Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

And Yet More Bullsh%$ in the Criminal Justice Arena

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It appears that, notwithstanding claims of the “Ferguson Effect”, and the reality of police slowdowns in places like New York City, there is no statistically significant increase in the murder rate:

As I’ve mentioned in a number of posts over the years, I believe the Late 20th Century Crime Wave was one of the two or three most politically and culturally consequential events in the US in the second half of the twenty century. It is hard to overstate the impact of this very real rise in the rates of all violent crimes but most especially murder. And one of the greatest mysteries about it is that that for all the studies, theories and attempts to control it, we simply do not have a clear understanding of why it began in the early 1960s or why it ended over the course of the 1990s. I’ve noted that, somewhat against my better judgment, I’ve become increasingly open to the seemingly crude and monocausal theory that lead poisoning played a key role in driving the crime wave. Still, I think we still basically do not know. Yet, over the last year or so we’ve seen a rising chorus of commentary and political posturing which claims that increasing civil rights activism (i.e. Black Lives Matter or the so-called “Ferguson Effect”) and more permissive or cowed policing is at least starting to push crime rates back up toward where they were in the bad old days.

………

When I started looking at this I was curious to find out myself because I have heard a lot of reports of the murder rate specifically going up. That’s obviously bad news in itself. But it also confounds my assumption that the rise and fall of the murder rate over the second half of the 20th century had far less to do with policy interventions of any sort than we’d like to think. So if a mild ramping back of aggressive policing can shift the scales in the other direction, that changes the whole story significantly. If crime is on the way back up, I’d still be suspicious that it is tied to differences in policing. My assumption would be that the underlying trends, about which we understand little, have shifted. In any case, what I found was quite different from what I’ve been hearing and reading.

From the beginning of 2015 there has been what can only be called a relentless desire to find a spike in the crime and murder rates. So for instance, back on March 3rd, The New York Daily News ran “Murders up 20% in 2015 in year-to-year comparison, NYPD says“. Needless to say, when you’re only going on 2 out of 12 months the statistics can be very volatile. Then there was a less hyperbolic story that ran in The New York Times, “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities, which noted a 9% increase in the murder rate for New York City. Then on September 21st, USA Today published ‘Bloody weekend in NYC puts rising murder rate in spotlight‘ which noted that “A bloody weekend in New York that saw eight shooting deaths could signal that out-of-control gun violence may return to the city” and then went on to say …

The number of homicides is up slightly over last year, and if the trend continues New York City may see its first uptick in the homicide rate after 25 years of decline.

Now, this last claim is worth zeroing in on. I’ve gone back and recompiled the number of homicides in New York City going back to the peak year of 1990. And whatever gloss, interpretation or prediction about the future one may make from these numbers, this point about a “first uptick” is simply false. Since 1990, even as the murder rate has gone down consistently, the number has actually gone up on a year over year basis 6 times: 1999 (6%), 2000 (.3%), 2003 (1.7%), 2006 (10.6%), 2008 (5.9%) and 2010 (13.8%).

As late as one week ago, Newsday predicted that the city murder rate would end up at just over 5%, with 350 homicides for the year. But as of Christmas Day, the number stood at 339 homicides for 2015, which would amount to an increase over 1.8% over 2014.
………

The Times itself touched on this point yesterday with a very different article “Anxiety Aside, New York Sees Drop in Crime,” which notes that while New Yorkers seemed to feel less safe, over all crime actually fell by 2%. 

………

The simple reality is that we won’t really know the story until the 2015 FBI statistics are released. And even then we will only know about a single year, which means very little. For the moment, what seems clear is that there is a public mood of panic, menace and fear. And at least in New York City, that seems to be the case even though it’s totally belied by the actual crime statistics.

What a surprise.  The reports of skyrocketing crime appear to be at best statistical noise, and more likely a juxtaposition of bias in reporting, and efforts by law enforcement to push the meme.

Why Cops Need to be Policed, Part Gazillion

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Police Sergeant Melissa Ruch, an officer in the West Penn Township police force, fabricated an ambush against herself, the 9th such case this year:

Another police officer is accused of fabricating a story about being attacked in the line of duty, making it a total of seven cops who fabricated such stories this year.

And that does not include the two dimwit cops from Connecticut who were off-duty when they shot up one of their personal cars, later claiming somebody else shot it up.

This time, it’s West Penn Township Police Sergeant Melissa Ruch out of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, who claimed in September that she pulled up to an abandoned car on the side of the road, only to get attacked by huge Hispanic man who threw her over a guardrail, causing her to tumble more than 35 feet down an embankment.

As in the other fabricated stories, the incident prompted a multi-agency manhunt, putting a scare into locals that a dangerous man was on the loose driving a Nissan Maxima with the license plate that read FUK 1011 or FUK 0011, which should have been our first clue she was lying because Pennsylvania does not allow license plates that  might be interpreted as profane.

 ………

The incident took place on September 2, one day after the most famous fabricated police ambush this year, the suicide of Fox Lake Police Lieutenant Joe Gliniewicz of Illinois, who turned out to be a lying, thieving cop stealing money from the department’s Explorer program.

 Needless to say, the mouth breather brigade took this to be more evidence of a “War on Cops.”

DoJ Shuts down One Method of Law Enforcement Extortion

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One of the most widely used asset forfeiture program in the United States has been shut down by the Department of Justice.

Unfortunately, the reason for closing it down is not widespread evidence of abuse and corruption in the program, but rather budget issues:

The Department of Justice announced this week that it’s suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers.

The “equitable-sharing” program gives police the option of prosecuting asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize — even if the people they took from are never charged with a crime.

The DOJ is suspending payments under this program due to budget cuts included in the recent spending bill.

“While we had hoped to minimize any adverse impact on state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, the Department is deferring for the time being any equitable sharing payments from the Program,” M. Kendall Day, chief of the asset forfeiture and money laundering section, wrote in a letter to state and local law enforcement agencies.

In addition to budget cuts last year, the program has lost $1.2 billion, according to Day’s letter. “The Department does not take this step lightly,” he wrote. “We explored every conceivable option that would have enabled us to preserve some form of meaningful equitable sharing. … Unfortunately, the combined effect of the two reductions totaling $1.2 billion made that impossible.”

Asset forfeiture has become an increasingly contentious practice in recent years. It lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, never charged — with wrongdoing. Recent reports have found that the use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profits and less by justiceAsset forfeiture has become an increasingly contentious practice in recent years. It lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, never charged — with wrongdoing. Recent reports have found that the use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profits and less by justice.

Of course, the usual suspects’ heads are exploding with people like the National Sheriff’s Association invoking the specter of narco gangs and terrorists.

The truth here is that these people could still seize property in much the same way that they do now.  The only difference is that they can no longer keep quite as much as they used to.

What this means is that cops will have to find other money sources to buy their: (Buzzfeed listicle ahead)

  • Gatorade
  • Zambonies
  • Segway scooters
  • “Disney Training” (Not The Onion)
  • First class flights and car rentals
  • Parties
  • Tequila, Kegs, and a Margarita Machines (Again, not The Onion)
  • Tanning Salons (OK, this one resulted in corruption charges)
  • Casino Junkets
  • Hawaii Vacations 
  • Bribing other cops (Convicted, but reversed on appeal)
  • A Dodge Viper supercar (Because they want to play Grand Theft Auto for real, I guess)
  • A “Party House”
  • Marijuana and Prostitutes (Again, charges pending)

A Feature, Not a Bug

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Is anyone surprised that 80% of Chicago PD dash cams don’t work properly:

On the night Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a Chicago Police officer, at least three dashboard video cameras in squad cars at the scene didn’t work. And the ones that did capture video did not record audio.

The massive failure was no statistical quirk.

In fact, 80 percent of the Chicago Police Department’s 850 dashcam video systems don’t record audio due to “to operator error or in some cases intentional destruction” by officers, according to a review by the Police Department.

Additionally, about 12 percent of dashcams experience “video issues” on any given day due to “equipment or operator error,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.

The Laquan shooting, which led to murder charges, has now been seen by the world — but not heard. And not every potential camera angle exists.

A sergeant on the scene reported he was unable to collect video footage from three squad cars at the scene due to system malfunctions including “disc error,” “power issue” and an “application error,” police reports show.

I gotta assume that, “operator error or in some cases intentional destruction.”

It fits with the whole “Thin Blue Line” siege mentality that permeates police forces throughout the United States.

I’m beginning to think that all these cams should be run exclusively by civilian review boards.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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It appears that the Cuyahoga County district attorney has been pulling out all the stops in the grand jury proceedings to ensure that the police walk free:

Lawyers for the family of a 12-year-old boy fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer called for a federal investigation into his death because they say the local prosecutor has been biased in favor of law enforcement.

In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch that was released on Tuesday, the legal team for Tamir Rice’s mother and sister complained about the unusual measures taken by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office in reviewing the 2014 shooting.

“We write to request that your office launch an independent investigation into Tamir’s death because the local prosecutor has abdicated his responsibility to conduct a fair and impartial investigation and has severely compromised the grand-jury process,” attorneys for the Rice family wrote.

Among a variety of complaints, the letter describes a bizarre moment when a prosecutor allegedly shoved a toy gun in the face of a police expert testifying to the grand jury that the shooting of Tamir was unjustified.

………

But the letter to Lynch shows that the family’s frustrations have widened under prosecutor Timothy McGinty’s oversight. The family’s lawyers allege that he has manipulated the investigation and grand jury proceedings to benefit the officers.

This month, McGinty allowed Loehman and Officer Frank Garmback, who drove the squad car to the playground, to read prepared statements to the grand jury, but then allowed them to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid questioning by lawyers.

An individual cannot selectively use Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination after giving some testimony under oath, the Rice family attorneys said.

………

The letter also alleges that McGinty’s office, in another unusual move, asked Rice’s family to gather evidence on its own for the grand jury. Experts rounded up by attorneys for Rice’s family were then subjected to perverse questioning by prosecutors last week, the letter alleged.

In one instance, a prosecutor removed a toy gun from his pants and pointed it in the face of an expert during his testimony, according to the letter. The letter says the surprise use of a prop in court was an exaggerated reference to the threat Loehman allegedly felt when encountering Tamir.

The expert was Roger Clark, a 27-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department. He was one of two experts with law enforcement backgrounds who’d been retained by Tamir’s family and wrote reports that concluded the killing was unjustified. HuffPost has been unable to reach Clark for comment.

I would suggest that a criminal,and a state bar, investigation against by the McGinty are justified, because the allegations appear to be credible, and if they are true, there appear to be a lot of lawyers who need to be marched out of their offices in handcuffs.

The Past 48 Hours in Criminal Justice has Been a bit of a Roller Coaster

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Yesterday, I looked out the window at work, and saw 2 helicopters hovering about 5000 feet up in the general direction of Lexington Market.

On closer examination, I noticed that they were both news choppers, as I saw the cameras, and I figured that something had happened in the first Freddie Gray trial.

It turned out that we had a hung jury and a mistrial:

A judge declared a mistrial Wednesday in the case of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter after jurors said they had failed to reach an agreement on any of the charges against him in the death of Freddie Gray.

 The decision, which came a day after jurors told Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams they were deadlocked, frustrated activists who had watched the first trial in Gray’s death closely. Outside the downtown courtroom, city officials and community leaders pleaded for calm, and authorities reported two arrests, but no violence or serious disruptions.

 Porter, 26, the first of six police officers to be tried in Gray’s death, remains charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Gray, 25, died in April after suffering a severe spinal cord injury in the back of a police van.

 Jurors deliberated for three days before Williams declared the mistrial. The decision now throws the other trials into flux.

 Prosecutors chose to try Porter first, planning to use him as a witness at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson. Goodson, who is charged with second-degree murder, was slated for trial in the first week of January.

I can’t imagine that the States Attorney Marilyn Mosby is not going to announce her intention to retry him soon.

Even ignoring the political overtones, if she gives up, she has no leverage at all about getting him to testify against his superiors.

Even so, it’s kind of depressing.

On the other hand, the announcement that “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli had been arrested for securities fraud:

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals.

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”

Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

The picture of him being hauled off in handcuffs (above) just made my day. (Does this make me a bad person?)

The comment of the day on this comes from the inimitable Charlie Pierce, “I suppose he could argue for a change of venue, but I think it impractical to delay the trial until we make it to Mars.”

Honestly, I think that it would be impossible to find a jury that wouldn’t want to give him the death penalty for jaywalking.

Another Myth Disproven

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The FBI has now made official statements (as opposed to the leaks that they have been feeding the press) regarding the San Bernardino shooters, and there was no proclamation of support for ISIS or any other terrorist group on social media:

There is no evidence a married couple who killed 14 people in California this month were part of a terrorist cell, the head of the FBI said on Wednesday, echoing investigators’ views that the pair were inspired by, rather than organized by, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

………

However, he said that while the perpetrators of the Dec. 2 shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29 — had expressed support for “jihad and martyrdom” in private communications, they never did so on social media.

Just days after the attack, authorities said they were looking into an apparent Facebook post in which Malik had pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Multiple U.S. media outlets reported Malik had expressed “admiration” for al-Baghdadi, but it was under an account that used a different name. The messages were reportedly deleted before the attack, and Facebook quickly removed the account in the wake of the shooting.

Seriously, why does the press continue acting as the FBI’s stenographer when the senior officials who leak this crap could not be trusted if they said the sky was blue?

When you get repeatedly burned by a source, they are no longer a source, they are just a random asshole for whom you refuse to take off the record statements.

Well, This Explains a Lot

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It turns out that some police departments reject candidates for being too smart:

A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

“This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class,” Jordan said today from his Waterford home. “I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action.

Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Whistleblowers are not ordinary people.  “Good Germans” are ordinary people.

My guess is that the cops found that a high score was too tightly correlated to people who would make waves or turn whistleblower.

Sharia Law in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

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It looks like the religious nut-jobs in the Murfreesboro district attorney’s office have turned a personal tragedy into an The Handmaiden’s Tale by charging a woman who attempted to abort her fetus with first degree murder:

A woman who attempted to perform an abortion with a coat hanger six months into her pregnancy has been indicted on a first-degree attempted murder charge, Murfreesboro Police reported.

Anna Yocca, 31, of 1939 Swindon Circle, was arrested Wednesday at Juvenile Court by Detective Tommy Roberts after the December session of the Rutherford County grand jury issued an indictment on the charge, according to the report. An employee at the Amazon fulfillment center in Lebanon, she was booked into jail on a $200,000 bond.

Roberts began investigating the case in September when evidence showed Yocca went to her upstairs bathroom, filled the tub with water, got in and tried to “self-abort” her pregnancy using a coat hanger, the report shows.

She became “alarmed and concerned for her safety” when she saw a great deal of blood in the tub, and her boyfriend took her to St. Thomas Rutherford Hospital emergency room. From there, she was transported to St. Thomas Mid-Town in Nashville where staff members saved “Baby Yocca,” the report shows.

This is the world that anti-abortion forces want.

We’ve already seen a woman jailed to compel her to carry her fetus to term, a woman charged with murder for taking an abortion drug, prosecuting a mother for helping her daughter obtain an abortion, and passing laws making some miscarriages murder, among other cases in the past few years.

These folks won’t be satisfied until every woman in America is back in chains.

(on edit)

The irony here is that a few years back, Murfreesboro was trying to prevent a mosque from being built in the area.

Taliban, Talibaptist, there is no difference.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

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Daniel Holtzclaw will likely spend the rest of his life in jail:

After listening to several weeks of testimony and four days of deliberating, a jury has found a former Oklahoma City police officer accused of sex crimes guilty on 18 counts.

Daniel Holtzclaw is accused of sexually assaulting 13 women while on duty as an Oklahoma City police officer.

In August 2014, the state charged Holtzclaw with 36 felony counts of rape, sexual battery, indecent exposure and forcible oral sodomy after the 13 women came forward, claiming the officer assaulted them while they were in custody or inside his police car.

In all, the jury heard 13 accusers’ stories of assault.

………

After four days of deliberating, the jury found Holtzclaw guilty on 18 counts.

They recommend he be sentenced to a total of 263 years.

This is not what I expect from an all white jury in Oklahoma.

Good for the jurors and the prosecutors.

5 Years ago, they probably would not even have charged the guy.

We chan thank Black Lives Matter for this change in attitude.

Rahm Throws Another Evil Minion™ under the Bus

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The head of the (supposedly) Independent Police Review Authority, Scott Ando, has been fired by hizzonner:

A former federal prosecutor will head the agency charged with investigating police shootings in Chicago after the immediate resignation of its chief administrator, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office announced Sunday.

Sharon Fairley will take over for Scott Ando as the head of the Independent Police Review Authority, according to a statement from the mayor’s office. Fairley declined to comment when reached Sunday by the Chicago Sun-Times. Ando could not be reached.

“Scott has taken important steps to move IPRA forward and reduce its backlog of cases,” Emanuel said in a statement. “Yet it has become clear that new leadership is required as we rededicate ourselves to dramatically improving our system of police accountability and rebuilding trust in that process.”

Emanuel made his announcement hours after hundreds of protesters led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson marched through the Loop on Sunday, demanding accountability after the release of video footage of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times on Oct. 20, 2014.

………

A former federal prosecutor will head the agency charged with investigating police shootings in Chicago after the immediate resignation of its chief administrator, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office announced Sunday.

Sharon Fairley will take over for Scott Ando as the head of the Independent Police Review Authority, according to a statement from the mayor’s office. Fairley declined to comment when reached Sunday by the Chicago Sun-Times. Ando could not be reached.

“Scott has taken important steps to move IPRA forward and reduce its backlog of cases,” Emanuel said in a statement. “Yet it has become clear that new leadership is required as we rededicate ourselves to dramatically improving our system of police accountability and rebuilding trust in that process.”

Emanuel made his announcement hours after hundreds of protesters led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson marched through the Loop on Sunday, demanding accountability after the release of video footage of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times on Oct. 20, 2014.

It is gratifying seeing the bully and coward that is Rahm Emanuel scrambling for his political career.

I think that he will serve out his term, even with all this, but it’s going to be as a very lame duck.

It will be fun to see the knives coming out.

Sucks to be Rahm Now

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First, it now appears that the DoJ will start an investigation of the Chicago Police Department:

The Justice Department plans to launch an investigation into the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department, a wide-ranging review similar to those that scrutinized the police departments in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, according to several law enforcement officials.

 The civil probe, which the officials say could be announced early this week, comes as Chicago continues to grapple with protests after the release of a video showing the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, which prompted murder charges for the officer involved and the resignation of the city’s police chief. The Justice Department is already investigating the McDonald shooting, but this new investigation by the department’s civil rights division would focus on the police department’s practices broadly to determine whether any of them contribute to civil rights violations.

 ………

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D), a former top aide to President Obama, called the possibility of a civil rights investigation “misguided” last week. But, a day later, he reversed course and said he would welcome such an investigation.

 Emanuel has come under fire for his administration’s handling of the McDonald video, specifically for fighting its release for more than a year, which some have suggested was a politically motivated decision meant to insulate the mayor from political backlash while he was locked in a tight reelection effort. One week after the McDonald video was released, Emanuel fired Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy.

 ………

 On the same day that McCarthy was fired, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan wrote a letter to the DOJ urging them to open an investigation into the police department.

 “The McDonald shooting is shocking, and it highlights serious questions about the historic, systemic use of unlawful and excessive force by Chicago police officers and the lack of accountability for such abuse by CPD,” Madigan (D) wrote.

 Under Obama, Attorneys General Loretta Lynch and her predecessor, Eric Holder, have used patterns-and-practices investigations to aggressively probe police departments for potential constitutional violations, investigating dozens of departments since 2009. Those probes have found patterns of excessive force by police in Cleveland; Albuquerque; the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; Portland; New Orleans; Seattle; Puerto Rico; and Warren, Ohio.

And on the civil/press end, a federal judge just forbade the CPD from destroying old misconduct investigations:

Chicago authorities must notify journalists and activists before they destroy decades of records related to police misconduct, Illinois Circuit Court Judge Peter Flynn ruled in an emergency order Thursday.

The order comes after journalist and activist Jamie Kalven petitioned the court after police officials said they would destroy hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence, investigative files and computer records related to Chicago police officer misconduct reports older than four years.

The documents are among a trove of data requested by Kalven and other media organizations, including the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, dating back to 1967. Last year, city officials agreed to release all of the police misconduct information, but the city’s police unions sued to prevent the documents from becoming public and the issue remains in limbo. The case will eventually be decided by an Illinois appeals court.

The emergency order comes in the wake of a large public outcry following the release of the video that shows police officer James Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in October 2014. Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder hours before the video’s release.

Kalven and his attorney, Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor, played a critical role in the release of the dash-cam footage by reporting on the video’s existence and demanding that officials release it. Kalven expressed relief at the judge’s order, saying it would give him time to go back to court before authorities could set a “bonfire” to decades’ worth of key information about police misconduct in Chicago. “Ministers, civic groups … are all calling for a full examination of the systems of accountability in the city.”

………

“So while we’re having this conversation about openness, honesty, transparency, distrust and lack of accountability, the destruction of these records would ensure impunity for officers who have engaged in abuse,” Futterman said. “I can’t imagine a worse time than this.”

I rather expect to see a whole lot of Freedom of Information Act requests to follow.

It also just blows my mind that the CPD unions have the right to demand the destruction of records. I would think that this decision would be exclusively the purview of management, and in any case, state and federal law would render that portion of the contract unforceable.

In either case, I expect to see a constant drip ……… drip ……… drip, of revelations, and even if they predate Rahm Emanuel’s tenure as mayor, he will take the heat.

I’m hoping that he is frog marched out the mayor’s offices in handcuffs, but if it merely leads to his being toxic in the context of Democratic politics, Dayenu.

Rats Turning on Each Other

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Rats

Following the release of dashcam footage of  the shooting of Laquan McDonald, which took a year of court fights, the shooter Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with the first-degree murder.

Now, with the heat rising for various attempts to bury this story for a year,Rahm Emanuel has fired Police superintendent fires Garry McCarthy:

The head of the Chicago Police Department was fired Tuesday amid widespread criticism over how authorities responded to the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer last year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he formally asked Garry F. McCarthy, the Chicago police superintendent, for his resignation on Tuesday morning, a week after video footage of the shooting was released and the officer was charged with murder.

“He has become an issue, rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction,” Emanuel said. He added that while he is loyal to McCarthy, whom he praised for his leadership of the department, the needs of the city are more important.

Even as the embattled Emanuel dismissed his police superintendent and made other vows of increased police accountability, announcing a task force to review police oversight, another Illinois official suggested that federal intervention was needed for the Chicago police. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan wrote a letter Tuesday asking the Justice Department to investigate possible civil rights violations by the Chicago Police Department.

Anger has erupted in Chicago since authorities released footage of Jason Van Dyke, a city police officer, shooting Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old, last year. In the video, Van Dyke is seen firing a volley of shots at McDonald, many of them after the teenager had already fallen to the ground.

What is clear now that the video has been released, is that there has been an aggressive attempt to sweep everyting under the rug.

The arbiter of banal mainstream opinion that is the New York Times editorial board has cut Rahm Emanuel a new asshole:

The cover-up that began 13 months ago when a Chicago police officer executed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on a busy street might well have included highly ranked officials who ordered subordinates to conceal information. But the conspiracy of concealment exposed last week when the city, under court order, finally released a video of the shooting could also be seen as a kind of autonomic response from a historically corrupt law enforcement agency that is well versed in the art of hiding misconduct, brutality — and even torture.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel demonstrated a willful ignorance when he talked about the murder charges against the police officer who shot Mr. McDonald, seeking to depict the cop as a rogue officer. He showed a complete lack of comprehension on Tuesday when he explained that he had decided to fire his increasingly unpopular police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, not because he failed in his leadership role, but because he had become “a distraction.”

Mr. Emanuel’s announcement that he had appointed a task force that will review the Police Department’s accountability procedures is too little, too late. The fact is, his administration, the Police Department and the prosecutor’s office have lost credibility on this case. Officials must have known what was on that video more than a year ago, and yet they saw no reason to seek a sweeping review of the police procedures until this week.

………

Justice Department officials, however, said on Tuesday that the department did not ask the city to withhold the video from the public because of its investigation. That makes this whole episode look like an attempt by the city, the police and prosecutors to keep the video under wraps, knowing the political problems it would most likely create.

I hope that this is a death knell for Emanuel’s political career, he is a cancer on Democratic Party politics, but the next election is 3 years down the road, and that is a long time in politics.

If Only the Ruling Included a Kick to the ‘Nads

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The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a permanent injunction against the Cook County Sheriff enjoining them from contacting credit card companies to threaten them into dropping n adult web site:

Nov 30 A federal appeals court on Monday ordered an injunction blocking the Cook County, Illinois, sheriff from pursuing any effort to stop credit card companies from handling transactions for Backpage.com, a classified ad website that the sheriff said promotes sex trafficking.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said Sheriff Thomas Dart, whose jurisdiction includes Chicago, violated Backpage’s First Amendment free speech rights by demanding that companies such as MasterCard Inc and Visa Inc ban the use of their cards to buy ads on the website.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Richard Posner said Dart’s “official bullying” and “campaign of suffocation” amounted to censorship, preventing even transactions for ads touting “indisputably legal” activities from being processed.

“As a citizen or father, or in any other private capacity, Sheriff Dart can denounce Backpage to his heart’s content. He is in good company; many people are disturbed or revolted by the kind of sex ads found on Backpage’s website,” Posner wrote.

But as sheriff of a county with more than 5.2 million people, Dart cannot make “dire threats,” including of possible prosecution, in a campaign “to crush Backpage’s adult section – crush Backpage, period, it seems,” the judge added.

………

The injunction bars Dart from coercing or threatening sanctions against card companies, processors and financial companies that do business with Backpage.com, while the company pursues its lawsuit to stop his campaign.

In August, U.S. District Judge John Tharp had rejected Backpage.com’s bid for a preliminary injunction.

Posner said that was a mistake because Backpage.com would probably succeed on the merits, and suffered “irreparable injury” from its loss of First Amendment freedoms.

Dart’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His office has said it has made more than 800 arrests since 2009 connected to Backpage.com ads.

800 arrests from lurking on an internet web site looking for sex workers.

How about policing those gun shops in Cook County, just over the border from Chicago who are selling to any sort of skeevy straw buyers with two nickels to rub together instead of pursuing some masseuses giving tug jobs?

I hope that Backpage.com takes him to the cleaners in a civil suit.

I also would like to see the Department of Justice go after Sheriff Dart for criminal conspiracy to deprive Backpage.com of its civil rights, but I don’t expect to see that happen.

It should happen, but it won’t.

Why did This Take a Year

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A police officer in Chicago has finally been charged with murder after shooting a black teen 16 times, the bulk of the shots coming after he was already on the ground:

A white Chicago police officer has been charged with murder over the shooting death of a black teenager, just one day before a deadline by which a judge has ordered the city to release a squad-car video of the incident.

 Veteran officer Jason Van Dyke was indicted on Tuesday on a first-degree murder charge after shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times. The officer was denied bail at a hearing in Chicago’s main criminal courthouse hours after the state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, announced the charges against him. 
City officials and community leaders have been bracing for the release of the video, fearing an outbreak of unrest and demonstrations similar to what occurred in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities after young African American men were killed by police. The judge ordered the dash-cam recording to be released by 25 November after city officials had argued for months that it could not be made public until the conclusion of several investigations.

 At a press conference before the video’s official release, Alvarez said the officer’s actions “were not justified or the proper use of deadly force by an officer”.

 ………

 Documents filed in court describe the video’s contents, in which the teen is said to be shown walking away from officers on a Chicago street. As McDonald turns away, Van Dyke takes one step towards the teen and begins to fire his gun, the description says.

 For 14 to 15 seconds, according the documents prepared by the state’s attorney’s office, the officers unloads his entire gun into the teen, who spends 13 seconds laying face down on the pavement with his arms and legs jerking from the shots making contact with his body. Three clouds of smoke appear during the incident that indicate shots hitting the pavement, according to officials.

 ………

 Van Dyke is the first on-duty officer to be charged with murder while working for the Chicago police department in nearly 35 years.

 ………

 According to a freedom of information request by the Chicago Tribune, the veteran officer has had at least 15 complaints filed against him while working in high-crime neighborhoods, for accusations including using racial epithets and pointing a gun at an arrestee without justification.

 In 2007, the officer was involved in a traffic stop in which he and his partner were found to have used excessive force on a man with no prior convictions, leading to a $350,000 award for damages in the case, the Tribune reported.

The murder occurred on October 20 of Last Year, and it was caught on camera, and it still took them a year to file charges, and the initial release from the authorities, portrayed Laquan McDonald as a cross between Rambo and the Incredible Hulk.

The charges and the release of the dashcam video (I am not embedding it) only happened because the protests did not end.

It is clear that everyone on the law enforcement side of this just wanted it to go away.

BTW, there are still some people who should be charged as an accessory to murder, specifically the cops who deleted surveillance video from a Burger King in a clear attempt to obstruct justice.

I’m not sure how to stop this, though I think that the idea that police should be require to self insure might be a good start.

When being a bad cop boosts their liability insurance rates, cops will get better.

This is a Version of Cops and Robbers I was Previously Unaware Of

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It turns out that it is more likely that cops will take your stuff than robbers:

Last year, all of America’s burglars extracted a total of just $3.9 billion worth of property from their cumulative marks. Pansies, the nation’s cops spit in the general direction of that paltry figure. That’s all you got?

That’s because over the same period, U.S. law enforcement officials netted $4.5 billion in goods from Americans through a process known as civil asset forfeiture, an astounding figure that economist Martin Armstrong noted on his blog last week in response to an Institute for Justice report.

Consider that for a moment: in 2014, cops took more property from Americans than burglars did.

The short rap on asset forfeiture goes like this: if you are suspected of a crime, especially a drug-related crime, police can confiscate your money or property if they believe it is related to your supposed criminal activity—often without convicting or even formally charging you. In most states, police departments are entitled to keep some or all of the seized property, giving them an obvious incentive to continue the practice. Civil forfeiture laws allow cops to take your house because your kid has a heroin problem, or take your truck just because it’s a cool-ass truck.

Am I the only one here who finds this completely whack?

The Judge is Right, I Expect Obama’s DoJ to Appeal

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A magistrate has placed significant restrictions on the use of the “Stingray” cell phone tower spoofer:

A federal judge in Illinois has recently taken the unusual step of issuing three new stringent requirements for the government when it wants to deploy cell-site simulators. The move aims to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of innocent bystanders against unreasonable search and seizure.

Of course, for now, this order only applies to this one judge in the Northern District of Illinois.

These new stingray requirements come just about a month after the Department of Homeland Security imposed its own warrant requirement, following a similar move by the Department of Justice.


Not only can stingrays be used to determine location by spoofing a cell tower, but they can also be used to intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone as well as information from other phones within the vicinity.

As part of an ongoing drug case, US Magistrate Judge Iain Johnston told prosecutors recently that they will now have to fulfill three distinct requirements before he will sign off on the use of the invasive surveillance devices, as a way to protect the privacy of those who happened to be near a surveillance target. The memorandum opinion came down earlier this month as part of a largely sealed ongoing drug investigation, the details of which the judge described as “unsurprising.”

What is surprising is Judge Johnston’s order to compel government investigators to not only obtain a warrant (which he acknowledges they do in this case), but also to not use them when “an inordinate number of innocent third parties’ information will be collected,” such as at a public sporting event.

This first requirement runs counter to the FBI’s previous claim that it can warrantlessly use stingrays in public places, where no reasonable expectation of privacy is granted.

Second, the judge requires that the government “immediately destroy” collateral data collection within 48 hours (and prove it to the court).

Finally, Judge Johnston also notes:

Third, law enforcement officers are prohibited from using any data acquired beyond that necessary to determine the cell phone information of the target. A cell-site simulator is simply too powerful of a device to be used and the information captured by it too vast to allow its use without specific authorization from a fully informed court. Minimizing procedures such as the destruction of private information the United States has no right to keep are necessary to protect the goals of the Fourth Amendment.

I’m thinking that if someone could come up with an app that could detect when it is likely that one of these devices is in use, they sell it for a significant chunk of change.

I think that you could do that with an algorithm involving ping times to a cell tower.

How About Throwing this District Attorney in Jail?

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It appears that the single most prolific issuer of wiretap warrants in the United States, Riverside County, California, illegally wiretapped 52,000 people:

Prosecutors in the Los Angeles suburb responsible for a huge share of the nation’s wiretaps almost certainly violated federal law when they authorized widespread eavesdropping that police used to make more than 300 arrests and seize millions of dollars in cash and drugs throughout the USA.

The violations could undermine the legality of as many as 738 wiretaps approved in Riverside County, Calif., since the middle of 2013, an investigation by USA TODAY and The Desert Sun, based on interviews and court records, has found. Prosecutors reported that those taps, often conducted by federal drug investigators, intercepted phone calls and text messages by more than 52,000 people.

Federal law bars the government from seeking court approval for a wiretap unless a top prosecutor has personally authorized the request. Congress added that restriction in the 1960s, when the FBI had secretly monitored civil rights leaders, to ensure that such intrusive surveillance would not be conducted lightly.

In Riverside County — a Los Angeles suburb whose court and prosecutors approved almost one of every five U.S. wiretaps last year — the district attorney turned the job of reviewing the applications over to lower-level lawyers, interviews and court records show. That practice almost certainly violated the federal wiretapping law and could jeopardize prosecutors’ ability to use the surveillance in court.

“A district attorney is playing with gunpowder if he ignores the potential implications of letting somebody else handle the entire process. That’s potentially catastrophic,” said Clifford Fishman, a Catholic University of America law professor who studies wiretapping.

That also creates a legal problem for Riverside’s massive wiretapping operation, which had come under scrutiny from Justice Department lawyers. Last week, USA TODAY and The Desert Sun reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had secretly helped turn the county into the nation’s wiretap capital, even though federal prosecutors repeatedly warned that the surveillance orders violated a separate part of the wiretapping law and would not withstand a legal challenge.

Federal drug agents used information from Riverside wiretaps to make arrests as far away as Kentucky and Virginia, sometimes concealing the surveillance from judges and defense lawyers.

(emphasis mine)

Here’s an idea: How about going after that DA criminally, so maybe next time, we won’t having a sworn law enforcement official thumbing his nose at the law?

This is beyond negligent.

They Have Learned Nothing, and They Have Forgotten Nothing*

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We now have a report on the the police response that created the rioting in Baltimore.

It appears that excessively aggressive police actions, including when the police kettled large numbers of  students leaving high schools at the end of the day at Mondawmin in an misguided attempt at dick swinging, are not on the agenda:

As rioting erupted on Baltimore’s streets in April, the city police Command Center — where top decision-makers had gathered to get a handle on the situation — was itself in disarray, according to a new review of the agency’s response to the unrest.

 In a room designed to hold 30 to 40 people, as many as 100 had gathered, some without a clear role. The crowding was so severe that the department’s 10-person Analytical Intelligence Section, which was charged with developing information that could help the department deploy resources and anticipate threats, was blocked from its own equipment — and provided just two computers to do its work. The room was so loud the analysts could barely hear threat tips being relayed to them over the phone.

 That environment, described as “chaotic” and “distracting” by some in the room, was just one of many “major shortcomings” in the Baltimore Police Department’s handling of the unrest, according to a sweeping review by the Police Executive Research Forum, a highly regarded law enforcement think tank based in Washington.

 The group’s 79-page report, which then-Commissioner Anthony W. Batts requested this summer, is scheduled to be released publicly on Monday but was provided to The Baltimore Sun.

 The report — titled “Lessons Learned from the 2015 Civil Unrest in Baltimore” — provides new critiques of key top-level decisions and details that bolster previous criticism. It also highlights continuing gaps in knowledge about how the worst of the rioting, looting and arson erupted, noting that reviewers were “unable to determine who issued the order to cancel bus service” at Mondawmin Mall on April 27 — a decision that left many students stranded in the area that day.

 The report detailed a long list of “major findings,” reflected in 56 recommendations for the Police Department to implement. It said planning was inadequate, arrest policies were unclear, equipment was severely lacking, officer training was inadequate, mutual aid agreements with other localities were insufficient or unclear, and orders to officers were not clearly defined. Command positions were also changed at times without notice, causing confusion, the report said.

This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

They cannot find out who gave the order to kettle what were primarily students trying to get home because it was a relatively low level functionary who has gotten his friends to cover for him, and they are covering for him, because these officers believe that it is essential for them to be kept in their place.

They thought that they were justified in taunting a bunch of adolescent teens and confining them for no reason because they were “Uppity.”

Unfortunately, this deeply toxic mindset is the rule, rather than the exception in policing in the United States.

You can find the full report here.

*This is frequently attributed to the French stateman Tallyrand, but he is not the source.