The Warrior cops are out of control [Archive] - Page 7

boutons_deux

12-21-2015, 12:36 PM

The Powerful Union Official Standing Between Rikers Island and Reform

That's when Norman Seabrook, the boisterous president of the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association (COBA), the union for these latest additions to the city workforce, took the stage.
"How dare you?" roared Seabrook (http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/12/8584767/seabrook-steals-scene-doc-graduation-ceremony), referencing the mayor's departure. In patented fashion, Seabrook then delivered a lengthy rebuke of de Blasio and his reform efforts, dismissing the mayor and his correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, as out of touch with the rank-and-file keeping tabs on New York City's incarcerated. It was a hell of a welcome for a group of officers who had just been tasked with helping bring about change to a system whose main jail, Rikers Island, was deemed to have a "deep-seated culture of violence" by US attorney Preet Bharara (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/nyregion/us-attorneys-office-reveals-civil-rights-investigation-at-rikers-island.html?_r=0) in a scathing report last year.

"Mayor de Blasio made me feel under-appreciated," Seabrook, who presides over the largest municipal jail union in the nation, said in an interview with VICE. "Because he doesn't leave the police officers' graduation early, doesn't leave the firefighters' graduation early, [but] he doesn't have respect for us. Not even to say goodbye, to our graduates and our families, is a little bit insulting."

The acrimony between the jail guards' union and City Hall is playing out just a year after the feds sued the city (http://www.vice.com/read/the-feds-are-suing-new-york-city-because-rikers-island-is-a-gitmo-style-hellhole-1218) over conditions at Rikers Island, the hellhole of the New York City jail system, where thousands of men and women—mostly people of color (http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/race-rikers/) —rot whilethey wait for a trial (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/inside-rikers-island-interviews.html). But change has slowly begun (http://www.vice.com/read/will-more-cameras-new-rules-for-guards-and-federal-oversight-change-rikers-island-623) to make its way to the island. From new rules on solitary confinement to more services and support for the mentally ill, the reforms are an attempt to break the cycle of abuse and mistreatment. But in the rhetorical war over fixing this well-documented nightmare, one of the loudest and most effective voices belongs to the union leader standing in the way of change.

Throughout the reform process, Seabrook has been the proud and obstinate advocate for the status quo. The ongoing overhauls include new rules (http://observer.com/2015/11/after-lawsuit-department-of-correction-to-unveil-new-use-of-force-policy/) regarding use-of-force aimed at limiting the most severe methods correctional officers use to restrain and control incarcerated people, including strikes to the head, groin, or kicking an individual.

http://www.vice.com/read/the-powerful-union-official-standing-between-rikers-island-and-reform

FuzzyLumpkins

12-21-2015, 12:51 PM

How about this one? Anyone read it?

boutons_deux

12-21-2015, 02:49 PM

These 14 large police departments only killed black people this year

Fourteen of those departments — St. Louis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Cleveland, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Boston, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Raleigh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia and Charlotte-Mecklenberg — killed exclusively black people this year.

Only five of the 60 largest police departments killed only whites.

Police in Bakersfield, California; Oklahoma City; Oakland, California; Indianapolis; Long Beach, California; New Orleans; St. Louis, Missouri; and San Francisco killed people at the highest rates in 2015.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/these-14-large-police-departments-only-killed-black-people-this-year/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

12-21-2015, 05:17 PM

Nineteen-Hour 'Standoff' Ends With Law Enforcement Officers Destroying An Empty House
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151220/16023433144/nineteen-hour-standoff-ends-with-law-enforcement-officers-destroying-empty-house.shtml

boutons_deux

12-22-2015, 03:33 PM

New Report Finds That 44 Percent of All Georgians Killed by Police Were Unarmed or Shot in the Back

Since 2010, 81 of 184 officer-involved deaths in Georgia have involved either unarmed victims, or victims who were shot in the back. This report delves into the startling statistics around police shootings in Georgia. Some key findings:

About one in six people fatally shot were unarmed. Of those 31 cases, 17 people were black and 14 were white. That represented 19 percent of all black shootings and 16 percent of all white shootings.
In 18 cases, the person killed was shot solely in the back of their torso, neck, head or buttocks. In 52 other cases, they were shot in the backside, but also suffered wounds in other parts of the body.
In at least 11 fatal police shooting cases since 2010, the person shot by police was both unarmed and shot in the back. Seven people killed in this manner were black, four were white.
At least one in four of those killed by police had shown some signs of mental illness before the fatal encounter. About one in three whites fell into that category, compared to about one in five blacks. About 16 percent killed were veterans, but that figure could be higher because service records could not be determined for every death.
Black citizens killed tended to be younger, with a median age of 29, while white citizens tended to be older, with a median age of 41. Only 9 of the 184 killed were women.
At least 20 officers involved in fatal shootings had serious prior issues documented in their records. Four had previously been fired or resigned in lieu of termination from a previous police job in Georgia. Officers in two other shootings had been disciplined for lying. And two officers had failed to complete state-mandated annual use-of-force training to maintain their powers of arrest at the time they fatally shot someone.

The report also illustrates the fact that people with mental illnesses are more likely to die at the hands of police than other people, and also the fact that officers with serious disciplinary issues are likely to continue campaigns of brutality.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/new-report-finds-44-percent-all-georgians-killed-police-were-unarmed-or-shot-back?akid=13799.187590.HkIYC5&rd=1&src=newsletter1047793&t=12

Reports like this persecute the helpless policemen

boutons_deux

12-22-2015, 05:39 PM

Private Prison Exec Waves Off Criminal Justice Reform, Predicts More Profits (https://theintercept.com/2015/12/22/geo-group-explains-crime/)

A senior executive with the second-largest for-profit prison company in America assured investment bankers last summer that despite talk of drug policy and criminal justice reform, the country will continue to “attract crime,” generating new “correctional needs.”

“The reality is, we are a very affluent country, we have loose borders, and we have a bad education system,” said Shayn March, the vice president and treasurer of the Geo Group. “And all that adds up to a significant amount of correctional needs, which, thankfully, we’ve been able to help the country out with and states with by providing a lower cost solution.”

The previously unreported remarks were made during a presentation at the Barclays High Yield Bond & Syndicated Loan conference in June.

While students and activists have protested private prison corporations, scoring a recent victory last week with the decision by the University of California system to divest (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-university-idUSKBN0U202020151219) from firms like Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America, the firms have largely avoided the spotlight.

Private prison companies are a controversial player in America’s criminal justice system. In the 1990s, private prison firms pushed (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2002/09/ghostwriting-law) for tougher sentencing laws at the state level and have been tied (http://www.npr.org/2010/10/28/130833741/prison-economics-help-drive-ariz-immigration-law) to efforts in recent years to compel local law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws. Geo Group has also been faulted for multiple incidents (http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/09/12255/violence-abuse-and-death-profit-prisons-geo-group-rap-sheet) of abuse, ranging from inmates who have died in their facilities to employees charged with sexual assault.

Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit prison company in the U.S. and a competitor of Geo Group, discussed sentencing reforms on a call with investors in August. Damon Hininger, the chief executive of CCA, told analysts that new guidelines that narrow the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences will “have an impact” on “Bureau of Prisons populations.”

However, March told attendees that factoring in elderly care, immigrant detention, and expansion plans overseas, the company is sure to grow. “

I think I started at GEO, our stock price … got down to $12.50. And if you factor in an apples-to-apples comparison to where we are today, our stock is well over $50 a share. So we have quadrupled our value in that six-year period.”

He added, “No, we’re not Google, but we’re still doing pretty good.”
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/22/geo-group-explains-crime/

for-profit prions as wealth creation vehicle. What a fucking country the 1%/BigFinance/VRWC has screwed up.

boutons_deux

12-24-2015, 11:31 PM

Cop Charged With Murder and Manslaughter in 2 Separate Fatal Shootings Gets His Job Back

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/cop-facing-murder-and-manslaughter-charges-in-2-separate-fatal-shootings-gets-his-job-ba.jpg

Indicted on five counts, including felony murder and reckless homicide, Pike County Deputy Joel Jenkins was officially reinstated on Tuesday after the sheriff recently fired him for shooting his neighbor to death while drunk.

Indicted on five counts, including felony murder and reckless homicide, Pike County Deputy Joel Jenkins was officially reinstated on Tuesday after the sheriff recently fired him for shooting his neighbor to death while drunk.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/cop-charged-murder-and-manslaughter-2-separate-fatal-shootings-gets-his-job-back

Cops are untouchable, immune, totally unaccountable, in 99% of cases.

boutons_deux

12-26-2015, 05:11 PM

“You Don’t Have a Dog Anymore”: Police Officers in Pennsylvania Take Turns Shooting Family’s Dog

According to Fry, Bear was secured to a cable leash in his backyard when she heard him barking at the construction workers working on an abandoned house next door. Fry says that Bear was a ‘barker’, so this was nothing out of the ordinary. But when the barking was brought to a halt by the sound of gunfire, Fry panicked.
“Thank god the kids were at school,” Fry said in an interview with PuppycideDB.com (http://blog.puppycidedb.com/chester-pa-police-officer-shoots-dog-8-times-laughs/)

When Fry got up to see what was going on, she heard more shots. Fry recalls those frightening moments:

I hear 2 gunshots. As I’m getting up I hear the third. As soon as I’m standing, I can see out my side window. Police. Fourth shot. I look at what they’re doing & see my dog on the ground. My dog starts screaming. I scream. More shots. Five, six, seven, eight. There’s 2 cops taking turns shooting him with smiles on their faces. I run out yelling “What the hell!!!!!” They said “Is this your dog?” “Yes!!” I replied. “What happened??!!” The officer said (& I quote!!) “Well you don’t have a dog anymore. He’s done now!” & laughed in my face.

My 1yr old puppy that I did everything in my power to save was laying there dead. They shot my dog like he was a human coming at them with a gun.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/you-dont-have-dog-anymore-police-officers-pennsylvania-take-turns-shooting-familys

boutons_deux

12-28-2015, 12:26 PM

Cops Brutally Abuse Man in Public for Rolling Through a Stop Sign

A video uploaded to Facebook shows a gang of cops from the Fort Myers Police Department and Lee County Sheriff’s Office brutally violating a man on the roadside, after pulling him over for a rolling stop.

Screams of agony can be heard echoing from the trees as the man’s arm is twisted almost to the breaking point and his rectum is invaded by the gloved hand of a drug war enforcer.

The cops can be heard saying, “Stop resisting! Just relax!” as the victim continues to scream and kick in pain.

Five officers are initially involved in subduing the man and searching his vehicle, and then another joins the fun by posing with gun in hand facing the onlookers.

The search appears to be in violation of at least part of Florida statute 901.211 (http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0900-0999/0901/Sections/0901.211.html), which states in part:

“No person arrested for a traffic, regulatory, or misdemeanor offense, except in a case which is violent in nature, which involves a weapon, or which involves a controlled substance, shall be strip searched unless:
(a) There is probable cause to believe that the individual is concealing a weapon, a controlled substance, or stolen property; or
(3) Each strip search shall be performed by a person of the same gender as the arrested person and on premises where the search cannot be observed by persons not physically conducting or observing the search pursuant to this section. Any observer shall be of the same gender as the arrested person.
(4) Any body cavity search must be performed under sanitary conditions.
(5) No law enforcement officer shall order a strip search within the agency or facility without obtaining the written authorization of the supervising officer on duty.

Clearly, the anal cavity search was carried out in full view of the public, including a female onlooker. Other parts of the statute may have been violated as well.

Todd Crisp, a family member of the victim, said that at least one of the cops, Arturo Gonzales, routinely harasses Crisp and his family, and this was just the latest episode.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/cops-brutally-abuse-man-public-rolling-through-stop-sign

boutons_deux

12-30-2015, 06:56 AM

Police Union Thinks Cops Should Receive Less Scrutiny Than Retail Workers

from the pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-arbitration! dept

Police unions are working tirelessly towards destroying any remaining shreds of respectability. Presumably, they once served a purpose roughly aligned with the public good. Now, they serve the singular purpose of ensuring our nation's law enforcement agencies will always be forced to keep the abusive, incompetent officers on their payroll.

No entity has spoken out more frequently (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150802/16394131829/report-nypd-body-camera-program-shows-police-union-doesnt-speak-officers-mostly-full-shit.shtml) about the supposed damage body-worn cameras will do. Meanwhile, many officers appear to have made peace with the new technology, much as they had with dash cams.

No entity has continued to voice its resistance to anything approaching accountability as vociferously as our nation's police unions.

If you want to see what's wrong with today's policing and why it won't be changing anytime soon, all you have to do is spend a few minutes (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150123/06242629789/police-union-you-can-have-safe-neighborhoods-be-free-flashbang-burned-toddlers-not-both.shtml) talking to a union rep.

Out in Pittsburgh, the local police union wants cops to be held to a lower standard than retail employees (http://www.wpxi.com/news/news/local/pittsburgh-police-union-files-civil-rights-grievan/npbyk/).

The union representing Pittsburgh police officers has filed a civil rights grievance against the city, claiming officers have been ordered to undergo drug and alcohol testing that is in violation of their contract.

The union tells Channel 11’s Rick Earle that the testing amounts to an illegal search and seizure that is not only in violation of the contract, but the Constitution as well.

Perhaps the union will be surprised to know that these supposed "Constitutional violations" occur daily at nearly every major employer. They are required before applicants are hired and random checks are often performed post-hire as well. Why the union feels police officers -- who should hold themselves to higher standards than the average hourly worker -- should be exempt from this extraordinarily common practice isn't clear.

The only thing it offers in its defense is that the contract signed with the city only specifies three times cops can be tested: after firing weapons, being involved in a car accident, or are "suspected of being under the influence." Why the additional testing of three officers involved in a car chase suddenly rises to the level of Constitutional violation is something only the union can suss out. And it seems to have confused "violated the terms of an agreement" with "violated officers' Fourth Amendment rights."

Because if the test is a violation of civil rights in this particular circumstance, then it's a violation of rights even under the terms of the agreement. The union reps seem to have opted for drama, rather than accuracy, which is kind of standard operating procedure. I mean, it's not as though the Pittsburgh PD needs to swear out a warrant to obtain the fluids requested in the circumstances permitted by the agreement.

Police officers should be subject to random drug and alcohol testing just like everyone else in the nation's workforce.

Considering most states tie implied consent to drug/alcohol testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_consent) to the issuance of drivers licenses, it's really not too much to ask that people in powerful government positions be subject to the same expectations.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151219/18323833139/police-union-thinks-cops-should-receive-less-scrutiny-than-retail-workers.shtml

boutons_deux

12-30-2015, 07:01 AM

A California lawsuit over the cash bail system could prompt changes across the U.S.

Crystal Patterson didn't have the cash or assets to post $150,000 bail and get out of jail after her arrest for assault in October.

So Patterson promised to pay a bail bonds company $15,000 plus interest to put up the $150,000 bail for her, allowing the 39-year-old to go home and care for her invalid grandmother.

The day after her release, the district attorney decided not to pursue charges. But Patterson still owes the bail bonds company. Criminal justice reformers and lawyers at a nonprofit Washington D.C. legal clinic say that is unconstitutionally unfair.

San Francisco public defender Chesa Boudin says some of his clients who can't afford to post bail plead guilty to minor charges for crimes they didn't commit so they can leave jail.

"The bail system in most states is a two-tiered system," said center founder Phil Telfeyan. "One for the wealthy and one for everyone else."

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bail-bond-lawsuit-20151226-story.html

boutons_deux

12-31-2015, 12:00 PM

listen to the audio after the dog has done its doggy work

Horrifying video shows cops sic K-9 on infant daughter of a man they mistook for a suspect
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/horrifying-video-shows-cops-sic-k-9-on-infant-daughter-of-a-man-they-mistook-for-a-suspect/

rightwingnut response: "no big deal, shit happens"

boutons_deux

01-02-2016, 12:06 PM

The Girl Who Was Assaulted By A Cop At Spring Valley High Is Now Facing Jail Time

Justice is being served in the Spring Valley High assault case (http://globalgrind.com/2015/11/02/spring-valley-high-video-teen-name-shakara/). But not like you’d think.

Shakara, the girl who was thrown to the ground (http://globalgrind.com/2015/10/29/student-rights-spring-valley-assualt/) by a school resource officer, and Niya Kenny, the student who filmed it, are now in legal trouble.

While Officer Ben Fields was promptly fired, the two girls face a misdemeanor charge of disturbing schools.

If found guilty, they could face 90 days in jail or be fined up to $1,000.

http://newsone.com/3299797/girl-assaulted-by-cop-spring-valley-high-facing-jail-time/

boutons_deux

01-04-2016, 12:27 PM

Watch: Mall Cops :lol Forceful Restraint of Black Teen Girl for Curfew Violation

http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/article_imgs19/019413-mall-of-america-010416.jpg

The family of a 14-year-old black girl accuses Mall of America security guards of using excessive force to restrain her over a curfew violation, as the local NAACP calls for a boycott, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports (http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-naacp-objects-to-restraint-of-14-year-old-girl-at-mall-of-america/363948541/).

According to Isabella Brown’s family, mall guards approached her around 5 p.m. on Dec. 26 and asked Isabella to leave the shopping center. She was shopping beyond the 4 p.m. curfew for children under 16 without an adult escort.

https://www.facebook.com/jalynjakobe.bass/videos/794079987404785/?fref=nf

Following that warning, Isabella walked around the mall’s public transportation area asking for change of a $20 bill. At that point male security guards wrestled her to the ground and restrained Isabella face down, as she screamed for them to get off her back. She was not arrested or charged with a crime.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/01/watch_mall_america_security_guards_forceful_restra int_black_teen_girl_curfew.html

boutons_deux

01-04-2016, 02:18 PM

Undercover Cop Disgracefully Tricks Autistic Student into Selling Weed, Court Denies Family Justice

Riverside County Superior Court Judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Jesse’s family against the school district (http://edsource.org/2015/judge-rules-school-district-not-liable-in-arrest-of-special-ed-student-in-drug-sting/91180).

“The suit alleged that the Temecula Valley Unified School District had breached its mandatory duties by allowing a deputy from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department to manipulate Snodgrass – a friendless student who had bipolar disorder, trouble keeping up with conversations and a history of being bullied – as part of an undercover drug sting.”

The undercover cop, named “Dan,” introduced himself to Jesse on the first day of school and befriended him during graphics art class. After committing this first act of deceit—which itself would violate the moral code of most people—“Dan” gave Jesse $20 and badgered him repeatedly to find a bit of weed.

Having never come in contact with marijuana before, Jessie had no idea where to find the illegal plant. He was forced to dangerously seek it out on the streets from a homeless man – just so he could appease his ‘friend,’ who would later turn on him and ruin his life.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/undercover-cop-disgracefully-tricks-autistic-student-selling-weed-court-denies?akid=13848.187590.6GPsu7&rd=1&src=newsletter1048379&t=18

boutons_deux

01-05-2016, 10:26 AM

“Speed Trap Town” Dissolves Entire Police Dept After Years of Officials Getting Rich from Fines

According to a 2007 report from the Enquirer, the overwhelming majority of cases (93%) that pass through court in Arlington Heights, are for traffic fines alone.

Despite issuing and collecting a record number of traffic fines, the money from those fines never found its way to the village bank account. The clerk of courts and the deputy clerk of courts, with the help of the ticket writing cops, enriched themselves to the tune of $260,000 before they were finally caught in October.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/speed-trap-town-dissolves-entire-police-dept-after-years-officials-getting-rich?akid=13849.187590.bErgIR&rd=1&src=newsletter1048410&t=22

boutons_deux

01-06-2016, 03:35 PM

Judge sets bail for former cop filmed killing an unarmed man, but delivers blow to his defense team (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/6/1466418/-Judge-sets-bail-for-former-cop-filmed-killing-an-unarmed-man-but-delivers-blow-to-his-defense-team)

Michael Slager, the former North Charleston police officer seen on cell phone video shooting an unarmed Walter Scott in the back numerous times in April of 2015, has been granted bail. The now-bearded Slager, who was originally denied bail (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/14/440337277/bail-denied-for-former-police-officer-who-shot-and-killed-unarmed-black-man) in September of 2014, is scheduled to go to trial on murder charges on October 31.

All defendants have a right to bail whether they can afford it or not; Circuit Judge Clifton Newman reversed his earlier decision of no bail so that Slager would not be unduly punished by sitting in jail until his trial later this year. Charleston’s Post and Couriernewspaper has more (http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20160104/PC16/160109767) on this story.

Newman also denied a request by Slager’s attorneys that they be paid with public monies available for indigent clients. The attorneys made the request last month (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f69119b4aa754cfbaad77603628d4676/south-carolina-officer-wants-public-money-murder-defense), stating they hadn’t been paid yet and wanted to be able to bring in expert witnesses.

Audio obtained by theNew York Daily News captures Slager talking about his adrenaline and laughing (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/michael-slager-recorded-laughing-walter-scott-kill-article-1.2182848) after the incident.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/01/06/1466418/-Judge-sets-bail-for-former-cop-filmed-killing-an-unarmed-man-but-delivers-blow-to-his-defense-team?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29

boutons_deux

01-06-2016, 03:53 PM

NYPD officer indicted for groping woman, then attacking and arresting the man who tried to film it (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/4/1466043/-NYPD-officer-indicted-after-video-shows-he-falsified-police-report-and-groped-woman)

Alas, there is some justice, sometimes. The indictment of New York City Police Officer Jonathan Munoz was announced last week (http://gawker.com/nypd-officer-charged-with-unlawful-arrest-illegal-sear-1749382181?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow) by the the Manhattan district attorney. Munoz is accused of illegally arresting a man who tried to videotape (http://jezebel.com/video-nypd-attacks-and-arrests-man-for-filming-a-cop-p-1701890381)the illegal search/groping/sexual assault of a young woman. The confrontation took place last spring. Jezebel (http://jezebel.com/video-nypd-attacks-and-arrests-man-for-filming-a-cop-p-1701890381) reports:

Last spring, Jason Disisto and some friends were hanging out in front of a restaurant in Washington Heights when an NYPD officer named Jonathan Munoz came up to one of Disisto’s female friends and started to frisk and paw her. Munoz stuck his hand in the woman’s sweater and took her by the wrist.

Disisto then grabbed his friend’s cell phone to record the incident. Another officer, Edwin Flores, charged at Disitso to prevent from filming. Video footage shows Munoz and Flores attempting to wrestle the phone of Disisto’s hand and then cuffing him. The two officers arrested Disisto and put him in a police car, throwing the cellphone out of the car window.

In the now dismissed case against Disisto, Officer Munoz claimed Disisto lunged and swung a fist at him. Thanks to cell phone cameras, security cameras, and social media, Munoz and others like him are proving themselves to be liars.

video:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/4/1466043/-NYPD-officer-indicted-after-video-shows-he-falsified-police-report-and-groped-woman

boutons_deux

01-06-2016, 04:07 PM

Nebraska routinely holds children in solitary confinement for ‘relatively minor infractions’

Solitary confinement is a commonplace experience for children held in Nebraska juvenile detention facilities, a report has shown, with minors routinely detained in isolation for days, weeks, even months at a time.

To varying degrees, in each of the state’s nine juvenile facilities children are placed in solitary confinement for “relatively minor offenses” such as keeping too many books, according to the report (https://www.aclunebraska.org/en/publications/growing-locked-down#fn4)compiled by the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter. Other infractions triggering the “overused” practice included talking back to staff members or refusing to follow directions.

The ACLU Nebraska spokesperson said they had heard reports of children as young as 12 being put into solitary confinement, although this was not confirmed by any of the facilities themselves.

Isolation practices include putting a child alone in a cell for several hours or days, restricting contact with family members, limiting access to reading and writing materials and providing limited educational programming, recreation, drug treatment or mental health services, the report found.

“It was 23 hours a day alone, no TV or radio,” Rusher was quoted as saying in thereport (https://www.aclunebraska.org/en/biographies/jacob-rusher). “You were in there with one book, a blanket, a mat and a toothbrush. No art materials, no hobby items – everything was considered contraband.”

Rusher said he developed anxiety and began a pacing habit as a result of being held for months at a time.

“If you don’t know how to deal with demons – you’re a kid, you don’t even know how to deal with normal emotions yet – then you’re sitting there by yourself, nowhere to go and every negative thing you’ve been told about yourself seems to be coming true,” he said.

Nebraska has the third highest per capita number of youth under 21 in juvenile detention centers, according to the Kids Count Data Center (http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/42-youth-residing-in-juvenile-detention-correctional-and-or-residential-facilities?loc=1&loct=2#ranking/2/any/true/867/any/17599). Some facilities surveyed in the report had no policies governing or tracking the use of solitary confinement.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/nebraska-routinely-holds-children-in-solitary-confinement-for-relatively-minor-infractions/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

... the inhumanity of red states, slave states, Christian Sharia states

boutons_deux

01-06-2016, 04:09 PM

Narcotics Cop Who Ruined Countless Lives for Weed Possession, Busted with $2 Million in Marijuana

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/cop_bust.png

A California police officer was recently busted after driving 247 pounds of marijuana all the way across the country. Yuba County Deputy Christopher M. Heath was caught in York, Pennsylvania with a shipment of marijuana that was worth over $2 million. Heath was reportedly on vacation from his job at the Yuba County Police Department at the time of his arrest.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/narcotics-cop-who-ruined-countless-lives-weed-possession-busted-2-million?akid=13855.187590.b7MaTP&rd=1&src=newsletter1048519&t=20

boutons_deux

01-06-2016, 05:42 PM

Texas trooper charged with perjury in arrest of Sandra Bland

A Texas state trooper has been charged with perjury for conduct related to a contentious traffic stop of a black woman who was eventually arrested for assault and then died three days later in jail.A grand jury indicted Trooper Brian Encinia on Wednesday with the misdemeanor charge. Encinia has been on desk duty since 28-year-old Sandra Bland (http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/crime-law-justice/sandra-bland-PENM00044-topic.html), formerly of Naperville was found dead in her cell in July. Her death was ruled a suicide.

Dashcam video shows the traffic stop quickly became confrontational, with Encinia holding a stun gun and yelling, "I will light you up!" after Bland refused to get out of her car.
Encinia is accused of lying about how he removed Bland from her vehicle

The same grand jury declined last month to indict sheriff's officials or jailers. :lol

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-sandra-bland-grand-jury-20160106-story.html

boutons_deux

01-07-2016, 03:53 PM

Govt Pays Millions in Reparations to 57 Victims of Worst Cop in History – Who Still Receives a Pension

Former Chicago Police Commander received 13 commendations before his termination for torturing over 200 citizens.

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/jon-burge.jpg

Responsible for torturing more than 200 people to obtain false confessions, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge has cost the city and Cook County over $100 million in legal fees and settlements.

On Monday, the city of Chicago paid out $5.5 million in reparations to 57 of Burge’s victims, while the corrupt former police commander continues to receive his $4,000 monthly pension from the city.

Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and his men tortured hundreds of people to extract forced confessions from them.

Up to 200 torture victims (http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dol/supp_info/burge-reparations-information/burge-reparations--frequently-asked-questions.html) have accused Burge of using cattle prods on their genitals, plastic bags to cause suffocation, phone books to strike their heads, burning them on radiators, and forcing guns into their mouths during interrogations.

Suspended from the department in 1991, Burge was fired two years later after the Police Department Review Board ruled that he had tortured hundreds of people.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/govt-pays-millions-reparations-57-victims-worst-cop-history-who-still-receives?akid=13858.187590.WVqxWM&rd=1&src=newsletter1048557&t=16

boutons_deux

01-07-2016, 05:54 PM

Hawaiian man beaten and pepper sprayed by police for praying over a seal on the beach (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/6/1466493/-Hawaiian-man-beaten-and-pepper-sprayed-by-police-for-praying-over-a-seal-on-the-beach)

http://images.dailykos.com/images/192850/story_image/Honolulu_Cop_Assualts_Hawaiian_TWO.png?1452049525

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/6/1466493/-Hawaiian-man-beaten-and-pepper-sprayed-by-police-for-praying-over-a-seal-on-the-beach?detail=email

great video, hi res, great colors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GLJqsqnh2o

FuzzyLumpkins

01-07-2016, 08:32 PM

Nice echo chamber boutox.

boutons_deux

01-07-2016, 09:41 PM

Nice echo chamber boutox.

FuzzyBrain, GFY

FuzzyLumpkins

01-07-2016, 09:46 PM

FuzzyBrain, GFY

I'm just going to condescend through your peevishness like I do with most around here.

You persuade no one and basically only talk to yourself around here outside of responses like this. Just curious why you do this?

boutons_deux

01-09-2016, 09:01 AM

Maryland cop gets five years in prison for shoving gun in black suspect’s mouth during 2014 incident

Cellphone video that captured the incident showed Santiago pointing his service weapon at Cunningham’s head and saying “I dare you to fucking fight me, son,” NBC said.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/maryland-cop-gets-five-years-in-prison-for-shoving-gun-in-black-suspects-mouth-during-2014-incident/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

will he really serve 5 years in prison?

son? I guess that shows more respect than "boy"

FuzzyLumpkins

01-09-2016, 12:20 PM

boutons_deux

01-09-2016, 02:05 PM

If this guy were black

Move over Oregon: Texas armed standoff ends after 15 years — one year after charges were dropped

http://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/gray_texas-800x430.jpg

A stand-off between police and a Texas man, who holed up on his 47-acre ranch for fifteen years after he assaulted a police officer, ended peacefully this week when the man –and the sheriff’s department — were informed that charges against him were dropped back in 2014.

According to WFAA (http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/texas-news/2016/01/08/15-year-armed-standoff-quietly-ends-outside-dallas/78452414/), John Joe Gray was arrested in 1999 for assaulting a state trooper during a traffic stop when he was found carrying a pistol without a permit. Telling the officer it was his God-given right to carry the gun, Gray attacked the officer and bit him.

Although charged with assaulting a public servant, Gray refused to go to court and face charges. Instead he armed himself in his home, warning law enforcement officials if they came looking for him that they better “bring extra body bags. Those who live by the sword will die.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/move-over-oregon-texas-armed-standoff-ends-after-15-years-one-year-after-charges-were-dropped/

white male privilege

boutons_deux

01-10-2016, 11:56 AM

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/12278881_934568496598076_8447609594339476529_n.jpg ?oh=864e07f7fa77be37376df4bff7eef485&oe=56FF0A01

boutons_deux

01-10-2016, 03:44 PM

btw, one point I don't remember at the time of the murder of Tamir Rice by a sicko cop

OH is an open-carry state, which means white men can open-carry guns, but black kids can't open-carry toy guns.

Open carry

Ohio is a traditional open-carry state. The open-carry of firearms by those who legally possess the firearm is a legal activity in Ohio with or without a license.

One must not have a concealed handgun license (CHL, CCW) to transport an unloaded handgun in a motor vehicle but it must be secured /contained and located in the vehicle requiring an exit of said vehicle to access it.

Ammunition AND magazines must be in a separate compartment or holding device.

Note: If you have any alcohol in your system above the legal limit it is not legal to possess a firearm in your vehicle or on your person.

A person may not possess a firearm in an establishment that is licensed to serve alcohol for on premises consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Ohio#Open_carry

No doubt, BigAlcohol and NRA are lobbying hard to remove the alcohol restriction

TheSanityAnnex

01-10-2016, 05:29 PM

12 year olds can't open carry stupid fuck.

No doubt, BigAlcohol and NRA are lobbying hard to remove the alcohol restriction

:lol and you wonder why no one takes you seriously

boutons_deux

01-11-2016, 09:24 AM

LAPD chief recommends criminal charges for officer in fatal shooting of homeless man in Venice

http://www.trbimg.com/img-56933283/turbine/la-me-0509-brendon-glenn-mc-jpg-20150510/750/750x422

Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck has recommended criminal charges against an officer who killed an unarmed homeless man in Venice, marking the first time as chief that Beck has called for charges in a fatal on-duty shooting.LAPD investigators concluded that Brendon Glenn was on his stomach, attempting to push himself off the ground, when Officer Clifford Proctor stepped back and fired twice, hitting the 29-year-old in the back, Beck told The Times.

After reviewing video, witness accounts and other evidence, investigators determined Glenn was not trying to take either Proctor’s gun or his partner’s weapon at the time of the shooting, Beck said. Proctor’s partner also told investigators he did not know why the officer opened fire.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lapd-shooting-venice-brendan-glenn-20160111-story.html

If Glenn had been black ...

boutons_deux

01-11-2016, 10:06 AM

Cops delivering professional, conscientious mental health care

Michigan officers suffocated man with a ‘spit hood’ despite pleas he couldn’t breathe: lawsuit

Naked, agitated and restrained in a chair, Jack Marden pleaded with officers to remove a “spit hood” covering his face, to let him breathe.The clash on 11 February began when the 56-year-old, locked up in Midland County jail on assault charges, became combative with sheriff’s deputies following brief questioning by a pair of healthcare workers.

The workers – called in by a sheriff’s deputy after an earlier dispute with Marden – asked officers to move the inmate back to his cell, at which point Marden began to act belligerently, deputies later said, complaining that “people were trying to hurt him” and “that the French government was confiscating his money”.

The situation – depicted in a federal lawsuit, documents and handheld video obtained by the Guardian – continued to escalate. Concerned by his erratic action in the cell, where officers said the 205lb Marden showed signs of “superhuman strength”, a deputy ordered a group of emergency response team officers to transfer him to a hospital for observation.

Within minutes, officers had entered Marden’s cell and pinned him to the ground. A deputy struck him in the head, after Marden managed to “grab his testicles and squeeze”, an incident report stated. As officers worked to restrain Marden, a deputy placed a spit hood over his face, the report continued, as Marden had “begun to manipulate his mouth as if he intended to spit”.

Following a struggle that lasted several minutes, the situation didn’t improve: Marden, a father of two with a history of severe depression and coronary heart disease, suffered a “severe anoxic brain injury … proximately” caused by the altercation and died days later, the lawsuit said.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/michigan-officers-suffocated-man-with-a-spit-hood-despite-pleas-he-couldnt-breathe-lawsuit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

01-12-2016, 11:31 AM

Why is Ramsey Orta, Man Who Filmed Police Killing of Eric Garner, the Only One Criminally Charged?

As Sgt. Kizzy Adonis Adonis (she's black, natch) becomes the first officer to face reprimand for Eric Garner’s death, the only person present that day to be criminally charged is the young man who filmed it.

Ramsey Orta, who recorded the fatal chokehold on his cellphone, has been arrested multiple times since.

Orta says police have deliberately targeted him for capturing Garner’s death on video and exposing it to the world.

Supporters rallied for Orta on Monday at a court appearance on Staten Island.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/12/why_is_ramsey_orta_man_who

boutons_deux

01-12-2016, 03:57 PM

boutons_deux

01-15-2016, 12:25 PM

Texas jail deaths continue despite 'zero tolerance'

Our friends at the Texas Jail Project have been busy lately. Last week, Emily Ling and Rebecca Larsen published an op ed in the Houston Chronicle titled, "Stop jail suicides and deaths: Here's how (http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Larsen-Ling-Stop-jail-suicides-and-deaths-6741267.php?cmpid=gsa-chron-result)."

They begin by quoting Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire from a hearing in September declaring he would "have zero tolerance for jail suicides and deaths."

And yet since the hearing on Sept. 22, there have been at least 13 more deaths in Texas county jails, seven of which are apparent suicides.

In reviewing the recent deaths, several issues stand out.

First, seven of the deaths in recent months have come from just three counties - Webb, McLennan and Fort Bend. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards found McLennan and Fort Bend to be out of compliance with minimum jail standards.

Those findings came only after inspections prompted by people dying. Webb County has yet to be found out-of-compliance with any state standards, despite the fact that three people died in the jail in the month of November alone.

Increased scrutiny has also revealed systemic disregard of safety by jail staff. Last month, following the suicide of Michael Angelo Martinez, three McLennan County correctional officers were arrested for falsifying records after an inspection revealed they tried to hide their failure to make mandated checks on those in their care.

Jailers must be trained and required to prioritize safe and humane care.

Additionally, all but one of the 13 people who died in county jails had not yet been convicted; they were awaiting the disposition of their cases.

On average, more than 60 percent of people in county jails are in a pretrial status, many in custody for court hearings simply because they cannot afford to post bail.

In related news, on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ERLing82/posts/10102477044584683?pnref=story.unseen-section), Emily Ling posted these data for 2015 jail deaths in Texas:

2015 Inmate Deaths in Texas County Jails:

1. Harris County - 16 deaths
2. Travis County - 8 deaths
3. Bexar County - 7 deaths
4. Dallas County - 5 deaths

Brazos, Fort Bend, Liberty, Webb, & Williamson Counties all had 3 people die in each of their jails within this past year.

Bowie, Comal, El Paso, Nueces, Walker, & Wharton Counties all had 2 people die in each of their jails.

And another 28 county jails had at least 1 inmate die in their custody, including the death of ‪#‎SandraBland‬ (https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/sandrabland?source=feed_text&story_id=10102477044584683) in Waller County Jail.

In total we know at least 99 people died this past year while in the custody of a Texas county jail. The majority of them had not been convicted of any crime. But there is no guarantee that "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't mean you won't lose your life in our criminal justice system. The Texas Jail Project is working to change that.

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2016/01/texas-jail-deaths-continue-despite-zero.html

TX Regug politicians are outraged by this slaughter, right?

boutons_deux

01-15-2016, 03:16 PM

FAU study shows 45 percent increase in death from law enforcement

Increase from 1999 to 2013 mostly among non-whites

Between 1999 and 2013 in the United States, between 279 (in 2000) to 507 (in 2012) people were killed each year by legal intervention or law enforcement, other than by legal execution.

In 2013, an estimated 11.3 million arrests in the U.S. resulted in approximately 480 deaths from legal intervention. Between 1999 and 2013, there were 5,511 deaths by legal intervention.
Results from this report show:

During this 15-year period, there was a 45 percent net increase in deaths from legal intervention.
96 percent of these deaths occurred among men, of which 78 percent occurred between ages 15 and 44 years.
In men ages 15 to 44 years, American Indians or Alaska Natives (whose numbers were small) had the highest rates of death from legal intervention, but blacks and African Americans, and white Hispanics or Latinos all had rates that were significantly higher than those experienced by non-Hispanic whites and Asians or Pacific Islanders.

There were extensive variations in states and counties with reliable rates:

In terms of urbanization, the highest mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black and African American men ages 15 to 44 years was in large central metropolitan areas, while the lowest occurred in non-core, non-metro rural areas.
The highest rate for non-Hispanic black men occurred in Nevada, while the lowest rate was in North Carolina.
New Mexico had the highest rate for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic white men.
The lowest rate for Hispanic and non-Hispanic white men was in New York.
The highest rate for blacks and African American men occurred in Riverside County, Calif., with the lowest rate occurring in Kings County (Brooklyn), N.Y.
For Hispanic white men, the highest rate occurred in Denver, Colo., and the lowest rate was in Los Angeles, Calif.
For non-Hispanic white men, the highest rate was in San Bernardino, CA, and the lowest rate was in Los Angeles, Calif.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/fau-fss011516.php

... the slaughter continues. In USA police state, de-escalation is a 4-letter word.

boutons_deux

01-16-2016, 10:54 PM

Two fat cops hold down an unarmed guy, stopped for unannounced reason, one fatcop shoots the other fat cop, and then they sit on the guy and shoot him several times, he dies, long video shows it all.
(http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/15/1470255/-Rally-for-man-who-paid-the-price-for-an-officer-s-mistake)
Rally for man who paid the price for an officer's mistake (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/15/1470255/-Rally-for-man-who-paid-the-price-for-an-officer-s-mistake)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/01/15/1470255/-Rally-for-man-who-paid-the-price-for-an-officer-s-mistake?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29

boutons_deux

01-18-2016, 12:59 PM

Family of black Ohio man killed by college cop gets $4.85 million in settlement

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/family-of-black-ohio-man-killed-by-college-cop-gets-4-85-million-in-settlement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

01-18-2016, 02:45 PM

TX law enforcement misconduct roundup

In an effort to clear Grits' browser tabs, here are links a number of police accountability episodes reported around the state recently which merit readers' attention:

An SAPD officer took a plea deal (http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/crime/article/Ex-SAPD-officer-takes-plea-deal-in-on-duty-theft-6758800.php) for stealing pot, money, guns from drug dealer while on duty.
A Houston PD officer pled guilty (http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/c13b42169ce6462285c10cb5bd2ed248/TX--Officer-Armored-Car?platform=hootsuite) to assisting thieves with an armored car robbery in 2013.
Another Houston PD officer stands accused of working for the Los Zetas drug cartel (http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/texas-cop-of-the-year-exposed-as-member-of-mexicos-most-dangerous-cartel/).
A Victoria Sheriff's deputy pled guilty (https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/2016/jan/11/former-deputy-pleads-guilty-to-official-oppression/?platform=hootsuite) to official oppression after using excessive force against a motorist. Charges of record tampering and perjury were dismissed, though he'd admitted to the former.
A new lawsuit accuses Caldwell County Sheriff's deputies of excessive force (http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/crime-law/lawsuit-accuses-caldwell-county-deputies-of-excess/npcdw/?platform=hootsuite) in an event caught on video.
A former Wise County Sheriff's deputy who was the department's liaison to sex offender was convicted and sent to federal prison or 16 months after subjecting them to nude photographs (http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/crime/2016/01/06/former-wise-co-deputy-sentenced-for-taking-nude-photos-of-sex-offenders/78362080/?platform=hootsuite).
An Austin cop was suspended for 90 days for unwarranted use of his Taser (http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/local/austin-police-officer-suspended-for-unjustified-us/np4mf/?platform=hootsuite) against a homeless man. The event was caught on video.
A former Cameron County Sheriff's deputy was sentenced to a year in federal prison for transporting immigrants into the country illegally (http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Former-Cameron-County-deputy-constable-gets-one-6757408.php).
A Bexar County detention officer is facing termination and criminal charges (http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Detention-officer-accused-of-sex-assault-faces-6754611.php) over allegations that he sexually assaulted a female inmate.

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2016/01/tx-law-enforcement-misconduct-roundup.html

and of course, people keep dying in county jails.

boutons_deux

01-18-2016, 02:56 PM

Ohio cop uses police database to stalk his rape victim after she reports him

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/ohio-cop-uses-police-database-to-stalk-his-rape-victim-after-she-reports-him-prosecutors/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

01-19-2016, 11:51 AM

Supreme Court Rejects Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Appeal Over Immigration

http://a2.img.talkingpointsmemo.com/image/upload/c_fill,fl_keep_iptc,g_faces,h_365,w_652/cbrb6e8eyzxtdlpkqtva.jpg

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/joe-arpaio-supreme-court-no-appeal?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tpm-news+%28TPMNews%29

boutons_deux

01-20-2016, 05:28 AM

Police Officer Doesn’t See A Difference Between Black, Light-Skinned Black Suspects

http://i.onionstatic.com/onion/2702/0/16x9/1200.jpg

FORT WAYNE, IN—Explaining that his sole concern is serving and protecting his community, Fort Wayne police officer Vincent Turner told reporters Wednesday that he does not see any difference between black and light-skinned black suspects.

“As an officer of the law, I am committed to administering justice swiftly and even-handedly, regardless of whether the suspect has dark skin or really dark skin,” said Turner, adding that he has no problem giving a full pat-down to any potential criminal or hauling them down to precinct headquarters in the back of his patrol car, even if they are more of a light mocha color.

“When you’re responding to reports of gunshots fired, or sprinting down an alleyway, you’re not thinking about where the suspect falls on the spectrum of African-American skin tones—you’re thinking about doing your job.

Heck, the guy could be a very dark-looking Latino, for all I care—I treat every one of them the same. He’s still just a suspect to me.”

Turner added that his dedication to upholding the law stems from a belief that all

local residents should be able to walk their streets without fear, whether they come from an affluent white neighborhood or a working-class white neighborhood.

http://www.theonion.com/article/police-officer-doesnt-see-a-difference-between-bla-36683 (http://www.theonion.com/article/police-officer-doesnt-see-a-difference-between-bla-36683)

boutons_deux

01-24-2016, 10:25 AM

Inside Kentucky’s Unregulated Private Probation Industry

Getting busted with a small amount of fake marijuana led to a more expensive lesson in criminal justice than Timothy Lee Cook could have imagined.

Cook, 54, agreed to a plea deal in Hardin County District Court last summer that kept him out of jail, but cost him $186 in fines and court fees. He couldn’t afford it himself. Bedeviled by mental disorders, he hasn’t held a job for more than 20 years. His 74-year-old mother put up the money.

Now Cook is tasting the cost of probation. Every month for two years, he has to pay a $25 monitoring fee to a company that serves as a privatized probation agency.

Had he been arrested in one of the many Kentucky counties that monitor misdemeanor offenders themselves, the service wouldn’t have cost him a dime.

And if Cook’s probation company had based its fee on his ability to pay, as district judges are supposed to ensure, his monitoring would be free or discounted.

“I told them I was on disability because I have dyslexia and bipolar disorder, and I figured, well, maybe they’d work with me a little bit, maybe make my payments a little cheaper. But, no, it’s one flat rate,” Cook said before leaving on his 32-mile drive home to Leitchfield.

Cook’s was one of 38,780 state misdemeanor cases that ended with probated jail sentences in 2015. How many of those went to private companies is anyone’s guess because no one keeps track. The companies operate under no contracts, no legal agreements with the state, counties or the courts they serve. No one in the Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts knows how many such companies operate in the state, which counties they serve, how many defendants they monitor or how much they charge. No state agency monitors the monitors.

http://kycir.org/2016/01/20/inside-kentuckys-unregulated-private-probation-industry/

boutons_deux

01-24-2016, 09:45 PM

Private prisons tip of iceberg in profit-based corrections

While a great deal of attention is paid and criticism is devoted to private prisons, the truth about profit-based corrections remains more pernicious.

As these infographics from In the Public Interest depict, private companies profit from almost every function of the American criminal justice system (http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/private-companies-profit-from-almost-every/):

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2016/01/private-prisons-tip-of-iceberg-in.html

boutons_deux

01-25-2016, 02:35 PM

Some relief, and gues who the 3 dissenters are.

Supreme Court: Ban On Automatic Life Sentences For Juveniles Is Retroactive

The 6-3 ruling means that some 2,100 juvenile murders will now have the possibility of parole.

As NPR's Nina Totenberg reported (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=448182651), this case was a "procedural spiderweb." But the implications of it were easy to understand: At issue was whether a previous ruling by the high court applied to Henry Montgomery, who killed a police officer in 1963 when he was 17-years-old. Montgomery was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But back in 2012, the Supreme Court decided that sentencing youth to life without parole amounted to cruel and usual punishment. That rule obviously applied to all future cases, but what about past cases?

The Supreme Court resolved today that it did indeed have jurisdiction to review this case and that its previous ruling was substantial enough that it should apply retroactively.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/25/464303622/supreme-court-ban-on-automatic-life-sentences-for-juveniles-is-retroactive?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app

boutons_deux

01-25-2016, 08:47 PM

Officer Indicted for Using Taser on City Official in Texas

A grand jury has indicted a police officer after he used a stun gun on a City Council member in a small, predominantly black Texas college town, authorities said Monday.
Prairie View officer Michael Kelley was indicted for official oppression, a misdemeanor, on Friday said E. Rivera, chief investigator for the Waller County District Attorney’s Office.

Kelley couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Monday.

Police said the incident began last October when they questioned four men outside Prairie View City Council Member Jonathan Miller’s apartment about suspicious activity in the neighborhood and Miller intervened. Video from police and from one of Miller’s friends showed Kelley using a Taser on Miller when he didn’t follow police commands.

Miller and a female officer also at the scene are both black while Kelley is white.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1950048-officer-indicted-for-using-taser-on-city-official-in-texas/

boutons_deux

01-26-2016, 03:51 PM

Cleveland fires six police officers over fatal shooting of unarmed black man and woman

Six Cleveland police officers were fired over their involvement in a November 2012 chase that led to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man and woman, city officials said on Tuesday.Six other officers in the incident, which involved a 137-shot barrage, were suspended for 21 to 30 days and another retired last year, officials said.

“The incident was unprecedented,” Cleveland Police Commander James Chura told reporters of the shooting, which killed Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell. “It took an investigation just as unprecedented to get to the truth.”

The decision to fire the officers comes as U.S. law enforcement is under scrutiny for the use of lethal force against minority groups. It followed a series of high-profile deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with police, which have prompted sometimes violent demonstrations.

The Cleveland chase lasted more than 20 minutes and went through multiple cities at speeds topping 90 mph (145 kph), ending in a school parking lot where Russell was shot 24 times and Williams 23 times.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/cleveland-fires-six-police-officers-over-fatal-shooting-of-unarmed-black-man-and-woman/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

and DA or prosecutor has something to say?

nah, these murderers will get hired sheriffs and constables, who seem to pick police discards.

boutons_deux

01-26-2016, 04:02 PM

Miami-Dade Prison Inmate Thrown Into Hot Shower for 2 Hours, but Death Is Ruled as ‘Accidental’

A Miami-Dade prison inmate’s death has been ruled “accidental,” despite it coming after he was forced to stay in a steaming shower for two hours.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s autopsy report was completed this week for the June 2012 death of Darren Rainey, a mentally ill inmate.

The report says Rainey died from complications of schizophrenia, heart disease and “confinement” in the shower, law enforcement sources told the Miami Herald (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/special-reports/florida-prisons/article56108525.html).

Rainey, 50, didn’t suffer any burns on his body and investigators couldn’t conclude the shower was “excessively” hot the day he collapsed, the report said.

The sources said the autopsy concluded that corrections officers had “no intent” to harm Rainey when they kept him in the shower for up to two hours.

But when staff finally took Rainey out of the stall, his skin seemingly melted off — a condition known as “slippage” caused by prolonged exposure to water, humidity and the “warm, moist” environment, the autopsy reported.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office must now decide whether to charge corrections officers with committing a crime, such as manslaughter, for locking Rainey in the shower and leaving him, according to the Herald.

Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/26/miami-dade-prisoner-shower-death-ruled-accident-darren-rainey?CMP=share_btn_fb) that it “defies belief” that Rainey, who was serving a two-year sentence for cocaine possession, and who had been locked in the shower after he defecated in his cell, died by accident.

“To accept the medical examiner’s conclusion you have to believe that he accidentally locked himself in a shower, then turned up the water temperature to 180 degrees, accidentally boiled himself to death and all the while he was screaming for help,” he told the Guardian. “That doesn’t sound to me much like an accident.”

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1950589-miami-dade-prison-inmate-thrown-into-hot-shower-for-2-hours-but-death-is-ruled-as-accidental/

boutons_deux

01-27-2016, 02:29 PM

Former Florida sheriff’s deputy indicted for beating of black man

A former Florida sheriff’s deputy has been indicted by a federal grand jury for using excessive force during a 2014 arrest where five white law enforcement officers were involved in the beating of a black man, U.S. Justice officials said on Wednesday.Former Marion County sheriff’s deputy Jesse Terrell, 33, was indicted late on Tuesday on a charge of depriving the man of his civil rights. The other officers previously pleaded guilty to that offense, court records show.

The officers have all either resigned or been terminated from the sheriff’s department in central Florida, said a spokeswoman for the agency, who confirmed the victim was black. Court records did not identify him by name.

The prosecutions come at a time of heightened scrutiny of the use of force by U.S. law enforcement, particularly against minorities.

Four deputies, including Terrell, struck the man during the August 2014 incident. It was captured on videotape, according to court records. The fifth officer watched and did not try to stop them.

The man was left bloodied in a parking lot where he was apprehended, after fleeing when authorities initially came to search his home. He had raised his hands in surrender and was lying on the ground, court records said.

The officers who pleaded guilty are awaiting sentencing.

An attorney for Terrell could not immediately be reached for comment. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/former-florida-sheriffs-deputy-indicted-for-beating-of-black-man/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

01-27-2016, 02:40 PM

An Assault on Justice

Federal prison guards are brutalizing inmates.

By John Kiriakou (http://otherwords.org/authors/john-kiriakou/)

The federal prison system certainly hasn’t seen the levels of inmate abuse that state and local prisons have become infamous for. New York’s Ryker’s Island, for example, is notorious for violent crimes committed by guards (http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Rikers-Correction-Officers-Arrested-Inmate-Beating-Coverup-137303958.html) against prisoners — including juveniles (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/08/412842780/kalief-browder-jailed-for-years-at-rikers-island-without-trial-commits-suicide)— who are sometimes chained or handcuffed while they’re assaulted.

A few months after I checked in at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, a new prisoner arrived. He was a former prison guard who’d used his steel-toed boots to stomp another prisoner unconscious. The Loretto guards were clear about the rules: “This is his house,” they told us. “If anybody even looks at him cross-eyed, they’re going to solitary.”

It didn’t really matter. After only a couple of months, the former guard was transferred to the minimum-security work camp across the street, despite the fact that he’d committed a violent crime. The fix was in.

One of my cellmates at Loretto, whom I’ll call “James,” was a mentally ill homeless man from Pittsburgh. He’d purposefully violated the terms of his federal probation so he could spend the winter months indoors.

James was clear with both the medical staff and his cellmates that he was mentally ill and needed to be medicated. We appreciated his candor.

But the medical staff’s primary mission is to keep costs low, and drugs for serious mental illness are expensive. Since James was supposed to go home in a few months anyway, they didn’t give him his meds. You can guess what happened: James began to spiral into insanity, and he was sent to solitary confinement.

James’s struggles angered the staff. After one incident in solitary,

he was stripped naked, beaten, and thrown outside.

It was January, and the temperature in the central Pennsylvania mountains was 10 degrees.

An eyewitness told me that James apologized and asked to be let back in.

He started crying after a couple of hours in the cold.

Then he curled up into a ball and fainted.

No guards were punished for what they did to James.

http://otherwords.org/an-assault-on-justice/

boutons_deux

01-27-2016, 03:12 PM

No charges for LAPD officers who shot newspaper delivery women during Dorner manhunt

Eight Los Angeles police (http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/law-enforcement/los-angeles-police-department-ORGOV000939-topic.html) officers who mistakenly opened fire on Los Angeles Times newspaper delivery women thinking they were rogue ex-cop Christopher Dorner (http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/crime/christopher-dorner-PEOCVC000250-topic.html) in 2013 will not be criminally charged, the L.A. County district attorney’s office announced Wednesday.The officers opened fire in the predawn hours of Feb. 7, 2013, as Margie Carranza and her mother, Emma Hernandez, were slowly cruising though a Torrance neighborhood in a pickup truck delivering papers.

Chief Charlie Beck (http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/law-enforcement/charlie-beck-PEGPF000051-topic.html) and the civilian commission that oversees the L.A. Police Department (http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/law-enforcement/los-angeles-police-department-ORGOV000939-topic.html) previously found that

the officers violated the LAPD's policy on using deadly force.

Beck faulted the officers (http://documents.latimes.com/chiefs-report-mistaken-id-shooting/) for jumping to the conclusion that Dorner was in the truck.

Beck said the officers compounded their mistake by shooting in one another's directions with an unrestrained barrage of gunfire.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-charges-lapd-shooting-newspaper-delivery-women-dorner-manhunt-20160127-story.html

boutons_deux

01-28-2016, 06:51 AM

black on black crime news

The Ticket Machine

Police higher-ups say the traffic unit has made Port Arthur a safer place to drive. The unit also caused the city’s yearly revenue from fines to soar, from $750,000 in 2006 (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2690512-2008-2009-Port-Arthur-budget.html#document/p13/a271779) up to as high as $2.1 million in 2012 (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2690513-2013-2014-Port-Arthur-budget.html#document/p13/a271780) before settling, most recently (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2690514-2015-2016-PROPOSED-BUDGET.html#document/p8/a271783), at $1.5 million.

But people who cannot afford to pay their fines — which can run to a thousand dollars or more — often wind up behind bars, leading to a great disparity in the consequences of traffic tickets on people’s lives.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machine#.cfAaw1ba9

Police say excessive ticketing "it's not for the (poor blacks') money, it's for their safety" :lol

boutons_deux

01-28-2016, 07:10 AM

“This is Just Evil”: Massive Private License Plate Database Tracks Car Locations Over Years (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/this-is-just-evil-massive-private-license-plate-database-tracks-car-locations-over-years.html)

A must-read article in the Atlantic describes yet another surveillance state advance that it was not hard to see coming: large-scale logging of time and location stamped license plate data, retained over years.

The company behind it, ominously called Vigilant Solutions, sells the information both to private parties and to law enforcement organizations. From the story (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/vigilant-solutions-surveillance/427047/):

The company has taken roughly 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80 million additional geotagged images.

They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored….

To install a GPS tracking device on your car, your local police department must present a judge with a rationale that meets a Fourth Amendment test and obtain a warrant. But if it wants to query a database to see years of data on where your car was photographed at specific times, it doesn’t need a warrant––just a willingness to send some of your tax dollars to Vigilant Solutions, which insists that license plate readers are “unlike GPS devices, RFID, or other technologies that may be used to track.” Its website states that “LPR is not ubiquitous, and only captures point in time information. And the point in time information is on a vehicle, not an individual.”

But thanks to Vigilant, its competitors, and license-plate readers used by police departments themselves, the technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous over time.

The article stresses that this form of surveillance may not be kosher, in that the ability to put together a person’s movements over time is not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind, from the idea that you have no presumption of privacy (and therefore protection from being photographed) when you are in public. And Vigilant and their ilk also argue that they are not tracking individuals but vehicles, as if the two are not the same in a high percentage of cases. But the bigger issue, which the article does not address explicitly, is that even if this sort of snooping is not legal (or at a minimum, not usable as evidence), it’s well on its way to being so well established as to be difficult to stop.

The Federal governments is supporting more license plate spying. Again from the story:

“During the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Georgia, population 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems,” the Wall Street Journal reports (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443995604578004723603576296). As one critic, California state Senator Joe Simitian, asked: “Should a cop who thinks you’re cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent? I think the answer to that question should be ‘no.’”

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/this-is-just-evil-massive-private-license-plate-database-tracks-car-locations-over-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29 (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/this-is-just-evil-massive-private-license-plate-database-tracks-car-locations-over-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29)

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/vigilant-solutions-surveillance/427047/

"information is on a vehicle, not an individual.” :lol

Govt and BigCorp have ALL the information they want, citizens have none on govt and BigCorp.

Information asymmetry is power asymmetry.

America is fucked and unfuckable.

boutons_deux

01-29-2016, 12:13 PM

Justice for Chloe: Owner Receives $262K Settlement for Dog Killed by Police

In the largest settlement of its kind in U.S. history, a Colorado man will receive $262,500 for the shooting death of Chloe (http://www.care2.com/causes/colorado-wants-to-stop-police-from-shooting-dogs.html), his 3-year-old Lab/pit bull mix therapy dog, by a police officer.

Commerce City police officer Robert Price claimed Chloe ran aggressively toward him in November 2012, so he shot the dog five times.

But a witness recorded a video of the incident (http://archive.9news.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=1989226020001) (it’s disturbing and graphic — consider yourself warned) that tells an entirely different story.

http://www.care2.com/causes/justice-for-chloe-owner-receives-262k-settlement-for-dog-killed-by-police.html

====

video here of cop shooting the non-threatening, stationary dog in a garage: slide to about 3/4 point

http://archive.9news.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=1989226020001

boutons_deux

02-03-2016, 10:45 AM

NYPD Triples the Strength of Their Pepper Spray Because the Old Stuff Didn’t Hurt Enough

Only in the twisted minds of NYPD officials would “more powerful weapons” be a solution to prevent their officers from killing people. Sadly, this is no joke. The NYPD recently announced that they are planning to stock more powerful and potent pepper spray, and they actually claim that this would be intended to prevent police from shooting people.

The potency that has been used by the NYPD and other departments previously is already highly dangerous with a concentration of just .21% capsaicinoids. The new spray will be concentrated at .67% which will undoubtedly be more dangerous and far more painful. The NYPD has already begun rolling out the new concentration and has equipped over 19,000 officers with the new mixture.

NYPD Deputy Chief Edward Mullen claimed in an interview with the Daily News (http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-hopes-new-pepper-spray-lead-shootings-article-1.2510683) that a higher concentrated pepper spray would help officers subdue unruly suspects more easily.

“A more effective pepper spray can help reduce the amount of force needed to gain control of a suspect or emotionally disturbed person,” Mullen said.
Mullen also noted that NYPD officers have been learning to use pepper spray less, claiming that NYPD officers only used pepper spray 284 times, which is down from 337 the year before.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/nypd-triples-strength-their-pepper-spray-because-old-stuff-didnt-hurt-enough?akid=13941.187590.Nc-GBL&rd=1&src=newsletter1050050&t=20

boutons_deux

02-04-2016, 03:50 PM

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/story_images/chidashcams.jpg

boutons_deux

02-04-2016, 04:08 PM

Report Cites Failure to Act Against Abusers of Juveniles in Detention

the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted anonymous surveys of youngsters in custody. Those surveys have produced startling estimates (https://www.propublica.org/article/rape-and-other-sexual-violence-prevalent-in-juvenile-justice-system): that some 10 percent of children in detention have reported sexual abuse by either staff or peers, often repeatedly, and often at the hands of female guards who victimize boys (https://www.propublica.org/article/rape-and-other-sexual-violence-prevalent-in-juvenile-justice-system).

In the vast majority of cases where youngsters formally report being abused, investigations done by facility administrators fail to support the claim. Advocates such as Stannow have long questioned the rigor and quality of those investigations. And they point to an incontrovertible truth the report lays bare: when investigations confirm that staff members sexually abused a youngster, the staff members too often receive no punishment beyond losing their jobs, if that.

Only 36 percent of staff members found to have abused children, the report found, were referred to the authorities for possible criminal prosecution. Only 16 percent wound up arrested. And roughly 20 percent actually kept their jobs.

“When staff who sexually abuse kids in their custody are allowed to get off scot-free and, in some cases, continue to be employed in the very facility where they committed the abuse, it’s a clear sign that the system is failing,” Stannow said. “We are talking about known perpetrators, adults who are typically employed in public facilities supported by our tax dollars. The lack of accountability described in the new BJS report is simply outrageous.”

The report also found that more than half the victims of staff sexual misconduct, some younger than 12, receive no medical follow up care. Fewer than 8 percent of confirmed victims of staff sexual misconduct were tested for sexually transmitted disease.

https://www.propublica.org/article/report-cites-failure-to-act-against-abusers-of-juveniles-in-detention?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

boutons_deux

02-06-2016, 09:43 PM

stupid sadist doesn't know how to erase or turn off the camera

New Mexico Deputy Charged With Slapping Teen That Was Captured on Video

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1960045-new-mexico-deputy-charged-with-slapping-teen-that-was-captured-on-video/

boutons_deux

02-12-2016, 11:18 AM

Mental health care by cops: shoot!

When the Hospital Fires the Bullet

More and more hospital guards across the country carry weapons, sparking a fierce debate over whether that improves safety or endangers patients.

patients seeking help at hospitals across the country have instead been injured or killed by those guarding the institutions. Medical centers are not required to report such encounters, so little data is available and health experts suspect that some cases go unnoticed. Police blotters, court documents and government health reports have identified more than a dozen in recent years.

They have occurred as more and more American hospitals are arming guards with guns and Tasers, setting off a fierce debate among health care officials about whether such steps — along with greater reliance on law enforcement or military veterans — improve safety or endanger patients.

The same day Mr. Pean was shot, a patient with mental health (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/mentalhealthanddisorders/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) problemswas shot by (http://fox8.com/2015/08/27/police-man-shot-after-taking-security-officers-taser-in-hospital-emergency-room/) an off-duty police officer working security at a hospital in Garfield Heights, Ohio. Last month, a hospital security officer shot a patient (http://www.campussafetymagazine.com/article/hospital_security_officer_shoots_patient_after_str uggle) with bipolar illness in Lynchburg, Va.

Two psychiatric patients died, one in Utah, another in Ohio, after guards repeatedly shocked them with Tasers.

In Pennsylvania and Indiana, hospitals have been disciplined by government health officials or opened inquiries after guards used stun guns against patients, including a woman bound with restraints in bed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/hospital-guns-mental-health.html?_r=0

boutons_deux

02-13-2016, 12:45 AM

Cop Placed on Leave After Comment About Activist’s Suicide

FAIRBORN, Ohio (AP) — Officials say an Ohio police officer is being put on paid leave over a Facebook comment about a Black Lives Matter activist who killed himself on the Statehouse steps.

The comment posted under Fairborn officer Lee Cyr’s account reads “Love a happy ending.” It was posted on the Ohio Politics Facebook page Wednesday, two days after MarShawn McCarrel II killed himself.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1965148-cop-placed-on-leave-after-comment-about-activists-suicide/

:lol Working assumption is that ALL police are sadistic, murderous racists, until proven otherwise.

boutons_deux

02-14-2016, 03:43 PM

The NYPD Is Kicking People out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven't Committed a Crime

And it’s happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods.

The nuisance abatement law was created in the 1970’s to combat the sex industry in Times Square. Since then, its use has been vastly expanded, commonly targeting apartments and mom-and-pop bodegas even as the city’s crime rate has reached historic lows. The NYPD files upward of 1,000 such cases a year, nearly half of them against residences.

Barred From Home
The process has remarkably few protections for people facing the loss of their homes

Three-quarters of the cases begin with secret court orders that lock residents out until the case is resolved. The police need a judge’s signoff, but residents aren’t notified and thus have no chance to tell their side of the story until they’ve already been locked out for days. And because these are civil actions, residents also have no right to an attorney.

Perhaps most fundamentally, residents can be permanently barred from their homes without being convicted or even charged with a crime.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/nypd-kicking-people-out-their-homes-even-if-they-havent-committed-crime

I wouldn't be surprised if landlords, property developers were paying police, judge, etc under table.

boutons_deux

02-15-2016, 04:38 AM

After Seven Long Years, the Question Remains: Who Killed Rafael Solis in a Texas Jail?

In 2009, Rafael Solis, a 38-year-old father of two, was taken into custody in Webb County, Texas, for falling behind on child support payments. Within days, he died in jail in Laredo after suffering extensive physical injuries, and the Webb County coroner ruled the death a homicide. After seven years with no prosecutions, Solis’ mother is crying out for justice.

Maria Escamilla says she learned of her son’s death after the Webb County jail phoned and asked her to go to a gas station. It was there that two deputies gave her the news. They would say only that “[h]e was just lying on the [jail] floor,” according to Escamilla.

Escamilla’s cause has been taken up by the Public Justice Foundation (http://www.publicjustice.net/content/justice-rafael-fighting-inmate-abuse-texas-jails), which is leading a campaign for accountability in the death and has taken action (http://www.publicjustice.net/sites/default/files/2015.12.23%20Response%20Br..pdf) in civil court. Its demands include a call for an investigation of Texas jails (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/12/1484073/-Inmates-are-Dying-in-Texas-Jails) in general.

Escamilla has turned to the news media in seeking answers. On Friday an article she wrote was published in the British newspaper The Guardian. In it she tells her side of the story (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/rafael-solis-stomped-to-death-texas-jail-cell-2009-nobody-held-accountable):

The truth, we now know from official reports, was that Rafael was put in handcuffs and shackles, held face down against the floor of his cell, stomped on and beaten until he died.

He had two fractured ribs, diaphragm contusions, hemorrhages on his back and chest and bruises and abrasions all over his body. A subsequent report from the Texas Rangers even noted there were cross-patterns on his body that matched the laces from a jailor’s boot and a bruise on his face that matched the pattern of the drain on the floor of his cell.

The jailers claim that Rafael was experiencing alcohol withdrawal, and jailors were just trying [to] help by putting his pants on him so he could be transported to the hospital. But broken ribs aren’t a symptom of alcohol withdrawal. And bruises all over your body, or boot prints on your chest, don’t usually result from trying to get someone get dressed.

According to the coroner, the jailors’ “help” asphyxiated Rafael, and he died.

Yet when a court recently ruled that seven jailors implicated in Rafael’s death should stand trial in a case saying their excessive force killed my son, all seven appealed. Each now claims they have immunity from prosecution because, well, they were just doing their jobs, in their official capacity, at the Webb County jail. The appeal is pending as my family and I continue to wait for justice. [Truthdig editor’s note: The jailors are the targets of a lawsuit alleging excessive force, but none has ever been officially charged with a crime.]

We may never know for sure what “doing their jobs” included, because the jailhouse cameras were—for a reason we still have not been told—not recording on the day Rafael died.

Public Justice has posted an online petition (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/613/205/506/) headed “Demand Justice For Rafael. Call For A Full Investigation Into Deaths In Texas Jails.” It cites the notorious case of Sandra Bland (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/us/texas-grand-jury-sandra-bland.html?_r=0), found hanged in a Waller County jail, in addition to the Rafael Solis death.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/after_seven_long_years_the_question_remains_who_ki lled_rafael_solis_in_a_te?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Truthdig+Truthdig%253A+Dril ling+Beneath+the+Headlines

Not a good idea to be brown or black is slave state Texas

boutons_deux

02-21-2016, 07:51 AM

Man accused of killing 6 in Michigan shooting spree has no criminal history, police say

http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/lt/lt_cache/thumbnail/610/img/photos/2016/02/21/60/1b/jason_dalton.jpg

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/national/man-accused-killing-7-michigan-shooting-spree-has-/nqTht/

taken alive! Thank God!

#WhiteMurderersLivesMatter

boutons_deux

02-21-2016, 08:02 AM

Pivotal Nursing Home Suit Raises a Simple Question: Who Signed the Contract?

Arbitration clauses have proliferated over the last 10 years as companies have added them to tens of millions of contracts for things as diverse as cellphone service, credit cards and student loans (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/student_loans/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier). Nursing homes in particular have embraced the clauses, which are often buried in complex contracts that are difficult to navigate, especially for elderly people with dwindling mental acuity or their relatives, who can be emotionally vulnerable when admitting a parent to a home.

Between 2010 and 2014, hundreds of cases of elder abuse, neglect and wrongful death ended up in arbitration, according to an examination by The New York Times of 25,000 arbitration records and interviews with arbitrators, judges and plaintiffs.

Judges have consistently upheld the clauses, The Times found, regardless of whether the people signing them understood what they were forfeiting. It is the most basic principle of contract law: Once a contract is signed, judges have ruled, it is legally binding.

It is a straightforward argument that is catching on. Appeals courts across the country have been throwing out arbitration agreements signed by family members of nursing home residents.

For years, judges hearing elder-abuse cases rejected arguments that arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts were patently unfair because they were signed by people who did not understand them or perhaps even realize they existed.

In a circuit court case involving a man in a Mississippi nursing home who could not read, write or sign his name, the judges held that under state law, “illiteracy alone is not a sufficient basis for the invalidation of an arbitration agreement.”

“Any normal human being would say that these contracts don’t pass the smell test. But the courts don’t accept this,”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/dealbook/pivotal-nursing-home-suit-raises-a-simple-question-who-signed-the-contract.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

No matter how fucking unjust or insane a law, lawyers, judges, politicians hold it as sacred, untouchable, as
Corporate-Americans fleece, crush Human-Ameriacans.

boutons_deux

02-24-2016, 11:52 AM

The TSA Releases Data on Air Marshal Misconduct, 7 Years After We Asked

Federal air marshals were arrested nearly 150 times between late 2002 and early 2012. Why did it take the Transportation Security Administration seven and a half years to release the data?

https://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-releases-data-on-air-marshal-misconduct-7-years-after-we-asked?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1456331997

boutons_deux

03-03-2016, 10:51 AM

Texas Trooper Who Arrested Sandra Bland Is Officially Fired

Trooper Brian Encinia has been indicted on charges of lying about his arrest of Bland, later found hanged in a jail cell.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-trooper-fired_us_56d774e9e4b0000de4035a51?

DarrinS

03-03-2016, 10:58 AM

There would probably be major riots in Baltimore, if this was a white cop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N432rbvCeyo

boutons_deux

03-03-2016, 11:21 AM

The South will remain unrisen

Georgia cops busted for arresting people on bogus charges as part of extortion racket

(http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/georgia-cops-busted-for-arresting-people-on-bogus-charges-as-part-of-extortion-racket/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29)http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/georgia-cops-busted-for-arresting-people-on-bogus-charges-as-part-of-extortion-racket/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

03-22-2016, 01:31 PM

Officer yelling ‘deplorable’ racial slurs crushes mail carrier’s eye socket for urinating in the woods

http://2d0yaz2jiom3c6vy7e7e5svk.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/necn_alvarado_160322a-800x430.jpg

A Connecticut Department of Correction officer was arrested over the weekend after he was accused of assaulting a mail carrier and using racial slurs.According to Waterbury police, 42-year-old Daniel Alvarado reacted in anger when he observed his mail carrier, 23-year-old Roshane Thompson, urinating in a wooded area near his property on Saturday, NECN reported (http://www.necn.com/news/new-england/Correction-Officer-Accused-of-Assaulting-Mail-Carrier-372992261.html).

Alvarado reportedly approached Thompson with a handgun and put the firearm against the postal employee’s stomach. The corrections officer then handed the gun over to his girlfriend and began physically attacking Thompson while yelling racial slurs, police said.

Alvarado was accused of repeatedly punching Thompson in the face and slamming his head onto the pavement.

Police later found Thompson lying next to his mail truck. He was transported to a nearby hospital where he was treated for a broken eye socket.

Alvarado is facing charges of second-degree assault with a firearm, reckless endangerment, carrying a firearm while intoxicated and second-degree bigotry.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/officer-yelling-deplorable-racial-slurs-crushes-mail-carriers-eye-socket-for-urinating-in-the-woods/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

... what does it take to rate "first-degree" bigotry? :lol

boutons_deux

03-22-2016, 01:49 PM

Shocking force: Police in Maryland didn't follow Taser safety recommendations in hundreds of incidents

As two Montgomery County police officers slowly closed in with Tasers pointed, Anthony Howard retreated up a small step and backed himself against the front door of a townhome on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Washington suburb of Gaithersburg.Minutes earlier, the 51-year-old man had asked an officer: "Are you gonna kill me?"

High on cocaine, Howard started the standoff by dancing barefoot on an SUV roof, barking and muttering gibberish on the late afternoon of April 19, 2013. Two dozen neighbors gawking at the bizarre spectacle laughed when Howard jumped off the Ford SUV to avoid an officer's stream of pepper spray, and they taunted police, urging them to use their stun guns.

Police said in a report on the incident that Howard had thrown "boulders" and charged at officers. But a 17-minute video taken by a resident and obtained by The Baltimore Sun shows that when officers approached Howard for the last time, he was standing still, holding a child's scooter. Officers fired two Tasers, shooting electrified darts connected by long wires into Howard's body.

The first-ever data analysis of all Taser incidents in Maryland reveals that police agencies across the state have predominantly used the devices against suspects who posed no immediate threat. In hundreds of cases over a three-year period, police didn't follow widely accepted safety recommendations.

Legal and policing experts worry that misuse is rampant across the nation as an increasing number of departments outfit more officers with stun guns; a Taser is used by law enforcement 904 times a day on average. The experts warn that too often officers are turning to Tasers before exhausting other means of dealing with disorderly people, actions that courts are beginning to brand as unconstitutional excessive force.

And while the Taser has been hailed as a less-lethal way to handle difficult situations, police and even the manufacturer say if the weapon isn't used right, it can lead to death.

More than 400 people have died nationwide since 2009 in encounters in which police used electronic-control weapons such as Tasers, a Sun analysis shows. California tops the list with more than 60 deaths.

Maryland ranks in the top 15 with 11 deaths, including five who died after being hit by Tasers for longer than what is now recommended.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/investigations/bal-tasers-in-maryland-story.html

boutons_deux

03-29-2016, 11:24 AM

Trial and Error: Report Says Prosecutors Rarely Pay Price for Mistakes and Misconduct

The Innocence Project released a report (http://www.innocenceproject.org/news-events-exonerations/prosecutorial-oversight-report) Tuesday alleging that prosecutors across the country are almost never punished when they withhold evidence or commit other forms of misconduct that land innocent people in prison.

All told, the researchers discovered 660 findings of prosecutorial error or misconduct. In the overwhelming majority of cases, 527, judges upheld the convictions, finding that the prosecutorial lapse did not impact the fairness of the defendant’s original trial. In 133 cases, convictions were thrown out.
Only one prosecutor was disciplined by any oversight authorities,

The report was issued on the anniversary of a controversial Supreme Court ruling for those trying to achieve justice in the wake of wrongful convictions. In a 5–4 decision in the case known as Connick v. Thompson, the court tossed out a $14-million dollar award by a Louisiana jury to John Thompson, a New Orleans man who served 18 years in prison for a murder and robbery he did not commit.

The majority ruled that while the trial prosecutors had withheld critical evidence of Thompson’s likely innocence – blood samples from the crime scene – the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office could not be found civilly liable for what the justices essentially determined was the mistake of a handful of employees. The decision hinged on a critical finding: that the District Attorney’s office, and the legal profession in general, provides sufficient training and oversight for all prosecutors.

https://www.propublica.org/article/report-says-prosecutors-rarely-pay-price-for-mistakes-and-misconduct?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1459252889

5 (https://www.propublica.org/article/report-says-prosecutors-rarely-pay-price-for-mistakes-and-misconduct?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1459252889)-4? wanna guess who those 5 and 4 were? :lol

boutons_deux

04-04-2016, 08:57 AM

Idaho mom calls police to report she’d found her missing son — and cops come smash

Olzak said she called dispatchers to report the boy was home and safe, and officers came to the family’s home to investigate.

She spoke to one of the Idaho Falls officers about the case, and Olzak said the officer then went to question her son.

“I just wanted them to be aware,” Olzak said. “They came over. I talked to an officer for a minute and he walked over to my son. Then he put my son’s hand behind his back and, like, lifted him up in the air and slammed his face into the trunk of a car.”

Courtney Beck, who owns the car, said she the officer had “”absolutely no reason” to use violence against the boy.

“He put his arm behind his back and his head into the back of trunk hard enough that it chipped his tooth, and then placed him under arrest,”said Beck.

The boy suffered a chipped tooth and facial injuries in the incident.

Olzak said she had to call for another officer before police offered medical assistance to her bleeding son, who was taken to a hospital in handcuffs.

Police told the TV station that the boy had been reported as a runaway, and they said Idaho law allows police to arrest and detain runaway children and then release them later to family members.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/idaho-mom-calls-police-to-report-shed-found-her-missing-son-and-cops-come-smash-the-boys-face/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

... if the kid were black?

boutons_deux

04-07-2016, 08:22 AM

Rhodes Middle School student slammed by SAISD police officer

http://www.kens5.com/news/education/in-our-schools/rhodes-middle-school-student-slammed-by-saisd-police-officer/123085099

Splits

04-07-2016, 08:26 AM

Video shows SAISD officer slamming middle school girl to the ground
Officer Joshua Kehm placed on paid administrative leave
http://www.ksat.com/news/video-shows-saisd-officer-slamming-middle-school-girl-to-the-ground

boutons_deux

04-09-2016, 05:10 AM

How Private Prison Companies Use Big Tax Breaks and Low Wages to Maximize Profit

The two largest private prison firms in the United States are exploiting a loophole in the tax code to secure millions of dollars in corporate tax breaks.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group avoided a combined $113 million in federal income taxes in 2015 alone, according to an analysis of federal financial filings by the racial and economic justice group Enlace (http://www.enlaceintl.org/).

The prison business is booming despite efforts (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35116-the-private-prison-business-is-booming-despite-reform-efforts) to reduce the nation's prison population, which has exploded in recent decades and forced the government to contract with private prison companies to meet demand. Last year, CCA reported $222 million in net profits, and GEO Group reported $139 million.

CCA and GEO Group have enjoyed increased profits per prisoner housed in their facilities since 2012, when both companies began converting themselves into special real estate trusts that are exempt from the federal corporate income tax, at least in the eyes of the IRS.

The conversion has effectively lowered each company's tax rate by 30 percent or more, according to annual reports submitted to investors and regulators.

CCA, which owns 66 jails and prisons nationwide and runs an additional 11 facilities on behalf of the federal and state governments, reported a net income tax benefit of nearly $138 million in 2013 alone.

The massive tax breaks have enraged prison reformers and advocates for communities impacted by incarceration, and they are currently petitioning Congress to remove them (http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/no-tax-breaks-for-private).

Federal law requires the bulk of these tax benefits to be paid out to shareholders in dividends, so the benefits do not trickle down to average private prison employees unless they are stockholders themselves.

From 2012 to 2015, the average hourly wage for correctional officers at both companies dropped from $16.47 per hour to $15.53, according to an analysis (http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/private-prison-ceos-continue-to-make-much-more-than-the-correctional-officers-that-work-for-them/) by the watchdog group In the Public Interest

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35564-how-private-prison-companies-use-big-tax-breaks-and-low-wages-to-maximize-profit

America is corrupted to unfuckability by BigCorp as BigCorp corrupts politicians.

boutons_deux

04-09-2016, 05:30 AM

Black Helicopter news

Spies In The Skies

America is being watched from above. Government surveillance planes routinely circle over most major cities — but usually take the weekends off.

Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with “augmented reality” software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines — making them hard to detect by the people they’re spying on.

The government’s airborne surveillance has received little public scrutiny — until now. BuzzFeed News has assembled an unprecedented picture of the operation’s scale and sweep by analyzing aircraft location data collected by the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 (https://www.flightradar24.com/) from mid-August to the end of December last year, identifying about 200 federal aircraft. Day after day, dozens of these planes circled above cities across the nation.

Day after day, dozens of these planes circled above cities across the nation.

The FBI and the DHS would not discuss the reasons for individual flights but told BuzzFeed News that their planes are not conducting mass surveillance.

The DHS said that its aircraft were involved with securing the nation’s borders, as well as targeting drug smuggling and human trafficking, and may also be used to support investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The FBI said that its planes are only used to target suspects in specific investigations of serious crimes, pointing to a statement (https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-aviation-program-purpose-and-scope) issued in June 2015, after reporters and lawmakers (http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-wants-more-details-fbi-aerial-surveillance-program) started asking questions about FBI surveillance flights.

“It should come as no surprise that the FBI uses planes to follow terrorists, spies, and serious criminals,” said FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, in that statement. “We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so.”

But most of these government planes took the weekends off. The BuzzFeed News analysis found that surveillance flight time dropped more than 70% on Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays. :lol

http://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies

z0sa

04-09-2016, 05:48 AM

:lol thinking that they are not conducting mass surveillance. As much as I hate to agree with their tactics, though, using the current constitutional and generally, felony laws a basis, they have every right to watch us.

boutons_deux

04-11-2016, 09:30 AM

racist pigs news

More blacks and Latinos lose their driver’s licenses than whites due to unpaid tickets

African American and Latino drivers in California have another reason to question police these days.

A recent study (http://maps.ebclc.org/backontheroad/) from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area used U.S. Census Bureau data, records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and records from 15 police and sheriff’s departments in California that track the results of unpaid traffic citations.

The findings showed unmistakably that people of color have a higher rate of losing their license due to unpaid tickets as well as a higher rate of being arrested for driving on a suspended license.

“Individuals who cannot afford to pay an infraction citation are being arrested, jailed and prosecuted, and are losing their licenses and their livelihoods,” the report in theLA Times said (http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-license-suspensions-bias-20160411-story.html).

“The communities impacted by these policies are disproportionately communities of color.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/more-blacks-and-latinos-lose-their-drivers-licenses-than-whites-due-to-unpaid-tickets/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

04-11-2016, 07:26 PM

District Fires Cop Who Threw Girl to Ground in Viral Video

https://www.texasobserver.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/201604-josh-kehm-fb.jpg

Officer Joshua Kehm, who was shown in a widely circulated video throwing a 12-year-old Central Texas student to the ground, was fired Monday by the San Antonio Independent School District Police Department.

He’d worked for the district for more than a year, but had not yet completed a new course in school policing, which the state began offering in early 2016.

https://www.texasobserver.org/saisd-joshua-kehm-fired/

Joshua Kehm, and he went.

boutons_deux

04-13-2016, 01:39 PM

A Machinery Of Denial

Chicago police officer Gil Sierra shot three black men in six months and stayed on the force. This is how the city with more police shootings than any other in America circles its wagons.

Pinex’s death was one of 70 fatal police shootings in Chicago between 2010 and 2014, more than any police department in America over that stretch. And like other fatal police shootings in this city, it set in motion a series of familiar events and decisions, a set of practices that almost always leads to the same result: Chicago police officers facing little to no punishment.

A Georgia State University review of Chicago police shootings from 2006 to 2014 found that 95% of victims were people of color.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/a-machinery-of-denial-how-chicago-protects-police-involved-i#.grbA4GZrN

TheSanityAnnex

04-13-2016, 02:18 PM

boutons_deux

04-13-2016, 10:28 PM

:lol Chicago

http://heyjackass.com/

TSA :lol seek mental health care.

boutons_deux

04-13-2016, 10:29 PM

NYPD Gets Sued After Kicking Wrong Family Out of Home

The New York Police Department got an order kicking a family of four out of their Queens apartment by telling a judge it was a drug den — but the dealers had moved out seven months earlier.

A lawsuit to be filed in Brooklyn Federal Court on Tuesday details an egregious case of the NYPD’s use of the nuisance abatement law — a controversial tool in which cops are able to get a temporary order barring people from their homes without first giving them the opportunity to appear before a judge.

The bungled operation left Austria Bueno, 32, a housekeeper, crashing at a hotel and on a relative’s floor, beside her two sons and husband, for four nights, as they waited for their first court date.

“Everybody cried. Me, I was crying like a baby,” said Bueno. “I don’t deserve that. My kids don’t deserve that either.”

Her lawsuit, which cites the Daily News and ProPublica’s ongoing investigation (https://www.propublica.org/article/nypd-nuisance-abatement-evictions) into the NYPD’s misuse of the nuisance abatement law, seeks to have the legislation and its provision for secret lockout orders declared unconstitutional.

A new analysis by the Daily News has also found the number of cases filed by the NYPD has dropped substantially since the first investigation was published in February.

Bueno’s ordeal began before she even got to the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City. Police say a confidential informant purchased crack at her future apartment twice in January 2015. A subsequent search turned up crack, weapons and $21,500.

Bueno and her family moved into the apartment months later, in August 2015.

https://www.propublica.org/article/nypd-gets-sued-after-kicking-wrong-family-out-of-home?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1460472902

TheSanityAnnex

04-13-2016, 10:35 PM

TSA :lol seek mental health care.
:lol says the forums 24/7 spammer

boutons_deux

04-15-2016, 07:46 AM

UC Davis Wants You To Forget About Its Pepper Spray Incident. So Here’s The Video

University of California Davis spent an exorbitant amount of money to make you forget that one of its officers pepper-sprayed a bunch of students for protesting tuition hikes.

The video, photos and memes that resulted were such a public relations nightmare for the school that it paid $175,000 for consultants to scrub its negative search results and improve the reputation of university Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi,

UC Davis would pay almost $1 million (https://archive.org/stream/441332-stipulation-for-uc-davis-settlement/441332-stipulation-for-uc-davis-settlement_djvu.txt) in settlement money to 21 students and their lawyers. It put Pike and former UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza on paid administrative leave (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/annette-spicuzza-uc-davis-police-chief-resigning-after-pepper-spray-controversy/) for an undisclosed amount of money and time. Then, the university awarded Pike more than $38,000 (http://www.sfgate.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/UC-Davis-pepper-spray-officer-awarded-38-000-4920773.php) in workers compensation for “psychiatric injury” he sustained during the fallout.

In all, UC Davis has funneled millions toward its problem. Here’s a breakdown:

$980,000 — In 2012, a settlement was reached to pay 21 students $30,000 each, pay $250,000 to their lawyers, and set aside an extra $100,000 in case more plaintiffs joined the class action.
$175,000 — In 2013, UC Davis hired various consultants to improve the university’s search results online and boost its image.
$38,055 — Two years after the incident, Lt. Pike was awarded workers compensation for psychiatric damage.
$2,540,000 — The Bee found that the university increased its strategic communications budget from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015, in part so that the “reputation of the university is fairly portrayed.”

An unknown amount of money spent while Pike and former police Chief Annette Spicuzza were on paid administrative leave.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/uc-davis-pepper-spray-video_us_570fc93fe4b03d8b7b9fb62b?

boutons_deux

04-15-2016, 06:17 PM

National Crime Agency Used Hundreds Of Flawed Warrants, Official Review Finds

Almost 90% of the warrants used by Britain’s elite crime-fighters to search property and seize evidence have been found to be faulty by a sweeping independent review, after BuzzFeed News uncovered the “systemic” failings last year.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomwarren/national-crime-agency-used-hundreds-of-flawed-search-warrant#.ht72bWG61

.G.

04-16-2016, 09:01 PM

Innocent man ends up pals with crooked cop who framed him.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/on-the-road-innocent-michigan-man-ends-up-working-alongside-crooked-cop-that-locked-him/

"I falsified the report," former Benton Harbor police officer Andrew Collins admitted.

"Basically, at the start of that day, I was going to make sure I had another drug arrest." And in the end, he put an innocent guy in jail.

boutons_deux

04-17-2016, 07:37 AM

Pennsylvania cop threatens child on school bus: Don’t smile or I’ll drag you to the f*cking police car

A police officer outside the city of Pittsburgh was caught on tape berating a school child on a bus for smiling at him, according to a video posted to Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/micah.dean.501/videos/1715787665369155/?permPage=1).The video was posted on April 13 but the caption doesn’t give much in the way of details.

It says the officer works for the Braddock Police Department.

He walks over to a child seated on a school bus and leans over threateningly.

“Smile in my face one more time and I’ll be dragging your ass off this bus and back to that f*cking police car,” the officer says. “Don’t smile one more time.”

The video doesn’t show the child he was talking to, but the other children on the bus seem to be elementary school-age.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/pennsylvania-cop-threatens-child-on-school-bus-dont-smile-or-ill-drag-you-to-the-fcking-police-car/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

Law enforcement, prison work attracts murderous, sadistic, racist, dickless bullies. Wannabe macho skinheads hiding behind external, not intrinsic power, hiding behind dark glasses.

boutons_deux

04-18-2016, 06:02 AM

Over 7,800 Prosecutions Questioned After NJ Lab Tech Caught Faking Drug Test Results

from the so-fast-the-tests-can't-even-keep-up-with-him dept

Hey, it's only someone's freedom at stake (http://www.nj.com/passaic-county/index.ssf/2016/03/state_police_lab_tech_allegedly_faked_results_in_p .html#incart_river_index). Why try harder? (via Fusion.net (http://fusion.net/story/276350/kamalkant-shah-fake-drug-test-new-jersey/))

A lab technician for the State Police allegedly faked results in a drug case, and has drawn into question 7,827 criminal cases on which he worked, according to state officials.

Kamalkant Shah worked as a laboratory technician for the State Police laboratory in Little Falls and was found to have "dry labbed" suspected marijuana, according to a Feb. 29 memo to Public Defender Joseph Krakora from Deputy Public Defender Judy Fallon (http://www.muni-mail.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fallonmemo.pdf).

Shah's essentially accused of making up data."Basically, he was observed writing 'test results' for suspected marijuana that was never tested," Fallon said in the memo.

If Shah wasn't concerned about putting a possibly innocent person behind bars, it's unlikely his yearly salary of $101,039 would have been much of a motivating factor for better work either. It could be that this was an isolated incident -- the one time Shah cut corners to increase throughput.

(Which, truth be told, is kind of how our entire criminal justice system (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150715/11374931651/judge-kozinski-theres-very-little-justice-our-so-called-justice-system.shtml) operates: throughput is preferable (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140828/11204628350/miraculous-works-criminal-justice-system.shtml) to diligent effort.)

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160304/07245133805/over-7800-prosecutions-questioned-after-nj-lab-tech-caught-faking-drug-test-results.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techdirt%2Ffeed+%28Techdirt%2 9

boutons_deux

04-19-2016, 06:34 AM

Judge holds public defender in contempt for doing his job (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/15/1515684/-Judge-holds-public-defender-in-contempt-for-doing-his-job)

Weill was hearing arguments from the state to revoke the bond given in County Court to a woman her office represented. The woman was in court with her 3-month-old baby and both began to cry.

Routh requested a finding on why bail for the accused was being denied and Weill immediately said he wanted order in court, according to an affidavit filed in state Supreme Court. The affidavit said Weill took a 10 minute break and then held Routh in contempt.

Attorney Merrida "Buddy" Coxwell, representing Routh, filed an emergency appeal with the state high court. A three-judge panel of the court granted the petition in part filed on behalf of Routh. It said Routh should be immediately released from custody after posting a $500 bond while he appeals his contempt citation to the state high court.

“We have had over nine attorneys to serve in Judge Weill’s courtroom. And every one of those attorneys has at some point been threatened with the contempt that has never occurred in any of the other courtrooms,” claims Harris. In December, Harris herself was escorted out of Weill’s courtroom. At that time, the Supreme Court also sided with the public defenders.

“We will continue to do our jobs, and that is what is required of us and that’s what we’ll do,” says (http://wjtv.com/2016/04/14/hinds-county-assistant-public-defender-jailed/) Harris. “We will not be intimidated. We will not be bullied.”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/04/15/1515684/-Judge-holds-public-defender-in-contempt-for-doing-his-job?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29

boutons_deux

04-21-2016, 07:58 PM

America’s Cash Bail System Is a Disgrace

Thhere are only two countries on the planet that currently jail people for being too poor to pay the government for getting arrested:

The United States and the Philippines. That’s right. Two.

As Slate’s Leon Neyfakh explained last year (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/06/is_bail_unconstitutional_our_broken_system_keeps_t he_poor_in_jail_and_lets.html), there is currently a crusade underway in this country to end the practice of caging poor people who have been arrested for misdemeanors and traffic violations (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/the-bail-trap.html?_r=0) unless they can come up with sums ranging from $300 to $500.

One prominent civil rights attorney in Washington D.C., Alec Karakatsanis, has been filing suits across the United States arguing that this practice is unconstitutional (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cash-bail-system-under-attack-as-unconstitutional/2015/12/26/e70de61c-ac06-11e5-9b92-dea7cd4b1a4d_story.html).

In any given year, city and county jails across this country lock up between 11 and 13 million people just because they aren’t rich enough to write a check for a few hundred dollars.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/04/jason_flom_on_how_to_get_rid_of_cash_bail.html

One nasty fucking country, huh?

boutons_deux

04-22-2016, 09:15 AM

The NYPD is Running Stings Against Immigrant-Owned Shops, Then Pushing For Warrantless Searches

“It was total entrapment,” says one storeowner.

AN UNDERCOVER NYPD OFFICER entered the spotless Super Laundromat & Dry Cleaners in Inwood, a largely Dominican neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. He made his rounds through the store, hawking what he said were stolen gadgets — an iPhone, iPad Mini and iPad.

One man took the bait, agreeing to shell out $200 for all three. He was arrested during the May 2013 sting, and the trouble seemed to end there.

But seven months later — the week before Christmas — cops arrived at the laundromat again. This time, they slapped a neon sticker on the front door declaring in block letters: “RESTRAINING ORDER.”

They presented the store’s owner, Sung Cho, with a daunting slew of legal papers, threatening to shutter the laundromat for a year and auction off everything inside. Their justification, the cops said: The store was being “used to facilitate criminal possession of stolen property.”

Cho was shocked. The 54-year-old Korean immigrant said he had operated his shop for six years without a problem. He says he had even helped cops solve neighborhood crimes, giving them video footage of the sidewalk outside his store.

To build its case, the NYPD cited the May 2013 arrest, along with one other undercover sale of an iPad months earlier for $100 and tips that people inside the laundromat were buying stolen property. Cho said police never told him about the iPad sale or the tips.

“It cannot be denied that this subject premises is a serious public nuisance,” the NYPD wrote in boilerplate language. “As such it should not be allowed to remain open even one more day.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/nypd-nuisance-abatement-shop-stings-warrantless-searches?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1461327489

My guess is that "capitalists" wanting to buy building pay the cops to go after shop owners.

There was a recent story of NYPD cops evicting paid-up apartment dwellers for "nuisance" or very old "drug dealing" by previous occupants.

Trill Clinton

04-26-2016, 09:35 AM

RACIST TEXTS SENT BY SAN FRANCISCO POLICE OFFICER

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160425191310-jason-lai-mugshot-exlarge-169.jpg

CNN)"I hate that ******," one text reads, "but I think the nig is worse."

"Indian ppl are disgusting," proclaims another.
"Burn down walgreens and kill the bums," a third message states.
These and numerous other racist and homophobic text messages were allegedly sent by a San Francisco police officer at the center of an ongoing scandal (http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/08/us/san-francisco-police-texts/)that is the most recent disturbing revelation for the beleaguered SFPD.

Justice Department to investigate San Francisco police (http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/01/us/san-francisco-police-justice-department/index.html)
CNN has exclusively obtained a list of dozens of offensive texts sent to and from Officer Jason Lai. The content has not been previously disclosed. The list is not a full history of his texts.

Lai resigned from the department earlier this month, according to a police spokesman.
Don Nobles, Lai's attorney, said the texts were "not reflective of who he is" and that "there is no evidence he carried out any of those sentiments as an officer."
"He was well liked and well loved on his beat," he said of the six-year-veteran.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160425191310-jason-lai-mugshot-exlarge-169.jpg (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160425191310-jason-lai-mugshot-exlarge-169.jpg)

The texts were seized from Officer Jason Lai's personal phone. He's resigned from the department.
Second scandal in as many years
Nobles said the texts were seized from Lai's personal phone and had been exchanged with some of his closest friends on the police force, as well as with people he had befriended on his beat.

"It's hard to say any of those things in context," the lawyer said, "but there is context to it."
It marks the second time in as many years that the SFPD has been the subject of a racist texting scandal and could undermine Chief Greg Suhr's assertion that the problem is limited to a relative handful of officers and not part a broader cultural problem within the ranks, as critics contend.
2015 poll: 1 in 5 African Americans report 'unfair' dealings with police in last month (http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/29/us/criminal-justice-racism-cnn-kff-poll/)
Suhr said Monday that he has no tolerance for biased officers and takes "swift and severe" action when they come to his attention. He said he is working to get the SFPD to "a better place."

"We work for the community," Suhr said. "We work for everybody and when somebody demonstrates that they have this reprehensible character trait, we need to cut them from the body."
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160426041955-san-francisco-officer-texting-orig-simon-00002819-exlarge-169.jpg (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160426041955-san-francisco-officer-texting-orig-simon-00002819-exlarge-169.jpg)

Lai allegedly sent dozens of racist and homophobic texts.

Texts reference President Obama, LeBron James
In addition to disparaging blacks, Hispanics and Indians, Lai used coded language to talk about gay officers, according to a source, and made a blanket statement impugning residents of the city's largely minority and low-income Tenderloin district.
"They're all drug dealers in the TL," his text stated.
The officer also referred to a draft of an official incident report as "a story I wrote today."
The messages, sent in 2014 and 2015, were discovered as part of an SFPD probe into a sexual assault allegation against Lai made by a woman last year. Prosecutors declined to file rape charges in the case, citing insufficient evidence.
Chicago PD accused of institutional racism (http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/15/us/san-francisco-homeless-man-reward/index.html)

Lai has since been charged with multiple misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing DMV computers for a non-official purpose. He is scheduled to be arraigned on May 3rd.

Prosecutors recently turned over the text messages to the San Francisco Public Defender's office, which is representing a defendant in a case in which Lai was involved. Evidence of biased attitudes could be used to undermine the officer's credibility and result in cases being dismissed. San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi provided the texts to CNN at the request of reporters.
In the messages, Lai makes a disparaging joke about President Obama and says he hates basketball player LeBron James.
"F--- that nig," he says.

Such language could add to ongoing tension between the police and members of San Francisco's African American community, some of whom have called for Suhr to resign in the wake of the controversial police killing of a black man armed with a knife (http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/san-francisco-police-shooting-mario-woods-autopsy/index.html) last December. The shooting remains under investigation.
Fast facts: Controversial police encounters (http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/05/us/controversial-police-encounters-fast-facts/index.html)
Lai, who was identified as Chinese by his attorney, makes several references to "hock gwai," apparently a misspelled reference to the Cantonese "hak gwai," a derogatory phrase for African Americans.
In a series of texts sent last June he describes an incident involving a "bunch of hock gwais shooting each other."
"Sprained my ankle over these barbarians," he says.
One of the suspects "went to the hospital after he got shot lol," the officer texted.
"Too bad none of them died," he added. "One less to worry about."
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160426034332-san-francisco-officer-texting-orig-simon-00002719-exlarge-169.jpg (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160426034332-san-francisco-officer-texting-orig-simon-00002719-exlarge-169.jpg)

The texts disparaged against blacks, Hispanics, Indians, gays and poor people.
More than one officer involved
In another exchange referencing African Americans, Lai wrote: "They're like a pack [of] wild animals on the loose."
The exchange happened during a night of civil unrest in Baltimore following thedeath of Freddie Gray (http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/04/us/freddie-gray-trials/index.html). Gray, an African American, died after suffering head and neck injuries in the back of a police van.
Baltimore faces its 'original sin' a year after riots (http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/22/us/baltimore-future/index.html)

Lai used coded language to describe an encounter with a sergeant at the department's Taraval station.
"Passive aggressive 528," he wrote, using the numeric code for a fire call. The number is used to describe gay officers as "flames or flaming," according to the source.
The names of most of the people trading texts with Lai are blacked out or listed as "unknown" in the documents obtained by CNN.
Opinion: Racism deeply embedded in our psyche (http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/27/opinions/hill-race-in-america/)
At least two exchanges appear to involve one or more police officers. In one exchange, Lai and a fellow texter discuss running into one another at a police station and dealing with a "528" sergeant. In another, a person texting Lai described being in an "on-duty" accident that occurred in 2015.
"Some dumb Asian chick driving for Uber didn't look and changed lanes right into my car," the texter said.
Three of four officers implicated in the texting scandal with Lai are no longer with the department, said Officer Albie Esparza, a police spokesman. A fourth officer is facing disciplinary charges, Esparza said.
"We're going to be better served without them," Suhr said.
Texts discovered by accident
The SFPD's first texting scandal occurred last year when a federal prosecutor filed court papers detailing racist and homophobic texts made by former SFPD Sgt. Ian Furminger, one of three officers convicted of stealing money and drugs from the residents of low-rent Tenderloin hotels.
The texts were made public in support of a motion to put Furminger in jail in advance of his then-impending prison sentence.
They were discovered as part of a federal corruption probe into the officers. Fourteen officers, including a captain, were implicated in sending or receiving such texts. Suhr attempted to fire eight of those officers, but was barred from doing so after a judge determined he waited too long to initiate disciplinary proceedings. The city has appealed the judge's decision.
Public Defender Adachi, whose office released hotel surveillance footage of Furminger and other officers' alleged crimes on YouTube, prompting the federal investigation, noted that text messages discovered in that case—and in Lai's—were discovered by accident.
Adachi said it made him wonder what other SFPD officers are texting about that has not come to light because they've yet to be accused of a crime.
"What are the chances of two officers being arrested...and there's racists texts on [their phones]?" he said. "I don't know what the odds would be in Vegas."
Singled out officer 'extremely hurt'
Yulanda Williams, an African American sergeant who was singled out by name and called a racial slur in the first texting scandal, said she was "extremely hurt" by what happened.

"It made me wonder what must I do as a black woman to prove that I'm worthy of wearing the same blue uniform" as her fellow officers, she said.
Williams, president of a minority police officers' association called Officers for Justice, said she was concerned not only for herself.
"I was also concerned that it could hinder our ability to be able to hire officers of color when they see and hear of others being treated that way," she told CNN in a recent interview.

Without revealing the contents of the texts, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced last last month that a new round of racist and homophobic messages had been discovered as part of the sexual assault probe of Lai.
The first texting scandal prompted a review of some 1,600 cases for evidence of biased policing by the 14 officers implicated, Gascon said. Ultimately, 13 cases were dismissed due to concerns about the officers.

'A good old boys network'
The current texting investigation stemming from Lai's case involves several other officers, including a lieutenant. It could result in hundreds more cases being reviewed, Gascon said.
Like Adachi, Gascon stressed the accidental nature of the discovery of the texts in both cases. He also accused the police department of being slow to address the problem in both instances.
In an interview with CNN last week, Gascon said he has concluded two things about the police department he once ran.
"No. 1: There's a substantial number of people within the organization that are racist," he said. "And No. 2: There's a culture that has allowed those people to thrive and survive and even promote within that environment."
Suhr said he did not want to "get into it" with Gascon who he succeeded as chief, but he noted that "every one of these officers I've contended with were there when he was the chief of police."
Gascon likened the leadership of the SFPD's union to police in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1950s.
"They would probably feel right at home," he said. "It's a good old boys network that does everything they can to protect the status quo."
Martin Halloran, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, did not return a call or email seeking comment.
Gascon, who in addition to serving as the SFPD chief for more than a year, spent most of his career at the LAPD -- a department that has seen its own share of scandal.
Even after decades in law enforcement, Gascon said, he was stunned by the contents of the text messages he's read.
"I never in a million years would have dreamt that those kind of conversations would go on between San Francisco police officers," he said.
He said officers should not be allowed to engage in such talk, even in private.
"I would say OK if you're a plumber, if you're a carpenter," he said. "But if you're somebody that actually gets to put people in jail or in worst case conditions actually take somebody's life from them, and do so lawfully, you don't get to be a racist."
Adachi, the public defender, said he was concerned that a perceived lack of accountability could lead officers to believe there are no consequences for misconduct in the SFPD.

'R U READING THIS IA?'
Lai sent some of his texts after the first scandal had made headlines. He discussed what investigators would be able to find with a search warrant and suggested that deleting an app could cover his tracks.
At one point he made what appeared to be a joking reference to being the subject of an internal affairs investigation.
"R U READING THIS IA?" he texted.
Then, in August of 2015, as investigators obtained search warrants in pursuit of the sexual assault investigation, Lai sent this ominous message to an unknown recipient:
"This is my drop phone," Lai wrote, borrowing a term drug dealers used to describe disposable phones for conducting illicit business.
"Don't contact me or answer any calls/texts from my normal cell until further," the text said.

Trill Clinton

04-26-2016, 09:43 AM

the disease known as white supremacy is in our police forces and tainting those who are supposed to protect and uphold the values of justice.

DarrinS

04-26-2016, 09:49 AM

the disease known as white supremacy is in our police forces and tainting those who are supposed to protect and uphold the values of justice.

That dude looks Asian to me, Trill.

boutons_deux

04-26-2016, 09:50 AM

That dude looks Asian to me, Trill.

he's wannabe white supremacist/racist.

Trill Clinton

04-26-2016, 09:57 AM

That dude looks Asian to me, Trill.

You don't have to be white to participate in white supremacy

Trill Clinton

04-27-2016, 03:01 PM

http://i68.tinypic.com/2dqm545.png
725402460987203584

CosmicCowboy

04-27-2016, 04:59 PM

"constant wailing from some idiot in a tower"

:lmao

Winehole23

04-28-2016, 02:10 AM

CC dissing the Muslim call to prayer.

Wonder what he thinks about church bells. It's functionally the same.

boutons_deux

04-29-2016, 05:21 AM

LIE AND DENY: SECRECY AND SUSPICION SURROUND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

“The Sheriff’s Department is much worse than LAPD,” one lawyer said in a Knight Ridder investigation into the LASD. That was in the summer of 1991 (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1345&dat=19910806&id=G1pYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DvoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3984,614195&hl=en), blurry footage of Rodney King being beaten by four Los Angeles Police Department officers haunting the nation. The lawyer continued: “A growing joke in our circles is you never would have had the Rodney King videotape if they were sheriff’s deputies, because they just would have shot him.”

The sheriff at the time was Sherman Block, who died in 1998 and was replaced by Leroy “Lee” Baca, who had spent three decades rising steadily through the LASD ranks. The department was his from 1998 until 2014.

Now, though, Baca is probably headed to prison for lying to federal investigators looking into abuses in the jails run by his department. Because he took a plea deal (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ex-l-a-county-sheriff-baca-jail-scandal-20160210-story.html), the sentence, to be doled out in May, won’t be longer than six months.

The sentence for Baca’s longtime undersheriff, Paul Tanaka, who was convicted earlier this month on a similar array of charges, could be up to 15 years.

Neither man had any direct connection to Richardson’s disappearance, but

the secrecy, tribalism and cynical dishonesty that tarnished that investigation have manifested elsewhere: in the horrific abuses in the Los Angeles jail system, the nation’s largest, which the LASD operates; in the racial profiling by LASD deputies across the Antelope Valley; in charges of fawning favoritism for celebrities but often belligerent disdain for the average citizen.

Bob Olmsted, a former LASD commander who mounted a failed bid for the department’s top spot in 2014, tells me the men in charge of the department had an modus operandi for all potentially troublesome situations: “lie and deny.”

“They destroyed the organization,” he says of Baca and Tanaka. “They destroyed the public trust.”

http://www.newsweek.com/los-angeles-county-sheriffs-department-mitrice-richardson-secrecy-suspicion-450421

boutons_deux

04-29-2016, 06:56 AM

NYPD Chief: Police ‘Will Continue to Aggressively Enforce Nuisance Abatement’

“We have and will continue, and I will emphasize that, we will continue to aggressively enforce nuisance abatement as a cornerstone of our efforts to keep neighborhoods safe,” Bratton said.

"And bodega owners who want to continue to provide useful services to communities, fine. They want to continue to poison the communities with illegally selling knives, illegally selling alcohol, illegally selling drugs such as K2, well we’re coming. We’re going to come with every tool available to us.”

“Nuisance abatement is that tool,” he said. “I like it, and we’re gonna keep using it.”

the NYPD frequently brought nuisance cases against immigrant-owned shops, using stings to extract settlements in which storeowners agreed to warrantless searches, steep fines, and to install cameras and data-storing card readers that police can access at any time.

Many storeowners complained they’d been entrapped, describing instances in which undercover operatives came in during a rush, threw money down and walked out, obscuring what they had bought. Merchants said they often found out about nuisance cases when officers served them with closing orders shuttering their business until the matter was resolved.

In cases involving alcohol violations, merchants sometimes faced a kind of double jeopardy, getting hit with sanctions both by the State Liquor Authority and the city based on the same allegations.

The president of the Bodega Association, Ramon Murphy, said earlier this week (https://www.propublica.org/article/groups-mull-suits-over-police-stings-aimed-at-immigrant-owned-stores) that his group is considering a civil rights lawsuit over what he deemed disparate treatment.

“The police are picking on the most vulnerable stores, those with owners that are less educated about city laws and regulations,” Murphy said. “They are using intimidation tactics that force the owners to give up their legal rights. We will fight back with all of the legal weapons at our disposal.”

The Daily News and ProPublica reviewed 646 nuisance abatement cases filed by the NYPD against businesses over an 18-month period beginning in 2013. The review found that the businesses targeted were almost exclusively located in neighborhoods where most of the residents are minorities. Almost 60% of the cases cited alcohol violations.

https://www.propublica.org/article/nypd-chief-police-will-continue-to-aggressively-enforce-nuisance-abatement?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1461871781

If the police state wants to take you down, they will take you down.

boutons_deux

04-29-2016, 07:36 AM

A Death Sentence in Louisiana Rarely Means You’ll be Executed

Four out of five death sentences in Louisiana since 1976 have been reversed.

And for every three executions the state carried out, one death row prisoner was exonerated.

These statistics are among the most notable in an analysis of the death penalty in Louisiana,

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/04/28/a-death-sentence-in-louisiana-rarely-means-you-ll-be-executed#.HooJ7qW4q

boutons_deux

04-29-2016, 07:43 AM

Madness

In Florida prisons, mentally ill inmates have been tortured, driven to suicide, and killed by guards

an inmate whispered to her, “You know they starve us, right?”

Oh, this guy must be paranoid or schizophrenic,” she said recently. Moreover, she’d been warned during her training that prisoners routinely made false accusations against guards.

Then she heard an inmate in another wing of the T.C.U. complain that meal trays often arrived at his cell without food. After noticing that several prisoners were alarmingly thin, she decided to discuss the matter with Dr. Cristina Perez, who oversaw the inpatient unit.

In theory, the T.C.U. was designed to provide mentally ill inmates with a safe environment in which they would receive treatment that might allow them to return to the main compound. Krzykowski discovered, however, that many inmates were locked up in single-person cells.

Solitary confinement was supposed to be reserved for prisoners who had committed serious disciplinary infractions. In forced isolation, inmates often deteriorated rapidly. As Krzykowski put it, “So many guys would be mobile and interactive when they first came to the T.C.U., and then a few months later they would be sleeping in their cells in their own waste.”

Insuring that inmates with mental illnesses receive psychiatric care is a constitutional obligation, according to Estelle v. Gamble, a 1976 case in which the Supreme Court held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners” amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

“What’s going on with Rainey?” Krzykowski asked a guard.

“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll put him in the shower,” he told her.

Krzykowski remembers hearing this and feeling reassured. “I was thinking, O.K., lots of times people feel good after a shower, so maybe he will calm down. A nice, gentle shower with warm water.”

The next day, Krzykowski learned from some nurses that a couple of guards had indeed escorted Rainey to the shower at about eight the previous night. But he hadn’t made it back to his cell. He had collapsed while the water was running. At 10:07 P.M., he was pronounced dead.

Krzykowski assumed that he must have had a heart attack or somehow committed suicide. But the nurses said that Rainey had been locked in a stall whose water supply was delivered through a hose controlled by the guards. The water was a hundred and eighty degrees, hot enough to brew a cup of tea

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-of-mentally-ill-prisoners

boutons_deux

04-30-2016, 02:15 PM

Dashcam video shows Chicago cop smiling while attacking reverend with kids in her car

http://2d0yaz2jiom3c6vy7e7e5svk.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Officer-Jose-Lopez-caught-smiling-on-dashcam-video-800x430.jpg

A Chicago woman is suing local police over a 2013 incident in which two officers threatened her with their guns and pepper-sprayed her while her children were in the car, WBBM-TV reported. (http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/04/28/2-investigators-pastor-says-chicago-cops-beat-her-during-road-rage-incident/)Rev. Catherine Brown said the two officers, Jose López and Michelle Morsi-Murphy, “beat me down to my underwear, pulled my skirt off me. They beat me with the sticks and hit me with their boots in my head.”

According to Brown, the encounter on May 13, 2013 began when she honked her horn to avert a collision with the officers’ squad car, which was speeding toward her in the alley leading to Brown’s home.

Dashcam video shows Morsi-Murphy leaving her vehicle. Brown said Morsi told her,

“B*tch, move that f*cking car back” while López pointed his gun at her head.

Brown then called police dispatchers to ask for a supervisor. Audio of the call captures her childrens’ screams.

Brown was initially charged with attempted murder, but was later convicted of reckless conduct for backing out of the alley.

She has filed an appeal on that sentence, while also suing the officers.

Records show that López has been the subject of 21 citizen complaints, while Morsi-Murphy has had 19 complaints filed against her.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/dashcam-video-shows-chicago-cop-smiling-while-attacking-reverend-with-kids-in-her-car/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

05-08-2016, 08:22 PM

For-profit PIC, unstoppable.

Private juvenile center conceals abuse inquiries and pressures county to keep its business deal

Last spring, Caroline Mattson informed her superiors at Minnesota's largest private correctional facility for boys that three boys had told her they'd been sexually abused by an employee. They began an internal investigation, prompted either by that report or another.

But the leaders there — at Mesabi Academy in Buhl, Minn. — did not tell St. Louis County authorities about the allegations, a decision that avoided outside scrutiny and may have evaded state law.

Six months later, in October 2015, county officials learned of the alleged incidents, which both triggered their own investigation and contributed to a decision to end a contract critical to Mesabi's ability to operate in Minnesota.

As county officials proceeded down those paths, however, Mesabi Academy and an influential politician muscled up.

After Mesabi Academy objected to a certain investigator being on the case, St. Louis County removed him.

When the county alerted two other counties it had "health and safety" concerns about the facility, Mesabi threatened to sue.

And shortly after a St. Louis County official announced the contract was ending, a powerful politician intervened on Mesabi's behalf and expressed concern about potential job losses at the Iron Range facility. The contract was renewed.

Mesabi Academy in Buhl is Minnesota's largest privately run residential treatment facility for boys. Many residents in recent years have come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
On Friday, county officials said they had closed their six-month investigation into Mattson's allegations without determining any maltreatment had taken place. They said they had insufficient evidence.

But St. Louis County also confirmed Mesabi Academy didn't report several allegations of sex abuse to authorities.

State law required the academy to report such allegations to St. Louis County Child Protection or law enforcement within 24 hours of being told.

In all, the county said Friday it had closed its investigation into 20 allegations of maltreatment over the past 14 months, saying in each case that maltreatment could not be determined.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/05/02/mesabi-academy

boutons_deux

05-08-2016, 09:23 PM

The End of Prison Visitation

A new system called "video visitation" is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It's inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence — but god, it makes money.

Travis County ended all in-person visitations in May 2013, leaving video visitation as the exclusive method for people on the outside to communicate with the incarcerated. But Travis County is only on the leading edge of a new technological trend that threatens to abolish in-person visitation across the country.

Over 600 prisons in 46 states have some sort of video visitation system, and every year, more of those facilities do away with in-person visitation.

Extorting inmates' families is big business

You may have heard of the prison industrial complex (http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/), but the companies that provide corrections facilities with their communications technologies are an industrial complex all their own.

Three companies dominate the prison comms business: Securus, Telmate and Global Tel Link, also called GTL — the Verizon, AT&T and Sprint of jails.

Long before video visitation existed, prison phone calls were the bread and butter of these companies.

With exclusive contracts (http://atavist.ibtimes.com/fcc-prison-telecom-industry) protecting them from competition, the trio of prison telecom giants ratcheted up the prices until a single phone call could cost upward of $14 a minute.

https://mic.com/articles/142779/the-end-of-prison-visitation#.bf4mddey8

America's PIC and BigCorp fucks its own citizens more than Muslim terrorists could even dream of.

boutons_deux

05-12-2016, 10:18 PM

New Hampshire and Mass. troopers off duty after they’re caught beating motorist

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/new-hampshire-and-mass-troopers-off-duty-after-theyre-caught-beating-motorist/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

probably suspended with pay a few weeks, typical punishment for cop crimes.

boutons_deux

05-12-2016, 11:20 PM

“I founded the SWAT team that killed my son-in-law”: A former Utah sheriff speaks out against police violence

William “Dub” Lawrence was a former sheriff who established and trained one of Utah’s first SWAT teams, only to watch in horror as that same unit killed his son-in-law in a controversial standoff years later.

The cases Dub investigates are contextualized within the growing frequency of SWAT raids and immunity laws established to prosecute the War on Drugs.

Officers in cities and small towns are routinely armed with military surplus weapons and equipment, backed by federal incentives to use what they are given.

These and other factors have led to a 15,000% increase in SWAT team raids in the United States since the late 1970s.

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/12/i_founded_the_swat_team_that_killed_my_son_in_law_ a_former_utah_sheriff_speaks_out_against_police_vi olence/

15,000% increase in SWAT team raids? to match the 15,000% increase in crime? :lol

USA is a fucking police state, with brutes, criminals, rapists, sadists, murderers throughout the PIC/police state.

America is fucked and unfuckable.

Any legislators gonna dare to be "soft on crime" and get voted out of office? hell no.

PIC/police state is only ratcheting up, never down.

boutons_deux

05-13-2016, 05:11 AM

Jesus Christ boutons. I agree these fucking mogoloids like cocksucker and rmt are slap the shit out whatever fucking bullshit god you believe in stupid.

But for fuck sake have a thought of your own. Use this endless drivel of links you post to start forming an opinion, then research it. That way you can actually put forth an argument.

Don't be a stupid sack of shit like cocksucker rmt and tsa. Think for yourself.

G F Y.

FuzzyLumpkins

05-13-2016, 06:18 PM

nice comeback. Did you think that up all by yourself? Or did you need an article from slate to help you

As opposed to your well thought out shooting of the messenger?

boutons_deux

05-15-2016, 01:31 PM

more cops caring for the mentally ill

Delaware faults police but no charges in shooting of black man

The Delaware Department of Justice criticized the conduct of Wilmington police who shot dead a wheelchair-bound black man last year, but decided against filing criminal charges against any officers in the death of 28-year-old Jeremy McDole.

The report singled out one officer for "extraordinarily poor police work" and said he should be removed from any job requiring him to carry a gun in public.

Felony charges against that officer were warranted but the state opted against prosecution upon determining it was unlikely to convict him at trial, according to the report.

Three other Wilmington officers were justified in firing their weapons, the report said, in part because of uncertainty over who fired the first shot.

Police killed McDole last September after responding to a call about a man in a wheelchair who had shot himself.

About a minute after the first shot, as McDole reaches into his pants, police unload a volley of gunfire that kills him. McDole falls out of his wheelchair and into the street, where the report says police recovered a .38 that McDole had in his pants.

The report found "serious deficiencies" in how police were trained to deal with people with mental illness, disabilities, or cognitive impairments.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-delware-police-idUSKCN0Y32XE?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

TheSanityAnnex

05-15-2016, 02:07 PM

The guy had a gun in his pants and reached in said pants. What's the problem here?

boutons_deux

05-15-2016, 02:23 PM

The guy had a gun in his pants and reached in said pants. What's the problem here?

no problem at all ... for the cops. As always, their ONLY choice is to lay down a fusillade. There is absolutely no other option, is there?

What about that old white guy, mentally ill, standing in broad daylight on a street with a loaded rifle, why wasn't he shot dead, rather than talked down?

Why not? because he was white?

Or the black in a store holding a toy gun, aiming at no one. Only choice was to murder the knitter.

TheSanityAnnex

05-15-2016, 02:37 PM

no problem at all ... for the cops. As always, their ONLY choice is to lay down a fusillade. There is absolutely no other option, is there?

What about that old white guy, mentally ill, standing in broad daylight on a street with a loaded rifle, why wasn't he shot dead, rather than talked down?

Why not? because he was white?

Or the black in a store holding a toy gun, aiming at no one. Only choice was to murder the knitter.
Try to focus on the article you posted. What's the problem here? He had a gun in his pants and reached in his pants. You cheered when Robert "Lavoy" Finicum reached in his pants and was shot by the FBI. Your hypocrisy is amusing.

boutons_deux

05-20-2016, 04:54 AM

CIA Watchdog "Mistakenly" Destroys Its Sole Copy of Senate Torture Report

the CIA inspector general's office says it "mistakenly" destroyed its sole copy of the mass document "at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved."

While the deleted report was not the only copy in existence, the foul-up is already proving an embarrassment for the office, which is "responsible for independent oversight of the CIA," according to (https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/inspector-general) its materials.

Citing information obtained by "multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident," Isikoff explains:

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.

…The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight "out of the Keystone Cops," CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation methods.

This is not the first time CIA evidence has gone missing. Isikoff notes:

Ironically in light of the inspector general's actions, the intelligence committee's investigation was triggered by the CIA's admission in 2007 that it had destroyed another key piece of evidence -- hours of videotapes of the waterboarding of two "high value" detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

What's more, in 2014 the CIA hacked into (https://news.vice.com/article/the-google-search-that-made-the-cia-spy-on-the-us-senate) the computers used by the Senate committee overseeing the report, but was later absolved (https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2015-press-releases-statements/statements-on-agency-accountability-board-findings.html) for the breach by the inspector general's office.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36065-cia-watchdog-mistakenly-destroys-its-sole-copy-of-senate-torture-report

:lol

The militarized police/Nat-Sec government-within-government is without restraint, oversight, beyond culpability, beyond the reach of Congress, the Exec, the courts, unstoppable, etc, etc.

America is fucked and unfuckable

boutons_deux

05-20-2016, 04:55 AM

Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds' Complicity

The idea that technology has a decisive role to play in improving policing was, in fact, a central plank of President Obama's policing reform task force.

In its report, released last May, the Task Force on 21st Century Policing emphasized the crucial role of technology in promoting better law enforcement, highlighting the use of police body cameras in creating greater openness. "Implementing new technologies," it claimed (http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/taskforce_finalreport.pdf), "can give police departments an opportunity to fully engage and educate communities in a dialogue about their expectations for transparency, accountability, a

Police departments nationwide have been adopting powerful new technologies that are remarkably capable of intruding on people's privacy, and much of the time these are being deployed in secret, without public notice or discussion, let alone permission.

And while the task force's report says all the right things, a little digging reveals that the feds not only aren't putting the brakes on improper police use of technology, but are encouraging it -- even subsidizing the misuse of the very technology the task force believes will keep cops honest. To put it bluntly, a techno-utopia isn't remotely on the horizon, but its flipside may be.

The technology at issue is known as a "Stingray," a brand name for what's generically called a cell site simulator or IMSI catcher. By mimicking a cell phone tower (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/08/23/baltimore-police-stingray-cell-surveillance/31994181/), this device, developed (https://theintercept.com/2015/12/17/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/) for overseas battlefields, gets nearby cell phones to connect to it. It operates a bit like the children's game Marco Polo. "Marco," the cell-site simulator shouts out and every cell phone on that network in the vicinity replies, "Polo, and here's my ID!"

Thanks to this call-and-response process, the Stingray knows both what cell phones are in the area and where they are. In other words, it gathers information not only about a specific suspect, but any bystanders in the area as well. While the police may indeed use this technology to pinpoint a suspect's location, by casting such a wide net there is also the potential for many kinds of constitutional abuses -- for instance, sweeping up the identities of every person attending a demonstration or a political meeting.

Some Stingrays are capable of collecting not only cell phone ID numbers but also numbers those phones have dialed and even phone conversations. In other words, the Stingray is a technology that potentially opens the door for law enforcement to sweep up information that not so long ago wouldn't have been available to them.

All of this raises the sorts of constitutional issues that might normally be settled through the courts and public debate... unless, of course, the technology is kept largely secret, which is exactly what's been happening.

In a no-less-bizarre incident, the Sarasota Police Department was about to turn some Stingray records over to the ACLU in accordance with Florida's open-records law, when the U.S. Marshals Service swooped in and seized (https://www.aclu.org/blog/us-marshals-seize-local-cops-cell-phone-tracking-files-extraordinary-attempt-keep-information?redirect=blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/us-marshals-seize-local-cops-cell-phone-tracking-files) the records first, claiming ownership because it had deputized one local officer. And excessive efforts at secrecy are not unique to Florida, as those charged with enforcing the law commit themselves to Stingray secrecy in a way that makes them lawbreakers.

And it's not just the public that's being denied information about the devices and their uses; so are judges. Often, the police get a judge's sign-off for surveillance without even bothering to mention that they will be using a Stingray. In fact, officers regularly avoid describing the technology to judges, claiming that they simply can't violate those FBI nondisclosure agreements.

More often than not, police use Stingrays without bothering to get a warrant, instead seeking a court order on a more permissive (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/appeals-court-no-stingrays-without-a-warrant-explanation-to-judge/) legal standard.

This is part of the charm of a new technology for the authorities: nothing is settled on how to use it. Appellate judges in Tallahassee, Florida, for instance, revealed (https://www.aclu.org/blog/police-hide-use-cell-phone-tracker-courts-because-manufacturer-asked?redirect=blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/police-hide-use-cell-phone-tracker-courts-because) that local police had used the tool more than 200 times without a warrant.

In Sacramento, California, policeadmitted in court (http://legacy.abc10.com/story/news/local/sacramento/2016/01/08/new-developments-sacramento-stingray-case/78541240/) that they had, in more than 500 investigations, used Stingrays without telling judges or prosecutors.

That was "an estimated guess," since they had no way of knowing the exact number because they had conveniently deleted records of Stingray use after passing evidence discovered by the devices on to detectives.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36106-police-nationwide-are-secretly-exploiting-intrusive-technologies-with-the-feds-complicity

boutons_deux

05-24-2016, 07:22 AM

BigCorp and the militarized NatSec state know EVERYTHING about you, but you can know nothing about them

FBI WANTS TO EXEMPT ITS MASSIVE BIOMETRIC DATABASE FROM SOME FEDERAL PRIVACY RULES

The FBI wants to block individuals from knowing if their information is in a massive repository of biometric records, which includes fingerprints and facial scans, if the release of information would "compromise" a law enforcement investigation.

The FBI’s biometric database, known as the “Next Generation Identification System (https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/fingerprints_biometrics/ngi),” gathers a wide scope of information, including palm prints, fingerprints, iris scans, facial and tattoo photographs, and biographies for millions of people.

On Thursday, the Justice Department agency plans to propose (https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2016-10119.pdf) the database be exempt from several provisions of the Privacy Act -- legislation that requires federal agencies to share information about the records they collect with the individual subject of those records, allowing them to verify and correct them if needed.

Aside from criminals, suspects and detainees, the system includes data from people fingerprinted for jobs, licenses, military or volunteer service, background checks, security clearances, and naturalization, among other government processes.

Letting individuals view their own records, or even the accounting of those records, could compromise criminal investigations or "national security efforts," potentially revealing a “sensitive investigative technique” or information that could help a subject “avoid detection or apprehension,” the draft posting said.

http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2016/05/fbi-wants-exempt-its-massive-biometric-database-federal-privacy-rules/128051/

Claiming "national security" alienates "inalienable rights" and destroys the Constitution.

boutons_deux

05-28-2016, 09:27 AM

Machine Bias

There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.

Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.

Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.

Scores like this — known as risk assessments — are increasingly common in courtrooms across the nation. They are used to inform decisions about who can be set free at every stage of the criminal justice system, from assigning bond amounts — as is the case in Fort Lauderdale — to even more fundamental decisions about defendants’ freedom.

In Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, the results of such assessments are given to judges during criminal sentencing.

We obtained the risk scores assigned to more than 7,000 people arrested in Broward County, Florida, in 2013 and 2014 and checked to see how many were charged with new crimes over the next two years, the same benchmark used (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2840784-Practitioner-s-Guide-to-COMPAS-Core.html#document/p30/a296482) by the creators of the algorithm.

The score proved remarkably unreliable in forecasting violent crime: Only 20 percent of the people predicted to commit violent crimes actually went on to do so.
When a full range of crimes were taken into account — including misdemeanors such as driving with an expired license — the algorithm was somewhat more accurate than a coin flip. Of those deemed likely to re-offend, 61 percent were arrested for any subsequent crimes within two years.

We also turned up significant racial disparities, just as Holder feared. In forecasting who would re-offend, the algorithm made mistakes with black and white defendants at roughly the same rate but in very different ways.

The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.
White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants.

Could this disparity be explained by defendants’ prior crimes or the type of crimes they were arrested for? No.

We ran a statistical test that isolated the effect of race from criminal history and recidivism, as well as from defendants’ age and gender.

Black defendants were still 77 percent more likely to be pegged as at higher risk of committing a future violent crime and 45 percent more likely to be predicted to commit a future crime of any kind. (Read our analysis (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm/).)

The algorithm used to create the Florida risk scores is a product of a for-profit company, Northpointe. The company disputes our analysis.

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing

boutons_deux

06-07-2016, 07:08 PM

as will all power, this power will be abused

FBI wants access to Internet browser history without a warrant in terrorism and spy cases

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-wants-access-to-internet-browser-history-without-a-warrant-in-terrorism-and-spy-cases/2016/06/06/2d257328-2c0d-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html?postshare=3311465307515565&tid=ss_tw

spurraider21

06-07-2016, 09:49 PM

boutons_deux

06-08-2016, 04:58 AM

im sure hillary will grant their wish

The militarized, deeply, widely pervasive police state is irreversible, unstoppable.

The Constitutional "inalienable rights" have been, will be more alienated.

So where's God and his "God-given rights" enforcement team?

boutons_deux

06-08-2016, 06:59 AM

St. Louis police secret settlements total $4.7 million

The police officers involved in the deaths of Ball and Bennett were cleared by the police department. But unlike the fatal shooting of Smith, neither of the other cases has been reviewed by city prosecutors for potential criminal charges, a spokeswoman for Joyce said last week.

The lawyer whose firm won the $2.5 million judgment said that when police spend a lot of money to settle a case, local prosecutors should review it for potential crimes.

“In my considerable experience, police departments do not settle and certainly don’t settle for a lot of money unless there is clear evidence of liability, clear evidence the shooting was unjustified,” said Jon Loevy, of the Chicago firm Loevy & Loevy. “Anything short of that and they decline to settle.”

“I can tell you from experience, they don’t just cough up money routinely. They fight hard, they are reluctant to resolve cases and there is just not that kind of money lying around unless there is merit.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-police-secret-settlements-total-million/article_c141859b-3766-5b3d-8b30-2b6dbf4aef26.html

iow, as noted elsewhere, prosecutors are complicit in the crimes, murders by the police.

In govt, there's essentially nobody policing the police, and in fact, prosecutors protect the police.

spurraider21

06-08-2016, 10:29 AM

The militarized, deeply, widely pervasive police state is irreversible, unstoppable.

The Constitutional "inalienable rights" have been, will be more alienated.

So where's God and his "God-given rights" enforcement team?
They just locked up the Democratic nomination

boutons_deux

06-08-2016, 10:46 AM

They just locked up the Democratic nomination

it doesn't matter which party is in power, the police state is a government unto itself. Trump is a much more dangerous bullying autocrat than Hillary.

boutons_deux

06-08-2016, 06:40 PM

This infuriating story shows how debtors prisons are still a reality in America

Jailing people because they can’t pay off their debts has long been acknowledged as a terrible idea. However, that hasn’t stopped some cities or counties from using debtors’ prisons as ways to extract revenues from people.

the ACLU says that the practice of jailing people who can’t pay debts remains shockingly common throughout the country.

In Fuentes’ own Benton County, an estimated 320 prisoners were jailed over a six-month period for not being able to pay off debts.

What’s more, an ACLU lawsuit in Colorado Springs, Colo. revealed 800 cases of people who have been sent to prison for an inability to pay off fines related to minor violations.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/06/this-infuriating-story-shows-how-debtors-prisons-are-still-a-reality-in-america/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

06-08-2016, 06:57 PM

FBI is “Cooking Up” Cases Against Muslims

“The New York Times reported today that the FBI has increased (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html?_r=1) its use of sting operations in ISIS cases. To be clear, this is not a new tactic.

“A 2014 study, “Inventing Terrorists: the Lawfare of Preventive Prosecution (http://www.projectsalam.org/Inventing-Terrorists-study.pdf)” by Project Salam and the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, found that almost every domestic terrorist plot from 2001 to 2010 was in some way cooked up or assisted (and eventually ‘busted’) by the FBI. The report analyzed about 400 domestic terror cases and found only that only four cases were initiated or driven without the encouragement of the bureau.

‘the government’s use of intrusive surveillance, untrained paid informants, and manufactured terrorism plots raises serious human rights concerns that must immediately be addressed.’

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2016/06/08/fbi-cooking-cases-against-muslims

spurraider21

06-09-2016, 10:20 PM

Judge Finds Prosecutors Withheld Evidence in Freddie Gray Officer Case (http://Judge Finds Prosecutors Withheld Evidence in Freddie Gray Officer Case)
warrior prosecutors tbh

boutons_deux

06-10-2016, 09:45 AM

Kentucky Constables: Untrained And Unaccountable

The 37-year-old Smith had been a constable for just 15 months. He had no state-approved law enforcement training and mainly worked at a motorcycle dealership. Now, he faces a manslaughter charge and up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Smith serves as the latest in a long line of constables — pseudo police, really — who have run amok in Kentucky for years.

Constables are gods unto themselves, armed with badges and guns but almost always with little or no formal training. They masquerade as qualified, legitimate police, but case after case shows that they often pose a threat to public safety.

Some cruise around the county pulling drivers over or engaging in unnecessary and dangerous high-speed pursuits. Some use unauthorized blue lights. Others make questionable arrests that later collapse in court. Many have faced criminal charges of their own.

Despite this history, the cycle of constable-initiated misdeeds continues unabated.

Because the office is enshrined in the state constitution, constables are responsible to no one except a small slice of a county’s voters every four years. And many voters don’t know what constables do.

Kentucky is one of 17 states that elect constables. Sixteen others, including West Virginia, have done away with the office altogether. The remaining states appoint them. Some states require training for constables. Others limit their authority to serving court papers.

“It’s incomprehensible that we still have folks out here trying to enforce the laws of the commonwealth with absolutely no training whatsoever,” said former Kentucky State Police Commissioner Rodney Brewer, who retired in February (http://www.wave3.com/story/31267413/ksp-commissioner-rodney-brewer-to-retire-feb-29) after 34 years with the agency.

“If the office of constable was abolished tomorrow, and all of them were let go, the people of Kentucky would not miss a beat, they would not even know of their absence.”

http://kycir.org/2016/06/07/kentucky-constables-untrained-and-unaccountable/

rmt

06-10-2016, 10:43 AM

it doesn't matter which party is in power, the police state is a government unto itself. Trump is a much more dangerous bullying autocrat than Hillary.

Any dangerous idea Trump has you'll know about as he can't help himself and has no filter - the dems, repubs and media will come down on him. Hillary, on the other hand, will go to extreme lengths to not let us know (but not the hackers I guess)

FuzzyLumpkins

06-10-2016, 03:46 PM

Law Enforcement Unions are a blight.

boutons_deux

06-12-2016, 07:10 AM

DEA Wants Inside Your Medical Records to Fight the War on Drugs

The feds are fighting to look at millions of private files without a warrant, including those of two transgender men who are taking testosterone.

Marlon Jones was arrested for taking legal painkillers, prescribed to him by a doctor, after a double knee replacement.

Jones, an assistant fire chief of Utah’s Unified Fire Authority, was snared in a dragnet pulled through the state’s program to monitor prescription drugs after someone stole morphine from an ambulance in 2012. To find the missing morphine, cops used their unrestricted access to the state’s Prescription Drug Monitor Program database to look at the private medical records of nearly 500 emergency services personnel—without a warrant.

Jones was arrested along with another firefighter and a paramedic on suspicion of prescription fraud.

“There were three police officers pounding on the door. They said they had a warrant for my arrest and they were going to take me in,” he said. “It was the middle of the day, on my front doorstep, in front of my wife and daughter. I’m handcuffed and stuffed into a police car and they haul me to jail.”

Jones was hit with 14 felony counts but all of them were later dropped.

The DEA has claimed for years that under federal law it has the authority to access the state’s Prescription Drug Monitor Program database using only an “administrative subpoena.” These are unilaterally issued orders that do not require a showing of probable cause before a court, like what’s required to obtain a warrant.

The case pits the full weight of the Obama administration against the state of Oregon and five individual plaintiffs, two of whom (John Doe 2 and John Doe 4) are transgender and take prescription hormone drugs that are covered by Oregon’s prescription monitoring law.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/10/dea-wants-inside-your-medical-records-to-fight-the-war-on-drugs.html

boutons_deux

06-12-2016, 09:05 AM

FBI wants to boost its surveillance authority by reworking nat'l security letter statute (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/10/1537053/-Bad-idea-FBI-wants-to-boost-its-surveillance-authority-by-reworking-nat-l-security-letter-statute)

The FBI would like to expand the national security letter statute, and the Senate is debating two proposals to do just that.

The Senate’s proposed changes would allow the FBI to get a much larger range of Internet records, such as email to/from headers, Internet browsing history, and more, all of which it could not previously get with an NSL.

Particularly given the FBI’s well-documented history of abusing NSLs (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/06/fbis-abuse-patriot-act-even-worse-we-thought), EFF opposes expanding the scope of this unconstitutional surveillance power to include even more revealing records.

Yesterday we joined with a broad coalition of organizations and companies (https://www.eff.org/document/nsl-coalition-letter) to urge the Senate not to pass these proposals.

Amending a surveillance law to let the FBI issue warrantless demands for new types of Internet users’ records—without even needing to go before a judge—is a significant expansion of that law. But to hear FBI Director James Comey explain it, the bills amount to a mere “typo fix (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-wants-access-to-internet-browser-history-without-a-warrant-in-terrorism-and-spy-cases/2016/06/06/2d257328-2c0d-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html).”

That’s because the FBI thinks it was already entitled to get these records using NSLs, and Congress simply messed up when it drafted the law. The problem with this theory? The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which issues definitive interpretations of the law for the rest of the executive branch, looked at the issue in 2008 and concluded the FBI was flat wrong (https://fas.org/irp/agency/doj/olc/ecpa.pdf)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/06/10/1537053/-Bad-idea-FBI-wants-to-boost-its-surveillance-authority-by-reworking-nat-l-security-letter-statute?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29

boutons_deux

06-12-2016, 09:47 PM

Patchy reporting undercuts national hate crimes count

The AP identified more than 2,700 city police and county sheriff's departments across the country that have not submitted a single hate crime report for the FBI's annual crime tally during the past six years — about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Advocates worry that the lack of a comprehensive, annual accounting disguises the extent of bias crimes at a time of heightened racial, religious and ethnic tensions. The nation was stunned last June when nine black parishioners were shot dead at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, and community groups have reported a notable increase in violence against Muslims and mosques in the wake of last year's terror acts in Paris and San Bernardino, California. Gay and transgender people also are regular targets.

Between 5,000 and 7,000 hate crime incidents are catalogued each year in the FBI report, with nearly half of all victims in recent years targeted because of their race.
A better accounting of hate crimes, the FBI and other proponents say, would not only increase awareness but also improve efforts to combat such crimes with more resources for law enforcement training and community outreach.
"We need the reporting to happen," said the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached. "Without a diagnosis, we don't know how serious the illness is. And without a diagnosis, there is no prescription. And without a prescription, there is no healing."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/05ef3b1b56214fc4b1129ac881089844/ap-patchy-reporting-undercuts-national-hate-crimes-count

Just another way the racist cops screw minorities.

boutons_deux

06-13-2016, 08:32 AM

Voter Fraud Probe In California Turns Into Voter Intimidation Boondoggle

Having police come to your home wielding weapons and asking questions about your voter registration status just days before an election sends a clear signal.

That signal wasn't lost on residents of Hmong communities in rural northern California, who said police came to their doors doing just that earlier this month. They said authorities also set up a roadway checkpoint to target Hmong drivers, threatening to arrest and prosecute them if they voted illegally.

Following those allegations of flagrant voter intimidation in the lead-up to Tuesday's state primary, the sheriff of Siskiyou County, where just about 43,000 people reside, told TPM his deputies played only a “minor” role in a state-led gumshoe probe into potential voter registration fraud. Sheriff Jon Lopey (pictured right) said deputies accompanied investigators to provide security in an area he described as potentially dangerous and “inundated” with what he estimated to be 2,000 illegal marijuana grow sites.

But the accounts of voter intimidation were serious enough that investigators from the Secretary of State’s Office, joined by staffers from the state Attorney General's Office, were dispatched on June 7 to monitor polling places across Siskiyou County.

“What began as an investigation of alleged voter fraud quickly evolved into an investigation of potential voter intimidation,” a spokesman said in a statement emailed to TPM.

Ironically, the Secretary of State's Office was being forced to look into acts of alleged voter intimidation performed in service of its very own probe.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/jon-lopey-siskiyou-county-voter-fraud-probe

boutons_deux

06-20-2016, 10:06 AM

the police state can abuse their powers, abuse citizens in complete secrecy

Latest Attempt at Police Transparency Fails In California

This isn’t apt to change any time soon: A California Senate bill aimed at making misconduct and disciplinary information available to the public died in committee last month (https://www.aclusocal.org/pr-sb1286-dies-in-senate-approps/).

“Police in California shouldn’t be able to operate as if they’re the CIA,” said Chauncee Smith, a legislative advocate with the ACLU of California, which sponsored the proposed legislation, SB 1286, along with the California Newspaper Publishers Association and other groups.

https://www.propublica.org/article/latest-attempt-at-police-transparency-fails-in-california?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1466422010

I wonder how many legislators the police unions own?

boutons_deux

06-20-2016, 01:24 PM

Sotomayor’s blistering SCTOUS dissent warns America is turning into a prison state

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor strongly disagreed (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/sotomayor-dissent-utah-illegal-search-case) with the majority as she passionately denounced a ruling on unreasonable search and seizures.

A 5-3 majority ruled that prosecutors may present evidence unlawfully collected by police officers

to reverse a Utah Supreme Court decision, and Justice Clarence Thomas, :lol who wrote the majority opinion, argued that “the costs of exclusion outweighs its deterrent benefits.” :lol

Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan each wrote a dissent, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined portions of each.

“Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more,” wrote Sotomayor. “This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants — so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact.”

Sotomayor said the court’s ruling had essentially classified all Americans as inmates in the prison-industrial complex.

“By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time,” Sotomayor wrote. “It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.”

She said the court had ignored mountains of evidence that police routinely harass some Americans with unreasonable searches — and she warned that legitimizing those stops undermined democracy.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/06/sotomayors-blistering-sctous-dissent-warns-america-is-turning-into-a-prison-state/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

America is fucked and unfuckable.

Of course, cops won't break into BigFinance's offices on fishing expeditions.

So it looks like FBI will be able to use wikileaks files, taken and released "illegally", on Hillary.

spurraider21

06-20-2016, 02:59 PM

Warrior courts are out of control tbh

I can't understand why Breyer went with the majority

Spurminator

06-20-2016, 03:40 PM

Unbelievable decision.

boutons_deux

06-20-2016, 03:44 PM

no worries, mate, America isn't fucked, and isn't unfuckable. America is getting better and better for everybody.

Trill Clinton

06-21-2016, 10:58 PM

Updates on the Oakland PD scandal

http://i63.tinypic.com/n37ord.jpg
http://i64.tinypic.com/2vsi9ls.jpg
http://i65.tinypic.com/rb9mva.jpg
http://i64.tinypic.com/qrbr02.jpg

spurraider21

06-22-2016, 02:28 AM

the chiefs stepped down, werent fired

boutons_deux

06-22-2016, 05:36 AM

DA: 'I Refuse To Ruin The Lives' Of Arrested Alabama Football Players

The district attorney's office has decided not to prosecute Alabama offensive lineman Cam Robinson and reserve defensive back Laurence "Hootie" Jones on drug and weapons charges, with the district attorney saying he didn't want to "ruin the lives" of the two football players.

Prosecutor Neal Johnson cited insufficient evidence in court documents filed on Monday, but district attorney Jerry Jones told KNOE-8 he did not want to prosecute the men because of their athletic backgrounds.

"The main reason that I'm doing this is that I refuse to ruin the lives of two young men who have spent their adolescence and their teenage years working and sweating while we were all home in the air conditioning," Jones said.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/da-declines-prosecute-alabama-football-players?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tpm-news+%28TPMNews%29

AL football is a stay-out-of-jail card, sorta like being banker.

spurraider21

06-22-2016, 03:22 PM

I bet all the players are white

boutons_deux

06-22-2016, 06:45 PM

Mitch McConnell wants to protect your Second Amendment rights, to hell with the Fourth (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/21/1541040/-Mitch-McConnell-wants-to-protect-your-Second-Amendment-rights-the-hell-with-the-Fourth)

The very same day Mitch McConnell was using the excuse of Second Amendment rights for his vote to allow people on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun, he brought an amendment to the floor (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/senate-republicans-call-for-more-surveillance-after-orlando-massacre_us_576938ffe4b0fbbc8beb9dfc) that would gut Americans' Fourth Amendment protections.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set up a vote late on Monday to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s authority to use a secretive surveillance order without a warrant to include email metadata and some browsing history information. […]

The amendment would broaden the FBI’s authority to use so-called National Security Letters to include electronic communications transaction records such as time stamps of emails and the emails' senders and recipients.

It would do a hell of a lot more than that—it would allow the FBI to bypass the courts in getting your metadata.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/06/21/1541040/-Mitch-McConnell-wants-to-protect-your-Second-Amendment-rights-the-hell-with-the-Fourth?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29

spurraider21

06-22-2016, 07:02 PM

My personal opinion on metadata collection is that generally it doesn't matter... And that electronic surveillance generally isn't intrusive, so on a personal level I don't care much

I fully understand the legal standards are entirely different. Just giving my opinion. Plus iirc the govt collection of telephony metadata was already held as NOT violating the 4th

That being the case, should email metadata be any different? Browsing history might be pushing it if you go by that standard

Trill Clinton

06-23-2016, 11:40 AM

http://media1.fdncms.com/eastbayexpress/imager/u/mobilestory/4826704/luisroman_guap_textmessage.png

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site568/2016/0611/20160611__SJM-SCANDAL-0611-01~1.JPG

this is where our tax dollars are going. the underage sex portion of this investigation is like something out of a lifetime movie. they had a cop who was around the same age ass CC participating in this mess:

On Monday, three Oakland cops were placed on leave for allegedly having sex with Guap when she was a minor, The East Bay Express reported.

Guap also had sex with five Richmond police officers — including a lieutenant and two sergeants — along with four Alameda County sheriff’s deputies, one Livermore officer and a Stockton law-enforcement worker, she claimed.

Police began a probe into the alleged sexual misconduct after Oakland cop Brendan O’Brien committed suicide in September. He left a note admitting he and other officers had sex with Guap, the paper reported.

----A retired Oakland Police Department captain in his 80s also paid her $250 to have sex with him in a fleabag motel, she said

boutons_deux

06-24-2016, 04:54 PM

SETTLING FOR MISCONDUCT

Between 2012 and 2015, the City of Chicago paid $210 million in settlements in police misconduct cases.

That was for 655 lawsuits.

On average, a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department is settled almost every other day.

http://projects.chicagoreporter.com/settlements/

boutons_deux

06-24-2016, 04:56 PM

Chicago does little to control police misconduct – or its costs

Most of these cases conclude as they occurred – outside of the public glare. People know about the high-profile police shootings of civilians and the multimillion-dollar settlements that result. But most cases are lesser known and settle for far less. Half of all cases paid out $36,000 or less, but they also contribute to a mounting taxpayer bill that goes largely unchecked by the mayor or City Council.

(http://projects.chicagoreporter.com/settlements/)The City of Chicago spent more than $210 million for police misconduct lawsuits from 2012 to 2015, according to a Chicago Reporter analysis. It spent almost $53 million more on outside attorneys to litigate the cases. The Police Department exceeded its annual budget for lawsuits by almost $50 million, on average, in each of those years.

Yet, unlike some other major cities, Chicago doesn’t analyze the lawsuits for trends, identify the officers most frequently sued, or determine ways to reduce both the cost of the cases and officer misconduct.

Rather than rein in the practices that lead to these settlements, officials have borrowed millions to pay for police lawsuits, adding to the city’s crippling debt. Over time, the interest on the bonds will more than double the cost for police misconduct.

To analyze the settlements, the Reporter built a database (http://projects.chicagoreporter.com/settlements/)of the 655 police misconduct lawsuits that paid out from 2012 to 2015. (Click here (http://projects.chicagoreporter.com/settlements/about.html) to read the methodology.)

Some findings confirm public perceptions about policing. Latinos and blacks are disproportionately represented in the lawsuits. More than half the lawsuits allege false arrest. A tiny cohort of officers are defendants in multiple lawsuits.

But other patterns gleaned from the lawsuits indicate that police misconduct extends beyond a few “bad apples” to department-wide practices.

In the small fraction of cases where officers and the city admit liability, the officers rarely are disciplined.
Nearly half of the lawsuits claim that officers filed false reports—and sometimes committed perjury on the witness stand—to cover up their misconduct.
More than one-quarter of lawsuits allege that two or more officers conspired to violate a person’s civil rights. Nearly one-third allege that some officers on the scene could have but didn’t intervene to prevent misconduct.
In one-quarter of excessive force lawsuits, the person who alleged police abuse was also charged with either resisting arrest or assault of a police officer.
One in 10 cases involves minors. Officers have pointed guns at children, shot at teenagers and left toddlers alone while their parents were arrested.
Roughly 1 in 6 cases alleges that an incident is part of a pattern of misconduct, fortified by specific Police Department policies or the city’s general failure to adequately investigate officer misconduct. The city usually successfully argues to dismiss these claims, or to separate them from particular claims about the incident. That means the city's policies and practices are rarely adjudicated.

http://chicagoreporter.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2016/06/MisconductComplaints_type_FINAL-336x273.png (http://chicagoreporter.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2016/06/MisconductComplaints_type_FINAL.png)

http://chicagoreporter.com/chicago-does-little-to-control-police-misconduct-or-its-costs/

ducks

06-24-2016, 04:58 PM

they need to start shooting people that are shooting others in Chicago
I bet that would stop the murders in Chicago
the gang members keep killing the other guys gang members and they got their guns illegally anywhoe

boutons_deux

06-24-2016, 05:23 PM

Wrongful Convictions Have Cost Texans More Than $93 Million

Texas has paid 101 men and women who were wrongfully sent to prison $93.6 million over the past 25 years, according to data from the state comptroller’s office. The tab stands to grow as those wrongfully imprisoned individuals age and more people join the list.

Generally, someone whose conviction is thrown out and is declared by a judge, prosecutor or appellate court to be “actually innocent” is eligible for a lump sum payment equal to $80,000 for each year they spent behind bars. In addition, they become eligible for monthly annuity payments for the rest of their lives, unless they are later convicted of a felony.

Texas’ compensation program is among the most generous in the nation, though several states have no such laws or cap the total amount an exoneree can be paid,

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/24/wrongful-convictions-cost-texans-over-93-million/

Under his leadership, Texas executed 152 prisoners, more than any previous governor in modern American history; critics such as Helen Prejean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Prejean) argue that he failed to give serious consideration to clemency requests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governorship_of_George_W._Bush

boutons_deux

06-27-2016, 04:15 PM

944 LOST GUNS

Nine-hundred and forty-four guns.

From Glocks, Sig Sauers and Remingtons to sniper and assault rifles, some equipped with grenade launchers.

They used to belong to law enforcement officers across California, but a new Bay Area News Group investigation found hundreds of police-issued weapons have been either stolen, lost or can’t be accounted for since 2010, often disappearing onto the streets without a trace.

A federal ranger's stolen gun was used in the high-profile killing of Kate Steinle as she walked with her father on a San Francisco pier. Despite the attention, a year later guns are still being stolen from law enforcement officers' vehicles.

Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is charged in Steinle's killing. He says he found the gun that was stolen from a Bureau of Land Management agent's vehicle.

A year after a bullet from a federal agent’s stolen gun killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier, this news organization surveyed more than 240 local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and discovered an alarming disregard for the way many officers — from police chiefs to cadets to FBI agents — safeguard their weapons.

Their guns have been stolen from behind car seats and glove boxes, swiped from gym bags, dresser drawers and under beds. They have been left on tailgates, car roofs and even atop a toilet paper dispenser in a car dealership’s bathroom. One officer forgot a high-powered assault rifle in the trunk of a taxi.

The tally includes Colts, Rugers, Smith & Wessons, a Derringer, a .44-caliber Dirty Harry hand cannon and a small snub-nosed revolver called a “Detective Special.”

In all, since 2010, at least 944 guns have disappeared from police in the Bay Area and state and federal agents across California — an average of one almost every other day — and fewer than 20 percent have been recovered.

Little attention had been paid to the issue before Steinle’s highly publicized death. But at least 86 weapons were snatched from officers’ vehicles between January 2010 and last June’s smash-and-grab burglary of a U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger’s gun recovered after Steinle’s shooting. Police have not determined who stole it, but an illegal immigrant is charged in her killing.

http://extras.mercurynews.com/policeguns/

And you rightwingnuts bitch about Fast'n'Furious? :lol

Law enforcement "loses" 1000s of guns every year. I bet a lot of them are lost by cops and staff "for profit".

rmt

06-30-2016, 12:30 PM

boutons_deux

06-30-2016, 12:47 PM

My shake-head for the day:

http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160629_Why_police_were_called_to_a_South_Jersey_ third_grade_class_party.html

These are the administrators I should trust my kids to? Really, call the police for that? I guess the word "brownies" is racist now.

the much bigger problem is why schools call the police for any little damn shit. Fucking police ready to arrest, criminalize, shoot anybody for anything.

pgardn

06-30-2016, 12:58 PM

the much bigger problem is why schools call the police for any little damn shit. Fucking police ready to arrest, criminalize, shoot anybody for anything.

What any little damn shit is widespread and frequently used by schools to call police?

boutons_deux

06-30-2016, 03:47 PM

Why Prison Phone Rates Keep Going Up Even Though The FCC Regulated Them

Families of prisoners in the U.S. pay as much as $1 a minute (http://www.ibtimes.com/how-prison-phone-calls-became-tax-poor-2342043) to talk to their loved ones behind bars, which is why the Federal Communications Commission stepped in last fall to regulate (http://www.ibtimes.com/fcc-will-cap-prison-phone-rates-thats-bad-news-these-two-tech-companies-2150606) the industry, which is controlled by a few private firms. And yet families expecting financial relief got a surprise in June: Their rates went up, again.

“It’s salt in the wound,” said Connie Pratt, a 63-year-old woman from Chico, California, whose 33-year-old son is incarcerated in Northern California. Pratt, who lives on a $900 monthly disability check, says she had hoped the FCC action would lower the cost of talking to her son. Instead, she found that on June 20 — the day prices were supposed to go down — the bill for a 15-minute phone call to her son had increased from $7.20 to $9.77.

So what happened?

For America’s 2.2 million inmates, all communication with the outside world is outsourced to private firms. In some cases, a 15-minute conversation with an inmate can cost upwards of $15. The high prices were largely due to monopoly contracts, revenue-sharing deals with local sheriffs, and little oversight.

“In my 16 years as a regulator, this is the clearest, most egregious case of market failure I have seen,” said Mignon Clyburn, a federal regulator at the FCC who championed the reforms.

In October 2015, the FCC voted to implement so-called “rate caps” that companies were allowed to charge inmates and their families.

http://www.ibtimes.com/why-prison-phone-rates-keep-going-even-though-fcc-regulated-them-2388200

rmt

06-30-2016, 07:54 PM

the much bigger problem is why schools call the police for any little damn shit. Fucking police ready to arrest, criminalize, shoot anybody for anything.

maybe you missed my, "Really, call the police for that?"

Trill Clinton

07-02-2016, 04:23 PM

boutons_deux check out this reckless female cop. she's put so many innocent people lives at risk and still has her job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Utq1wuCDk

boutons_deux

07-05-2016, 12:29 PM

L.A. sheriff's deputies sentenced to federal prison for assaulting jail visitor (http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/12/1/1455790/-L-A-sheriff-s-deputies-sentenced-to-federal-prison-for-assaulting-jail-visitor)

http://images.dailykos.com/images/173840/story_image/Gabriel_Castillo.png?1446950266

Gabriel Carrillo, after receiving some warm hospitality from the L.A. Sheriff's Department

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/1/1455790/-L-A-sheriff-s-deputies-sentenced-to-federal-prison-for-assaulting-jail-visitor

boutons_deux

07-06-2016, 05:07 PM

Alton Sterling shooting: Video of deadly encounter with officers sparks outrage
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/06/us/baton-rouge-shooting-alton-sterling/index.html

Hold the knitter down and shoot him to death. The South Will ... Always Be The South.

boutons_deux

07-06-2016, 05:21 PM

...

spurraider21

07-06-2016, 09:38 PM

Alton Sterling shooting: Video of deadly encounter with officers sparks outrage

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/06/us/baton-rouge-shooting-alton-sterling/index.html

Hold the knitter down and shoot him to death. The South Will ... Always Be The South.

the videos on that one are brutal af

boutons_deux

07-06-2016, 10:48 PM

the videos on that one are brutal af

Cops will skate free. all they need is "he had a gun, so we held him down and murdered him", iow, he was doing what BigGun wants, "concealed carry".

Trill Clinton

07-06-2016, 11:43 PM

another shooting smh
750912257568026625

Splits

07-07-2016, 01:40 AM

Didntdonuffin in Baton Rouge

Splits

07-07-2016, 02:30 AM

Didntdonuffin in Minnesota

pgardn

07-07-2016, 08:15 AM

the videos on that one are brutal af

Very brutal.

I honestly can't tell what the heck happened except those cops were determined to kill him with cameras rolling. It was not at all a clean execution like the cop who shot the guy walking away. This one will be tough.

Xevious

07-07-2016, 08:28 AM

another shooting smh
750912257568026625
This one is really fucked up. While you can't actually see the shooting... dude apparently had a concealed carry permit and told the officer that he had a gun (as he was supposed to do), then was shot while reaching for his driver's license. The officer opened fire into a car with a woman and four year old little girl. What the hell.

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 09:35 AM

Yes, Black America Fears the Police. Here’s Why.

https://www.propublica.org/article/yes-black-america-fears-the-police-heres-why

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 10:08 AM

How a $2 Roadside Drug Test Sends Innocent People to Jail

Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives.

Why are police departments and prosecutors across the country still using them?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside-drug-test-sends-innocent-people-to-jail.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

$2 and you get an job-destroying arrest record, while the cop notches +1 on his arrest quota.

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 02:12 PM

Why Black Lives Don’t Matter To The NRA

The country’s largest gun lobby has fought tirelessly in recent years to expand gun ownership to all Americans, successfully securing the right for people to legally carry both open and concealed firearms virtually anywhere they want. In Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was shot Tuesday night at a convenience store, a license is not required to openly carry a firearm. And in Minnesota, where Philando Castile was shot on Wednesday during a traffic stop, people with permits can carry weapons, openly or concealed.

Before he died, Castile specifically told the officer Wednesday night that he was armed and had a license to carry, but was shot and killed anyway. “He tried to tell you he was licensed to carry and he was going to take it off. Please don’t tell me my boyfriend is gone. He don’t deserve this,” his girlfriend said in a Facebook Live video (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/07/3796061/philando-castile-shooting/) she recorded after the incident. Her young daughter witnessed the entire thing from the backseat.

But the NRA has not addressed either shooting. Instead, the group shared news this week of a Pennsylvania homeowner who shot a man after an apparent home invasion and a Colorado man, a “good guy with a gun,” who stopped a robber (https://www.facebook.com/NationalRifleAssociation/posts/10154476741781833) until police arrived. Both incidents occurred in rural neighborhoods — the Pennsylvania town where the home invasion occurred is 100 percent white (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayton,_Pennsylvania).

The NRA was also silent during the protests (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/19/why-isn-t-the-nra-defending-ferguson-s-blacks.html) in Ferguson, Missouri, when the government used militaristic SWAT teams and tanks against civilians. Instead of calling out the government, the NRA only mentioned that gun sales increased during the unrest.

Still, the NRA wants to sell firearms to black people, who remain overwhelmingly supportive (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-africanamerican-guns-idUSKCN0PP2N320150715) of gun control. The organization has put forth some clumsy attempts at minority outreach.

At its annual convention in Louisville this year — where there was hardly a non-white face (https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/733748936113020929) in sight — the group attempted to market to black people, highlighting videos in which black gun-owners discussed the threat of foreign terrorists coming across the border and “Islamic sleeper cells” in every major American community.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/07/3796062/nra-black-lives-matter/

#AllLivesMatter (except when they're black)

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 02:15 PM

Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport

Tens of thousands of people every year are packed into vans run by for-profit companies with almost no oversight.

https://d1n0c1ufntxbvh.cloudfront.net/photo/36d5780e/16612/2000x/

Every year, tens of thousands of fugitives and suspects — many of whom have not been convicted of a crime — are entrusted to a handful of small private companies that specialize in state and local extraditions.

A Marshall Project review of thousands of court documents, federal records and local news articles and interviews with more than 50 current or former guards and executives reveals a pattern of prisoner abuse and neglect in an industry that operates with almost no oversight.

Since 2012, at least four people, including Galack, have died on private extradition vans, all of them run by the Tennessee-based Prisoner Transportation Services. In one case, a Mississippi man complained of pain for a day and a half before dying from an ulcer. In another, a Kentucky woman suffered a fatal withdrawal from anti-anxiety medication. And in another, guards mocked a prisoner’s pain before he, too, died from a perforated ulcer.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/07/06/inside-the-deadly-world-of-private-prisoner-transport#.UgFAXXQNo

Pelicans78

07-07-2016, 03:25 PM

I think one of the issues is some of these cops are inherently afraid of black people and will overreact on anything.

pgardn

07-07-2016, 05:22 PM

I think one of the issues is some of these cops are inherently afraid of black people and will overreact on anything.

Definitely in the Minnesota case.
Looks like the cop really freaked out.

The Louisiana case is gonna take time.

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 05:56 PM

Heavily Armed White Man Arrested Alive After Shooting at Police Officer

The racist double standard in American law enforcement continues.

62-year-old William Bruce Ray, who is white, was arrested alive Tuesday afternoon by police in Wake County, North Carolina, despite pointing his shotgun at oncoming traffic and even firing a .22 caliber pistol at officers responding to the scene. According to local media, Ray threatened deputy D.R. Farmer (http://www.wral.com/man-charged-with-shooting-at-wake-deputy/15832777/) with his shotgun before reaching for the handgun in his pocket, saying, “I got something for you.”

Sheriff Donnie Harrison told WRAL-TV that Farmer was able to subdue Ray peacefully, though Ray’s pistol did discharge into the air as he was subdued.

“The deputy luckily grabbed the barrel and pushed him back,” Harrison said. “Luckily, nobody got hurt. That’s the good thing. God was looking out for us… (Ray) was very fortunate that he didn’t get shot, very fortunate that anybody didn’t get shot.”

http://usuncut.com/news/armed-white-man-arrested-alive-nc/

Xevious

07-07-2016, 05:56 PM

I think one of the issues is some of these cops are inherently afraid of black people and will overreact on anything.

That was my thought also in the MN video. I don't believe that the officer set out to hurt anybody, but something spooked him and he was freaked the fuck out. The victim's girlfriend was calmer than the cop. That said, he has no business being a cop and will hopefully be charged. Not only did he kill an innocent man completely unprovoked, he endangered a woman and her child.

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 05:58 PM

FBI investigating after cellphone video shows police fatally shooting unarmed man in Fresno

Cellphone video showing Fresno police officers shooting an unarmed 19-year-old man lying on the ground at a gas station has sparked protests and prompted theFBI (http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/fbi-ORGOV000008-topic.html) to launch an investigation.The shooting, which occurred last month but generated debate this week after the video was made public, is the latest in a series of police use-of-force incidents caught on tape.

The video shows Dylan Noble lying on the ground on June 25 as two officers with their guns drawn stand feet away from him. As officers yell “Keep your hands up” and other commands, one shot is fired. Seconds later, a third officer approaches the pair, and another shot rings out. At one point during the video, Noble can be seen raising his arm and saying, “I’ve been shot.”

The witness video does not show the moments just before the fatal shooting. Two shots already had been fired at Noble before the recording began.

Police Chief Jerry Dyer told The Times on Thursday that Noble twice raised his shirt with his left hand and used his right hand to reach under his shirt into his waistband. The officers, he said, feared for their lives.

Officers warned Noble not to reach into his waistband because they believed he was trying to retrieve a firearm, Dyer said.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-video-shooting-dylan-noble-20160707-snap-story.html

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 06:23 PM

Fatal shootings by police are up in the first six months of 2016, Post analysis finds (http://link.washingtonpost.com/click/7104232.0/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cud2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tL25hdGlvbm FsL2ZhdGFsLXNob290aW5ncy1ieS1wb2xpY2Utc3VycGFzcy0y MDE1cy1yYXRlLzIwMTYvMDcvMDcvODFiNzA4ZjItM2Q0Mi0xMW U2LTg0ZTgtMTU4MGM3ZGI1Mjc1X3N0b3J5Lmh0bWw_d3BtbT0x JndwaXNyYz1mbF9mYXRhbA/000000000000000000000000C87d97b8f)

http://link.washingtonpost.com/view/5535104da6cba84a6f8b4584489ns.0/56e3c60b

There's no stopping the slaughter by the police state.

Muslim terrorists! :lol

cd021

07-07-2016, 08:20 PM

That was my thought also in the MN video. I don't believe that the officer set out to hurt anybody, but something spooked him and he was freaked the fuck out. The victim's girlfriend was calmer than the cop. That said, he has no business being a cop and will hopefully be charged. Not only did he kill an innocent man completely unprovoked, he endangered a woman and her child.

There should be attention charges to reflect that as well, then again I am highly skeptical that the officer will receive jail time, it just doesn't happen when the victims are black.

DarrinS

07-07-2016, 08:25 PM

Meanwhile

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-82-shot-14-killed-in-chicago-4th-of-july-weekend-shootings/

Th'Pusher

07-07-2016, 08:43 PM

Meanwhile

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-82-shot-14-killed-in-chicago-4th-of-july-weekend-shootings/

Hey. Look over there!

Capt Bringdown

07-07-2016, 09:29 PM

http://craphound.com/images/gen_strike_english_hi-res.jpg

Trill Clinton

07-07-2016, 09:37 PM

Meanwhile

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-82-shot-14-killed-in-chicago-4th-of-july-weekend-shootings/
What does that have to do with police killing Americans?

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 09:38 PM

racist Darrin loves, rejoices over dead knitters.

pgardn

07-07-2016, 09:57 PM

So during the protests aimed at Police shootings, two police officers are shot in Dallas.

Just wonderful...

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 10:03 PM

So during the protests aimed at Police shootings, two police officers are shot in Dallas.

Just wonderful...

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.

pgardn

07-07-2016, 10:09 PM

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.

Yeah.

Lets balance it out.

Looks like more cops are down now.
How many more to even it up boots?
Wait, it's not balanced (even) anymore as 2 = 500+

So where do we stand boots? I'm a little confused.

TheSanityAnnex

07-07-2016, 10:17 PM

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.
Stop pretending to hide your excitement you sick fuck.

pgardn

07-07-2016, 10:18 PM

Holding these protests at night is not a good idea.
I know it's hot, but if you want to protest shootings it might be a good idea to make it less likely to get random shooters joining in. Just a thought for #blacklivesmatter. I think this group organized it. Or maybe this WAS the point. To just get cops and civilians shot randomly/ or targeted.

Excellent...

pgardn

07-07-2016, 10:37 PM

So boots...

As of right now 1 officer dead and 3 other cops wounded.
Protesters have also been shot. This will probably change by tomorrow morning so I just wanted a feel for your scoring system now. If it stayed 1 cop dead, 3 wounded, how even is it? And how are protesters tallied in?

TeyshaBlue

07-07-2016, 10:44 PM

Protest in Dallas turns deadly. 10 cops shot, 3 dead. 2 snipers reportedly.

TeyshaBlue

07-07-2016, 10:45 PM

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.

Fuck you, coward.

Th'Pusher

07-07-2016, 10:46 PM

Protest in Dallas turns deadly. 10 cops shot, 3 dead. 2 snipers reportedly.
Snipers? Seriously?

TeyshaBlue

07-07-2016, 10:50 PM

That's what the local news is reporting.

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 10:51 PM

Fuck you, coward.

:lol TB:lol G F Y stalker.

It's about time the fucking cops got some push back.

Th'Pusher

07-07-2016, 10:51 PM

Yeah. Watching it on cnn now. Fucking crazy.

TeyshaBlue

07-07-2016, 10:52 PM

:lol TB:lol G F Y stalker.

It's about time the fucking cops got some push back.

Die in a fire, coward.

pgardn

07-07-2016, 10:58 PM

It's about time the fucking cops got some push back.

This is why your fake sympathy for the downtrodden can't be taken seriously.
You are just a vile creature.

boutons_deux

07-07-2016, 11:08 PM

you rightwingnut cop-fellators don't GIVE A SHIT if the cops slaughter blacks by the 100s, every year. G F Y

baseline bum

07-07-2016, 11:42 PM

you rightwingnut cop-fellators don't GIVE A SHIT if the cops slaughter blacks by the 100s, every year. G F Y

Everyone's a right winger to you. :lol

DPG21920

07-07-2016, 11:51 PM

you rightwingnut cop-fellators don't GIVE A SHIT if the cops slaughter blacks by the 100s, every year. G F Y

What does that have to do with you doing what you accuse others of doing (not giving a sh*t when cops are slaughtered)?

pgardn

07-08-2016, 12:27 AM

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.

Dallas Hospital

http://i66.tinypic.com/f50dc4.jpg

These folks got some bad news. I wonder if they think it's even.

boutons_deux

07-08-2016, 05:26 AM

This is why your fake sympathy for the downtrodden can't be taken seriously.
You are just a vile creature.

Your takes suck, as usual

boutons_deux

07-08-2016, 05:31 AM

Dallas Hospital

http://i66.tinypic.com/f50dc4.jpg

These folks got some bad news. I wonder if they think it's even.

Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamil Rice, Philando Castile, etc, etc etc

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/recent-police-shootings-involving-black-men-40399003

and your cop-fellators show no sympathy for the knitters. Rather you and the media dig up backgrounds with the subtext "see, the knitter deserved to executed without trial"

Are you gonna dig into the police b/g of these cops, some of who have very probably brutalized, killed knitters or other "bad cop" shit, with the same "see, the cops deserved to be murdered"?

TeyshaBlue

07-08-2016, 06:18 AM

What hilarious bullshit. Shut the fuck up, coward.

CosmicCowboy

07-08-2016, 06:41 AM

:lol TB:lol G F Y stalker.

It's about time the fucking cops got some push back.

I would kick your fucking ass if you said that to me in person you cowardly piece of shit.

boutons_deux

07-08-2016, 07:03 AM

I would kick your fucking ass if you said that to me in person you cowardly piece of shit.

big talk, little dick, GFY.

CosmicCowboy

07-08-2016, 07:14 AM

big talk, little dick, GFY.

Yep. That's you, bitch. You disgusting piece of shit.

boutons_deux

07-08-2016, 07:17 AM

Yep. That's you, bitch. You disgusting piece of shit.

:lol You rightwingnuts are fucking hilarious. GFY

CosmicCowboy

07-08-2016, 07:23 AM

:lol You rightwingnuts are fucking hilarious. GFY

Because I respect the hard job our police are asked to do? Because it pisses me off when disgusting pieces of shit like you celebrate their deaths and call it "getting even"?

I don't find you "hilarious". You need to have your ass beat down to a pulp.

boutons_deux

07-08-2016, 08:13 AM

Because I respect the hard job our police are asked to do? Because it pisses me off when disgusting pieces of shit like you celebrate their deaths and call it "getting even"?

I don't find you "hilarious". You need to have your ass beat down to a pulp.

You Lie. I don't celebrate cops deaths.

America's unbroken, serial repeats as World Champion of gun violence is as American as apple pie. It's a defining aspect of American civilization.

My ass is just fine, and you won't touch it, asshole.

I see your racism makes all kinds of excuses for white cops slaughtering blacks, but no excuses for blacks shooting back in frustration of having their people slaughtered by cops.

CosmicCowboy

07-08-2016, 08:24 AM

You Lie. I don't celebrate cops deaths.

America's unbroken, serial repeats as World Champion of gun violence is as American as apple pie. It's a defining aspect of American civilization.

My ass is just fine, and you won't touch it, asshole.

I see your racism makes all kinds of excuses for white cops slaughtering blacks, but no excuses for blacks shooting back in frustration of having their people slaughtered by cops.

I don't excuse anyone for assassinating cops you disgusting piece of shit.

boutons_deux

07-08-2016, 08:54 AM

I don't excuse anyone for assassinating cops you disgusting piece of shit.

Neither do I, you dickless piece of rightwingnut shit.

CosmicCowboy

07-08-2016, 09:04 AM

Neither do I, you dickless piece of rightwingnut shit.

You said you could excuse them because they were "frustrated" with "having their people slaughtered by cops".

Your words, asshole.

TeyshaBlue

07-08-2016, 06:12 PM

Neither do I, you dickless piece of rightwingnut shit.
Lying motherfucker.

FuzzyLumpkins

07-08-2016, 06:28 PM

I don't excuse anyone for assassinating cops you disgusting piece of shit.

I don't excuse it either but I can understand where the anger towards police come from. For all the difficulty of their job, they are held to a lower standard then the rest of us and are protected by a collection of unions that are amongst the most powerful political forces in our country.

In some neighborhoods it is tyranny. Not Dallas but unchecked power is what it is. Perhaps instead of trying to push through more police protection acts when LEOBOR and capital police crimes already exist, perhaps some introspection is in order.

pgardn

07-08-2016, 07:00 PM

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.

pgardn

07-08-2016, 08:21 PM

Boots now has settled down and can rescind his statement. It's been 24, so he was a bit upset.

He is really just shocked about how cops were using lethal force, especially on blacks, far too often for his liking.
He really does not want for police to die to "even" things out.

TheSanityAnnex

07-08-2016, 08:25 PM

Trill Clinton

07-09-2016, 11:35 AM

The video contradicts earlier reports.
In the early hours of Monday, July 4, an off-duty New York City Police officer shot and killed a black man.

In a week full of national stories about killer cops and cop killers, this one barely registered. The shooting was a “road-rage incident,” one police source told the New York Post (http://nypost.com/2016/07/04/road-rage-incident-leads-off-duty-cop-to-fatally-shoot-man/). Wayne Isaacs “feared for his life” as Delrawn “Smalls” Dempsey pummeled him in the face, these sources said (http://nypost.com/2016/07/07/video-shows-motorist-punching-off-duty-cop-before-fatal-shooting/). Unreleased footage showed Smalls “punching the shit” out of Isaacs as the off-duty cop, a three-year veteran of the NYPD who’d just changed out of his uniform after finishing a 4-to-midnight shift, sat in his car, these sources said. “After he was struck in the face and head numerous times, Isaacs, fearing for his life, pulled out his weapon and fired three times.” ..

http://players.brightcove.net/41372...0bc1_default/index.html?videoId=5028231413001 (http://players.brightcove.net/4137224153001/ed38fae1-4db1-4308-8095-399a04010bc1_default/index.html?videoId=5028231413001)

Besides, the police chorus noted (http://nypost.com/2016/07/07/video-shows-motorist-punching-off-duty-cop-before-fatal-shooting/), Smalls was a guy with a long rap sheet and three stints in jail. One whose own girlfriend told police after he was shot that he’d been drinking, had a hot temper and that she couldn’t restrain him when he went to attack the man in the other car.

But Friday, the Post published the black-and-white surveillance video the sources had alluded to, and it showed something very different: Smalls approaching Isaacs’s car on foot, then a movement—ducking his head and cocking his shoulder—as he nears Dempsey’s window. A second after that, he falls to the ground.

Even before the video was posted, Smalls’s girlfriend, Zaquanna Albert, who was in the car with him just before the shooting, along with the couple’s infant son and one of her teenage daughters, gave a very different description of the events from what police sources had voiced on her behalf:

“I’m so upset about this 4 lives taken by the police department in a few days and I express my deepest sympathy to the other families and I’m trying hard real frigging hard to be strong for him but he knew I was a crybaby,” she wrote in a Thursday Facebook post, which featured Smalls’s picture among those of other black men recently killed by police. “THE pain is a unexplainable. # justice ‪#‎standup‬#fatherlesssons ‪#‎UNEXCEPTABLE‬”

The investigation into the shooting is being run by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who one year after Eric Garner was killed in New York was named special prosecutor to oversee cases of police-involved civilian deaths.

“At the end of the day, if the attorney general decides he used poor judgement in shooting here, that’s fine, but he didn’t get out of his car and shoot this guy,” a police department official said. “Finally, it’s about (Isaac’s) perspective: what was he thinking at the time and did he have reason to fear.”

But one New York law-enforcement official who didn’t want to be further identified weighing in on another office’s investigation said that the video doesn’t look good for Isaacs.

“The point is it’s almost instantaneous, it in no way appears to be life-or-death. The officer just doesn’t seem to be justified in his reaction,” the official said. “Again there’s no car in front of him as far as you can see so it’s not like he can’t roll up the window and drive so yeah it doesn’t look good.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX28fT4d9ik

Trill Clinton

07-09-2016, 11:35 AM

RIP delrawn, alton and philandro

boutons_deux

07-09-2016, 06:20 PM

White Connecticut man pulls gun on off-duty cop — and is arrested later at home

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/white-connecticut-man-pulls-gun-on-off-duty-cop-and-is-arrested-later-at-home/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

:lol EXACTLY the same tactics used on Tamir Rice.

boutons_deux

07-09-2016, 06:23 PM

Bahamas issues advisory to citizens visiting US: ‘Avoid crowds’ due to cops shooting ‘young black males’

http://2d0yaz2jiom3c6vy7e7e5svk.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/shutterstock_261897017-800x430.jpg

According to a statement posted online (http://mofa.gov.bs/ministry-of-foreign-affairs-and-immigration-issues-travel-advisory-for-bahamians-traveling-to-united-states-of-america/) by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration, Bahamian citizens vising America should be extra cautious given recent events.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration has taken a note of the recent tensions in some American cities over shootings of young black males by police officers,” the statement reads. “

At the commencement of the Independence holiday weekend, many Bahamians will no doubt use the opportunity to travel, in particular to destinations in the United States.”

“We wish to advise all Bahamians traveling to the US but especially to the affected cities to exercise appropriate caution generally.

In particular young males are asked to exercise extreme caution in affected cities in their interactions with the police” it continues, before giving a very specific warning.

“Do not be confrontational and cooperate.”

Officials added, “Do not get involved in political or other demonstrations under any circumstances and avoid crowds.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/bahamas-issues-advisory-to-citizens-visiting-us-avoid-crowds-due-to-cops-shooting-young-black-males/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

Visit America, The Land of White Supremacy and the Slaughter of Blacks! :lol

boutons_deux

07-09-2016, 06:49 PM

Video: Phoenix police in riot gear hose down anti-brutality protestors with pepper spray

An anti-violence rally in Phoenix ended abruptly Friday night when police used massive amounts of pepper spray and bean bag projectiles on protestors sending them running in panic, reports AzCentral (http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2016/07/09/phoenix-rally-turns-confrontational/86882956/).

As the crowd chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot,” police unleashed wave after wave of pepper spray as the protestors fled, with police following some and making arrests.

According to police, three men were taken into custody for throwing rocks at officers, while six people were treated for injuries from the pepper spray or from falling as they ran.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/watch-phoenix-police-in-riot-gear-hose-down-anti-brutality-protestors-with-pepper-spray/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

boutons_deux

07-10-2016, 12:24 PM

Kansas Cop Fired After Bizarre Facebook Threat to Black Dallas Stranger's Daughter

The officer from the Overland Park Police Department used his personal account to send an ominous message to LaNaydra Williams' Facebook page beneath a public photo of her 5-year-old daughter just after the Dallas attack (http://www.insideedition.com/headlines/17426-obama-to-cut-short-europe-trip-after-dallas-cop-slayings-calls-shooter-demented-individual).

“We’ll see how much her life matters soon,” read the message, which was written on a years old photo of Williams' daughter, India. “Better be careful leaving your info open where she can be found :) Hold her close tonight it’ll be the last time.”

http://www.insideedition.com/headlines/17428-kansas-cop-fired-after-bizarre-facebook-threat-to-black-dallas-strangers-daughter-reports

Winehole23

07-10-2016, 06:27 PM

https://external-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQCv2D4J4hj2oEJ-&w=476&h=249&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.theatlantic.com%2Fassets%2Fm edia%2Fimg%2Fnotes%2F2016%2F07%2FRTSH3XR%2Ffaceboo k.jpg%3F1468180530&cfs=1&upscale=1&sx=2&sy=0&sw=956&sh=500

(http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/07/a-single-photo-that-captures-race-and-policing-in-america/490664/)

pgardn

07-10-2016, 07:10 PM

well, that's balanced now, 500+ dead by police this year, and 2 police shot. it all evens out.

:lol TB:lol G F Y stalker.

It's about time the fucking cops got some push back.

Is it even boots?

boutons_deux

07-10-2016, 09:52 PM

Police Arrest Man Who Posted Video of Alton Sterling’s Death

The man who was instrumental to making the first released recording of the Alton Sterling shooting go viral was arrested less than 24 hours later on charges of “assault and battery,” a move that he says was an act of police retaliation,

The very next day, while trying to get through a security checkpoint to go to his job as an aerospace ground equipment technician at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, LeDay was surrounded and detained by ten military police officers, some of whom carried M-16 rifles.

The military officers allegedly told him that he was wanted for assault and battery before hauling him to a back room where he was handcuffed and leg-shackled. He was then taken to Dekalb County Jail by local Dunwoody police.

When he arrived, the warrant for his arrest mentioned nothing about an assault and battery charge.

“It was just over some traffic tickets from a couple of years ago,” LeDay said. “They said my license was suspended.”

LeDay wound up being forced to spend 26 hours in a jail cell, only being released after paying $1,231 in traffic fines. He admitted to not paying the tickets and allowing his license to be suspended, because he did not have the money at the time and no longer drives.

http://usuncut.com/news/alton-sterling-videographer-arrested/

boutons_deux

07-10-2016, 09:58 PM

Police have been safer under Obama administration than every president in 35 years

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/republican-deadbeat-dad-joe-walsh-thinks-mlk-would-go-on-fox-news-to-say-all-lives-matter/) (R-IL) tweeted, “Obama’s words & ’s deeds have gotten cops killed.”

Rep. Steve King (http://www.rawstory.com/?s=Steve+King) (R-IA) claimed the shooting had “roots” in the “anti-white/cop events illuminated by Obama.”

But according to an analysis by the Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-analysis-police-safer-under-obama-20160709-story.html), blaming Obama or Black Live Matter activists, who began protesting shootings by police following the death of Michael Brown, isn’t supported by any of the data available.

In fact, their claims are outright false. :lol, OF COURSE, they're Repugs. :lol

The Officers Down Memorial Page paints a different picture than conservatives would have the public believe.

The site tracks law enforcement officers murdered in the line of duty in real time and shows an average of 101 police officers deliberately killed each year under the Reagan administration.

Under George H.W. Bush that number fell to 90, to 81 under Clinton and 72 deaths per year under George W. Bush.

As for the Obama administration, that number has continued to drop. The average number of police murdered during his presidency has fallen to an average 62 deaths each year through 2015. Looking at projections for 2016, that number stays the same.

[B]There are so few officers being killed intentionally that just the Dallas shootings skew the data showing a 44 percent increase. Without the murders this week, the year-over-year rise would only have been 17 percent.

This isn’t about better medical care and quicker response time either. Under Obama’s administration, assaults on police officers have dropped as well.

The FBI reports that in 1988, the final year of the Reagan administration, police had 15.9 assaults per every 100 law enforcement officers.

However, at the end of the Clinton administration in 2000, that number dropped to 12.7 assaults for every 100 officers. Under the Bush administration, it fell again 11.3.

The trend has continued under Obama’s administration.

The most recent data from the FBI shows that in 2014 it decreased to 9.0.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/police-have-been-safer-under-obama-administration-than-every-president-in-35-years-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

Still, cops now horrify citizens with 10Ks militarized swat raids every year, flash bang grenades, shooting dogs, destroying the wrong address, shooting anybody who tries to shoot bac at the unknown, unannounced invaders, aka, "home defense" gets you killed.

And of course, the PIC must swallow citizens into its voracious, instatiable maws:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg/2000px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

boutons_deux

07-10-2016, 11:24 PM

Freedom of Assembly denied, peaceful dissent criminalized

Total Chaos Erupts as Baton Rouge Police Assault Protesters and Deploy Sound Cannon

http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/baton-rouge-protest-chaos/

CosmicCowboy

07-11-2016, 06:46 AM

Winehole23

07-11-2016, 07:05 AM

it's good advice not to exercise your right to petition

boutons_deux

07-11-2016, 07:17 AM

blacks don't even think to call the police, or help the police, for fear of getting brutalized or killed.

boutons_deux

07-11-2016, 07:32 AM

‘No Field Test is Fail Safe’: Meet the Chemist Behind Houston’s Police Drug Kits

Decades after L.J. Scott developed a test for cocaine, his invention played a role in hundreds of wrongful convictions in Houston.

https://www.propublica.org/article/no-field-test-is-fail-safe-meet-the-chemist-behind-houston-police-drug-kits?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1468239433

... so how many 100s of years of false imprisonment?

Will the courts release the wrongfully convicted?

Apparently, they really really hate to release the falsely convicted.

If released, will the courts remove the arrest, conviction, jail time from their records so the "ex-cons" can get apartments, public assistance, jobs?

Capt Bringdown

07-11-2016, 10:01 AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dry9oK6FLUg

Trill Clinton

07-11-2016, 05:22 PM

baton rouge cops arrested the store owner of the convenience store alton sterling was murdered in front of. this has been a trend with cops. they arrest and make trumped up charges against witnesses of their killings as a intimidation tactic. they did the same thing to the man who recorded the eric garner murder. i believe they gave him 4 years in prison.

Alton Sterling Witness: Cops Took My Phone, My Surveillance Video, Locked Me Up (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/11/alton-sterling-witness-cops-took-my-phone-my-surveillance-video-locked-me-up.html)
I told them I would like to be in the store when [they took it],” Muflahi told The Daily Beast, adding that he also demanded they get a warrant for the seizure of his private property.

Officers didn’t even file an application for a search warrant, The Daily Beast found last week. Nor did Muflahi sign a “Voluntary Consent to Search Form” with the Baton Rouge police.

After taking away Muhlafi’s cellphone — and the damning video on it — Lt. Robert Cook and Officer Timothy Ballard locked the him in the back of a police car for the next four hours, the lawsuit claims. The only time Muhlafi was let out was when he had to use the restroom.

“The officers would not allow Mr. Muflahi to use the restroom inside of his business establishment and he was escorted to the side of his building and forced to relieve himself right there within arm distance of a BPRD officer and in full view of the public,” the lawsuit states.

During the four hours inside a cop car and another two hours at police headquarters, Muhlafi was allegedly prevented from making a phone call to his family or an attorney.

Muhlafi is suing Salamoni, Lake, Cook, and Ballard as well as the City of Baton Rouge and police chief Carl Dabadi. The lawsuit seeks damages for “false arrest, false imprisonment, the illegal taking and seizing of his security system, illegally commandeering his business,” attorney Joel Porter told The Daily Beast on Monday.

boutons_deux

07-11-2016, 05:33 PM

http://media.salon.com/2016/07/jonathan-bachman.jpg

An even match. dickless white cops in military gear vs a black women in a dress.

Trill Clinton

07-11-2016, 05:35 PM

surveillance footage contradicts off duty cop and "witnesses" claim in the case of delrawn small, who was shot and killed after a road rage accident.

In the early hours of Monday, July 4, an off-duty New York City Police officer shot and killed a black man.

In a week full of national stories about killer cops and cop killers, this one barely registered. The shooting was a “road-rage incident,” one police source told the New York Post (http://nypost.com/2016/07/04/road-rage-incident-leads-off-duty-cop-to-fatally-shoot-man/). Wayne Isaacs “feared for his life” as Delrawn “Smalls” Dempsey pummeled him in the face, these sources said (http://nypost.com/2016/07/07/video-shows-motorist-punching-off-duty-cop-before-fatal-shooting/). Unreleased footage showed Smalls “punching the shit” out of Isaacs as the off-duty cop, a three-year veteran of the NYPD who’d just changed out of his uniform after finishing a 4-to-midnight shift, sat in his car, these sources said. “After he was struck in the face and head numerous times, Isaacs, fearing for his life, pulled out his weapon and fired three times.” ..

Besides, the police chorus noted (http://nypost.com/2016/07/07/video-shows-motorist-punching-off-duty-cop-before-fatal-shooting/), Smalls was a guy with a long rap sheet and three stints in jail. One whose own girlfriend told police after he was shot that he’d been drinking, had a hot temper and that she couldn’t restrain him when he went to attack the man in the other car.

751572191788097536

But Friday, the Post published the black-and-white surveillance video the sources had alluded to, and it showed something very different: Smalls approaching Isaacs’s car on foot, then a movement—ducking his head and cocking his shoulder—as he nears Dempsey’s window. A second after that, he falls to the ground.

Even before the video was posted, Smalls’s girlfriend, Zaquanna Albert, who was in the car with him just before the shooting, along with the couple’s infant son and one of her teenage daughters, gave a very different description of the events from what police sources had voiced on her behalf:

“I’m so upset about this 4 lives taken by the police department in a few days and I express my deepest sympathy to the other families and I’m trying hard real frigging hard to be strong for him but he knew I was a crybaby,” she wrote in a Thursday Facebook post, which featured Smalls’s picture among those of other black men recently killed by police. “THE pain is a unexplainable. # justice ‪#‎standup‬#fatherlesssons ‪#‎UNEXCEPTABLE‬”

The investigation into the shooting is being run by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who one year after Eric Garner was killed in New York was named special prosecutor to oversee cases of police-involved civilian deaths.

“At the end of the day, if the attorney general decides he used poor judgement in shooting here, that’s fine, but he didn’t get out of his car and shoot this guy,” a police department official said. “Finally, it’s about (Isaac’s) perspective: what was he thinking at the time and did he have reason to fear.”

But one New York law-enforcement official who didn’t want to be further identified weighing in on another office’s investigation said that the video doesn’t look good for Isaacs.

“The point is it’s almost instantaneous, it in no way appears to be life-or-death. The officer just doesn’t seem to be justified in his reaction,” the official said. “Again there’s no car in front of him as far as you can see so it’s not like he can’t roll up the window and drive so yeah it doesn’t look good.”