Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

Training Will Not Help.

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Training does not reduce incidences of abusive law enforcement conduct. This has been shown over, and over, and over, and over again

What DOES help is firings and prosecutions, because the misconduct arises from the perceived impunity of police officers.

They don’t do this because they are poorly trained, they do this because they CAN do this, so the brutality of the Ocean City police needs to be treated as the crime that it is:

A year before video of the violent arrests of six Black teenagers in this Maryland resort town went viral, spurring calls for reform and demands for an investigation, a police lieutenant grabbed a White man who was shouting insults at officers and punched him in the face.

The Ocean City Police Department said the lieutenant’s actions were “within policy” that day on the crowded boardwalk, where the population swells with nearly 8 million visitors each year, and officers on foot and bicycle are charged with maintaining a “family friendly atmosphere.”

This is the problem.  The Police think that thier behavior is OK, and it is NOT.

………

Records released by the department show its officers use force a couple hundred times a year during arrests that are concentrated in the summer season. Policing experts say such confrontations illustrate the importance of de-escalation techniques, especially in today’s charged law enforcement environment. While limited, publicly available data shows the violent arrests in Ocean City have involved both Black and White civilians, with a disproportionate percentage of use-of-force incidents involving Black people.

At a time when Maryland and other states are launching new efforts to hold police officers accountable, and the nation is paying closer attention to police treatment of minorities, the June 6 and 12 arrests of several young Black men have drawn national attention.

The incidents — in which unarmed teens were shocked by Tasers, held down on the ground and repeatedly kneed in the rib cage — are generating questions about how a popular vacation spot polices its visitors, and whether officers should do more to de-escalate confrontations before resorting to force.

The real question should be about how a popular vacation spot polices its police.

Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan says that if people obey the law and are courteous to each other, they have nothing to worry about. “We have ordinances, and we do need to enforce those ordinances,” he said. “Our goal is compliance, and if people comply there’s really no issue. The majority of people do.”

And here is the crux of the issue:  The people of Ocean City, as represented by the Mayor, see the job of the police as being keeping the n*****s down, with a secondary roll of keeping non-townies in their place.

He Won’t See 22½ Months

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Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd, and tried to do the same with many of the people he encountered, (in addition to being a tax cheat) was sentenced to 22½ for murdering George Floyd.

It’s nice that he got a sentence commensurate with his actions, which were callous and heinous, but I’m inclined to believe that he’s going to get preferential treatment in terms of prison assignments and by the parole board, so I don’t expect him to serve this in a maximum security prison, which the sentence would generally require, and I expect him to serve only a small portion of the actual sentence, rather than the ⅔ of the sentence generally required for parole:

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced Friday to 22 and a half years in prison for the murder of George Floyd.

Before Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill announced the sentence inside a courtroom in the Hennepin County Government Center, members of members of Floyd’s family spoke about the impact of his murder. Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd wept as he struggled to speak.

“I wanted to know from the man himself,” he said, addressing Chauvin. “Why? What were you thinking? What was going through your head when you had your knee on our brother’s neck?”

Philonise Floyd, another of Floyd’s brothers, wiped his eyes as he spoke and asked the judge for closure by giving Chauvin the harshest sentence possible.

………

“I want to give my condolences to the Floyd family,” Chauvin said in a brief statement before he was sentenced. His defense team has indicated they will appeal.

Cahill’s decision started with the state’s sentencing guidelines which recommend 12 and a half years in prison for a conviction on unintentional second-degree murder for someone with no criminal history.

The prosecution asked for 30 years, or twice the highest recommended sentence of 15 years.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Frank reiterated the four aggravating factors the prosecution hoped would sway the judge to add years to Chauvin’s prison sentence — that Chauvin abused his position of authority, treated Floyd with particular cruelty, that the crime was seen by several children and that Chauvin knew the restraint of Floyd was dangerous.

I would add another reason for a harsh sentence:  This sort of behavior is ROUTINE for police officers in the United States, and thus the sentence needed to be severe in order to provide deterrence to other malefactors on police forces throughout the country.

Still, I expect him to be out into home confinement or some-such within 2 years.

What a Bunch of Whiny Snowflakes

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A police officer in the Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau “Rapid Response Team” (Goon Squad) was caught on video wailing a journalist, and when he finally forced her to the ground, he continued to strike her with his night stick in her head.

Today, for the first time in the history of Portland, Oregon, an officer was indicted for his actions in suppressing a protest.  

It was only 4th degree assault, a misdemeanor, but in response, the PPB Goon Squad voted to disband, because they are afraid of the rule of law.

They are still on the force, but the “Rapid Response Team” is now shut down.

Considering their behavior, I would say, “Good Riddance,” because they are a bunch of bad cops who should not be allowed close to a water pistol, but Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is (once again) taking the side of the abusive cops, even as more evidence piles up against other members of the unit:

Portland’s public safety landscape has undergone tectonic shifts in under 72 hours.

On June 15, the day after the Portland Police Association filed for closed-door mediation to hash out its contract with the city, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced that a grand jury had indicted Portland police officer Corey Budworth on one count of assault in the fourth degree for his use of force at an Aug. 2020 protest.

Budworth, now on administrative leave, was a part of the police bureau’s Rapid Response Team, a 50-member unit most known for its management of protests. RRT members, whose assignment on the team is voluntary, receive specialized training in “crowd psychology and behavior [and] team formations and movements,” according to PPB.

Hours after Budworth’s indictment, news broke that Erik Kammerer, a squad leader for RRT who is also a homicide detective for the police bureau, is under review by the Oregon Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution. (WW has reported extensively on complaints alleging Kammerer used excessive force during protests.)

………

In response, Mayor Ted Wheeler—who said he learned of the RRT dissolution late Wednesday night—has activated mobile law enforcement units in PPB and requested assistance from Oregon State Police.

………

Wheeler also said that he heard directly from RRT members during an impromptu Thursday morning Zoom meeting between the mayor’s office and law enforcement.

“I want to acknowledge the toll this past year has taken on them and their families—they have worked long hours under difficult conditions,” Wheeler said. “I personally heard from some of them today, and I appreciate their willingness to share their concerns about managing the many public gatherings that often were violent and destructive.”

It is a disgrace that this piece of sh%$ mayor is still in office. (He’s also in the pocket of real estate developers)


………
Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a longtime advocate of police reform in Portland, called the RRT resignations “an opportunity to commit change.”

“We should formally disband the RRT, but through Council action,” Hardesty said in a statement Thursday. “The good old boy network is crumbling and we can either be a part of the change or part of the status quo—but the arc of justice is bending quickly and it’s imperative that the Portland City Council lands on the right side of history.”

Hardesty went on to describe the RRT members as “staging their own protest” through their resignations, which she said occurred “the moment there is a possibility for accountability for inappropriate and potentially illegal conduct.”

This is my assessment too.

The fact that the police are SO shocked that they are held accountable is a mark of just how bad the culture of policing in Portland is right now.

Until some police officers are disabused of the notion that they can act with impunity, and their fellow cops are disabused of the notion that it is OK for them to look the other way, it will never be fixed.

The (Old) New Normal in Germany

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It appears that every few weeks, we have revelations of an element of the German state security apparatus with ties to Neo-Nazis or the far right.

In this case, it was a German commando (basically S.W.A.T) unit in Frankfurt, which has been disbanded over right-wing ties:

German authorities disbanded a Frankfurt police commando unit Thursday over the suspected far-right links of a group of active officers, the latest in a string of extremist-related scandals to blight the country’s police and military.

Peter Beuth, interior minister for Hesse state, where Frankfurt is located, said “unacceptable misconduct” prompted the decision to close the unit. He also said superiors had turned a “blind eye.”

Hesse’s prosecutor on Wednesday said the office was investigating 20 officers from the force, with the majority suspected of sending messages in far-right chat groups, including Nazi symbols and “inciting content.” Three supervising officers were accused of failing to stop or report the exchanges. All but one of the 20 officers was on active duty.

The chat groups were uncovered after examining the phone of an officer suspected of possessing and distributing child pornography.

Pedophile German Neo-Nazis? That’s like the worst law enforcement misconduct bingo card ever.

Germany’s Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has pushed back against assertions of structural racism or far-right sympathies in the country’s police forces. But he agreed to commission a study into the issue last year as pressure grew amid a slew of such cases.

The resurgence of Nazis in positions of authority in Germany is concerning, and there are definitely echoes from the past here.  

It’s even more concerning given the hegemony that Germany has over the EU.

Welcome to the Handmaiden’s Tale

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A woman had a miscarriage in Spokane, Washington and Spokane police treated it as a crime, and swore out a search warrant against her.

This sort of sh%$ needs to be slapped down hard by the Feds.  The local US Attorney should make their lives hell:

In March, a woman miscarried in a Spokane hotel. Police investigated. They searched her room, told her they’d meet her at the hospital and found it suspicious when she did not show up. They filed a search warrant in hopes of finding her.

Considering the fetus her dependent, officers suspected that the woman could be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child if she did not call 911 soon enough to potentially save her pregnancy, according to a warrant filed at the time.

Police later closed the investigation without pursuing criminal charges, but to Paul Dillon, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, the move to investigate was “a huge violation of privacy and very stigmatizing.”

………

“Under Washington law, everything about this is discriminatory and potentially violating of constitutional rights,” Ainsworth said.

………

The case arises as reproductive freedoms have been restricted in Republican-led Legislatures from Texas to Idaho, and with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to curtail or even overturn the abortion rights enshrined in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. While abortion remains legal in all 50 states, Ainsworth said under Washington’s Equal Rights Amendment, investigating pregnancy losses could be discriminatory as such investigations are necessarily biased against women, Ainsworth said.

“Here this person is suffering, an ambulance is called to make sure they’re OK, then the police show up and the police are surprised they didn’t check themselves into a hospital,” Ainsworth said. “This person needed their autonomy and grief to be respected and instead there’s a search warrant.”

The goal here is to eventually make a miscarriage a matter for law enforcement, and it must be aggressively fought at every level, because any step back will be occupied by people who want to keep women in chains.

A Little Late, Aaron Schwartz is Dead

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The Supreme Court has finally shot down the overbroad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that was used to prosecute Aaron Schwartz to death.

I’d say, “About f%$#ing time,” but it’s at least 7 years too late: 

The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday in Van Buren v. United States provides the court’s first serious look at one of the most important criminal statutes involving computer-related crime, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion for a majority 0f six firmly rejected the broad reading of that statute that the Department of Justice has pressed in recent years.

Among other things, the CFAA criminalizes conduct that “exceeds authorized access” of a computer. Crucially, the statute defines that term as meaning “to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain … information … that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain.” The question in Van Buren was whether users violate that statute by accessing information for improper purposes or instead whether users violate the statute only if they access information they were not entitled to obtain. In this case, for example, a Georgia police officer named Nathan Van Buren took a bribe to run a license-plate check. He was entitled to run license-plate checks, but not for illicit purposes. The lower courts upheld a conviction under the CFAA (because he was not entitled to check license-plate records for private purposes). The Supreme Court disagreed, adopting the narrower reading of the CFAA, under which it is a crime only if users access information they were not entitled to obtain.

To be clear: Van Buren should be in jail for a very long time, but his crime is violation of people’s civil rights, abuse of power, and taking bribes, not computer hacking.

And Amy Coney Barret gets to the heart of the matter, that the government’s position would literally make tens of millions of people unwitting felons:

Finally, Barrett turns to a topic that dominated the amicus filings and much of the time at oral argument: the “breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity” that the Government’s reading would criminalize. For Barrett, that reality “underscores the implausibility of the Government’s interpretation,” which provides (in words Justice Elena Kagan coined in an earlier case) “extra icing on a cake already frosted.” Barrett notes that extending the statute to “every violation of a computer-use policy” would make criminals of “millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens,” offering examples of such trivial conduct as “embellishing on online-dating profile” and “using a pseudonym on Facebook” – activities that violate website use restrictions and thus would fall within the government’s understanding of the CFAA.

If there is a lesson from all of this, it is that prosecutors will take the most outrageous and extreme view of any criminal statue that they come across.

There needs to be some serious reform here.

Support Your Local Police

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West Hazleton, Pennsylvania (why does ALL this crap seem to happen in the Keystone State?) police chief Brian Buglio threatened an online critic with arrest on trumped up charges.

The FBI got involved, and he’s now pled guilty to federal civil rights charges.

Am I a cynic for thinking that the only thing special about this story is that THIS time, the dirty cop got caught:

A police chief in Pennsylvania who threatened a critic with false arrest unless the person deleted Facebook posts attacking him has agreed to plead guilty to a federal civil rights violation.

The chief, Brian Buglio of the West Hazleton, Pa., Police Department, made the threats in March 2020 to a private citizen, telling the person that he would pursue felony charges in retaliation for several social media posts that were directed at him and the police, the authorities said.

The person agreed at the time to remove the posts from Facebook and to refrain from making future comments about Chief Buglio and the police, according to a criminal complaint that was filed on Thursday in federal court in Scranton, Pa.

“During the meeting, Brian Buglio acknowledged that the threatened felony charges lacked merit,” federal prosecutors said in the criminal complaint, adding that Chief Buglio and the person had shaken hands over the “deal.”

………

Chief Buglio could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, according to the plea agreement, which still must be finalized in court.

Here is hoping that the judge will throw the book at him.

Karen²

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Amy Cooper, who was caught on tape attempting to use the police to murder a bird watcher who noted that her dog needed to be leashed in that area of Central Park, has now sued her former employer, who fired her for the episode.

She is now claiming that she was fired because she was white.

My guess is that she has discovered that she is justifiably toxic and cannot get a new position anything near to what she used to do.

Consequences are a good thing, and they should apply to white people as well:

Amy Cooper, a white woman who last year became an international symbol of the routine racism that Black people face in their daily lives, is suing her former employer for firing her, arguing that she is a victim of racial discrimination.

Ms. Cooper makes the claim in a lawsuit filed this week against the investment firm Franklin Templeton, which terminated her employment a year ago after she was captured on a widely shared video in a tense encounter with a Black bird-watcher.

The lawsuit is the latest fallout from the May 2020 episode in Central Park, which touched off intense discussions about the history of white people making false, and sometimes life-threatening, accusations against Black people to the police.

………

She says in the suit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan, that she “did not shout at Christian Cooper or call the police from Central Park on May 25, 2020, because she was a racist — she did these things because she was alone in the park and frightened to death.” She goes on to say that Mr. Cooper had selected her as a “target” and describes him as “overzealous.”

And the suit argues that Franklin Templeton did not thoroughly investigate the situation because of Ms. Cooper’s own race and gender, effectively reaching its decision to terminate her because she is a white woman.

They terminated you because are a self-important bigot, and people won’t hire you for the same reason.

The fact that you are a horrible human being who got caught on tape is karma, not oppression.

Support Your Local Police

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Just a brief rundown on police misconduct in the news recently.

William Jennette was suffocated by prison officers, and when he said he could not breath, one officer replied, “You shouldn’t be able to breathe, you stupid bitch.”

Recently released police dashcam and body cam video has revealed that, Louisiana State Troopers beat Ronald Greene to death (see also here).  They then refused to make a report to the coroner and told the family that he had died in a car crash.

And finally, we have the Springfield, Illinois cops who confiscated and spilled a man’s daughter’s ashes claiming that they contained drugs. 

Thin blue line, my ass.

Consider the Source

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The New York Times editorial board is a font of conventional thinking. (Note that I did not say, “Wisdom.”)

You won’t find bold new or visionary ideas, but it is a good marker of where the conventional, “Wisdom,” is going, so their OP/ED calling for the end of qualified immunity for police officers might be an indication of a sea change in the elite consensus:

When a Minneapolis jury last month convicted the former police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd on May 25, 2020, many Americans celebrated. At last, a moment of accountability, if not quite justice, in the face of persistent police brutality.

But for all the justified relief at the verdict, a troubling reality lurks: Had Mr. Chauvin not been criminally prosecuted — as the vast majority of police who kill in the line of duty are not — he may well have faced no consequences at all.

………

Qualified immunity arose out of an 1871 civil rights law that made government officials, including police officers, financially liable for violating a person’s constitutional rights. In a series of rulings starting in the late 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that an officer is immune from liability unless it can be shown that he or she broke “clearly established” law in the process. The burden is on the plaintiff to make this showing, and the bar is absurdly high: If no other court has previously ruled in a case involving an essentially identical set of facts, the law is determined to be not “clearly established.”

Examples of courts splitting hairs to give a pass to even egregious misconduct abound: the prison guard who pepper-sprayed an inmate in the face “for no reason at all”; the officer who fired at a nonthreatening dog and missed, accidentally hitting a 10-year-old child lying nearby on the ground; the officers who stole $225,000 in cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant; the officer who shot a 14-year-old boy after he had dropped a BB gun and raised his hands.

“I don’t think there’s any serious argument but that the qualified immunity doctrine as it currently exists is completely off the rails,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University and a founder of the Policing Project, which aims to give the general public a role in shaping law enforcement policy. “It makes no sense whatsoever and gives police officers far more leeway than they ought to have.”

In short, it’s hard to see what is qualified about qualified immunity.

………

In practice, qualified immunity has become what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called an “absolute shield” that “tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

The court has also expressed the concern that individual cops will be bankrupted by judgments. This simply doesn’t happen. To the contrary, governments virtually always foot the bill for police wrongdoing. One study found that officers personally paid only .02 percent of the dollars that plaintiffs were awarded.

………

Ending or curtailing qualified immunity would not be a cure-all for police brutality. By the time it becomes an issue, the harm has already been done. While holding people and departments accountable is important, it’s even more important to ensure that the harm doesn’t occur in the first place. “Police misconduct is often a systemic problem. These are not just bad apples but bad barrels,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who studies police misconduct. “We should be thinking about how to reduce the harm, not just pay people.”

………

The more immediate solution is legislative. Congress is currently considering the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a far-reaching bill addressing racial discrimination and excessive force by law enforcement officers. One provision would eliminate the “clearly established” defense and prevent cops from relying on their own belief that their conduct was lawful. Unfortunately, that has become the bill’s main sticking point, as most Republicans have sided with police unions in opposing any liability for individual officers.

………

If the rule of law means anything, it means that those sworn to enforce it should not be above it.

The current state of policing int he United States is needlessly corrupt and brutal. 

It must be reformed, and many, if not most, of its current members need to removed.

Cowardly Prosecutor Bullsh%$

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Elizabeth City, NC DA Andrew Womble has announced that he will not be charging the officers who unleashed a fusillade of bullets and killed Andrew Brown in his car.

He has also announced that this was a serious investigation, and that he won’t be releasing the body cam footage, because, f%$# you.

This does not fill me with confidence in the integrity of the investigation:

A North Carolina district attorney on Tuesday said officers were justified in the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr, a Black man, in April, and that the sheriff’s deputies who fired will not face charges for killing the 42-year-old father of seven.

Andrew Womble said Brown’s death “while tragic, was justified” because three deputies “reasonably” believed deadly force was necessary to protect themselves and others while serving a warrant for Brown’s arrest on felony drug charges.

………

Brown’s death certificate said he died as the result of a gunshot wound to the head. Brown’s family commissioned an independent autopsy which specified that he was shot five times, once to the back of his head.

Womble said he would not release body-camera video of the confrontation, for which Brown’s family and supporters have repeatedly called to ensure integrity in the investigation of his death.

If the body cam footage were that clear, they would be streaming it on YouTube now.

They are covering it up because they have something to cover up.

This is Contemptible

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It turns that cops and medical examiners are conspiring to use Sickle Cell Trait to excuse police misconduct.

Sickle Cell Trait is the heterozygous form of Sickle Cell Anemia, and it has a limited effect on people.  It is almost universally asymptomatic.

Nevertheless, because it is almost exclusively associated with Black people, cops and their enablers use it as an an excuse for beating people to death:

When they carried the body of a 32-year-old Black man named Lamont Perry out of the woods in Wadesboro, N.C., there were no protests over his sudden death in police custody.

No reporters camped at the scene. No lawyers filed suit.

Instead, the final mark in the ledger of Mr. Perry’s life was made by a state medical examiner who attributed his death in large part to sickle cell trait, a genetic characteristic that overwhelmingly occurs in Black people. The official word was that he had died by accident.

But the examiner’s determination belied certain facts about that night in October 2016, public records and interviews show. Accused of violating probation in a misdemeanor assault case, Mr. Perry was chased by parole and local police officers through the dark into a stand of trees, where only they could witness what happened next.

He had swelling of the brain, and a forensic investigator reported that he had an open fracture of his right leg. He was covered in dirt, and residents of a nearby housing complex told his family that when the officers emerged from the woods, their shoes and the bottoms of their pants were spattered in blood.

Yes, clearly this is a case of Sickle Cell Trait causing a broken leg, closed head trauma, and massive bleeding.

Mr. Perry’s case underscores how willing some American pathologists have been to rule in-custody deaths of Black people accidents or natural occurrences caused by sickle cell trait, which is carried by one in 13 Black Americans and is almost always benign. Those with the trait have only one of the two genes required for full-blown sickle cell disease, a painful and sometimes life-threatening condition that can deform red blood cells into crescent shapes that stick together and block blood flow.

………

The New York Times has found at least 46 other instances over the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers pointed to the trait as a cause or major factor in deaths of Black people in custody. Fifteen such deaths have occurred since 2015.

In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the person who died had been forcefully restrained by the authorities, pepper-sprayed or shocked with stun guns. Scattered across 22 states and Puerto Rico, in big cities and small towns, the determinations on sickle cell trait often created enough doubt for officers to avert criminal or civil penalties, The Times found.

………

“You can’t put the blame on sickle cell trait when there is a knee on the neck or when there is a chokehold or the person is hogtied,” said Dr. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia and now chairman of pathology at the Howard University College of Medicine. “You can’t say, ‘Well, he’s fragile.’ No, that becomes a homicide.”

I guess that we need to add, “Living while Black,” to, “Driving while Black,” to the list of offenses that the authorities find worthy of the death penalty.

I Feel Very Good About This

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Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill has ruled that Derek Chauvin is eligible for a sentence enhancement for up to 40 years in prison. 

He used the terms, “Particular cruelty,” and “Abused a position of trust and authority,” as a cop to justify taking a potential sentence for 2nd degree murder from about 12 years.

Good.  This psychopath is a menace to society:

Derek Chauvin abused his authority as a police officer when he pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck until he went limp and treated him with “particular cruelty,” qualifying him for a longer prison sentence, a judge said.

In a ruling made public Wednesday, Hennepin County District Judge Peter A. Cahill found state prosecutors had proved beyond a reasonable doubt four of five aggravating factors in Floyd’s killing that they argued should result in a tougher prison sentence for the former Minneapolis police officer.

Chauvin was convicted April 20 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s May 25 killing. Floyd died when Chauvin placed his knees on Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes while he was handcuffed, facedown, on a Minneapolis street. Chauvin, who is being held in solitary confinement at a Minnesota prison, is scheduled to be sentenced June 25.

Although a jury found Chauvin guilty on all three charges he was facing, Minnesota law dictates he will face sentencing only on the most serious charge: second-degree murder. State sentencing guidelines on that charge recommend 11 to 12 years in prison for someone with no criminal history.

But prosecutors last fall and again last month asked Cahill for what is known as an “upward sentencing departure,” citing several factors they argued should open Chauvin up to a maximum of 40 years in prison.

In his ruling, Cahill agreed with prosecutors that Chauvin had “abused a position of trust and authority” as a police officer and that Chauvin “knew from his training and experience” that his restraint was putting Floyd in “danger of positional asphyxia.”

The scary part is that without a video that had gone viral, Derek Chauvin would still be a cop, and he would still be brutalizing people.

Suck it Up and Take It

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The White supremacist right has been aggressively infiltrating law enforcement across the United States for decades. 

The numerous police officers caught on tape invading the Capitol, it’s clear that this problem is far worse than was previously admitted.

Unfortunately, police are fighting these efforts tooth and nail: 

In the battle to stamp out extremism from the ranks of the police, lawmakers from California to Minnesota have proposed solutions they thought were straightforward.

Some laws would empower the police to do more robust background checks of recruits, letting them vet social media to make sure new officers were not members of hate groups. Other laws would make it easier for departments to fire officers with ties to extremists.

But legislators working to get these measures passed in recent months have found themselves confronting a thicket of obstacles and somewhat unexpected opposition, ranging from straight Republican vs. Democrat clashes to profound questions about protecting constitutional rights.

Last month, a police officer in Fresno, Calif., was fired after videos surfaced that showed him supporting the Proud Boys at a protest. “Such ideology, behavior and affiliations have no place in law enforcement and will not be tolerated within the ranks of the Fresno Police Department,” the police chief said.

Yet when lawmakers in the state recently proposed legislation to give police departments more power to weed out officers with extremist ties, they met resistance.

Brian Marvel, the president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, said in a statement that the organization supported the idea but not the legislation that was drafted. It would “infringe on a person’s individual rights,” he said, and possibly prevent someone from becoming an officer based on personal beliefs, religion or other interests.

………

Various such efforts have been simmering around the country for years, spurred by F.B.I. reports starting more than 15 years ago that document a concerted effort by white supremacist and other extremist organizations to infiltrate the police.

The events of Jan. 6 brought new momentum to those efforts, with more than 30 active or retired police officers coming under scrutiny for joining protests in Washington, and at least seven facing charges for storming the Capitol.

………

Racist gangs among Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies have been a problem for decades. In Virginia, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska and Louisiana, law enforcement officers have been dismissed in recent years for ties to the Ku Klux Klan. And various agencies have been shaken by revelations of police officers exchanging derogatory remarks about minorities on social media, with the Philadelphia Police Department dismissing 13 of the 72 officers it put on leave in 2019 because of such Facebook posts.

………

Police officers themselves, at least those who acknowledge that there is an issue, tend to welcome the idea that added scrutiny will drive bad officers away. Major unions in California have supported the general idea of scrutinizing applicants more closely, but they opposed the first draft in February of a law that would reject all candidates who had been members of hate groups, participated in their activities or publicly expressed sympathy for them.

(emphasis mine)

You can drive a truck through, “At least those who acknowledge that there is an issue.”

If you assume that just a few percent police are white supremacists, and add in those who know  and let it slide, you can very easily get to a majority of cops out there.

Given the fact that police have the authority to use lethal force on behalf of the state, and that police in the United States are so profligate with the use of lethal force on behalf of the state, aggressive action is essential to protect society.

Imagine That

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The department of Justice has condemned the Portland Police Bureau’s response to Black Lives Matter Protests.

This is not a surprise.  The police were rioting:

The Department of Justice has delivered a striking rebuke of the Portland Police Bureau for its brutal policing of last year’s racial justice protests, calling out the police for violations of bureau policy and the U.S. constitution, while criticizing a leadership structure that “lacks critical self-assessment” and broadly views “all force as justified.”

In the aftermath of the George Floyd murderer by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin last May, Portland erupted in a months-long streak of nightly protest demanding racial justice and police accountability. (Portland protests also made national news after President Trump deployed federal officers, who clashed with protesters and swept suspects off the streets in unmarked vans.) The city’s activists recently got a shout out from Floyds’ younger brother Rodney after Chauvin was found guilty. “I’d like to thank the people that stayed in the streets marching night and day — the people of Portland stayed in the streets for 83 days,” he said, “making a statement with us, encouraging us on our dark days.”

In real time, the protests against police violence were met with brutality from the Portland Police Bureau, whose commissioner is also the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler. The Police used force against protesters more than 6,000 times, ranging from firing less-than-lethal munitions, to launching tear gas, to individual beatings delivered with batons. (Rolling Stone explored the contradiction of this progressive city’s violent cops in a dispatch last summer.)

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The new letter from DOJ is dated May 5th and was published by The Oregonian. It is the federal government’s response to a PPB self-assessment of its work policing the nightly protests. In that assessment, the police appeared not to understand the public anger directed at the bureau, blaming the protests on shiftless youth, writing: “many younger people, lacking entertainment and work, often attended the protests, with some gathering regularly to socialize and drink and a portion of those then engaging in criminal activity.” Independent contractors, hired by the city to offer oversight, had earlier slammed PPB’s assessment as “tone deaf.“

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The Department of Justice found much to criticize in PPB’s “abnormally high” use of force. And it calls out PPB leadership for its inability or unwillingness to impose restraint, writing, “PPB command broadly portrays all force as justified.”

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Public anger at the police bureau runs deep. Racial disparities in arrests in Portland are the fifth worst in the nation. This year the city paid out a $2 million settlement to the family of Quanice Hayes, a Black teenager who was killed while on his knees in 2017 by a PPB officer with an AR-15. Last month, the police killed a man experiencing homelessness, Robert Delgado, who appeared to be in mental distress. As seen in video of the incident, the officer shot Delgado with an AR-15 from long distance while taking cover behind a large tree trunk. (The shooting is under state and county investigation.)

The Portland Police Bureau, as well as the Portland’s city council structure, whose commission based structure is antithetical to good government.

The case of Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, where he has strongly endorsed police brutality, and implied support for violence against protesters, is just one data point showing that this system does not work.

If You Thought That There Was a Speck of Sanity in Law Enforcement………

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Then you should read just how cops believed the weirdest conspiracy theories during the Black Lives Matter protests.

I want what they are smoking:

The graffiti on a port-a-potty in a gravel pit was, in the opinion of one Washington state resident, a sign that anti-fascists might blow up a nearby dam. Another local was convinced that a young man reading signs was actually an “Antifa or BLM scout.” A third person warned, via an anonymous email tip, that her ex-husband was part of an anti-fascist group that was coming to burn down the town.

All these complaints were forwarded throughout police ranks in Washington, where officials urged vigilance against the leftist threat.

As racial justice protests flared across the country in summer 2020, so did conservative fears of leftist protesters. From Oregon to Virginia, social media lit up with rumors about anti-fascists (“antifa”) or Black Lives Matter participants, who were allegedly coming to terrorize small towns.

Anacortes, a scenic city of 17,000 in coastal Washington, was no exception. From June to August 2020, the city’s police department received repeated tips about supposed antifa threats, according to police documents obtained by the government transparency nonprofit Property of the People and shared with The Daily Beast. Even some of the most absurd claims found their way up to state-level law enforcement, those documents show.

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The documents, obtained via Freedom of Information request, reveal the absurdity of some of last year’s complaints.

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The following month, another alleged antifa threat, even wilder than the others, found its way to the Skagit County Sheriff, documents show. In this case, it involved two overturned port-a-potties in a gravel pit near a boat launch in Concrete, Washington.

One of the port-a-potties had been spray painted with the acronym “ACAB,” short for “all cops are bastards.” The other was tagged with an A in a circle, an anarchist symbol. But where some observers might have seen common vandalism symbols, the tipster who photographed the port-a-potties saw something more ominous—maybe even part of a plot to blow up a dam.

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“When individuals and law enforcement have been whipped into such a paranoid frenzy that they’re primed to see ‘antifa’ or ‘BLM’ terrorist conspiracies literally in the toilet, the situation is a powder keg,” Shapiro said. “There’s a direct line from this sort of deliberately induced political hysteria to violent, repressive crackdowns on progressive dissent.” 

The police were clutching at any potential excuse to foment violence and beat up (riot against) protesters.

It’s not conducive to the proper functioning of a democratic society.

Support Your Local Police

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A cop in Georgia (where else?) was planning to arrest black people to prevent them from voting. 

He is also hooked up with white supremacists online.

Am I the only one who thinks that this guy is not an isolated case?

A former Middle Georgia sheriff’s deputy bragged in text messages with members of an alleged extremist group that he had beaten a Black person he arrested and planned to charge Black Georgians with felonies to keep them from voting, according to an FBI affidavit.

The ex-Wilkinson County deputy, Cody Richard Griggers, of Montrose, was fired last November after the FBI contacted the sheriff there about an investigation into illegal guns and their alleged ties to a California man said to have made violent political statements on Facebook.

Griggers, 28, a former Marine, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court in Macon to one count of possession of an unregistered firearm, a crime the authorities discovered in their probe, which began last summer. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in July.

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Griggers, in the texts, was said to have claimed he was making and gathering illegal firearms and explosives.

Griggers, who is white, “also expressed viewpoints consistent with racially motivated violent extremism, including the use of racial slurs, slurs against homosexuals and making frequent positive references to the Nazi holocaust,” prosecutors said in a statement on Wednesday announcing Griggers’ plea.

The prosecutors said that on Nov. 19 last year that the FBI searched Griggers’ patrol car and found a machine gun “with an obliterated serial number,” a weapon he was not allowed to have in his patrol car.

It was Griggers’ statements in text messages, however, that most concerned Wilkinson Sheriff Richard Chatman.

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“I beat the (expletive) out of a (racial slur) Saturday. (Expletive) tried to steal (a gun magazine) from the local gun store. … Sheriff’s dept. said it looked like he fell,” the affidavit noted, quoting Griggers.

Griggers went on to write that the beating was for him “sweet stress relief.”

………

The affidavit also said Griggers had texted how he “intended to charge black people with felonies in order to keep them from voting.”

“It’s a sign of beautiful things to come,” he wrote, according to the affidavit. “Also I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote.”

Griggers had worked as a deputy in Wilkinson County — which lies just east of Macon and has a population of about 9,000 people, about 40% of them Black — for just over a year, the sheriff said.

According to the FBI affidavit, Griggers also discussed “killing liberal politicians” with other members of the text group, writing they could “make it look like Muslims” were responsible.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, and I am not just talking about the Wilkinson County sheriff’s department.

Police departments across the nation are objectively pro-white supremacist.

RTead more here: https://www.bnd.com/news/nation-world/national/article251004169.html#storylink=cpy

Did Not Expect This

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It should come as no surprise that the Department of Justice planned to indict all 4 officers involved in George Floyd’s murder on Civil Rights charges. 

What does surprise me is that the DoJ planned to arrest Derek Chauvin in the court house in the event of a not-guilty verdict or a mistrial.

Leading up to Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, Justice Department officials had spent months gathering evidence to indict the ex-Minneapolis police officer on federal police brutality charges, but they feared the publicity frenzy could disrupt the state’s case.

So they came up with a contingency plan: If Chauvin were found not guilty on all counts or the case ended in a mistrial, they would arrest him at the courthouse, according to sources familiar with the planning discussions.

(emphasis mine)

These folks were sh%$ting their pants over the possibility that a bigot on the jury would blow everything up.

About Bloody Time

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has announced that the Department of Justice will be conducting an in depth review of policing in Minneapolis.

Considering the reputation of the Minneapolis PD was among the worst in the nation even before Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, this is long overdue:

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday announced a sweeping Justice Department probe into the practices and culture of the Minneapolis Police Department, elevating the federal government’s role a day after former officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of killing George Floyd.

Garland said the pattern-or-practice civil investigation would be conducted separately from an ongoing federal criminal probe opened during the Trump administration over whether the Black man’s civil rights were violated during his arrest and death last May.

The new examination will go beyond Floyd’s case, Garland said, to determine whether the Minneapolis department has engaged in systemic misconduct that constituted “unconstitutional or unlawful policing.”

“Nothing can fill the void the loved ones of George Floyd have felt since his death,” Garland said during brief remarks at Justice Department headquarters. “My heart goes out to them and to all those who have experienced similar loss.”

He added that “justice is sometimes slow, sometimes elusive and sometimes never comes. The DOJ will be unwavering in its pursuit of equal justice under the law.”

If this ends with a consent decree, those involved in the negotiations, the Minneapolis city government, the Minnesota Governor, and the Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison should do their level best to roll back the more odious parts of the police collective bargaining agreement.

Also, NYPD Officers Will Have to Start Asking Their Wives for Blow Jobs Again

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On the Stellar Parthenon BBS, user DC noted, upon hearing that the Manhattan DA will stop pursuing prostitution prosecutions, cynically observed that, “The income for NYPD officers just dropped by 20%, now that they can’t shake down the women.“

I noted (See title) that it will likely effect their home and family life as well. 

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. announced on Wednesday that his office would no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage.

The new policy, according to a press release from the office, will prevent unnecessary future contacts with the criminal justice system, eliminate the collateral consequences associated with having a prostitution case or conviction and “empower New Yorkers to interact with law enforcement without fear of arrest or deportation.”

“Over the last decade we’ve learned from those with lived experience, and from our own experience on the ground: criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer, and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers,” Vance said in a statement.

“By vacating warrants, dismissing cases, and erasing convictions for these charges, we are completing a paradigm shift in our approach,” he added.