Oct. 27, 2007, that he intended to kill his fourth wife because she planned to divorce him, win custody of their children and take Peterson's money.
Morphey stopped short of saying Peterson directly admitted murdering Stacy and he said the two men never talked about what was in the barrel. Morphey also testified that he had told Peterson that he always assumed he had killed Savio, but that Peterson denied it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35021365/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Medical Examiner: Death in cop custody a homicide
Man died of ‘blunt trauma’ to head, torso
By Marie Szaniszlo and Laura Crimaldi
Saturday, January 23, 2010 -
A 45-year-old man’s death in police custody at a North Andover sobriety checkpoint was caused by a beating and has been ruled a homicide, the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said.
But two months after Kenneth Howe of Worcester died, all of the officers involved in the case remain on full duty, his lawyer said.
And the account given by a state trooper differs from the one initially issued by Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett’s Office.
“I’m not suprised, the way this investigation is proceeding,” the lawyer, Frances King, said.
The ME’s office determined the cause of death was “blunt impact of head and torso with compression of chest,” with “atherosclerotic and hypertensive cardiovascular disease” as “other contributory conditions.”
The homicide ruling assigns no blame or criminal wrongdoing, the medical examiner’s office said.
Steve O’Connell, a spokesman for Blodgett’s office, which is investigating Howe’s death, said investigators have conducted more than 50 interviews and are awaiting a final autopsy report and forensic results. Asked whether the probe is now a murder investigation, O’Connell said: “We’re not characterizing it.”
State police spokesman David Procopio declined to comment, other than to say the status of the troopers involved has not changed. North Andover police and the Essex Sheriff’s department referred all questions to Blodgett’s office.
Howe was a passenger in a car stopped on Thanksgiving Eve at a checkpoint manned by state and North Andover police and sheriff’s personnel when a trooper saw him making “furtive” movements, according to a statement Blodgett’s office released two days after the incident.
Howe “jumped out the window, struck the trooper and fled,” according to that statement, and was handcuffed after a brief foot chase and an “ensuing struggle.” Police later found 15 mg of Oxycodone, for which Howe had a prescription, in his pocket, Blodgett’s office said.
In her own statement, trooper Jodi A. Gerardi says Howe hit her twice before he got out of the vehicle, striking her a third time with the door. Gerardi yelled “help,” she says, and several troopers and town police ran after Howe, who “continued to assault everyone in his path” as a pit bull he released charged at officers.
Howe “was eventually taken to the ground, where he continued to disobey orders to ‘stop resisting’ by several other officers,” according to Gerardi’s report, which says he was charged with assaulting a police officer, assault with a dangerous weapon, resisting arrest and possession of marijuana and a controlled substance, OxyContin. The report makes no mention of Oxycodone.
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100123medical_examiner_death_in_cop_custody_a_homicide_man_died_of_blunt_trauma_to_head_torso/srvc=home&position=4
Pennsylvania man beat up and arrested after questioning officer’s illegal parking (Updated)
January 22nd, 2010
A Pennsylvania man who questioned an off-duty state police officer about parking a pick-up truck in the fire lane of a grocery store ended up having cops follow him home, beating him up and arresting him on disorderly conduct charges.
Ron Doyle was also charged with DUI, but he said he didn’t drink until after he got home from the store. His blood-alcohol content level was .108, which is above the legal limit of .08.
Ron DoylePolice say he was belligerent, insulting and took an “aggressive stance” when he opened the door.
He said they were the aggressive ones, kicking his door in when he did not open it immediately. He said they also tackled him to the floor where he ended up with several cuts to his face.
The truth may lie in a dispatch tape because Doyle dialed 911 after he saw three state police cars pull in front of his duplex. He kept an open phone line with the dispatcher during the entire exchange with police, according to the Chambersburg Public Opinion.
But the local police department is refusing to release that tape because “the public interest in disclosure does not outweigh the interest in nondisclosure.”
In other words, the local police department is covering up for the state police officers, which is not surprising.
Hopefully, they get sued for withholding public records.
The police side of the story has already been contradicted by a pair of witnesses who observed the initial interaction in front of a local grocery store.
Jeremiah Snyder told Public Opinion Monday that narrative did not fit with what he saw as he and his wife walked out of Giant the afternoon of Jan. 10.
He said Doyle walked up to a truck parked in the fire lane, knocked on the truck’s window and said something to the man sitting in the driver’s seat about being parked in the fire lane.
He said the man flashed a badge and told Doyle the badge gave him the right to park there.
“My wife and I looked at each other, but kept walking,” he said.
He said Doyle did not appear to be drunk, “in any way, shape or form.”
He said he also did not hear Doyle swear or even raise his voice at the trooper during the encounter.
Doyle is a retired U.S. Marine who has worked as a civilian police officer on military bases. His preliminary hearing on the matter was postponed indefinitely.
http://carlosmiller.com/2010/01/22/pennsylvania-police-beat-up-and-arrested-after-questioning-officers-illegal-parking/#comment-18872
FOLLOW-UP: Former Deputy Paul Schene Says He Beat Teenage Girl Because He Was Afraid of Her
By Caleb Hannan in Crime & Punishment
Wednesday, Jan. 20 2010 @ 10:12AM
Video: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/01/former_deputy_paul_schene_says.php
It's long past time for Paul Schene to man up. The King County Sheriff's Deputy who lost his job after beating 15-year-old Malika Calhoun in a SeaTac holding cell first said he'd attacked the girl because she injured his shin kicking off her shoe. Then, when video was released showing him accidentally kicking the cell's metal toilet, and thus injuring himself, he wisely shut up. Until yesterday.
That's when he testified for the first time about his version of the events that were caught on tape in November of 2008.
As The Seattle Times reports, Schene defended his actions as appropriate because he said Calhoun had made an "angry face" at him, kicked her shoe deliberately at his groin and because he was "afraid of being injured by her." Schene also said he followed police academy protocol when he kicked Calhoun, grabbed her by the hair, threw her to the ground and punched her multiple times while she was cuffed.
It's unknown what effect Schene's testimony had on jurors. But as a representative of everyone in the world with working retinas, I can say the only effect it had on me was to feel pity for the man who lives his life in fear of teenage girls throwing tantrums.
TSA Plants "White Powder" On Unsuspecting Passenger
Daniel Rubin: It was no joke at security gate
By Daniel Rubin
Rebecca Solomon said the security worker's action "was such a violation."
In the tense new world of air travel, we're stripped of shoes, told not to take too much shampoo on board, frowned on if we crack a smile.
The last thing we expect is a joke from a Transportation Security Administration screener - particularly one this stupid.
Rebecca Solomon is 22 and a student at the University of Michigan, and on Jan. 5 she was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.
She would be flying into Detroit on Northwest Airlines, the same city and carrier involved in the attempted bombing on Christmas, just 10 days before. She was tense.
What happened to her lasted only 20 seconds, but she says they were the longest 20 seconds of her life.
After pulling her laptop out of her carry-on bag, sliding the items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she went to collect her things.
A TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him.
Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on - the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.
She remembers his words: "Where did you get it?"
Two thoughts came to her in a jumble: A terrorist was using her to sneak bomb-detonating materials on the plane. Or a drug dealer had made her an unwitting mule, planting coke or some other trouble in her bag while she wasn't looking.
She'd left her carry-on by her feet as she handed her license and boarding pass to a security agent at the beginning of the line.
Answer truthfully, the TSA worker informed her, and everything will be OK.
Solomon, 5-foot-3 and traveling alone, looked up at the man in the black shirt and fought back tears.
Put yourself in her place and count out 20 seconds. Her heart pounded. She started to sweat. She panicked at having to explain something she couldn't.
Now picture her expression as the TSA employee started to smile.
Just kidding, he said. He waved the baggie. It was his.
And so she collected her things, stunned, and the tears began to fall.
Another passenger, a woman traveling to Colorado, consoled her as others who had witnessed the confrontation went about their business. Solomon and the woman walked to their gates, where each called for security and reported what had happened.
A joke? You're not serious. Was he hitting on her? Was he flexing his muscle? Who at a time of heightened security and rattled nerves would play so cavalierly with a passenger's emotions?
When someone is trying to blow planes out of the sky, what is a TSA employee doing with his eyes off the ball?
When she complained to airport security, Solomon said, she was told the TSA worker had been training the staff to detect contraband. She was shocked that no one took him off the floor, she said.
"It was such a violation," the Wynnewood native told me by phone. "I'd come early. I'd done everything right. And they were kidding about it."
I ran her story past Ann Davis, regional TSA spokeswoman, who said she knew nothing to contradict the young traveler's account.
Davis said privacy law prevents her from identifying the TSA employee. The law prevents her from disclosing what sort of discipline he might have received.
"The TSA views this employee's behavior to be highly inappropriate and unprofessional," she wrote. "We can assure travelers this employee has been disciplined by TSA management at Philadelphia International Airport, and he has expressed remorse for his actions."
Maybe he's been punished enough. That Solomon's father, Jeffrey, is a Center City litigator might mean this story isn't over.
In the meantime, I think the TSA worker should spend time following passengers through the scanners, handing them their shoes. Maybe he could tie them, too.
Update: Ann Davis, the TSA spokeswoman, said this afternoon that the worker is no longer employed by the agency as of today. She said privacy laws prevented her from saying if he was fired or left on his own.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20100121_Daniel_Rubin__It_was_no_joke_at_security_gate.html
Police fight cellphone recordings
Witnesses taking audio of officers arrested, charged with illegal surveillance
By Daniel Rowinski, New England Center For Investigative Reporting | January 12, 2010
Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.
“One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,’’ Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, “my phone was seized, and I was arrested.’’
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.
Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.
There are no hard statistics for video recording arrests. But the experiences of Surmacz and Glik highlight what civil libertarians call a troubling misuse of the state’s wiretapping law to stifle the kind of street-level oversight that cellphone and video technology make possible.
“The police apparently do not want witnesses to what they do in public,’’ said Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who helped to get the criminal charges against Surmacz dismissed.
Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected the notion that police are abusing the law to block citizen oversight, saying the department trains officers about the wiretap law. “If an individual is inappropriately interfering with an arrest that could cause harm to an officer or another individual, an officer’s primary responsibility is to ensure the safety of the situation,’’ she said.
In 1968, Massachusetts became a “two-party’’ consent state, one of 12 currently in the country. Two-party consent means that all parties to a conversation must agree to be recorded on a telephone or other audio device; otherwise, the recording of conversation is illegal. The law, intended to protect the privacy rights of individuals, appears to have been triggered by a series of high-profile cases involving private detectives who were recording people without their consent.
In arresting people such as Glik and Surmacz, police are saying that they have not consented to being recorded, that their privacy rights have therefore been violated, and that the citizen action was criminal.
“The statute has been misconstrued by Boston police,’’ said June Jensen, the lawyer who represented Glik and succeeded in getting his charges dismissed. The law, she said, does not prohibit public recording of anyone. “You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want; you can do that.’’
Ever since the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 was videotaped, and with the advent of media-sharing websites like Facebook and YouTube, the practice of openly recording police activity has become commonplace. But in Massachusetts and other states, the arrests of street videographers, whether they use cellphones or other video technology, offers a dramatic illustration of the collision between new technology and policing practices.
“Police are not used to ceding power, and these tools are forcing them to cede power,’’ said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Ardia said the proliferation of cellphone and other technology has equipped people to record actions in public. “As a society, we should be asking ourselves whether we want to make that into a criminal activity,’’ he said.
In Pennsylvania, another two-party state, individuals using cellphones to record police activities have also ended up in police custody.
But one Pennsylvania jurisdiction has reaffirmed individuals’ right to videotape in public. Police in Spring City and East Vincent Township agreed to adopt a written policy confirming the legality of videotaping police while on duty. The policy was hammered out as part of a settlement between authorities and ACLU attorneys representing a Spring City man who had been arrested several times last year for following police and taping them.
In Massachusetts, Wunsch said Attorney General Martha Coakley and police chiefs should be informing officers not to abuse the law by charging civilians with illegally recording them in public.
The cases are the courts’ concern, said Coakley spokesman Harry Pierre. “At this time, this office has not issued any advisory or opinion on this issue.’’
Massachusetts has seen several cases in which civilians were charged criminally with violating the state’s electronic surveillance law for recording police, including a case that was reviewed by the Supreme Judicial Court.
Michael Hyde, a 31-year-old musician, began secretly recording police after he was stopped in Abington in late 1998 and the encounter turned testy. He then used the recording as the basis for a harassment complaint. The police, in turn, charged Hyde with illegal wiretapping. Focusing on the secret nature of the recording, the SJC upheld the conviction in 2001.
“Secret tape recording by private individuals has been unequivocally banned, and, unless and until the Legislature changes the statute, what was done here cannot be done lawfully,’’ the SJC ruled in a 4-to-2 decision.
In a sharply worded dissent, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall criticized the majority view of a law that, in effect, punished citizen watchdogs and allowed police officers to conceal possible misconduct behind a “cloak of privacy.’’
“Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police,’’ Marshall wrote. “Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals when they seek to hold government officials responsible by recording, secretly recording on occasion, an interaction between a citizen and a police officer.’’
Since that ruling, the outcome of Massachusetts criminal cases involving the recording of police by citizens has turned mainly on this question of secret vs. public recording.
Jeffrey Manzelli, 46, a Cambridge sound engineer, was convicted of illegal wiretapping and disorderly conduct for recording MBTA police at an antiwar rally on Boston Common in 2002. Though he said he had openly recorded the officer, his conviction was upheld in 2007 on the grounds that he had made the recording using a microphone hidden in the sleeve of his jacket.
Peter Lowney, 39, a political activist from Newton, was convicted of illegal wiretapping in 2007 after Boston University police accused him of hiding a camera in his coat during a protest on Commonwealth Avenue.
Charges of illegal wiretapping against documentary filmmaker and citizen journalist Emily Peyton were not prosecuted, however, because she had openly videotaped police arresting an antiwar protester in December 2007 at a Greenfield grocery store plaza, first from the parking lot and then from her car. Likewise with Simon Glik and Jon Surmacz; their cases were eventually dismissed, a key factor being the open way they had used their cellphones.
Surmacz said he never thought that using his cellphone to record police in public might be a crime. “One of the reasons I got my phone out . . . was from going to YouTube where there are dozens of videos of things like this,’’ said Surmacz, a webmaster at BU who is also a part-time producer at Boston.com.
It took five months for Surmacz, with the ACLU, to get the charges of illegal wiretapping and disorderly conduct dismissed. Surmacz said he would do it again.
“Because I didn’t do anything wrong,’’ he said. “Had I recorded an officer saving someone’s life, I almost guarantee you that they wouldn’t have come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you just recorded me saving that person’s life. You’re under arrest.’ ’’
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University is an investigative reporting collaborative. This story was done under the guidance of BU professors Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/
Deputy accused of having sex while working security at hotel
Regional Report
December 02, 2009|By Walter Pacheco, Orlando Sentinel
The Orange County Sheriff's Office disciplined a veteran deputy caught having sex while working off-duty security at a hotel that hosted Gay Days events.
Witnesses at the Royal Plaza Resort told investigators they saw Master Deputy Bryan Villella and another man having sex in an unlocked conference rooms this summer. Villella worked security at the hotel while off duty.
Sheriff's investigators said Villella, 45, violated the agency's moral conduct policy. Supervisors docked him 150 vacation hours, placed him on one-year probation and assigned him to another beat. Villella is a 23-year-veteran of the Sheriff's Office.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2009-12-02/news/0912020028_1_gay-days-events-front-desk-investigators
Small Town Illinois Sheriff Charged With Pot Dealing And Murder-For-Hire
Justin Elliott | January 5, 2010, 9:48AM
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/gallatin_sheriff_raymond_martin_drugs_corruption_a.php?ref=fpa
Raymond Martin had been sheriff in tiny Gallatin County, Illinois, for 20 years. So when he was arrested on federal drug and gun charges last May for allegedly running a large-scale marijuana dealing operation out of his police SUV, residents were shocked.
But that was only the beginning.
On Saturday, when Martin's wife Kristina and 20-year-old son Cody came to visit him at the jail, they were both promptly arrested. All three were charged Monday on state murder-for-hire charges.
According to the complaint, the trio arranged to have two men -- identified as Kevin B. and Thomas H. -- carry out first degree murder. The charging documents don't detail the alleged plot. But citing a source close to the investigation, ABC affiliate WSIL reported that the subjects of the alleged murder plot were two witnesses in Raymond's upcoming drug trial.
The three are scheduled to appear in Jackson County Circuit Court today.
It's not clear whether one of the targets of the alleged murder plot is the confidential DEA source who appears to be the main informant on the drug charges. According to the federal complaint, Martin warned the source that he would prosecute the source on any charge Martin wanted to "make up."
He allegedly gave the confidential source as much as 20 pounds of pot on a biweekly basis, according to the criminal complaint. The source would then allegedly sell the drugs and split the profits with Martin.
The complaint alleges Martin used his sheriff's department cell phone and his patrol vehicle, a Ford Expedition, during drug deals, all while in uniform and on the job.
So where was Martin getting the pot? He allegedly had at least two sources, as the complaint describes:
"On at least two other occasions when the C/S [confidential source] called Martin to tell him that he was ready for a delivery of marijuana, Martin told the C/S that Martin would have to go by the Courthouse and 'pick it up' and would meet the C/S at the usual location in ten or fifteen minutes. Martin also told the C/S on more than one occasion that if the C/S could locate any outdoor marijuana grow operations in Gallitin County that Martin would arrest the individuals and confiscate the marijuana. After the case was completed in court, Martin would then bring the confiscated marijuana to the C/S to sell instead of destroying it. Martin and the C/S would split the profits evenly on the sale of this marijuana as Martin would have 'nothing' in the marijuana."
The alleged drug dealing was a lucrative enterprise for Martin. Investigators reportedly found a safe at his house with $100,000. They allege that Martin didn't have a mortgage on the $300,000 home, even though he and his wife brought in just over $50,000 a year in legal income.
You can read the drug complaint here and the murder-for-hire charges here.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/gallatin_sheriff_raymond_martin_drugs_corruption_a.php?ref=fpa
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