General Police Abuse Thread

[Dominus Atheos]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- ... wat-teams/

I reported last year that many of Massachusetts’s SWAT teams were claiming to be private corporations that were immune from public records requests. Last month, the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC), the corporation that overseas that region’s SWAT teams, settled with the Massachusetts ACLU and released records related to how SWAT teams are used. A number of publications have since been sifting through the documents.

The results are similar to what we found in other situations in which these records have been made public — the widespread use of the kind of militarized tactics, weapons, and gear that was once reserved only for emergency situations, when lives were at immediate risk. Most notable: Of the 21 times a NEMLEC SWAT team was deployed to serve a search warrant for drugs, the SWAT team reported finding drugs just five times.

From The Intercept:

Just one of the 79 SWAT deployments in 2012-14 — assistance with the search for the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing — involved terrorism. Other SWAT actions during that period show no hostage situations, no active shooters and only 10 non-suicidal barricaded subjects.

About half of the remaining cases involved everyday and often mundane police activity, including executing warrants, dealing with expected rioting after a 2013 Red Sox World Series game, and providing security for a Dalai Lama lecture. In one mission, 15 SWAT team members roved through Salem’s Halloween celebrations looking out for unspecified “gang-related activity,” but were warned by their commanders to maintain a “professional demeanor” given that “everyone has a camera phone and you don’t want to be on YouTube or the news later.”

The remaining 37 SWAT actions were either proactive drug operations, initiated by local police, or suicide response operations . . .

More than half of the SWAT teams’ drug operations were initiated at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. Furthermore, of the 22 narcotics operations detailed in the documents over the two years, 14 included warrants authorizing SWAT teams to conduct “no knock” raids and four authorizing “knock and announce” raids — both of which are forceful entry options that have made national headlines for the accidental killings, injuries, and trauma they can produce.

As for those suicide calls . . .

“I was a Boston police officer and was on some of the first SWAT deployments in the 70s. Those were only for armed barricaded subjects in buildings, the reason we were deployed were for hostage situations or threats to harm others,” Nolan said. “That’s why they were established. What we’re beginning to see is that in small towns like where NEMLEC has jurisdiction, their officers want to be on SWAT teams, so they’re looking for any justifiable way to get on.”

“It’s certainly counter-productive to have a fully-armed militarized SWAT team respond to potentially suicidal suspects who are looking for ways out like suicide-by-cop situations,” contended Nolan. “I don’t know why you couldn’t just have someone respond who knows negotiation strategy techniques, without the tanks and the body armor.”

More analysis from DigBoston:

. . . n the vast majority of cases . . . overkill appears to be an underlying theme …

-In October 2012, NEMLEC dispatched 28 members from 10 different city and town departments—their alliance spans from Groton and the New Hampshire border to the north, to Newton and Waltham on the southern side, and to Gloucester and Newburyport up the coast—to confront a “barricaded subject armed with a knife” who had a “history of mental health issues.”

-In January 2013, NEMLEC was activated to assist with a “no knock day time search warrant … for narcotics (heroin).” Since the target had a “very extensive criminal history” and a “confidential informant” allegedly reported a handgun in the apartment, Lowell police were given three teams with a total of 30 troops, the “platoon” packing everything from battering rams and long arms to attack dogs and tasers. Together with the medics and crisis negotiators in tow, the posse totaled nearly 40 people.

-Responding to a suicidal subject in Gloucester who was armed with a knife back in September 2013, Gloucester police were complemented by 23 members of NEMLEC SWAT, four crisis negotiators, two K-9 officers, and nine incident management specialists—plus two additional SWAT associates from the Middlesex Sheriff’s Office for good measure.

-In September 2013, NEMLEC called an astonishing 110 bodies from SWAT and their affiliated Regional Response Team (RRT) to Dunstable after reports rung out of a “missing 57 year old male who had a history of depression and suicidal thoughts.” After approximately three hours of searching, during which NEMLEC “deployed ATVs, mountain bikes and personnel on foot to conduct line and grid searches,” local police found the man in question deceased on an abandoned property with self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Of the seemingly innumerable frivolous deployments and expenses, one NEMLEC action on October 16, 2012 stands out as the most absurd. Documents show that “to assist Medford PD with security, dignitary protection and crowd control issues with the visit of the Dalai Lama,” the council dispatched 34 personnel to the Elks Lodge near the Kurukulla Center. While four members comprising an “immediate action team” sat in a “grey van” for the rest of the day, the “remaining members of the SWAT team were assigned to crowd control, if needed.” As anyone familiar with the Lama’s repertoire may have predicted, special units were not ultimately required to quell the horde, and after eight hours on the clock, the team was dismissed.

In the late 1980s, the death of Boston police officer Sherman Griffiths during a botched SWAT raid to serve a drug warrant spurred investigations that uncovered a culture of militarism, deceit, and corruption with the drug squads of the Boston Police Department. Things didn’t improve much. In March 1994, the Rev. Accelyne Williams was killed by police during a botched SWAT raid on the wrong house. As the New York Times reported later that year, subsequent investigations blamed Williams’s death on “a bad tip, bad police work, a lack of supervision and inadequate regulations governing confidential informers.” Two year later, a SWAT team in Fitchburg, Massachusetts burned a building to the ground when a flash grenade caught fire during a drug raid, leaving 24 people homeless.

More recently, in 2011, a SWAT team in Framingham shot and killed 68-year-old Eurie Stamps during a drug raid on his home. The police were looking for the son of Stamps’s wife. Stamps, who was unarmed, wasn’t suspected of any criminal activity. The officer shot him was cleared of any culpability. And in 2012, also in Fitchburg, an FBI SWAT team took a chainsaw to the door of a terrified woman and her three-year-old daughter. They had the wrong apartment.

But as Kade Crockford of the Massachusetts ACLU points out, there’s a problem here even if the police manage to avoid killing innocent grandfathers and pastors, or chainsawing the door of the wrong apartment.

To truly understand how the drug war functions in Massachusetts, we must take a hard look at the big picture—not just the SWAT raids that end in violent death . . . We must look closely at the hundreds of daily SWAT raids nationwide targeting suspected drug users or dealers, even when they end in less spectacular kinds of misery and trauma. These cases might not make for bleeding headlines on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, but they constitute the bulk of the war on drugs in Massachusetts and nationwide, and they are also destructive—to individuals, to families, to communities, and to the relationship between police and the people they serve.

These records open up an important window onto the ground truth of the war on drugs in our state. Despite the countless raids on suspected drug users and dealers conducted by NEMLEC and the many other SWAT teams in Massachusetts, drugs like heroin are more widely available and harmful than ever before. Militarized police tactics aren’t the way to fix the opiate crisis in the Bay State.

The NEMLEC data is similar to data from other jurisdictions, such as Maryland, or the figures published a couple years ago by the national ACLU, all of which show that SWAT teams are primarily used to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes, and most of the time don’t turn up enough contraband to merit even a felony charge.

The justification for the use of this kind of force is usually officer safety. It’s arguable that tactics like no-knock raids actually make warrant service safer for police officers. But even if that were true, the justification itself is revealing. SWAT teams were once used only in emergency situations, when lives were in immediate danger. That is, they were primarily used to protect civilians. Today, they’re primarily used to protect police officers, often at the expense of the safety and civil liberties of civilians. Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern in modern policing, and it isn’t limited to SWAT teams.

[Dominus Atheos]

Michigan judge bullies children in open court for refusing to see their dad

The Internet is abuzz this morning about Michigan Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca, who berated three juvenile siblings in her court before sending them to juvenile detention. Their crime? They didn’t want to have lunch with their father. From the Detroit Free Press:

Three Oakland County children who refused to go to lunch with their father, as part of a bitter divorce and custody battle between their parents, are spending their summer in the county’s juvenile detention center, according to court records.

“We’ll review it when school starts, and you may be going to school there,” Oakland County Family Court Judge Lisa Gorcyca told the children during a June 24 hearing, referring to the center in Waterford Township called Children’s Village, where authorities house as many as 200 juvenile offenders.

Gorcyca, who blamed their mother for poisoning the children’s attitude toward their father, ordered the children be sent to the center for defying her orders — while in court — that they go to lunch with their father.

The children — ranging in age from 9 to 15 — were deemed in contempt of court last month by Gorcyca for disobeying her orders to “have a healthy relationship with your father.”

We’re already well into the absurd here. Even assuming the judge is correct that the mother is turning the kids against their father, why in the world would a judge punish the kids for that? Keep in mind, these kids aren’t accused of any crime. They’re accused of defying a judge who ordered them to have a relationship with their father. And they say this is because their father is abusive (which, again, is an accusation we have no way of knowing is true or false).

But it gets much, much worse. Gorcyca then seems to lose her temper — and all perspective. Here’s another account, from the Oakland County Daily Tribune:

An Oakland County circuit judge who sent three children to a juvenile detention facility for refusing to speak to their father compared the kids to cult leader Charles Manson.

Oakland Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca declared the children of Maya Tsimhoni in contempt of court last month and ordered them held at Oakland County Children’s Village until they attempt to have a relationship with their father or they turn 18.

The three — ages 9, 10, and 15 — have been incarcerated for more than two weeks . . .

“I do apologize if I didn’t understand the rules,” said one boy, 15, “but I do not apologize for not talking to (the father) because I have a reason for that and that’s because he’s violent and I saw him hit my mom and I’m not going to talk to him.”

The father has not been charged with a crime.

Gorcyca called the boy a “defiant, contemptuous young man” and asked him if there was anything he’d like to say about being sent to Children’s Village.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the boy said.

“No, you did,” Gorcyca said.

“I ordered you to talk to your father. You chose not to talk to your father. You defied a direct court order. It’s direct contempt so I’m finding you guilty of civil contempt.”

The boy responded: “But he was the one that (did) something wrong. I thought there (were) rules .. for not hitting someone.”

“You’re supposed to have a high IQ, which I’m doubting right now because of the way you act,” Gorcyca said.

“You’re very defiant. You have no manners … There is no reason why you do not have a relationship with your father . . .

It then got especially weird.

“You need to do a research program on Charlie Manson and the cult that he has … You have bought yourself living in Children’s Village, going to the bathroom in public, and maybe summer school.”

Gorcyca forbid the mother or anyone from her side of the family from visiting the boy.

A review hearing was scheduled for Sept. 8.

“You are so mentally messed up right now and it’s not because of your father,” Gorcyca said.

“And one day you are going to realize what’s going on in this case and you’re going to apologize to your dad … Dad, if you ever think that he has changed and he’s no longer like Charlie Manson’s cult, then you let us know and we can (review the case).”

Gorcyca refused to allow Tsimhoni to say goodbye to her son or to convince him to speak with his father.

The judge then began threatening the other children.

Tsimhoni’s two other children had a hearing later in the day, during which the 10-year-old boy did speak briefly to his father.

“Judge, I’m sorry for my behavior, and dad, I’m sorry for my behavior,” he said.

“Dad, the judge wanted me to talk to you so here is something about myself ? I enjoy soccer and I hope to be on the soccer team.”

A girl, 9, was asked if she would also like to apologize to her father, but she had no audible response.

“I know you’re kind of religious,” Gorcyca told the girl.

“God gave you a brain. He expects you to use it. You are not your big, defiant brother who’s living in jail. Do you want to live in jail?”

The girl said she would try to work with her father during visits, and Gorcyca told the children to go to lunch with their father.

“Let’s see, you’re going to be a teenager,” Gorcyca told the girl.

“You want to have your birthdays in Children’s Village? Do you like going to the bathroom in front of people? Is your bed soft and comfortable at home? I’ll tell you this, if you two don’t have a nice lunch with your dad and make this up to your dad, you’re going to come back here (after lunch) and I’m going to have the deputies take you to Children’s Village.”

The other brother and sister said they didn’t want to have lunch with their father, either, so Gorcyca sent them to juvenile detention, too. She then forbade the boy from contacting their brother while they’re there. She also ordered that they have minimal contact with one another. And they’ve apparently been there ever since.

Yesterday, the New York Observer published an interview with the kids’s father. The tone of the article indicates that the Internet mobs got this wrong, and that the interview will provide some ameliorating context. But it really doesn’t. The father provides a plausible argument that the mother has turned the children against him. But it doesn’t remotely vindicate Gorcyca’s brutish behavior. Either the father beat the mother, the mother has convinced the kids of this or the kids are lying about it because they simply don’t like their father. Under all three scenarios, berating three kids between the ages of 9 and 15, comparing them to Charles Manson, threatening them with humiliation, then taking away their freedom is behavior that ought to result in this judge getting removed from the bench. It’s also bizarre that the father seems completely unfazed by the judge’s unconscionable behavior. If he expressed any anger over it during the interview, it didn’t make it into the article.

In this interview from late last year, Gorcyca credits her husband for encouraging her to become a judge. Her husband is David Gorcyca, the former Oakland County DA (where Lisa Gorcyca is a judge). Before becoming a judge, Lisa Gorcyca was a prosecutor in that same office. Last year, David Gorcyca was found personally liable for a $1 million judgment against the parents of an autistic girl. He had tried to prosecute her father for sexual assault. From the Detroit Free Press:

Gorcyca was prosecutor in 2007 when he charged Julian Wendrow of West Bloomfield with raping his severely autistic daughter and charged Wendrow’s wife, Thal, with child abuse for failing to prevent the attacks.

The girl’s disablity prevents her from speaking or writing and the allegations of rape were made through a controversial method known as facilitated communication, in which a teacher’s aide holds the girl’s arm over a keyboard to help her type responses to questions. Critics insist that the aide is the author of the typed messages, either conciously or subconsciously.

The criminal case against the Wendrows collapsed after the method was tested in court by asking the girl questions out of earshot of her facilitator. She couldn’t answer a single question correctly.

Gorcyca eventually dropped the charges but not until Julian Wendrow had served 80 days in jail and the family had been separated for months. Gorcyca left office in December 2008 after deciding not to seek re-election.

Gorcyca had absolute immunity from any liability for bringing the charges. He lost the lawsuit because he continued to defame the family after he had left office. Ultimately, Oakland County paid out more than $6 million to settle the lawsuit.

Four years ago, he pled no contest to two counts of professional misconduct for public statements he made implicating a kindergarten teacher in the sexual assault of two children. The teacher was convicted but ultimately vindicated and released after a Free Press investigation found significant flaws in the case. The teacher spent three years fighting the charges, including six months in jail. Columnist Brian Dickinson pointed out at the time that Oakland County paid more than $200,000 in legal fees for Gorcyca’s lawyers, who managed to help him avoid any professional discipline. Meanwhile, the county pays an average of $525 to poor people accused of crimes who can’t afford a lawyer.

In some ways, Lisa Gorcyca is just a symptom of a wider problem — the use of the criminal justice system to address problems that are better addressed by parents, communities, religious institutions and families. (See this timely Huffington Post investigation of other kids caught up in Michigan’s criminal justice system.) But I don’t know that her actions in this case can really be attributed to her merely being a cog in a flawed system. She straight-up bullied these kids. Even if it’s true that they had been brainwashed, her behavior was way over the line. The judge who was supposed to protect them then terrorized them more.

Perhaps Gorcyca is under a lot of stress. She certainly seems to have faced a lot of hardship recently — in addition to the judgment against her husband, the interview linked above references a battle with breast cancer. But whatever the cause, her actions in this case alone show that she’s unfit to be a judge, least of all a family court judge.

[Dominus Atheos]

How A Teenage Girl Who Gave An 'Intimidating Look' Was Sentenced To Up To 5 Years In Prison

WASHINGTON -- In suburban neighborhoods around the country, teenagers sass their parents and yell at their peers. Usually, they grow out of it. In Detroit, a 17-year-old girl who misbehaved was sentenced to up to five years in the adult prison system. Afterwards, she tried to kill herself multiple times and was subjected to a cell extraction by prison guards that a use-of-force expert called "wrong and clearly dangerous.”

Jamie, as we’ll call her, was initially sentenced to two concurrent six-month sentences for a fight with a family friend. She was given a special youthful status that allowed her record to be scrubbed clean, as long as she met certain good behavior standards. But she was sent to an adult prison to serve her time, and while there, she lost that status and was given a longer sentence for the same crime. Jamie’s saga was part of a recent HuffPost Highline investigation into the treatment of children in adult prisons.

Prison officials, for the purposes of that story, told The Huffington Post that Jamie had been resentenced as a result of misconduct during her confinement. Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections, said that she "failed in every instance" to live up to the conditions the judge laid out.

But new documents obtained through an open records request, which arrived after the initial story was published, reveal that her disciplinary record appears fairly mundane. The only misconduct tickets she received prior to the new sentence were for defying an order and giving a guard an "intimidating look," and yelling at an inmate who allegedly had slapped her on the back of the head.

The prison presented these two tickets to a judge, who revoked Jamie's special youthful status and changed her sentence from six months in prison to between almost 11 months and five years, with some credit for time served. The prison also told the judge that she had "no motivation to be involved" in peer groups and missed school, which she was required to attend, according to Gautz.

But Gautz told HuffPost that Jamie was not permitted to attend school because she was in segregation, or isolation. He said she was not in isolation for disciplinary reasons. (A logbook obtained by the Huffington Post shows that Jamie has a history of being on suicide watch.)

Jamie is one of the plaintiffs suing Michigan for mistreating youth held in the adult prison system, allegations the state denies. Jamie was originally sentenced in January 2012 for throwing a brick at a family friend and breaking her glass mail chute. (Jamie denied the assault and the police report notes that the brick may not have, in fact, hit the friend.)

In a wealthier county in Michigan that includes Ann Arbor, kids with this status generally do community service, like helping out at the local science museum. Jamie was sent to serve her time at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, a prison that holds inmates convicted of crimes like first-degree homicide.

James Chylinski, the judge who sentenced her, said that for kids who come from unstable environments, the youth program, where some kids serve their time in adult prison, is an opportunity, "like sending them away to college." He added, "It's actually an effort to try to help them to lock them up, it's less punishment and more trying to rehabilitate them, making them go to school."

Jamie had at least three adult cellmates before her 18th birthday, including one in her 50s with a history of cocaine possession. In March 2012, she was issued a misconduct ticket for yelling, "I'm gonna whoop that bitch's ass" about another inmate. Jamie claimed she made the statement because the inmate slapped her on the back of the head and when she reported it to correctional officers, they didn't do anything. She claimed the inmate then threatened her again in the yard.

The next month, she refused to take down a cover from her door window and give her ID to a guard. (She told us she was changing her clothes and wanted privacy.) When the guard reprimanded her, she asked whether she was getting a ticket and refused to leave the guard's desk area. The officer wrote, "Prisoner stared at this writer the whole time with an intimidating look on her face." Jamie received a ticket for threatening behavior and disobeying an order.

"It’s hard to be here when you’re young, not having everything explained to you," Jamie told HuffPost in an interview.

Gautz said there were "about a half dozen" reasons the judge could have revoked her youthful status.

“We rely on the staff at the [Department of Corrections] because they deal with this all the time," Chylinski said. It's very rare for him to have to revoke an inmate's youthful status and there are a number of factors that go into his decisions, he said. "Every case is individual, but a lot of it has to do with attitude," he said, relaying a hypothetical situation to make his point.

“Two guys come in front of you for stealing your car, and one of them came in with a suit and tie on and had both parents there, and you're in school and everything else,” he said, “and the other one comes in with an old raggedy T-shirt with an attitude like, ‘Screw you, judge’ -- they have sentencing guidelines, the guidelines for each of those people because of their prior record, or lack of it, would be the same -- but as a judge would you treat them the same?”

Advocates contend that this case only shows that teenagers are not adults -- and adult prisons are not equipped to deal with them. "At 17, you are literally still going through puberty and hormones are changing," said Kristen Staley, associate director of youth justice policy at the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency. "Moreover, factors such as early trauma or mental illness can stunt this growth ... MDOC staff is not thoroughly trained to handle teenagers and this [incident] is a clear indication of that."

Amy Fettig, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said that "it seems to me Michigan is giving up on some of its kids for no good reason." She added, "That's a weekend of a teenager who is maybe having a bad day, it's certainly not somebody who is a threat to the community."

[TheFeniX]

Agreed to an extent. I think you're kind of ignoring the fact that lots of people kill animals and are not sociopathic or psychotic...which is what you seem to be implying.

Where are you getting "kill animals?" I've almost shot small animals, one of which was a possum hissing at my dog. I would have been both morally and legally justified in killing it. Instead I man-handled it into a cage while wearing my "bite gloves" and dropped it off out in the sticks because it's just what I do.

Had that been a 6-lbs Chihuahua, you could make the case it was legal for me to shoot it. That would however make me a fucking psychopath. You can in no way, ever, convince me that killing a small domesticated animal out of either "self-defense" or anger doesn't make you a terrible person.

Again, it is evidence against your claim that only police can do these things and it supports my claim that when it comes to an animal versus a human the word of the person is sufficient.

Private citizens generally don't end up in people's back-yards shooting their animals.

Source

Dogs Attacking People or Livestock
Dogs Running at Large

Neither of which is relevant to my original point that there really is no safe place to keep your dog if police care to shoot it.

I was talking about the minimum that should be done when cops hit the wrong house. Someone should lose their job regardless of the circumstances. Minimum does not mean maximum. Obviously if a crime took place then they should be charged but if that's the case we're not talking about the minimum and that should be obvious to anyone. Use some common sense.

I'm passed that. If your job incompetence leads to people getting traumatized, injured, or killed: you go to jail. Negligence is a crime. When you're in the business of breaking into people's homes with body-armor and automatic weapons "lol whoops, guess I might get fired" doesn't fucking cut it. Not just for the safety of the general populace, but your other boys in blue who should be able to rely on good information about the target they're hitting. But since they have hardware that puts John Matrix's stash to shame, they aren't the ones ending up in body bags and the consequences are so tame for screwing the pooch as to barely be considered a slap on the wrist, so what reason do they have to do anything different?

I'm sure cops would spend a little more time gathering good information rather than going all gang-busters on random houses if the end result of you fucking up meant felony charges.

Agreed. However, my question to you remains unanswered. How is an officer that works for HPD suppose to distance himself from those statements?

I answered this.

Without context shelters are by far more prolific killers of dogs and companion animals than cops.

They don't come up with the lame excuses for doing so.... unless the shelter is run by PETA.

Like I said dogs are shot across the country for simply wandering onto airport property and those statistics are recorded and that action is policy. I think it may shock you to learn how animals are dealt with by animal control and shelters. I'm talking about boxes full of kittens and puppies being killed in large numbers. The bodies of those animals being frozen into nice cubes of dead cats and dogs.

Don't patronize me, I fully understand how many domesticated dogs and cats are put down every day in this country. However, if I saw some guy laughing gleefully while gassing or posioning dogs to death, I'd have to wonder just what kind of hiring practices the shelter has.

Just like if a cop shoots a 6lbs dog due to fearing for his life and his departments defends it: I wonder about the hiring practices of that department.

Michigan judge bullies children in open court for refusing to see their dad

No judge should have the power to sentence a minor to any kind of jail-time without some form of over-sight that kicks in before the sentence is administered. Expecting a 9-year-old to understand the consequences of ignoring a court order already makes the judge unworthy of passing judgement on anyone.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Where are you getting "kill animals?" I've almost shot small animals, one of which was a possum hissing at my dog. I would have been both morally and legally justified in killing it. Instead I man-handled it into a cage while wearing my "bite gloves" and dropped it off out in the sticks because it's just what I do.

I'm talking about the part of your post where you say "I'm talking talking about people who kill varmits that are damaging their property or animals". Them doing so does not make them mentally unhinged.

Unless you mean that you are not talking about those people in which case disregard.

Had that been a 6-lbs Chihuahua, you could make the case it was legal for me to shoot it. That would however make me a fucking psychopath. You can in no way, ever, convince me that killing a small domesticated animal out of either "self-defense" or anger doesn't make you a terrible person.

Why would it make you a psychopath, Dr. Fenix?

I'm not here to change your subjective opinion. Just because someone will kill an animal, even a small one, out of self defense doesn't mean they are a psychopath. I personally look down upon trophy hunting but I don't think that makes them a psychopath.

Private citizens generally don't end up in people's back-yards shooting their animals.

So what? This wasn't the subject but since you brought it up I will point out that in order for a police officer to perform their job effectively they may have to enter peoples back yards for many other reasons besides warrant service or searching for a lost child. The majority of times I've ended up in persons backyard is because I'm chasing someone and sometimes it is the yard of the person I'm chasing. I won't know until they are caught and identified.

To get us back on track the subject of this part of our conversation is unless there is evidence to the contrary a humans word will be taken when it comes to matters of self defense against an animal.

Neither of which is relevant to my original point that there really is no safe place to keep your dog if police care to shoot it.

You're right. It doesn't address that point. It's because it wasn't meant too and I even told you why I posted it. You actually do need to read what I say and comprehend it. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going "nah nah nah" isn't acceptable.

Here's why I said when I posted that source.

"Again, it is evidence against your claim that only police can do these things and it supports my claim that when it comes to an animal versus a human the word of the person is sufficient."

I'm arguing this because you said "How convenient for him he needs nothing but his word to determine if he's in the right or not...

to which I replied "Yeah. That's how it is in most encounters of animal vs human."

Now I will address your point...again. The concept is called risk management. You're attempting to add "100% effective" to my claim. I never said that.

I'm passed that.

Don't care. Stop adding bullshit and listen to what I'm saying. We shouldn't even be arguing about this.

If your job incompetence leads to people getting traumatized, injured, or killed: you go to jail. Negligence is a crime.

Again, you've added bullshit. I said "Police shouldn't get off scot free when they raid the wrong house. At a minimum someone should lose their job". You don't get to add "lying, murder, injury, etc and then act like I'm being soft. I'm talking about a warrant service on the wrong house due to police incompetence where nobody got hurt and the warrant was obtained legally.

When you're in the business of breaking into people's homes with body-armor and automatic weapons "lol whoops, guess I might get fired" doesn't fucking cut it. Not just for the safety of the general populace, but your other boys in blue who should be able to rely on good information about the target they're hitting. But since they have hardware that puts John Matrix's stash to shame, they aren't the ones ending up in body bags and the consequences are so tame for screwing the pooch as to barely be considered a slap on the wrist, so what reason do they have to do anything different?

I agree that there should be severe consequences when a warrant service on the wrong house due to incompetence results in injured/dead people and/or pets. I would also like to see an overhaul of the requirements for obtaining those warrants and that judges that issue warrants under weak causes also be held responsible. The punishment for that would also escalate depending on the loss.

I'm sure cops would spend a little more time gathering good information rather than going all gang-busters on random houses if the end result of you fucking up meant felony charges.

Felonies would be acceptable in the case of injury, loss of life, lying etc. If it is just simple incompetence then termination is sufficient. Don't like it. Too bad.

I answered this.

Eh. You provided an incomplete answer. You said "someone" should step forward. Well, who? What if your mysterious someone sides with the offending officer. How would say an officer that disagrees with them distance him/her self?

They don't come up with the lame excuses for doing so.... unless the shelter is run by PETA.

I'm glad you admit that context does matter.

Don't patronize me, I fully understand how many domesticated dogs and cats are put down every day in this country. However, if I saw some guy laughing gleefully while gassing or posioning dogs to death, I'd have to wonder just what kind of hiring practices the shelter has.

I wasn't attempting to patronize you. Calm down.

So, when you hear of a cop killing a dog do you picture them laughing gleefully? What if they are broken up about it?

Just like if a cop shoots a 6lbs dog due to fearing for his life and his departments defends it: I wonder about the hiring practices of that department.

Rightfully so.

[TheFeniX]

I'm talking about the part of your post where you say "I'm talking talking about people who kill varmits that are damaging their property or animals". Them doing so does not make them mentally unhinged.

I never claimed that, which is why my qualifiers were "anger" and "self-defense." Even a small dog or cat can injure and possibly kill a small child. Obviously, I wouldn't fire a gun in that situation, but the safety of the animal wouldn't weight on my mind if I tossed it aside and it was injured in the process.

Why would it make you a psychopath, Dr. Fenix?

You know killing/injuring small animals is a pretty clear indication of being a handjob of a human being.

I'm not here to change your subjective opinion. Just because someone will kill an animal, even a small one, out of self defense doesn't mean they are a psychopath. I personally look down upon trophy hunting but I don't think that makes them a psychopath.

I'm not talking about trophy hunting. I'm talking about the mentality of someone firing a gun in self-defense against a domesticated animal that has no chance to cause any lasting harm to them.

So what? This wasn't the subject but since you brought it up I will point out that in order for a police officer to perform their job effectively they may have to enter peoples back yards for many other reasons besides warrant service or searching for a lost child. The majority of times I've ended up in persons backyard is because I'm chasing someone and sometimes it is the yard of the person I'm chasing. I won't know until they are caught and identified.

And now we're back to the fact the officer has now entered an area where a dog is legally being contained, which is no defense for the dog.

To get us back on track the subject of this part of our conversation is unless there is evidence to the contrary a humans word will be taken when it comes to matters of self defense against an animal.

We've been over a few times about an officer's ability to escalate a situation, pushing it in a direction where they can use lethal force, then claim "I did what I had to do." I don't care to go over it again.

"Again, it is evidence against your claim that only police can do these things and it supports my claim that when it comes to an animal versus a human the word of the person is sufficient."

I'm arguing this because you said "How convenient for him he needs nothing but his word to determine if he's in the right or not...

to which I replied "Yeah. That's how it is in most encounters of animal vs human."

Now I will address your point...again. The concept is called risk management. You're attempting to add "100% effective" to my claim. I never said that.

I'll give you this: the U.S. is a shitty place where pretty much anyone can say "I was terrified by a small animal, so I fired a handgun in a residential area because my huge insecurities trump public safety." So, yes. In the instance of dog murdering, I have to say cops = private citizens in this area. It's nice that we have some common ground.

I'm passed that.

Don't care. Stop adding bullshit and listen to what I'm saying. We shouldn't even be arguing about this.

How is that bullshit? I'm passed cops just losing their jobs for being chuckle-fucks who don't know what's going on half the time and not caring when they find out they had bad information. The justice system is more than happy to dump mandatory sentences and multiple charges on top of private citizens (minors as well), why not just dump everything we can on them when they fuck up?

Again, you've added bullshit. I said "Police shouldn't get off scot free when they raid the wrong house. At a minimum someone should lose their job". You don't get to add "lying, murder, injury, etc and then act like I'm being soft. I'm talking about a warrant service on the wrong house due to police incompetence where nobody got hurt and the warrant was obtained legally.

I love this "nobody got hurt shit." You have kids? Imagine some idiots burst in and pointed assault rifles at them, held them, handcuffed, at gunpoint for an hour, next to their dead family pet. And why did they do all this? Because it's their policy once they enter your home.

I'm so fucking tired of this "no one got hurt" bullshit, when the fact is: the second you kick down that fucking door, people are getting hurt because I have the right to feel safe in my home not only morally, but also legally. My children should have the right to not have guns pointed in their face because someone didn't do their job. And they should have the right to see that person be punished for rights violations.

I agree that there should be severe consequences when a warrant service on the wrong house due to incompetence results in injured/dead people and/or pets. I would also like to see an overhaul of the requirements for obtaining those warrants and that judges that issue warrants under weak causes also be held responsible. The punishment for that would also escalate depending on the loss.

Like I said, I'm passed that: it's no longer a valid police action. Charge the moron who screwed the pooch with criminal negligence and anyone who knew the info was bad with breaking and entering and assault and battery. I wouldn't be opposed to kidnapping charges either.

Felonies would be acceptable in the case of injury, loss of life, lying etc. If it is just simple incompetence then termination is sufficient. Don't like it. Too bad.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Nothing is going to change. No politician has the spine to go up against the cops, these are scary dudes when provoked. Only thing that might cause a change is more people shooting back at cops when they break into the wrong home and juries refusing to convict them under Castle Laws. But that's a terrible idea as police will just start shooting sooner, killing more people, and dodging any repercussions.

Eh. You provided an incomplete answer. You said "someone" should step forward. Well, who? What if your mysterious someone sides with the offending officer. How would say an officer that disagrees with them distance him/her self?

I forgot, police are only allowed to release official statements when it's "nothing to see here, move along."

So, when you hear of a cop killing a dog do you picture them laughing gleefully? What if they are broken up about it?

I don't have to picture it, video in that vein has been posted in this very thread. Well, more depraved indifference, but whatever.

[Kamakazie Sith]

I never claimed that, which is why my qualifiers were "anger" and "self-defense." Even a small dog or cat can injure and possibly kill a small child. Obviously, I wouldn't fire a gun in that situation, but the safety of the animal wouldn't weight on my mind if I tossed it aside and it was injured in the process.

It seemed like you were claiming that but probably due to that typo.

being a handjob of a human being.

Sorry. Not seeing "killing a small animal that is attacking you" in that list, Dr. Fenix.

I'm not talking about trophy hunting. I'm talking about the mentality of someone firing a gun in self-defense against a domesticated animal that has no chance to cause any lasting harm to them.

Even a cat can inflict lasting harm in the form of scars. Killing one doesn't make you a psychopath especially in self defense.

By the way, I was talking about trophy hunting. I brought it up as an example of people who kill animals that pose no threat to them but aren't psychopaths. Why you would think that I thought you brought it up is very very bizarre. Honestly, it just seems like you aren't paying attention.

And now we're back to the fact the officer has now entered an area where a dog is legally being contained, which is no defense for the dog.

Yes. Again, that wasn't the subject. However, if an officer is also in your backyard because he is chasing a suspect then they are also there legally and entitled to self defense. I want to reiterate that I do think there should be a law on the books that prevent police from using any type of deadly force against animals 25lbs and under though. That seems very reasonable.

We've been over a few times about an officer's ability to escalate a situation, pushing it in a direction where they can use lethal force, then claim "I did what I had to do." I don't care to go over it again.

Which has nothing to do with my point that when a human claims self defense against an animal the human in generally taken at their word.

I'll give you this: the U.S. is a shitty place where pretty much anyone can say "I was terrified by a small animal, so I fired a handgun in a residential area because my huge insecurities trump public safety." So, yes. In the instance of dog murdering, I have to say cops = private citizens in this area. It's nice that we have some common ground.

There's nothing to give, Fenix. You should have conceded this a while ago. By the way, is there a country in the world where the word of a person isn't taken at face value over the body of a dead animal?

How is that bullshit?

What do you mean? You're telling me that you honestly don't understand how taking someone's statement and then adding critical qualifiers to that statement and then pretending that is their original statement isn't bullshit? Are you mental?

I'm passed cops just losing their jobs for being chuckle-fucks who don't know what's going on half the time and not caring when they find out they had bad information. The justice system is more than happy to dump mandatory sentences and multiple charges on top of private citizens (minors as well), why not just dump everything we can on them when they fuck up?

That's what happens when people are incompetent at their jobs. They get fired.

I love this "nobody got hurt shit." You have kids? Imagine some idiots burst in and pointed assault rifles at them, held them, handcuffed, at gunpoint for an hour, next to their dead family pet. And why did they do all this? Because it's their policy once they enter your home.

Hahaha I'm going to quote your stupidity here.

"I love this nobody got hurt bullshit" .... "Next to their dead family pet".

Sounds like someone got hurt, son. Are you stupid? Are you not paying attention to even what you are saying in the same paragraph?

I'm so fucking tired of this "no one got hurt" bullshit, when the fact is: the second you kick down that fucking door, people are getting hurt because I have the right to feel safe in my home not only morally, but also legally. My children should have the right to not have guns pointed in their face because someone didn't do their job. And they should have the right to see that person be punished for rights violations.

Losing your job isn't some minor inconvenience so stop pretending it is. Also, I'm not talking about gross negligence that leads to the wrong house being hit. If that's the case then yes someone should be charged.

I'll add that if someone, including a family pet, is injured/killed during this then adding charges would be acceptable even in the case of simple negligence.

Like I said, I'm passed that: it's no longer a valid police action. Charge the moron who screwed the pooch with criminal negligence and anyone who knew the info was bad with breaking and entering and assault and battery. I wouldn't be opposed to kidnapping charges either.

You realize that if they knew the information was bad but proceeded anyone this would be an actual crime? I really don't think you're grasping what a mistake is.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Nothing is going to change. No politician has the spine to go up against the cops, these are scary dudes when provoked.

Are you implying that cops are threatening our politicians with violence?

Only thing that might cause a change is more people shooting back at cops when they break into the wrong home and juries refusing to convict them under Castle Laws. But that's a terrible idea as police will just start shooting sooner, killing more people, and dodging any repercussions.

Well, I think being killed is a serious repercussion but to normal people. Obviously, when a cop is killed it's just a slap on the wrist because we have multiple lives.

No, change won't happen because the American voter is lazy and easily manipulated.

I forgot, police are only allowed to release official statements when it's "nothing to see here, move along."

Huh that seems quite normal policy across the board regardless of career. So, can you tell me what jobs have you worked where anyone and everyone was allowed to release official statements on behalf of their employer? Can you tell me of any job that has this policy?

I don't have to picture it, video in that vein has been posted in this very thread. Well, more depraved indifference, but whatever.

I didn't ask for a specific instance, you moron. I asked you "When you hear of a cop killing a dog do you picture them laughing gleefully? What if they are broken up about it".

I am trying to get a straight answer out of you because you said at the start of this for things to change cops will have to distance themselves from the actions of another cop. My point, which your inability to provide an answer is proving, is that there is no way for an individual cop to distance themselves from the actions of another officer. Thus, that makes that an unreasonable requirement.

[Borgholio]

Lawsuit: Teenager hit with Taser 3 times during grand mal seizure

http://www.al.com/news/anniston-gadsden ... r_3_t.html

A lawsuit filed this month by an Etowah County woman alleges that police officers from Rainbow City repeatedly fired Tasers at her and her teenage daughter at a concert while the daughter was suffering from grand mal seizures.

The 32-page lawsuit, filed July 9 in U.S. District Court, accuses at least five Rainbow City officers and three Gadsden officers who were allegedly handling security for a Jan. 16 hip-hop concert of excessive force, torture "and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." It also names Rainbow City Police Chief Greg Carroll and Center Stage, the entertainment venue where the suit alleges the incident took place.

The woman and her daughter seek damages for pain, emotional distress, medical expenses, punitive damages and attorney's fees.

Gregory Harp, attorney for the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit speaks for itself.

"A Taser was used three times on a child's chest, during a medical emergency, while she was pinned to the ground by officers," he said. "Other officers present at the scene failed to intervene. Her mother was knocked to the ground, handcuffed, and then she herself Tased and arrested."

Gadsden City Attorney Lee Roberts said he had no comment as he has not seen the suit. A message left for Center Stage was not returned. Rainbow City Attorney Jim Turnbach said he had not seen the lawsuit, but said it would be "vigorously defended."

According to the lawsuit, the incident happened at a Jan. 16 concert for hip-hop artist Kevin Gates at Center Stage. Earlier that day, the teenager suffered a grand mal seizure at her high school and was treated there but not taken to a hospital.

The suit states that the teenager, as the result of an accident, suffers from a medical condition that brings on the seizures causing her to lose consciousness, experience muscle contractions and "sometimes exhibit loud vocalizations caused by the forceful exhalation of air from her lungs." Grand mal seizures are caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain, according to the Mayo Clinic.

According to the lawsuit, after the concert began at 8 p.m., a performer at one point left the stage and went into the crowd, causing a "stampede" that knocked the teenager to the floor. Other concertgoers "trampled" her, triggering a seizure.

This caused the crowd to part around the girl, and her younger sister informed employees of Center Stage that she was suffering a seizure. The suit states an employee picked her up and carried her to the lobby, where she was "unceremoniously dumped" onto the floor and held with a chokehold.

The suit alleges the mother learned of her daughter's condition from the sister and came to the venue. When she arrived at the lobby dressed in a T-shirt and pajamas, the mother was "held down on the ground at five different points of her body" by police, then restrained to hold her wrists, hands and fingers immobile. After a police officer twice instructed another officer to "get her," an officer fired his Taser at the mother while she was restrained, causing her to urinate.

The Taser was also employed three times against the teenager, who was "face down with her arms secured behind her," the suit states. She temporarily lost consciousness and was taken to Gadsden Regional Medical Center, while the mother was arrested for disorderly conduct.

At the hospital, the suit claims, police made jokes about the teenager and threatened to have her committed to a mental hospital.

"The actions of the ...defendants ...were unjustified, unprovoked, and objectively unreasonable and constitute a violation of their rights under the Fourth Amendment and/or the Fourteenth Amendment to be free from the use of excessive force," the suit states.

[Lord Pounder]

Sandra Bland stopped for failure to indicate a lane change.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/yf8GR3OO9mU[/youtube]

This is the full unedited footage without CNN or Fox spin. From the start Sandra Bland appears to be edgy, some people smoke when they are nervous. Later Sandra can be heard shouting she is epileptic and has had her head slammed off the ground, the arresting officer can be clearly heard to shout good. Sandra then says she can't feel her arm, this is ignored. Finally she says she is having issues hearing. The black female officer can be heard arguing that point.

Three days later Sandra Bland is found hanged in her cell.

Guardian Link

It's noted Sandra was an active supporter of Black Lives Matter and was well aware of her rights. A taser is pulled on her "I will light you up" is the officers threat to make Bland leave her car. No Miranda Rights are read to her and she is refused the opportunity to call her lawyer. My understanding is she was arrested for resisting arrest, which is absurd. The arresting officer is now on paid leave. Sandra Bland is dead and it's being investigated as possible murder.

[Dominus Atheos]

The criminalization of poverty: Houston police arrest mother after she goes to a job interview

Here’s a roundup of stories and studies on a theme we’ve been covering here at The Watch, the criminalization of poverty.

Houston police arrested a single mother last week for “abandoning” her six-year-old and two-year-old in a food court while she went to a job interview. She says she couldn’t afford to hire childcare, and that the children were only 30 feet away, and never out of her sight.

A new study by Loyola law professor Alexandra Natapoff finds that public defenders are increasing fulfilling the role of social workers for their clients. This is in part because an increasingly large potion of our social institutions — from schools to doctors to public welfare agencies — are being asked to act as law enforcement. It’s a particularly troubling trend given recent revelations about just how overworked and understaffed most public defender offices are.

Welcome to the “Texas Triangle,” a trio of disproportionately poor towns that extract a disproportionately high amount of revenue from traffic fines. One of the towns, Hearne, has 4,400 people, but according to WFAA, “has more than 12,000 municipal court cases pending.” Hearne, you may remember, was the site of a massive drug bust in 2000 that rounded up about 10 percent of its black population. Most were later exonerated when it was revealed that nearly all the arrests were based on the word of a single informant who was paid per conviction.

San Francisco has more laws aimed at criminalize sitting, sleeping, and panhandling in public spaces than any city in California. A new study looks at how these laws essentially criminalize poverty and homelessness.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... interview/

[Dominus Atheos]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... t-violence

Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

Over the past year, video footage from around the country of law enforcement officers killing citizens, many of them black, has brought scrutiny on policing in the streets. Yet, another disturbing police problem has drawn far less attention: Use of force by cops in schools. According to news reports and data collected by advocacy groups, over the past five years at least 28 students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by so-called school resource officers—sworn, uniformed police assigned to provide security on K-12 campuses.

As with the officer-involved killings that have been thrust into the national spotlight, government data on police conduct in schools is lacking. And while serious use of force by officers against school kids appears to be rare, experts also point to a troubling lack of training and oversight, and a disproportionate impact on minority and disabled students.

Here are some of the recent cases, which Mother Jones has looked into further:

• Chokehold and a brain injury: In March, Louisville Metro Police officer Jonathan Hardin was fired after his alleged use of force in two incidents at Olmsted Academy North middle school: He was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line, and a week later of putting another 13-year-old student in a chokehold, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury. In April, a grand jury indicted Hardin on assault and misconduct charges for the chokehold incident, and his trial is pending. The Jefferson County Attorney's Office is also considering charges against Hardin over the punching incident, a spokesperson for the attorney's office told Mother Jones. Hardin's attorney declined to comment, citing the ongoing criminal litigation.
• Beating with a baton: In May 2014, Cesar Suquet, then a 16-year-old high school student in Houston, was being escorted by an officer out of the principal's office after a discussion about Suquet's confiscated cell phone. Following a verbal exchange, police officer Michael Y'Barbo struck Suquet at least 18 times with a police baton, injuring him on his head, neck and elsewhere, according to the lawsuit Suquet's family filed against the Pasadena Independent School District. In its response to the incident (which was captured on video according to court documents), the school district admitted that Y'Barbo struck Suquet but denied allegations of wrongdoing. Y'Barbo, in his response, denied striking Suquet on the head, stating that he acted "within his discretionary duties" and that his use of force was "reasonable and necessary." A spokesperson for the school district told Mother Jones that Y'Barbo remains on regular assignment including patrol.
• Taser-induced brain injury: In November 2013, student Noe Nino de Rivera was trying to break up a fight at Cedar Creek High School in Bastrop County, Texas, when two officers arrived and told Nino de Rivera to step back. Within moments, one of the officers, Randy McMillan, tased the 17-year-old, who fell to the ground and hit his head. Nino de Rivera was taken to a hospital, where he "underwent surgery to repair a severe brain hemorrhage and was placed in a medically induced coma," according to the family's lawsuit against McMillan, Bastrop County, and the school district. The teen remained in a coma for 52 days, a family attorney told CNN. Attorneys representing the county said that Nino de Rivera had failed to comply with orders and that McMillan "used the reasonable amount of necessary force to maintain and control discipline at the school." In May 2014, a grand jury declined to indict McMillan, and that month he received a promotion. Three months later, the county agreed to pay Nino de Rivera's family $775,000 to settle the lawsuit.
• Shot to death: On November 12, 2010, 14-year-old Derek Lopez stepped off a school bus outside of Northside Alternative High School, near San Antonio, and punched another student, knocking him to the ground. Officer Daniel Alvarado witnessed the altercation and ordered Lopez to freeze, and then chased a fleeing Lopez to a shed behind a house, where he fatally shot him. Alvarado later testified that Lopez had "bull-rushed" him as he opened the shed door. Lopez, who was unarmed, died soon afterward. In August 2012, a grand jury declined to indict Alvarado. The Northside Independent School District school board later agreed to pay a $925,000 settlement to Lopez's family. Alvarado has since been terminated from Northside for unrelated reasons, an attorney for the school district told Mother Jones.

The US and state governments do not specifically collect data on police conduct in K-12 schools. But some data has been gathered at the county and state level by the ACLU and other advocacy groups, including in Texas and North Carolina. Using news reports, the Huffington Post identified at least 25 students in 13 states recently who sought medical attention after getting tased, peppersprayed, or shot with a stun gun by school resource officers. (For more on these harsh tactics and a lawsuit they led to, read this Mother Jones story.)

rom the war on drugs to "zero tolerance policies," cops have been utilized in K-12 schools for decades. But the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 caused their ranks to swell, with the number of police officers patrolling K-12 campuses approximately doubling to 20,000 [15] by 2006, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers [16]. The US Department of Justice spent an estimated $876 million after Columbine to fund [17] nearly 7,000 school resource officers across the country. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, the DOJ has spent [18] another $67 million to fund an additional 540 cops in schools. Many school districts and local police departments have funded their own sworn law enforcement personnel for the job.

But much about this field remains unclear: According to a recent report [19] from Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green University criminologist, "The existing research offers few answers to such basic questions as to how SROs are selected, the nature and extent of SRO training, and the strategic uses of SROs."

Michael Dorn, a former school district police chief in Georgia, says that misconduct cases by school cops are rare and that overall their presence has helped improve campus safety. But the programs need to be better evaluated based on data, he adds. Studies [20] in some school districts have shown that school cops helped reduce crime, truancy, and bullying. But others have found [21] that the presence of cops in schools leads to increased ticketing and arrests for minor infractions. Jason Langberg, an attorney in Virginia who has represented victims of alleged abuse, explains that many officers end up stepping into matters of routine student discipline. They deal with "minor scuffles, a bag of marijuana, or even just talking back," he says. "The vast majority of incidents don't involve guns in schools."

Dewey Cornell, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who studies school safety, suggests that the rise of school cops has been based on misguided fear. After Sandy Hook, the NRA proposed putting them in every single school in America [22]. But relative to overall gun violence, "schools are one of the least likely places for a shooting to occur, and pulling officers off the street and putting them on guard in a school lobby is short-sighted and dangerous," Cornell says. "The fear of school shootings has been greatly overestimated because of the attention to a handful of tragic cases."

Last March, the US Department of Education reported [23] that 92,000 students were subject to school-related arrests in the 2011-2012 academic year, the first time the agency collected and published such data. Black students comprised 16 percent of the total students enrolled but accounted for 31 percent of arrests. And a quarter of the total arrested were students with disabilities, despite that they comprised only 12 percent of the student population. In recommendations to the White House published [24] in May, the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing advised that law enforcement agencies analyze data on all stops, frisks, searches, summons, and arrests—and seperate out the data for school detentions. "Noncriminal offenses can escalate to criminal charges when officers are not trained in child and adolescent development," the report noted.

Often young police officers are on the job, according to the advocacy group Strategies for Youth, which works with police departments and school districts on training. Yet, a national survey [25] conducted in 2013 by the group found that police academies in only one state, Tennessee, offered training specifically for officers deployed to schools. The majority of academies, the survey noted, "do not teach recruits how to recognize and respond to youth with mental health, trauma-related and special education-related disorders."

In February, Michael Reynolds, a black high school student in Detroit, testified [26] to the task force about an interaction with a cop at his school. "Before I could explain why I did not have my [student] badge I was escorted to the office and suspended for an entire week," he said. "Many young people today have fear of the police in their communities and schools."

[Dominus Atheos]

‘Come Back When You’re Dangerous’: How Police Are Failing The Mentally Ill

WASHINGTON — Natasha McKenna was killed in February by a Special Emergency Response Team officer at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center in Virginia. She had been shot four times with a taser while her hands were cuffed behind her back, her legs shackled, and a mask secured to her face to prevent her from spitting.

The Washington Post reported that her last words were, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!”

The Fairfax County Police Department released the findings of an investigation into the death of the 37-year-old woman on Monday. Video of the incident has not been released to the public.

The official cause of death, as reported in April by the FCPD, is: “Excited delirium associated with physical restraint including use of conductive energy device.” Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are also listed as contributing causes.

The official “manner” of death, however, is ruled an “accident” in the autopsy report.

In other words, the SERT officer accidentally killed McKenna, who is survived by a 7-year-old daughter.

This seems typical for the way that black and brown people are treated by law enforcement in the United States – unarmed persons are killed, and the offending officers walk away with, at the most, a slap on the wrist.

Matthew Fogg, a retired chief deputy for the U.S. Marshals Service, agrees.

“As a Marshal and having handled prisoners, thousands of prisoners, in my career, this seems like it was an unnecessary use of force,” Fogg, who has no professional connection to McKenna’s case, told MintPress News. “You’re talking about a female here, only 130 pounds, and you’ve got her restrained, and you’re tasing her!”

“Why so much force?”

McKenna’s situation was compounded by her mental health issues, according to Pete Earley, a former reporter for The Washington Post and author of “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness,” a book about his son’s experiences with mental illness and the failings of the criminal justice system.

“This is a woman who had a long history of mental illness. She got into an argument at a car rental place, the police showed up, [and] she became belligerent,” Earley told MintPress.

“They did what they thought would be a mercy arrest, took her to a hospital where apparently she did not get any decent care, and in the process she was charged with assault… and ended up with a felony [charge] just like my son,” Earley continued, explaining the sequence of events that led to McKenna’s jailing.

On Jan. 25, McKenna was arrested after calling police to report that she had been assaulted. While police were investigating her complaint, they discovered a warrant for McKenna’s arrest for assaulting an officer in neighboring Alexandria, Virginia.

The Alexandria incident is the “mercy arrest” Earley referred to, which occurred on Jan. 15. Five days later, on Jan. 20, a warrant was issued for her arrest.

While it is unclear what happened during the initial interaction with Alexandria police, it does seem like McKenna was experiencing some kind of episode associated with her mental illness because police took her to the hospital rather than jail, reported WUSA9, a CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.

Earley believes the assault charge could have been baseless. “She was charged with assault, and that could be everything from not obeying a policeman’s orders to just walking away,” he explained.

Fogg backed up this analysis, telling MintPress that part of his training as a U.S. Marshal was that people should be charged with assault if a Marshal has to put his or her hands on them in any way.

“If you’ve got to put your hands on somebody – that’s the first thing you do: you charge them with assault so that they can’t come back and try to sue you,” Fogg explained.



‘That’s just outrageous’
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “In a mental health crisis, people are more likely to encounter police than get medical help.” Indeed, the organization continues, 2 million people with mental illnesses are booked into jails each year.

Further, Human Rights Watch released a report in May, which reports that it is common for staff in jails and prisons across the country to use unnecessary, excessive, and malicious force against prisoners with severe mental health issues, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The report, “Callous and Cruel,” states:

“Corrections officials at times needlessly and punitively deluge them with chemical sprays; shock them with electric stun devices; strap them to chairs and beds for days on end; break their jaws, noses, ribs; or leave them with lacerations, second degree burns, deep bruises, and damaged internal organs. The violence can traumatize already vulnerable men and women, aggravating their symptoms and making future mental health treatment more difficult. In some cases, including several documented in this report, the use of force has caused or contributed to prisoners’ deaths.”

The report explains that staff are often authorized to use force against inmates when an inmate’s behavior threatens the immediate security of officers and other inmates, and other efforts have been made to secure the compliance of an inmate.

However, HRW noted that many of the incidents in their investigation were non-threatening in nature, so the abuse meted out against inmates may constitute torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment, according to international human rights prohibitions.

Pete Earley argues that Natasha McKenna should have never been taken to jail: “When the officers came, they should’ve had what they call a Crisis Intervention Trained (CIT) police officer, who’s somebody’s who’s undergone 40 hours of training to understand the difference between mental illness and someone just being a trouble-maker.”

If law enforcement had more humane mechanisms in place for handling people with mental illness, McKenna would have been brought to what’s called a drop-off center, where she could have been evaluated by a mental health professional and an appropriate treatment program could have been recommended.

Earley told MintPress:

“This thing could’ve been avoided. It’s very startling that if you look at the picture of Natasha McKenna that we put up where she’s booked into jail. She’s not some wild-eyed person in the midst of psychosis. She’s smiling, and that’s a contrast to someone who gets held down and repeatedly tasered when they’re in a controlled environment, when they’ve already had leg irons attached, when already been hanged up.”

He added: “I mean, that’s just outrageous.”



Reverting back to colonial days
Echoing the National Alliance on Mental Illness report, Pete Earley told MintPress it’s more common for people with mental illnesses to encounter police than get treatment because of the backward nature of how today’s system treats people with severe mental health issues.

Indeed, the way in which the mentally ill are imprisoned and sometimes abused is similar to the situation in colonial America, when there was an official policy to imprison the mentally ill, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes laws, policies, and practices that give timely and effective treatment to the mentally ill.

“As early as 1694, legislation was passed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony authorizing confinement in jail for any person ‘lunatic and so furiously mad as to render it dangerous to the peace or the safety of the good people for such lunatic person to go at large,’” according to a 2014 TAC survey of how mentally ill people are treated in jails and prisons across the U.S.

A growing movement of activists in the 1820s and 1830s influenced a new set of legislation to confine people in psychiatric wards instead of prisons because of the inhumane ways in which they were often treated.

“Thus, for approximately 100 years, the problem of mentally ill persons in prisons and jails appeared to have been solved. These individuals were treated as patients, not as criminals, and were sent to mental hospitals for treatment,” states the TAC report.

But, starting in the 1960s, de-institutionalization marked a massive shift in this policy. The severely mentally ill were transferred from state institutions, and those institutions were closed. This process has been called “one of the largest social experiments in American history” — and it’s one that has clearly failed individuals with mental illness.

The TAC report concludes:

“t has been known for almost 200 years that confining mentally ill persons in prisons and jails is inhumane and fraught with problems. The fact that we have re-adopted this practice in the United States in recent years is incomprehensible. Prison and jail officials are being asked to assume responsibility for the nation’s most seriously mentally ill individuals, despite the fact that the officials did not sign up to do this job; are not trained to do it; face severe legal restrictions in their ability to provide treatment for such individuals; and yet are held responsible when things go wrong, as they inevitably do under such circumstances. This misguided public policy has no equal in the United States.”



‘It’s not illegal to be crazy’
Matthew Fogg, the retired U.S. Marshal, told MintPress that the present state of indifference toward black and brown people by law enforcement in the U.S. is systemic.

“When it comes to African-Americans and people of color,” Fogg said, “I’ve seen excessive force used in extraordinary ways that you just don’t see on people of non-color, white.”

The only options he sees for exposing and tackling this pervasive attitude include community action and the various movements springing up across the country. People are standing up to law enforcement and saying, “We’re no longer going to be treated this way. If you’re outside the bounds of the law, we want to expose you to be prosecuted,” he said.

This kind of public awareness is also what’s needed for the systemic issues with law enforcement’s handling of the mentally ill to be addressed. Earley told MintPress the current situation drives the families of the mentally ill to take desperate measures to secure treatment for their loved ones.

“A family knows that they have to wait until somebody becomes dangerous because that’s the threshold,” he said. “You have to be dangerous. It’s not illegal to be crazy.”

“So they’ll wait or they’ll agitate the person. The person will react by maybe pushing the father. They’ll call the police. The police will come. Then the person gets arrested, and then they’re told they can’t go home. And then they release them into jail. And so all you’ve done is made a situation worse.”

Earley’s son, Mike, has been hospitalized five times to date, and during one crisis Mike became violent. Earley called the police, and when they came, they shocked his son with a taser twice. “This is just an example of how difficult it is to get anyone decent care in this country,” he said.

To combat malicious treatment of the mentally ill, like Natasha McKenna and his own son, Early suggests improving community-based services for the mentally ill, widening access to the mental health care system, and changing the criteria that allows the mentally ill to seek help.

“What happened was we closed down all the state hospitals and promised to use that money to help people in communities, but that didn’t happen,” he said, referring to the process of deinstitutionalization, which was supposed include mechanisms to bolster community-based services but never did.

Earley says it’s extremely difficult to gain access to mental health care — and this has got to change. “I couldn’t get in it,” he said. “I couldn’t get my kid in it until he became violent.”

Finally, he explained that the criteria used to assess whether a person can be treated need to be changed.

“We also need to look at first-time breaks,” he urged. “Most people who have a mental illness are confused the first time [they realize they’re having a mental health crisis] and are willing to see a doctor, and that’s the best time to try and engage them.”

“We don’t do that. We say, ‘Come back when you’re in a crisis. Come back when you’re dangerous.’”

http://www.mintpressnews.com/come-back- ... ill/207619

[Dominus Atheos]

A Revolving Door in Colorado

Like many states, Colorado certifies its law enforcement officers. However, the state’s barriers to decertify officers are higher than those in other states. Being dismissed from one law enforcement agency, or even convicted of a crime, does not automatically make an officer ineligible for employment in another jurisdiction. And many police officers in Colorado have done exactly that.

Yesterday, the Denver Post ran a lengthy feature describing a revolving door of dismissed and disgraced police officers within the state of Colorado. Among other things, the Post found:

• At least six Denver officers who were fired or resigned amid allegations of wrongdoing in the past decade found work at other smaller agencies.
• Rogue cops can negotiate to keep past transgressions secret. Nadia Gatchell was fired from the Denver police force in 2012 for lies she told superiors during an investigation into abuse of off-duty secondary employment. The officer, who previously had been disciplined in Denver for destroying marijuana evidence, was able to keep the decision to fire her out of her personnel file by agreeing to drop a Civil Service appeal. The city’s safety manager at the time, Alex Martinez, agreed to remove her dismissal letter from her personnel file and have her file reflect that she had resigned.
• Gatchell, who declined to comment, went on to work at the Elizabeth Police Department for about a year after her firing. Now she’s working as a parole officer for the Department of Corrections, her fourth law enforcement job.
• Officers who have their certificate for police work revoked often are repeat offenders. Of the nearly 280 officers who have been decertified in the past decade in Colorado, at least 29 had past serious personnel issues or arrests. Many more likely are repeat offenders, but how many could not be determined because many agencies in the state won’t release discipline or personnel files for public review.
• About a third of those 280 decertified for police work in Colorado had worked at more than one police agency. Seven of those officers had shuffled to four or more police agencies before they ended up with a conviction that brought a final end to their careers in law enforcement.
• The state’s review panel, the Colorado Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, does not always keep up with those who aren’t employed by a police agency but remain certified for law enforcement work.

According to the article, at least 18 states “require agencies to inform state review panels when an officer is fired or resigns,” but Colorado is not one of them.

The Colorado legislature passed a new law to require police agencies to disclose to any new law enforcement employer if their former officer “sustained violations for making “knowing misrepresentations” during their employment.” While this is an improvement, the new law does not require disclosure of excessive force, destruction of evidence, or other violations unrelated to lying on official documents.

The legislature also tried but failed to expand the number the offenses that trigger decertification in the last session. As a result, officers with convictions for misdemeanor child abuse, second-degree arson, and many other crimes remain eligible to be hired as sworn officers around Colorado.

Colorado is not the only state that has problems with “shuffling” bad police officers. Recall that the officer who shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio was deemed unfit for law enforcement by his previous employer due to incompetence with firearms. The CPD did not review that information before hiring the officer.

States should shore-up their reporting requirements and decertification procedures to prevent officers who commit serious misconduct from hopping job-to-job.

There are many more disturbing stories in Post feature here. You can read my testimony on the opacity of police disciplinary files before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights here.

http://www.policemisconduct.net/a-revol ... -colorado/

[Dominus Atheos]

Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever

Last month the libertarian site ReasonTV profiled the case of Andrew Sadek, a 20-year-old student at North Dakota State College of Science who turned up dead of a gunshot to the head in 2014. Sadek had been working as a confidential informant for a shadowy multi-county drug task force with ties to his campus police department.

About a year before his death, Sadek became ensnared in law enforcement’s version of a pyramid scheme. He was caught selling $80 worth of marijuana on campus to an informant who was also seeking leniency from the task force. Sadek in turn was instructed to make five small pot purchases from other unsuspecting dealers to clear his name. He managed to make three before he disappeared.

Sadek’s story resonated with me. In 2012, a close family friend (whom I’ll call Tim) was detained by campus police at the large Midwestern university where he was a sophomore and threatened with felony drug charges. Like a lot of kids his age, Tim had been peddling a little pot to friends to subsidize his own personal use. He was hardly a kingpin; but in his naivete he sold to the wrong person, got robbed and was forced to explain his ordeal to a veteran campus detective who was convinced he’d been handed the key to breaking open the school’s drug trade.

The police didn’t recover any drugs from Tim’s dorm room, but that didn’t stop them from sucking him into the informant system. For several weeks, the lead detective pressured Tim to make controlled-drug purchases from his off-campus pot supplier, using threats of expulsion and jail time as leverage. When Tim said he wanted to consult an attorney, the officer told him that if he did, the deal was off. Far from home and without the street sense to see through the detective’s bluff, Tim reluctantly agreed to serve as an informant.

Then he made a decision that might have saved his life. He decided to call his parents. They hired an attorney, who promptly broke off all communication between Tim and the detective. In the end, Tim got off with a misdemeanor paraphernalia charge and a slap on the wrist from the university. He graduated with honors the next year and was accepted into graduate school at a prestigious engineering university.

Tim’s and Sadek’s stories are similar, but they’re hardly unique. Under pressure from administrators, parents and local law enforcement, campus police departments have been quietly expanding their scope and reach to engage in more proactive crime-fighting. In some cases that means using low-level drug offenders to conduct potentially dangerous undercover stings. But it also includes other intelligence and investigatory activities that fall well outside the traditional purview of a campus police department.

Evidence of such mission creep was on display last week in Nashville, where more than 500 law enforcement officials representing 239 institutions gathered for the annual conference of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA). This year’s conference — which lists the scandal-ridden global security monolith G4S as one of its corporate sponsors — included presentations on counter-terrorism strategy, sex crimes investigation, tips for handling an active shooter, and, perhaps most telling, strategies for policing student behavior off-campus.

The agenda reflects an ever-expanding role for campus police and, due to the blurring lines between public and private authority, poses a threat to due process. In fact, it’s difficult to say just how much campus police agencies are expanding their reach, due to another problem: Journalists and civil liberties advocates who have tried to dig into the issue have been stymied by a culture of secrecy and state laws that protect private entities from public scrutiny. In some cases, these police agencies are “public” enough to be empowered to make arrests, conduct searches and use lethal force but are “private” enough to be exempt from public records laws.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), there are currently at least 861 campus law enforcement agencies serving schools with 2,500 or more students. Their authority comes from more than 40 state laws, which can vary widely in scope.

“[T]he jurisdiction of campus police officers is difficult to ascertain and untangle,” says attorney Jamie P. Hopkins, who looked into campus policing last year for the Montana Law Review.

In the past, laws governing campus police required officers to be sworn and to pass minimum training requirements before they were given full arrest powers. Even then, they could exercise those powers only while on duty and within the boundaries of the college property. Non-sworn officers were either deputized by local police agencies or weren’t given arrest powers. These boundaries have gradually eroded over the years. According to BJS, more than 70 percent of college and university police agencies now exercise off-campus jurisdiction, and 35 percent have policing powers that extend statewide.

Many of these new powers are established through “mutual aid agreements” with state and local police forces – which have increased considerably over the past decade, often with encouragement from the Department of Justice. Others have been created by amendments to existing statutes.

For the past two years, for example, community groups in Washington have been scrutinizing a push by George Washington University and several other area colleges to get the city council to give campus cops jurisdiction even when they aren’t on campus. A similar bill in 2002 died before a vote due to concerns over accountability. Local leaders say the current proposal still lacks sufficient protections for transparency and officer training requirements.

“I’m extremely skeptical that in the current climate of police-community relations nationwide it makes sense to empower private police forces, who don’t operate by the same standards of transparency and accountability as public departments, to perform public safety functions,” says Patrick Kennedy, chairman of the the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in D.C.’s Foggy Bottom and West End neighborhoods. “I think the prospect of them operating in the community opens the door to problems of profiling and abuse-of-power.”

But the openness of the process in the District is unusual. More often these kinds of legislative changes are made at the state level and with little public debate. Since 2009, for example, campus police in Florida have been allowed to arrest suspects within 1,000 feet of their property boundaries and are permitted to exceed that if they are in “hot pursuit.” Under a 2005 North Carolina law, campus police officers are given off-campus jurisdiction over “any other real property while in continuous and immediate pursuit of a person for an offense committed.” And a bill under consideration in Pennsylvania would give campus police at 14 state universities arrest powers along roads and highways adjacent to their schools.

Even in states that have not expanded campus police powers, Hopkins writes in his article, “[T]he property and premises covered by the statute may be difficult to determine” because of vague statutory language. This has led to a number of court challenges over the years, and most have sided with the colleges and universities, thus expanding the power and jurisdiction of campus cops.

“The public needs to pay attention to what the legislative branch is doing in our states, especially when it comes to police powers that impact our children, colleges, and universities,” Hopkins says. “These young adults need the same rights and privileges that all Americans enjoy.”

That’s not a given under current law, which makes inconsistent distinctions between state and private actors. For instance, while judges have generally ruled that suspects detained by state campus police have a right to due process, most courts have also acknowledged that non-state-sanctioned entities are absolved from heeding constitutional protections such as those granted by the Fourth Amendment if their actions are in furtherance of a private interest.

This is particularly problematic in light of the increased pressure on colleges and universities to adopt a more proactive crime-fighting stance. A case in point: Last November, in a move one attorney described as unprecedented, campus police at William Paterson University in New Jersey decided to investigate and file their own charges against five students accused of sexual assault rather than first consult county prosecutors. The five were arraigned on $200,000 bail and were barred from attending class before county officials even had a chance to review the case.

In January, the District Attorney of Passaic County refused to prosecute the students after a grand jury found insufficient evidence of a crime. Attorney Laura Sutnick, who defended one of the students, said William Paterson police lacked the “judgement and experience” to adequately investigate the case, and she took campus officials to task for failing to loop in county investigators from the start.

“Sex crimes cases are so sensitive it really takes someone who is skilled in those issues,” she says. “These were kids, many of whom were going to college on scholarship money, and their school decided that they were going to rush to judgement and file charges rather than wait five minutes and get the facts.”

Sutnick said the notion that there is a nationwide epidemic of campus sexual assault, and the risk of losing federal money, has put pressure on colleges to show they’re taking the issue seriously.

Another factor in the push to give campus police more power is the perception that college campuses are increasingly dangerous places. But the numbers don’t bear that out. The rate of violent crime on college campuses is a fraction of the national average and has declined by 27 percent over the past decade, according to BJS. Despite the saturation media coverage of such events, according to the IACLEA, from 2000-2013 there were just 12 active-shooting incidents at the nearly 5,000 U.S. degree-granting institutions — fewer than one a year.

Admittedly harrowing anomalies such as the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech aside, you’re far less likely to get hurt at an American university than on the streets of most midsize U.S. cities. But that hasn’t stopped campus police forces from fortifying themselves against both real and imagined threats.

The Department of Justice reports that in 2012, 75 percent of public and private four-year colleges employed armed police and guards, up from 68 percent in 2005. Over the same period, the percentage of campuses with armed private security guards grew from 2 percent to 11 percent, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

And just like their colleagues in municipal law enforcement, campus police departments have been supplementing their arsenals with hardware designed for war. According to the New York Times, as of last year more than 100 colleges had acquired surplus military equipment including assault rifles, armored vehicles and at least one grenade launcher through the Department of Defense’s 1033 program.

Some campus PDs even have their own SWAT team, including the University of Delaware, Radford University in Virginia, the University of Georgia and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Other campus PDs conduct joint operations with regional SWAT teams through mutual aid pacts.

In 2013, Ohio State University raised eyebrows when its SWAT team acquired a 19-ton mine-resistant ambush vehicle, courtesy of the U.S. government. It’s not clear why an institution of higher education thinks it needs a vehicle designed to withstand an improvised explosive device, but perhaps not surprisingly, the rise in the number of armed campus security officers has been paralleled by a rise in controversial officer-involved shootings (more than a dozen since 2003). Almost all involved unarmed students. In many of the cases, the student was intoxicated (which, of course, isn’t uncommon among college students).

A few recent examples: In December 2013, 23-year-old Texas student Cameron Redus was shot and killed by a campus police officer during a traffic stop. Redus was unarmed. A few months earlier, the same officer who shot Redus had entered the dorm room of a female student, at night and without a warrant, to question her about a hit-and-run. In 2012, 18-year-old Gil Collar was shot while standing naked outside a campus police station at the University of South Alabama. And in 2009 — in a case eerily redolent of the Walter Scott shooting in Charleston, S.C. — a former student of William Paterson University (the same school mentioned above in the sexual assault cases) was shot in the back while fleeing a campus police officer. Officials say the student, who was not armed, had been seen breaking into cars on the campus. His lawyers say he was leaving fliers on windshields. Unlike Scott, the student survived the shooting, and in a final injustice was forced to plead guilty to a misdemeanor eluding charge. The officer was not disciplined.

Recently, allegations of racial profiling by police at several schools – including Yale, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Minnesota – have attracted some scrutiny to the opaqueness of campus police departments. A federal law known as the Clery Act requires colleges to report campus crime statistics, but getting information on police stops, accusations of misconduct and even arrest details is difficult under most state laws. Despite having many of the powers of official police, nearly two-thirds of the nation’s private campus police departments lack official accreditation. The courts have generally ruled that this exempts them from transparency laws.

In 2006, for example, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that even though the Harvard campus police department has the power to make arrests and obtain search warrants, it is not “an agency of the Commonwealth such that it becomes subject to the mandates of the public records law.”

At least a few public officials have shown some concern. The Ohio Supreme Court recently ordered police at Otterbein University, a private college, to provide student journalists access to police reports. Elsewhere, some lawmakers have responded to community concerns about campus cops by trying to dismantle some of these protections from disclosure. In March, after a rash of complaints of racial profiling by the University of Chicago Police Department, the Illinois legislature considered an amendment to the state’s Private College Campus Police Act to force disclosure rules on private universities. The bill easily cleared the state House in April, but it died in committee before it could reach the Senate floor.

In May, similar legislation was introduced in Indiana after a judge ruled that as a private entity, the University of Notre Dame wasn’t required to turn over athlete arrest records to a reporter from ESPN.

One new law in Texas shows just how conflicted the issues surrounding campus policing can be. The law was designed to force private campus police forces to abide by open records laws. It passed and takes effect in September. But after debate had ended and just before it was passed, it was quietly amended to give campus cops expanded jurisdiction off-campus.

As of now, just three states – Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia – currently have laws on the books forcing transparency on campus cops. According to Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), there isn’t much incentive for campus PDs in other states to be more forthcoming. “I think the vast majority of colleges don’t consider themselves to be subject to these disclosure laws, and the answer you would probably get [as a journalist seeking information] is ‘sue us.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... than-ever/

[Dominus Atheos]

America’s Newest War
As the war on drugs loses its luster, legislators are intent to make the same mistakes with sex workers.

No one supports sex slavery. And the thought of child sex slavery turns the stomach. Last Friday, President Obama ostensibly addressed this issue by signing the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA), a massive package of grant appropriations, criminal penalty enhancements and other items aimed at fighting human trafficking in America and abroad. As well-meaning as this legislation may be, the “War on Sex Trafficking” that the federal government is waging will fail, just as the “War on Drugs” has failed.

With almost unanimous, bipartisan support in Congress and fans ranging from evangelical Christians to Planned Parenthood, it's easy to see the JVTA as a rare win-win in Washington. But just as giving local police and prosecutors an urgent mandate to fight drugs led mostly to the prosecution of low-level drug users and dealers rather than big-time drug traffickers, the fight against sex trafficking—plus federal funding to do so, contingent on arrests and convictions—sets up perverse incentives to treat everyday prostitution as sex trafficking.

All over the country, we're now seeing what would have been deemed "vice" work reframed as human trafficking stings. And who gets swept up in these stings? Willing, adult sex workers. Their would-be patrons. Petty pimps. For example, during last year's Operation Cross Country, an FBI spearheaded initiative "to recover victims of child sex trafficking," Newark, N.J. cops identified just one 14-year-old sex trafficking victim but it arrested another 45 people for normal prostitution or pimping. In Portland, one minor was recovered while 20 adult women were arrested on prostitution charges and three adults were arrested for promoting prostitution.

Under the JVTA, anyone soliciting paid-sex from a minor can be arrested on federal human trafficking charges. Throwing the book at child rapists is hard to argue against. But it’s worth noting that the “the Government need not prove that the defendant knew that the person had not attained the age of 18 years," nor that any element of force was involved. Also unnecessary is a real victim: the main catch in many “sex trafficking stings” are men who agree to pay for sex with a police decoy. And the breadth of these new anti-trafficking laws means they are used against individuals several degrees of separation from acts of child prostitution.

Take, for instance, Hortencia Medeles-Arguello, 71, who was recently arrested on federal charges as the “ring leader” of a sex trafficking syndicate. Arguello’s crime seems to be owning a bar where she allowed prostitution upstairs and didn’t check the ages of the women involved, some of whom were revealed to be teenagers. Bartenders and other employees were also charged as part of the sex trafficking “conspiracy.”

Most of the offenses the JVTA targets, including those of Medeles-Arguello, were already illegal under local prostitution, pandering kidnapping, or statutory rape laws. But under the new banner of human trafficking even relatively minor crimes related to sex work can come with serious felony status, a sex offender registry requirement and a mandatory minimum prison term.

Mandatory minimums are strictly fixed sentences that leave no room for a judge's discretion. They were a popular drug-war tack in the '80s and '90s that grew into a regular feature of counterterrorism and cybercrime laws; at their apex, every state had some form of mandatory minimum sentence on its books. In theory, these schemes bring fairness to sentencing, but in practice they're largely regarded to have been a flop—swelling prisons with nonviolent offenders, failing to prevent additional crime and even increasing recidivism rates among low-level offenders. Since 2000, 29 states have revised mandatory minimums, scrapping some and adding more judicial say back into others. At the federal level, bills such as the Smarter Sentencing Act, which Obama supports, aim to do the same.

"Mandatory minimum sentences have been studied extensively and have been found to distort rational sentencing systems, discriminate against minorities, waste money, and often require a judge to impose sentences that violate common sense," said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), co-chair of the Congressional Human Trafficking Caucus and one of only three members of the U.S. House to vote against the JVTA. The bill "contains a new mandatory minimum that someday will require a judge to impose a sentence that violates common sense," he said in a statement.

Scott is wary of the "the possible scope of defendants who could be prosecuted" under this provision. Known as the SAVE Amendment, it prohibits not just placing an "escort" ad for a minor or someone forced into it but also benefitting financially in any way from the ad—meaning that classified-ad hosting sites could be held criminally accountable as sex traffickers. And the penalty for this trafficking? Mandatory minimum imprisonment of 10 to 15 years.

While this may be justifiable in some cases, those prosecutable could include "all of the employees of the ad company, including the receptionist or the computer guy," said Scott. "The judge should have the discretion to consider all the facts and the culpability of the particular defendant."

The JVTA's approach to the issue of human trafficking is also ascendant in the states, which have each passed a few (if not a few dozen) trafficking laws in the past five years. In Georgia, human trafficking now comes with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, or 20 if the victim is under 18. In Louisiana, labor trafficking carries a five-year mandatory minimum and any activity related to commercial sexual activity involving a minor (including advertising) carries a 15-year minimum sentence. In Missouri, mandatory minimums for sex or labor trafficking of an adult range from five years if by means of "deception or blackmail," 10 years if by force/coercion. In Montana, sex trafficking anyone under 18 comes with a mandatory 100-year prison sentence, albeit eligible for parole or probation after 25 years.

Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, is also (unsurprisingly) against the mandatory minimum element of the federal trafficking bill. "There is no question in my mind that human trafficking demands our attention," said Stewart, "but there’s also no question that expanding mandatory minimum sentences is the wrong way to do it. Every time members of Congress create a new mandatory minimum, they end up disproportionately punishing offenders they never intended to."

It's not just mandatory minimums—other elements of new anti-trafficking laws could wind up disproportionately harming poor and minority populations. For instance, several states (including New York, most recently) have added enhanced penalties if a trafficking offense takes place within a certain distance of a school or its athletic grounds. (This was also a popular addition to drug offense sentences once upon a time.) Keep in mind that it's hard to be anywhere that's not near a school in major urban areas. And consider that such laws will be applied almost entirely to run-of-the-mill sex workers and pimps rather than big-time human trafficking operations.

State and local law enforcement "don't have enough power to come after organized crime for prostitution," says Lenny Sharon, a Maine-based criminal defense attorney. "So who are they going to prosecute? They'll prosecute street guys. That's who it'll be used against, because it's more convenient."

Sharon, who has been practicing law since the '80s, was vocally opposed to a 2014 Maine law addressing sex trafficking. "I've been through both the war on drugs and the war on terror," says Sharon. "What happens is you see money thrown at an issue for one reason or another. (Then) they have to justify the money, so they hire a strike force, they hire more police, they ratchet up the penalty."

The alleged increase in domestic human trafficking fuels the sense that these laws are proportionate. Yet there’s no credible research showing that human trafficking has been increasing the U.S. While federal agents speak of the hundreds of thousands trafficked in America annually, federal anti-trafficking task forces only confirmed a little over 120 cases between 2007 and mid-2008, including only 14 victims under age 18. The Government Accountability Office has called federal statistics on domestic trafficking "questionable" due to "methodological weaknesses, gaps in data," and the fact that “the U.S. government's estimate was developed by one person who did not document all his work.” And the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” has recently dismantled several dubious but oft-relayed trafficking stats.

Americans have watched a few decades of tough-on-crime policies deliver us massively expanded (and expensive) prisons, militarized local cops, wrecked communities and no discernible increase in public safety or deterrent of drug use. And for the first time, there's real momentum away from this in terms of drug offenses, with the rapidly growing decriminalization of marijuana and reforms of sentencing and civil asset forfeiture for drug offenders. Even the old guard in Congress is starting to "soften," said Josh Withrow, legislative affairs manager at Freedomworks. Yet both the old and new guard are reluctant to apply this wisdom beyond the drug war. Whenever a new threat, real or imagined, captures the national mood—crack, cyber terrorism, sex trafficking—we're right back in 1986, with every state and city and senator ready to prove they care by pushing ever harsher penalties and ever broader parameters for who should be penalized.

Molly Gill, of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, calls it "the crime du jour effect": whenever there's a new crime du jour, "there will be mandatory minimums hot on the heels of that," she says.

At a recent roundtable at the Center for American Progress (CAP), Christine Leonard, executive director of the new Koch- and CAP- backed Coalition for Public Safety, suggested that it's unrealistic to expect policymakers to radically shift from tough-on-crime policy all at once. Though we are at a "historic moment," incremental action is still the golden ticket to criminal justice reform in 2015.

But while that may be true in terms of introducing new reforms or repealing bad old policy, it shouldn't preclude reformers from fighting new manifestations of this bad policy. Ignoring them only seems likely to undermine or cripple the justice reform project in the long run. As Rep. Scott pointed out, "mandatory minimum sentences didn't get into the criminal code all at once but one at a time, each one part of an otherwise good bill. If we expect to get rid of mandatory minimums, we have to first stop passing new ones like this."

Scott seems sadly alone in this viewpoint in Washington. Though both Barack Obama and Sen. Rand Paul have been big proponents of reforming sentencing laws—Paul has called federal minimums “heavy-handed” and “unrealistic”—both supported the new penalties in the JVTA.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... z3gb4UUJFe

[Dominus Atheos]

The jaw-dropping police/prosecutor scandal in Orange County, Calif.

Last October, I noted some really disturbing revelations coming out of Orange County, Calif., in which prosecutors were allowing accused felons to go free rather than reveal potentially exculpatory information about how they use jailhouse informants. Since then, it’s only gotten more sordid, getting covered in outlets from Slate to National Review to Al-Jazeera America. But it really ought to be on the evening news.

In March, Judge Thomas M. Goethals recused the entire office of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas from a murder case “because of repeated government cheating.” More rot followed, including a gag order (issued by a different judge) preventing defense attorneys from discussing what they were discovering (it was later lifted), and revelations that the police and prosecutors collaborated with the Mexican mafia to target a rogue informant and with MSNBC to violate a suspect’s constitutional rights.

In May, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explained the magnitude of the misconduct on display here.

In his March order, Goethals wrote: “It is now apparent that the discovery situation in this case is far worse than the court previously realized. In fact, a wealth of potentially relevant discovery material — an entire computerized data base built and maintained by the Orange County Sheriff over the course of many years which is a repository for information related directly to the very issues that this court was examining as a result of the defendant’s motion — remained secret, despite numerous specific discovery orders issued by this court, until long after the initial evidentiary hearing in this case was concluded and rulings were made.”

Laura Fernandez of Yale Law School, who studies prosecutorial misconduct, says it’s amazing that both the sheriff’s office and the DA’s office worked together to cover up the misconduct: “From my perspective,” she says, “what really sets Orange County apart is the massive cover-up by both law enforcement and prosecutors—a cover-up that appears to have risen to the level of perjury and obstruction of justice. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors in Orange County have gone to such lengths to conceal their wide-ranging misconduct that they have effectively turned the criminal justice system on its head: dismissing charges and reducing sentences in extraordinarily serious cases, utterly failing to investigate unsolved crimes and many murders (by informants — in order to prevent that evidence from ever getting to defense lawyers), while simultaneously pushing forward where it would seem to make no sense (except that it conceals more bad acts by the state), as in the case of an innocent 14-year old boy who was wrongfully detained for two years.”

So far, the scandal has affected at least three dozen cases. (And this only really scratches the surface. Check the scandal archives of the OC Weekly.)

Here’s the latest, again from the OC Weekly:

For a quarter of a century, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) operated one of the nation’s longest frauds on the criminal-justice system through a secret, computerized records system called TRED. In late 2014, Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals forced a monumentally resistant OCSD to admit its existence. Why all the secrecy?

The few TRED records that have been pried free are a treasure trove of exculpatory evidence hidden from trials that resulted in prosecution victories over hoodwinked defendants. The records also clearly reveal that Southern California law-enforcement officials run a jailhouse-informant program that habitually tramples the constitutional rights of pretrial defendants.

With the aid of the county counsel’s office, OCSD officials employed exaggerations, half-truths, circular logic and legally inane gobbledygook to keep judges, juries and defense lawyers clueless about TRED since 1990. They’ve even been willing to tell fibs under oath in a death-penalty case.

Four months ago in People v. Scott Dekraai, Goethals labeled deputies Ben Garcia and Seth Tunstall as perjurers. These badged men repeatedly lied about the existence of the records, then faked amnesia when confronted with proof of their dishonesty. Perhaps anticipated protection emboldened these characters. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas — whose office is both the beneficiary of and willing partner in the Garcia/Tunstall ploys — refuses to prosecute the officers.

A newly unsealed transcript of a March 25, 2005, pretrial hearing in People v. Henry Rodriguez sheds additional light on the TRED deception. To convict Rodriguez, government agents violated legal principles established in Brady (records helpful to a defendant must be surrendered) and Massiah (police can’t use trickery to entice incriminating statements from charged suspects who have a lawyer). . . .

As with all outsiders, James Crawford — Rodriguez’s defense lawyer — didn’t know TRED existed until recent months, in part because deputies generically referred to the system as “classification records.” But Crawford caused the 2005 hearing by filing a subpoena seeking the type of data contained in TRED, including Garrity’s jail movements and snitch-related operations. In open court with Superior Court Judge Frank F. Fasel, deputy County Counsel Laura Knapp objected to surrendering the records, claiming a nonexistent disclosure exemption entitles deputies to private “stream of consciousness” files. Knapp also argued TRED records were simultaneously nonexistent and yet vital for jail security. She told the judge, “It is the sheriff’s contention that these records are highly confidential investigatory files, which are not written or created.”

The judge ordered the files to be turned over, with some redactions. That apparently never happened. Ten years later, despite their predecessors defying a court order, prosecutors are still arguing that any information about TRED is still too sensitive to be released, even though at this point, the local press has already exposed much of this.

No fool, Goethals noted he saw zero legitimate security concerns and asked [Elizabeth] Pejeau [of the Orange County Counsel’s office] to support her contention with facts. Looking exasperated if not angry, she paused and stared at him. “I can’t answer that right now,” she finally said.

The judge has grown weary of malarkey. He announced plans to put government officials on the witness stand to answer his questions about what happened in the Rodriguez case, and he unsealed related TRED records.

“I’m a big believer that these are public courts,” he said. “The public should know what we are doing here. It protects the integrity of the system.”

It’s far too late for that now. This isn’t a case of a few bad actors. This is systematic corruption involving dozens of police officers and prosecutors that went on for well over two decades. At a minimum, there should be mass firings of cops and disbarments of prosecutors, past and present. A system that still retained some integrity would also have the worst offenders in handcuffs.

But don’t believe for a second that this is a uniquely Orange County problem. I pointed out in a post in May a couple stories I’ve personally reported in which prosecutors willingly put on informant testimony that they should have known wasn’t true. The problem is that there’s so little accountability for prosecutors. It’s just far too easy to skirt ethical rules, even to break the law, in procuring damning testimony from an informant. (And let’s be honest here, these are people whom those same prosecutors wouldn’t trust for a moment in just about any other context.) Prosecutors have very little to fear for going too far. Professional sanctions are rare. Save for a very few high-profile cases, criminal charges are unheard of. And they’re shielded from civil liability by absolute immunity.

The scandal in Orange County is only a scandal thanks to the work of a brave public defender named Scott Sanders and some dogged reporting by local journalists. Alexandra Natapoff, a criminologist and author of the book Snitching, captures the real lesson from Orange County in a quote she gave to Lithwick: “What’s newsworthy is not that it’s unique. What’s newsworthy is that we actually found out.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... nty-calif/

[Dominus Atheos]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/special ... 38046.html

Whistleblower prison guard paid the price for reporting abuse

Kelly Bradley crouched in the corner of his cell, cowering under a blanket, as five officers clad in riot gear barreled inside and jumped on him, pinning him face-down.

As they cuffed Bradley’s wrists and ankles, one of the officers, William Hamilton Wilson, reached toward Bradley’s face and dug his index finger into the inmate’s eye — several times —until he ripped out Bradley’s right eyeball. It happened swiftly, almost as if it was routine.

Afterward, the extraction team at Charlotte Correctional Institution was summoned to the commander’s office. Capt. Scott Anderson, a 23-year veteran of the Florida Department of Corrections, asked the officers what happened.

No one saw anything. No one heard anything. No one could explain how Bradley’s eyeball ended up on his cheek, dangling by a thread.

Anderson later testified he didn’t think there was anything odd about it. He told the officers to write up only what they individually did, leaving out the injury, then ordered the cell cleaned up to make room for the next inmate. The officers’ gloves were discarded, and the gear was washed of blood.

The brutal encounter, focal point of a civil lawsuit settled by the DOC last month, was eerily similar to another cell extraction at Charlotte in 2014, except that it ended in the death of an inmate, Matthew Walker. Last week, a Charlotte County grand jury said there wasn’t enough evidence to bring criminal charges against the officers involved in Walker’s fatal beating, largely because the officers discarded the evidence and — as in the Bradley case — told their bosses that they had no idea how Walker’s larynx was crushed or how his head was bashed with such force that there were imprints in his skull.

Bradley’s case likely would have ended similarly — with no one knowing what happened and no one arrested — had it not been for one officer, John Pisciotta.

Pisciotta, then 34 and with 31/2 years on the job, was part of the extraction team that morning in May 2008 when Bradley, who suffered from schizophrenia, barricaded himself in by placing his mattress up against the door of his cell in Charlotte’s psych ward.

“This inmate was cowering under a blanket in the corner of his cell,” Pisciotta recalled in an interview this week. “He was an older man, very frail and mentally ill. He wasn’t trying to fight anybody. He was just scared. He was no threat to anyone.”

He saw everything that happened, and wrestled with what to do.

“I knew that it was morally wrong. They wanted us to prepare statements and not say anything. I told them I just couldn’t go along with it,” said Pisciotta, 41.

Pisciotta told the truth, and Wilson was arrested. After testifying against Wilson, Pisciotta was fired and lost almost everything: his home, his friends, his pension and his career.

“I knew once I did the right thing, and I stepped forward...my career would be over,” Pisciotta told a jury during Wilson’s 2009 federal criminal trial. “It’s something you don’t do. You don’t go against other officers. Because my life has been a living hell ever since.’’

Wilson, now 32, the only person criminally charged, was convicted of civil rights violations, served five years in federal prison and was released in December. Other than Pisciotta, no one came forward; no one else was disciplined. Six other officers were involved in the episode and four of them, including Anderson, were promoted. Two are still at Charlotte.

Bradley, 54, who was serving a six-year sentence for burglary and grand theft, was fitted with a prosthetic eye and released in 2009.

Pisciotta said after the trial Bradley’s mother called him to thank him.

“I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell the truth,” Pisciotta said.

Staff solidarity

“We Never Walk Alone” is an unofficial oath that Florida corrections officers have followed for decades, a mantra printed on signs in every state prison.

The words refer to the tight bond among corrections officers, men and women charged with keeping order among some of the most evil and lawless people in society.

To some, however those words are an unspoken code of loyalty that cloak more sinister — and sometimes criminal — acts. The average corrections officer lives every day with the absolute fear of speaking up, said Ron McAndrew, a former warden.

“There are a lot of good and decent people who work for the Department of Corrections. But there are also some people who intimidate them and prevent them from speaking the truth — even when a man’s life is at stake,” said McAndrew, who worked in the Florida prison system for 25 years.

McAndrew knows first-hand the consequences a whistleblower can face. In 1979, after McAndrew reported the beating of an inmate at Dade Correctional, his Doberman was poisoned. “It took six months for her to die,’’ recalled McAndrew, now a prison consultant.

Pisciotta’s $135,000 out-of-court settlement — and the full details of what happened to him — came to light this month, just days after a Charlotte County grand jury released a scathing report in connection with Walker’s death at Charlotte, located in Punta Gorda, north of Fort Myers.

Walker, who was serving a life sentence for burglary and robbery, died after his throat was crushed during a melee involving a team of at least five officers. Inmates told investigators that the officers beat Walker after he mouthed off and then slapped one of them — a female officer who had roused him out of his bunk after midnight, demanding he get up to put away a cup he had left out.

Pisciotta said he recognized some of the names of the officers involved in the Walker case. They were the “go-to guys” who commanders encouraged, promoted and rewarded for their loyalty and brutality.

“You are taught that you are God there, and the good ol’ boys, they are the ones they went to when they wanted things done because they kept their mouth shut, they all came up with the same stories, wrote the same reports and nobody knew anything. Nothing has changed,” Pisciotta said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which investigated Walker’s death, found that the officers’ versions of events changed over time, were riddled with “inconsistencies” and didn’t match the physical evidence. Still, there were no witnesses — other than inmates — willing to point the finger at the guards. FDLE said that amounted to a lack of evidence.

Nearly every officer involved in the incident remains employed by the department. Although nine were fired last year, all but one of them won their jobs back.

In April — one year after Walker’s death — prisons Secretary Julie Jones gave Charlotte Warden Tom Reid the “Secretary’s Leadership Award,” which recognizes a warden who “consistently exemplifies the department’s values.”

Department spokesman McKinley Lewis provided a list of the prison’s accomplishments under Reid, including extensive programs to help rehabilitate and reintegrate inmates back into society.

“It is only fair, when discussing an institution, to give credit to those who devote their time to go above and beyond to ensure the rehabilitation and betterment of our state’s inmates,” Lewis said.

Reid, who began his career at Charlotte, rose to the rank of major during his first 10 years with the agency. He was assistant warden of operations at Charlotte in May 2008, and was promoted six months later to warden at Martin Correctional Institution before taking the helm of Charlotte in 2012. On Friday, it was announced that Reid would take over as warden at Suwannee Correctional Institution, another Florida prison that has been under scrutiny for a series of suspicious beatings and deaths. The FBI is looking at several of the cases.

Jones, Lewis said, remains committed to overhauling the prison system. Since she was appointed secretary in January, she has initiated a number of reforms aimed at sending a message that retaliation will not be tolerated.

McAndrew, who has stayed in touch with many of his FDOC co-workers, said he is hearing good things about the changes.

“It’s not like they like her, but she has their respect and their attention,” he said.

Pisciotta’s attorney, Bill Amlong of Fort Lauderdale, said Jones may be making cosmetic changes, but until she shakes things up at the top, the abuse will continue.

“Generally, corporate culture does not start at the loading docks and seep up,” he said. “For this stuff to be going on, there must be a tolerance for it at the top that seeps down. I’m not exactly sure how you break that.”

Honor and pride

Pisciotta grew up in Long Island, N.Y., joined the U.S. Navy when he was 18, and served four years, two of them overseas. While in the Navy, he met and wed his wife, Nicole, to whom he has been married for 20 years. They have three children.

They lived in Connecticut and other places around the country before settling in Southwest Florida. He loved being a corrections officer.

“You get to help people every day. It was a sense of honor and pride, back then,” Pisciotta said.

In the moments before Bradley’s cell extraction, Pisciotta was so concerned about Wilson’s aggressive behavior that he asked his bosses not to let Wilson participate. Anderson told him Wilson would do fine.

“He was a big boy and he took care of what they wanted taken care of. He was part of the good ol’ boy crew that did things the way they wanted,” Pisciotta said of Wilson. “Unfortunately, I was part of the good ol’ boy crew that day.”

Pisciotta testified during Wilson’s trial that after breaching the cell, all the officers jumped on Bradley and had already subdued him, in handcuffs and leg restraints, when Wilson began “digging and digging” into Bradley’s eye.

Pisciotta said he shouted to Wilson to let him know that Bradley was restrained, but by then it was too late.

Horrified, but worried that the inmate would come to further harm if he told doctors and nurses what happened, Pisciotta whispered to Bradley to tell medical staff that he had gouged out his own eye. Later, at the hospital, and away from the guards, Bradley told the nurses what had actually happened.

After the incident, Pisciotta and the other officers gathered in a room at the prison to take off their bloody gloves and riot gear. Pisciotta said he was angry at Wilson for putting his fellow officers in jeopardy.

“I told him that I wasn’t going along with it,” Pisciotta said.

He said Wilson responded with a racial slur.

“C’mon, he’s just a f---ing n-----, whatta you care?” Wilson said, according to Pisciotta’s testimony.

“He thought it was funny,” Pisciotta said.

Anderson called all the officers into his office and instructed them not to mention the inmate’s injury in their reports, Pisciotta testified. Everyone — including Pisciotta — initially, did what they were told. Only one of the eight officers involved, a lieutenant who filled out his report in another room, noted Bradley’s injury. According to Pisciotta’s testimony, Anderson looked at Pisciotta, who was visibly upset, and said, “Are you OK? You’re making us all nervous here.”

On the same day that he gave a taped statement to an investigator with the DOC Inspector General’s Office, the harassment began, Pisciotta said.

It started with officers shunning him, then turned into threats and intimidation, according to his civil court complaint. A union representative warned him: “It’s going to be rough for you now.”

On June 6, 2008, Wilson was arrested on charges of aggravated battery. Wilson’s arrest affidavit — which described Pisciotta’s role as a witness — was sent to the email accounts of 19 different officers. Two weeks later, “Coward’’ was sprayed in black across the side of Pisciotta’s home. His car’s fender was damaged and its transmission wires were cut.

On April 1, 2009, Wilson was indicted, and his case was removed from the state attorney’s jurisdiction and reclassified by the FBI as a federal civil rights case. Wilson, who was fired after the arrest, contacted several of his fellow officers during the course of the federal probe, phone records show, but later denied in court that he tried in any way to influence their testimony.

The officers who testified said they couldn’t remember what the conversations were about. They also testified they didn’t see how Bradley lost his eye.

Thirteen days after the indictment, a corrections officer at Charlotte with whom Pisciotta had a brief affair called Reid, the assistant warden. The corrections officer, who had Reid’s cell phone number and knew him from when they worked together at another prison, left a frantic message for Reid to call her back.

Reid would later tell an investigator that the officer, Brandy Lindsay, told him a “rambling” and “emotional” story about how she had witnessed Pisciotta assaulting an inmate during a transport earlier that day. Pisciotta was placed on administrative leave.

Pisciotta complained to the Florida Commission on Human Relations, which investigates the complaints of whistleblowers who feel they were retaliated against. It found that the allegation against Pisciotta was false and that he was set up by his fellow officers.

Nonetheless, Pisciotta was fired by the department — hours after Wilson was sentenced, according to his lawyer.

Pisciotta and his wife sold everything they owned — their home and their vehicles — and cashed in his retirement. They moved to Vermont, where he accepted a job with the state prison system.

Still haunted by his experience in Florida, he recently resigned to go into farming.

None of the other officers involved in the extraction, either as active participants or supervisors, were disciplined, except for Wilson. Anderson, the captain, was promoted to colonel and is now at Okeechobee Correctional Institution.

Lt. James Nordstrom resigned Nov. 8, 2008; Lt. Michael Riley was promoted to captain before resigning in 2013. He remains as one of the leaders of Teamsters 2011, the union representing the department’s corrections officers.

Officer Ernest Hoopes resigned in November 2008. Officer Stephen Lekawa was promoted to sergeant and remains at Charlotte. Officer Jeffery Koslowski was promoted to sergeant, then lieutenant. He’s now a captain at Charlotte.

[Dominus Atheos]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... ting-cops/

Chicago’s police review agency fires investigator for not exonerating cops

From WBEZ in Chicago:

A Chicago investigator who determined that several civilian shootings by police officers were unjustified was fired after resisting orders to reverse those findings, according to internal records of his agency obtained by WBEZ.

Scott M. Ando, chief administrator of the city’s Independent Police Review Authority, informed its staff in a July 9 email that the agency no longer employed supervising investigator Lorenzo Davis, 65, a former Chicago police commander. IPRA investigates police-brutality complaints and recommends any punishment.

Davis’s termination came less than two weeks after top IPRA officials, evaluating Davis’s job performance, accused him of “a clear bias against the police” and called him “the only supervisor at IPRA who resists making requested changes as directed by management in order to reflect the correct finding with respect to OIS,” as officer-involved shootings are known in the agency.

Since its 2007 creation, IPRA has investigated nearly 400 civilian shootings by police and found one to be unjustified.

Oddly enough, Davis was getting stellar reviews up until he found a few cases in which he believed police had inappropriately fired their weapons.

Through most of his IPRA tenure, Davis’s performance evaluations showered him with praise. They called him an “effective leader” and “excellent team player.”

The final evaluation, issued June 26, said he “is clearly not a team player.”

“Team player” of course meaning “willing to side with cops who shoot people.”

Back in 2009, I wrote about the department’s record of exonerating bad cops and hiding bad behavior.

A 2008 study by University of Chicago law professor Craig B. Futterman found 10,000 complaints filed against Chicago police officers between 2002 and 2004. That’s more than any city in the country, and proportionally it’s 40 percent above the national average. Of those 10,000 complaints, just 19resulted in significant disciplinary action. In 85 percent of the cases, the complaint was dismissed without even interviewing the accused officer. The study also found that about 5 percent of the department’s 13,500 officers accounted for more than half the complaints.

Yet the Chicago PD recently went to federal court—and won—to prevent the release of the names of 662 officers who had more than 10 citizen complaints filed against them between 2001 and 2006. Even members of the city’s Board of Aldermen aren’t allowed to see the officers’ names.

Now, the police department is working to become even less accountable. Last October, a study from the Chicago Justice Project found that on those rare occasions when Chicago police brass want to fire an officer, the Chicago Police Board—the agency that oversees the department—nearly always overrules them. On the very same day that study was released, the department announced a new policy whereby it would reserve the option to file criminal charges against citizens who file police misconduct reports deemed to be without merit.

And of course this is the city where police were found to have tortured suspects for decades. Conveniently, the city managed to cover up the mess long enough for the statute of limitations to prevent all but one of the officers from facing any criminal charges. In 2008, the city’s most elite police unit was disbanded after officers were accused of a host of crimes from assault to theft to burglaries to conspiracy to commit murder. And just earlier this year, the Guardian reported new allegations of torture, beatings, and other physical abuse at an abandoned warehouse.

Just a thought: Maybe the Chicago PD needs fewer “team players.”

[Kamakazie Sith]

Sandra Bland stopped for failure to indicate a lane change.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/yf8GR3OO9mU[/youtube]

This is the full unedited footage without CNN or Fox spin. From the start Sandra Bland appears to be edgy, some people smoke when they are nervous. Later Sandra can be heard shouting she is epileptic and has had her head slammed off the ground, the arresting officer can be clearly heard to shout good. Sandra then says she can't feel her arm, this is ignored. Finally she says she is having issues hearing. The black female officer can be heard arguing that point.

Even if she decided to start smoking because she wanted to and purely out of contempt for the trooper that still isn't a valid reason to arrest someone. Not saying you are claiming that. Just adding.

I read the probable cause statement and he charged her with assault on a public official and resisting arrest. The problem is the assault, which took place off camera, was after she was pulled out of her car. Law enforcement doesn't need much of a reason to pull you out of your car, there's significant court precedence that supports this but contempt of cop isn't one of those reasons. This trooper extended the scope of the stop for no reason other than he seemed to not like the fact that she didn't like receiving a ticket and she wouldn't put her cigarette out during the serving of the citation which doesn't take long at all.

It's noted Sandra was an active supporter of Black Lives Matter and was well aware of her rights. A taser is pulled on her "I will light you up" is the officers threat to make Bland leave her car. No Miranda Rights are read to her and she is refused the opportunity to call her lawyer. My understanding is she was arrested for resisting arrest, which is absurd. The arresting officer is now on paid leave. Sandra Bland is dead and it's being investigated as possible murder.

The trooper didn't advise her of her Miranda rights because he is not required to and he is not obligated to let her call her lawyer during the arrest process. Law enforcement only has to read Miranda when a person is in custody and being asked investigatory questions.

So to reiterate on the Miranda warning. It's a two prong test. In custody and being interrogated.

[Dominus Atheos]

In Texas, police search woman’s vagina for marijuana

Here we go again.

A Spring woman claims sheriff’s deputies violated constitutional protections by conducting a body cavity search on the concrete of a Texaco gas station parking lot during a routine traffic stop in late June.

Charnesia Corley, a 21-year-old African American, was driving in northern Harris County around 10:30 p.m. on June 21 when a male deputy pulled her over for allegedly running a stop sign. He said he smelled marijuana, handcuffed Corley, put her in his vehicle and searched her car for almost an hour. He didn’t find any pot, according to her attorney, Sam Cammack.

Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her.

Then, according to Cammack, Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley’s legs apart to conduct the probe.

Incredibly, a spokesperson for the Harris County Sheriff’s Department told a local TV station that “the deputies did everything as they should.” And so there you have it. Holding a woman down and forcibly penetrating her vagina to search for pot is official policy in Harris County.

Keep in mind that under Texas law, it takes more than four ounces of marijuana to bring a felony charge. This is what four ounces of marijuana looks like. It seems doubtful that a woman could be casually driving around with that much marijuana stuffed into her vagina. So Corley was forced to the ground, stripped, and penetrated to search for evidence that at worst would have amounted to a misdemeanor. Which means that the Harris County Sheriff’s Department believes its perfectly acceptable to allow a stranger to forcibly probe a woman’s vagina in order to prevent her from possessing a personal-use quantity of marijuana. And even that happened without a warrant, based only on one deputy’s claim to have smelled the drug.

This story comes two years after two women filed a lawsuit claiming they were cavity searched after being pulled over for throwing cigarette butts out of the window. That lawsuit claimed to have found evidence that such searches were “standard procedure” in the Texas Highway Patrol. In May, Reason’s Jacob Sullum found three more incidents, all involving women suspected of possessing marijuana. Publicity from those incidents prompted the Texas legislature to pass a law that’s supposed to prohibit such searches without a warrant. But that law doesn’t take effect until next month. That the state would need such a law in the first place speaks volumes.

But it isn’t just Texas. In January of last year, I noted the other places where these searches have happened:

Oakland recently paid $4.6 million to 39 men who were illegally strip searched in public. A similar lawsuit was filed in Chicago just this week. There have been other recent allegations of cavity searches in Citrus County,Florida; Coral Springs, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; and Mission, Kansas. In Milwaukee, a group of four cops spent two years subjecting women to illegal cavity searches after traffic stops. They at least have been arrested and charged.

But requiring a warrant won’t stop these incidents from happening. In some jurisdictions, a cop can get a warrant with little more than a phone call. A couple of years ago, two horrifying cases in New Mexico made national headlines. One man subjected to repeated digital anal penetration, x-rays, enemas and a colonoscopy, all without his consent. Days later, another New Mexico man came forward with a similar story. In both cases, the police obtained warrants that were approved by a judge and local prosecutor. And in both instances, the police failed to find any drugs (not that it should matter).

Last October, I also posted here about two additional incidents in which men were anally penetrated during drug searches in Tennessee. One of those searches was authorized when a drug-sniffing dog “alerted” to a $20 the man was carrying. (Gives last week’s post about the inaccuracy of drug dogs a hell of lot more urgency, doesn’t it?)

There are times when it seems like we’re moving in the direction of sanity in the drug war, at least when it comes to marijuana. These cases are a good reminder that in most of the country, things are as bad as they’ve ever been. A majority of the Americans now believe that pot should be legal. In a few states, it already is, at least under state law. A majority also believe that even harder drugs should be treated as a medical condition, not a crime. Yet the government is still waging terrifying raids on people because of pot. It’s still performing sexual assault because pot. It’s still taking children away from their parents because of pot. And it’s still killing people because of pot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... marijuana/

[TheFeniX]

Incredibly, a spokesperson for the Harris County Sheriff’s Department told a local TV station that “the deputies did everything as they should.” And so there you have it. Holding a woman down and forcibly penetrating her vagina to search for pot is official policy in Harris County.

It's rape, don't pussy-foot around it. Gang rape actually. That you can be head of a department and say "raping women is our SOP" and not immediately get shit-canned.... I got nothing. I can't finish that jab.

Harris County: always setting the bar as low as possible and still managing to surprise me every once in a while.

[Dominus Atheos]

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/0 ... m=webfeeds

When Calling The Police On An Abusive Partner Leads To A Victim Losing Her Home

For seven months, Nancy Markham’s now ex-boyfriend visited violence on her in her apartment in Surprise, Arizona. “He choked me, punched me, threatened me with weapons,” she said on a call with press on Thursday. She repeatedly called the police for protection, but when he didn’t flee and evade them he was often simply released.

Instead, Markham found that she was the one who ended up punished. In September of last year, her property manager told her that she had to leave her apartment. When she asked why, she was told it was because she had called the police too many times. She quickly found out that Surprise has a so-called nuisance ordinance that penalizes landlords with potential revocation of their license or other measures if there are four calls to police in 30 days at a given property, or two or more criminal activities at any time. To avoid penalties, landlords almost always simply evict the tenant that has been deemed a nuisance.

There's more at the link, but this quote sums up the whole article

I no longer call the police…because of the law

[Mr Bean]

Sigh time to update this thread again


Preemptive TL:DR
1. Man calls 911 reporting suspicious person hanging around a house
2. Cops show up, break into different house
3. Cops shoot the owners dog, the owner and each other
4. Yeah that pretty much sums it up
Channel 11 Atlanta News

EKALB COUNTY, Ga. -- The G.B.I. says the DeKalb County police officer that entered the wrong home for a burglary call was accidentally shot by another officer, not by the homeowner.

A DeKalb County police officer was shot in the line of duty after police responded to the wrong house on Monday, authorities said. WXIA

The incident happened on Boulderwoods Drive around 7:35 Monday night. Three officers arrived at the residence and attempted to contact any occupants inside. When no contact was made, the officers made their way around to the rear of the home and gained entry to the residence through a screened porch. The G.B.I. said police went through a "reportedly unlocked door".

Upon entry, the officers encountered a dog. Two officers fired their weapons striking and killing the animal. A male in the home, later determined to be the homeowner, was also shot by the responding officers.

One of the police officers was shot. The G.B.I. says their early investigation indicates the officer was likely shot accidentally by one of the other officers at the scene.

The injured officer, who was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital, is in "in serious but stable condition", according to DeKalb County Police PIO Capt. Steven Fore. The officer "lost a lot of blood" after suffering an injury in his thigh, DeKalb County Public Safety Director Dr. Cedric Alexander said.

Alexander said officers received a vague location description of the burglary-in-progress call and ended up entering the wrong home. The 911 call described the home as a brick and tan one-story home. 11Alive has requested the audio and transcript of that 911 call. DeKalb County Police have declined to release that information at this time.

The homeowner also suffered a gunshot wound to his leg. He was treated at Atlanta Medical Center and released.

Dr. Alexander asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to take over investigation of the incident. Tuesday morning, the G.B.I. released their first public report. Read it here. After the investigation is complete, it will be turned over the the district attorney for "any action the district attorney deems appropriate".

There's a Reddit comment also being passed around here by the person who called 911 for the original incident. Not verified they were person who made the call but info is in there proving they were one of the ones on the scene interviewed by the media.

[Dominus Atheos]

It had to happen eventually, a cop empties entire magazine into fellow cop.

http://www.kob.com/article/stories/s389 ... edvw_RdV8E

The Albuquerque police detective who was shot by his own lieutenant in what the department called a botched drug bust filed a scathing 77-page lawsuit Wednesday.

Lieutenant Greg Brachle shot Jacob Grant nine times in January while Grant was working an undercover drug operation outside a McDonald's on Central near Tramway.

Now, Grant is going after the city, police department and Brachle himself.

The lawsuit includes the moments he says Brachle kept shooting as Grant says he was crawling away and as he asked the shooting to stop.

The shooting was, at the very least, an embarrassment for APD. But the lawsuit shows it was much more – explaining how Det. Grant suffered "catastrophic injuries as a result of the shooting and almost tragically died."

He lost "approximately 80 percent of his blood," according to the lawsuit.

The case lays much of the blame on Lieutenant Greg Brachle.

It says Brachle and Grant had a two-year working relationship and that Grant was visible the day of the operation and at the time of the shooting, saying he was not wearing anything to cover his body or face.

Yet at a distance of less than 5 feet, he opened fire on Detective Grant.

The case says Brachle shot twice, then "repositioned himself." Grant pleaded with Brachle to "please stop shooting," according to the lawsuit.

Brachle then shot seven more times, emptying his weapon.

More information from a not-very-neutral source:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -away.html

Trigger-Happy Cop Shot One of His Own and Kept Blasting Away

A detective who worked narcotics with an undercover officer walked up to a car, shot his fellow officer twice, and then seven more times against the victim’s pleas.

The number of signs that Albuquerque Police Lieutenant Greg Brachle ignored or didn’t see before putting nine .45-caliber bullets into his fellow officer’s body are simply staggering.

There was the fact that Brachle knew Detective Jacob Grant was involved in a drug buy last January, a sting the superior officer walked up on while Grant sat in an undercover police car. There were Grant’s clothes, an outfit specially worn according to a safety protocol to prevent friendly fire incidents. Even Grant’s position in the car—behind another undercover narcotics agent in the driver’s seat—was to signal to other officers that the two men were cops.

But most damning—and the most confusing part of it all—is that Brachle and Grant were well-known to each other. For nearly two years, they worked in the narcotics division of the department.

The lieutenant and the detective had “substantial, frequent, and almost daily interactions with each other,” said the civil lawsuit filed last week against the city of Albuquerque and the police department.

According to Bernalillo County court documents filed by Grant’s lawyer, Grant was taking part in a drug buy with another undercover officer while the sting was being monitored by Brachle and others. A briefing was held before the bust and officers in attendance learned not only of Grant and his fellow undercover cop’s presence in the car, but also of descriptions of their clothing and seating positions. Brachle didn’t attend the briefing, Grant’s lawyer says, but nonetheless took an “active and aggressive role in the operation.”

Brachle went against protocol by approaching the driver’s side of the car Grant was sitting in. The lieutenant again broke the rules when he ripped open the door and started firing into Grant, alleging without offering a single “hands up,” or “freeze,” according to the complaint.

Brachle’s actions were called “overzealous and aggressive,” in Grant’s lawsuit. Another way of saying it might be that Brachle went John Wayne, swooping into a situation he apparently knew little about, guns blazing. Even if Grant wasn’t a cop, Brachle’s alleged zealousness to fire on a suspect presenting no apparent threat would be disturbing.

Brachle first put two bullets into Grant’s torso at point-blank range. The detective’s body slumped over in the back seat. Brachle then fired seven more times as Grant tried to crawl away.

“Please stop shooting,” the detective pleaded as the lieutenant kept firing.

The damage was substantial: Almost all of Grant’s vital organs were struck and he lost 80 percent of his blood that day, nearly dying. After several surgeries, Grant can expect a lifetime of more medical work and costs to recover.

The lawsuit filed by Grant’s lawyer says not only did Brachle ignore training, protocol, and all manner of common sense while firing on his fellow officer, but he also violated Grant’s constitutional rights by using an excessive amount of lethal force.

The same charge can be found in just about every lawsuit filed by people shot by police.

“A reasonable officer should have known” that shooting someone at point-blank range with the largest caliber handgun police are allowed to carry was overkill, the complaint states. Furthermore, when the person is “trying to crawl away while leaving a heavy trail of blood and while requesting for the shooting to please stop,” Brachle should have let up.

In addition to this charge, Grant’s lawyer notes that Brachle didn’t even live by his own words. As a firearm-safety instructor for the police department, Brachle knew a shooter should be aware of objects and persons behind his target. Brachle apparently ignored this maxim, firing indiscriminately into Grant as he crawled away. A bullet or bullet fragment traveled through the detective’s torso and struck the other undercover officer in the car.

“Moreover, Lt. Brachle use lethal force in a McDonald’s restaurant parking lot during the start of the lunch hour at a location frequented by children, families and other non-suspecting individuals,” the complaint states.

Perhaps worst of all, as Brachle shot his fellow cop, the two suspects in the drug bust were busy surrendering peacefully to officers on the other side of the car.

Brachle’s trigger finger has long been itchy. The detective’s lawyer found a previous incident in which Brachle was accused of using excessive force, thus implicating the Albuquerque Police Department for allowing the lieutenant to continue working in the “highly dangerous APD narcotic unit.”

There was a glaring similarity between Brachle’s apparent past use of lethal force and his encounter with Grant. Both times, Grant’s lawsuit contends, Brachle “simply fired until he ran out of ammunition.”

Whether Grant’s lawyer was referring to a 2000 lawsuit that names Brachle as a defendant is unclear, and the lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment. A judge eventually decided in favor of Brachle, who admitted to shooting a man he said was holding a gun and who had previously been seen pouring gasoline near a home and threatening to set it on fire.

Grant’s lawsuit also makes mention of the 2012 Department of Justice report that found Albuquerque police were overly aggressive and regularly used lethal force. That judgment came after an especially violent few years beginning in 2010; from January of that year through February 2015, Albuquerque police shot 42 people, one of the highest rates of shootings by law enforcement officers in the country.

“The City’s failure to stop these deficiencies was a moving force behind Lt. Brachle’s actions,” Grant’s lawyer wrote of his client’s shooting.

But the city is standing by its man—or at least one of them.

“We know this is a very difficult situation for Detective Jacob Grant and his family,” City Attorney Jessica Hernandez said in a statement provided to The Daily Beast via the police department. “We take Detective Grant’s attorney’s claims very seriously. However, at this point, we have a duty to fully defend against the allegations made by Detective Grant’s attorney and believe the judicial process will prove the facts to be otherwise. The claims are under careful review by the City Attorney’s Office.”

Like many situations in which people who are shot by police—rightfully or wrongfully so—the powers-that-be appear to have taken law enforcement’s word above all else. This time it just happens to be a cop who is suing, and like those who have died in police custody for relatively minor charges, Grant was nearly killed over for a maddeningly petty sum.

The estimated value of the narcotics involved was $60.

On a side note, I really don't think very many people read this thread, and story really deserves to be seen by more than 5 people.

[Dominus Atheos]

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story ... edv4fRdV8F

Man goes to hospital for help with mental episode, gets shot by security guard, charged with assault on security guard

A single gunshot was heard through the halls of St. Joseph Medical Center in Houston on Thursday after an off-duty officer shot Rio Grande Valley native Alan Pean in the chest.

His brother Christian Pean told Action 4 News that the Mission family was finally able to see him – 48 hours after he was admitted into the St. Joseph Medical Center.

Alan Pean was shot in his own hospital room by an off-duty officer, after police said he had become “combative.”

Christian Peon said his brother’s tubes have been removed and he is now able to breathe on his own.

“The bullet just missed his vital organs, coming out his back,” Christian Pean said. “I was preparing myself for the fact that I was traveling to Houston to bury my brother.”

Alan Pean, who is the son of a Mission doctor and graduated from Sharyland High School, is currently a student at the University of Houston. He was at the hospital because he was seeking help for a mental health issue.

“My brother went to the hospital as a patient and now is treated like a criminal,” said Christian Pean, who is also studying medicine.

Houston police said Pean became aggressive and combative while he was receiving care. Two officers who were working off-duty security at the medical center entered Pean's room, where one of them said he was forced to fire.

Investigators said the two off-duty officers suffered head injuries while trying to subdue Pean. The officers used a Taser before one of them opened fire.

“I was shocked. I was outraged. I was grief-stricken,” Christian Pean said. “We have lots of questions as to why there were lethal weapons in a hospital.”

To help answer their questions, the family hired attorney Mark O'Mara. The high profile lawyer is no stranger to the national spotlight, as he represented George Zimmerman and had him acquitted in the Trayvon Martin case back in 2013.

In a statement O'Mara said:

“Alan has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault on a peace officer, and I will be working with the family to navigate through this difficult matter. Please keep Alan and the two officers who were also injured in your prayers. There is no doubt that these were extraordinary circumstances and that Alan was experiencing a severe mental health episode at the time of the event. In the meantime, we will be investigating how this tragedy could have occurred and how it could have been avoided.”

Pean's family said they are still trying to grasp what happened.

“He went to the hospital where he thought he was going to get appropriate care, instead he got a bullet to the chest,” Christian Pean said.

Alan Pean is recovering in the hospital. A bond for the assault charges has been set $60,000.

Apparently I might be crazy, because the things I think are perfectly reasonable are often called crazy, even on this very site which is usually more reasonable than most.

But I'll say it anyway: People who are hospitalized or are attempting to be hospitalized for a mental illness shouldn't be charged with a crime for anything like assault, destruction of property, or the like.

Someone tell me: Is that crazy? Am I crazy for thinking that? Not to quote Will Smith, but does thinking you are the only sane person in the world make you crazy?