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Who's A Rat > Topics > reasons for creating a volunteer civilian review police board with subpoena powers
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joeb
Posted 1427611829 · Edited Reply with quote #51
see link for full story
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/westchester/2015/03/28/cop-accused-lying-fbi-got-retirement-deal/70608768/
Cop accused of lying to FBI gets sweet retirement deal
Sgt. Ray Henderlong was suspended last March and has been out on an undisclosed disability since then.
PEEKSKILL – A Peekskill police sergeant suspended a year ago when he was accused of lying to FBI agents and the chief and of failing to monitor sex offenders continues to receive full pay and will be granted a disability retirement under a settlement that's been criticized by Mayor Frank Catalina.
Sgt. Ray Henderlong was suspended last March and has been out on an undisclosed disability since then. He will receive his full $121,000 salary until the Aug. 25 retirement date agreed on with the city as part of a settlement that also drops all departmental charges against him.
That settlement, approved by City Manager Anthony Ruggiero, "did not come to the mayor or the (Common) council until it was a done deal, and I was very, very unhappy about it," Catalina said, adding that Ruggiero should not have paid lawyers who negotiated the agreement without consulting the council.
"I don't know if the settlement was justified," Catalina said. "What are the facts?"
A March 3, 2014, memo obtained by The Journal News informs Henderlong that he is suspended and lists numerous departmental charges of misconduct and incompetence.
The 55-year-old patrol sergeant and former department spokesman is accused of ordering another officer to stop a garbage truck on Jan. 11, 2013, "without a legitimate reason" five days before the FBI rounded up 30 people in the New York metro area on racketeering and extortion charges as part of an investigation into organized crime's influence on the trash hauling industry.
Three days after that stop, Henderlong was questioned by the FBI about it and was allegedly "untruthful," to both federal agents and Peekskill Police Chief Eric Johansen, saying that he ordered the stop based on a tip from a lawyer in court. The disciplinary charges say he ordered the stop at the behest of a contractor, but does not say why.
Johansen would not say why the traffic stop attracted the FBI's attention. A New York City FBI spokesman also would not comment or discuss whether Henderlong was "untruthful." No criminal charges were ever brought against the 18-year police veteran.
Henderlong, who in 2012 made a bid to become chief, denied the allegations, saying he was "fully cooperative" with the FBI and did not lie.
He also denied other accusations listed in his suspension notice. Those charges include failing to inform the chief about a criminal investigation in which the victim was a city councilwoman; directing Peekskill detectives not to tell the chief about that and other investigations; and ignoring orders to monitor sex offenders living in the city.
The 12-page settlement, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, bars Henderlong, Ruggiero, Johansen and other officials from making derogatory comments about any of the parties, and anyone who does can be fined $10,000. It also prevents Henderlong from applying for other jobs with the city or suing the city.
Lance Klein, whose law firm was paid $4,600 by the city to negotiate the settlement, said the city manager is not required to inform the mayor or Common Council of the agreement. He said the city charter gives the manager the power to hire and fire employees.
Ruggiero, the city manager, resigned his $163,000 post in February
NC Police Reform Bill Would Permit Civilian Review Boards That Could Subpoena, Fire Police Officers
Toothless local boards inspire a stronger proposal. The bill also includes a prohibition on profiling and a new training commission.
Mar. 27, 2015 1:35 pm
DurhamDurhamNorth Carolina state Rep. Rodney Moore (D-Mecklenburg) introduced a bill in the state legislature this month, House Bill 193, the "Prohibit Discriminatory Profiling" Act (pdf), that prohibits police profiling based on a perceived identity rather than behavior, requires the collection by the state of police deadly use of force data, a new training commission, and allows local municipalities to set up civilian review board with subpoena powers and the ability to fire police officers, with an appeals process, naturally.
The bill was inspired by the toothless citizen review boards across North Carolina (and the country), as Indy Week reports:
None of those things is legal in Durham. Rather than investigate the complaints themselves, the nine-member Durham review board's job is to ensure that the police department's internal-affairs investigations are adequate.
Supporters of the system believe the process properly leaves investigations to trained detectives; critics have long argued that the review board is little more than a rubber stamp. Indeed, says board chairman DeWarren Langley, since he began serving in 2009, there's never been an instance when the board sided with the complainants over the cops.
Last year, after a series of officer-involved shootings, allegations of racial profiling and disproportionate traffic stops against minorities in Durham, the city's Human Relations Committee made a recommendation to City Council for the citizen review board to begin directly investigating complaints against officers. In August, City Manager Tom Bonfield rejected that recommendation, arguing that review board members—whom he appoints—lack necessary investigative backgrounds.
Thanks in large part to lobbying by the parent of a police shooting victim, Wisconsin recently passed a law requiring state-level investigations of deadly use of force incidents. In the first test case, involving a Milwaukee police officer already fired for the fatal shooting, the cop was cleared by a team comprised of several former Milwaukee police officials, including the team chief. Gov. Scott Walker (R), a potential presidential hopeful, said he wasn't sure if the right decision was made but wasn't getting involved.. A second test case involving an unarmed victim is already going through the system.
The North Carolina bill, meanwhile, has a long way to go before it becomes law. The bill has 23 sponsors, all Democrats, and is still sitting in the judiciary committee. Both houses of the North Carolina legislature are controlled by Republicans. Other bills related to the police in the legislature include a bill to limit the number of law enforcement appointments an official can hold to three
After reading this Washington "FBI Propaganda " Post Machine
I felt I could now trust the taxpayer funded Death Squad
called the FBI.
wink,nod, know what I mean?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-the-fbi-director-figures-out-who-belongs-in-the-most-important-jobs/2015/03/29/1dfb26ea-d4b1-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html
How the FBI director figures out who belongs in the most important jobs
March 29 at 7:27 PM
As FBI Director James B. Comey focuses the country's premier law enforcement agency on terrorism and cyberthreats, he is leaning heavily on a little-known corporate tool to deal with a critical part of getting the job done: climate surveys.
Comey is using the surveys to help determine who should be running the most important jobs at the bureau. And in the process, he says, he wants to create a leadership factory.
In an e-mail last year, Comey let all of the bureau's nearly 35,000 employees know just how seriously he takes the results. "For those leaders whose surveys are covered in red, we need to quickly find a path to improvement, or we need to get them out of the role," he wrote.
The anonymous responses offer a snapshot of the FBI's many field offices, pinpointing poor morale, potentially lousy managers and how well the bureau has collaborated with other federal agencies in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Some of the problems identified occur in any large organization: gripes about pay, cronyism and bad bosses. "I also see the occasional mean comment (even about your beloved Director," Comey wrote in an e-mail last year. "Ignore the mean people; I do.")
But the responses also offer a window into how those working at the FBI think the bureau is performing, including in areas such as intelligence sharing and respecting the Constitution.
The Washington Post obtained the 2014 results for all 56 field offices after filing a Freedom of Information Act request.
Comey has made leadership changes at offices with some of the lowest average scores, including in Seattle, Norfolk and Springfield, Ill. Larger offices such as New York and Washington have not been spared, with Comey replacing senior agents in divisions that scored poorly.
Climate surveys were developed by industrial organizational psychologists, who study the workplace. The FBI began using its own version in 2007 to identify emerging problems and what was going smoothly.
Comey calls the surveys "smoke detectors."
Keep Reading vv
For those who worry about being too honest, he had this reassurance in an e-mail to the workforce: "Let me say it as clearly as I can: responses to the survey are confidential."
The surveys consist of dozens of questions that touch on integrity, fairness, pay and benefits — among other topics — that offer a "rich source of information about our leadership and our people," Comey said in an e-mail.
The survey's answers are given on a scale of 1 to 5 and divided into four categories of green, light green, yellow and red.
Nearly 75 percent of the 2014 survey's responses were green or light green, a sign that the FBI's field offices are generally in good shape. Yellow means there are potential problems that could worsen. Red signals significant problems, and about 10 percent of last year's survey questions scored red.
"Red is dead," as current and former FBI officials like to say.
Among the questions that received red responses in many field offices were those that dealt with raises, lazy coworkers, promotions, counterproductive work behavior and favoritism, with FBI employees saying that it was "difficult to recover from a mistake" and that "it takes more effort than necessary to get stuff done around here."
Amy Grubb, an industrial psychologist at the FBI who helps interpret the surveys, said that the latter response was understandable.
"They get a little frustrated with the bureaucracy around here," she said. "There are a lot of things we have to do because of the nature of the job. We have t's to cross and i's to dot to protect civil liberties."
Still, the surveys strongly indicated that employees were proud of working for the FBI and believed in its mission. They also thought that Americans, for the most part, had a "positive view of the FBI."
Employees also had a "high level of respect" for Comey and his top executives, an indication, perhaps, that his management style is resonating with the workforce, Grubb said.
Another response that scored very high: "Following the law is just as important as accomplishing the mission."
In interviews, current and former FBI agents had mixed views of the surveys. Some worried the results would be used to settle scores and wondered whether they could accurately
Here is the legislation just filed to create civilian review police board with subpoena powers in North Carolina.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/30/floyd-dent-police-inkster-michigan-beating
see link for video and full story
How a traffic stop left a Michigan man beaten, bloodied and bitter at police
A video with echoes of the Rodney King beating shows Floyd Dent pinned to the ground and punched 16 times by an officer with a history of citizen complaints
Video from a patrol car shows Floyd Dent being beaten by Inkster police officer
Monday 30 March 2015 10.14 EDT Last modified on Monday 30 March 2015 10.52 EDT
Floyd Dent never felt pain like he did the night of 28 January.
At about 10pm, the Detroit native says he went to visit a blind friend in the neighboring city of Inkster, to deliver a bottle of Rémy Martin and a 40oz of Bud Ice. He stayed for a few minutes, then left to drive home.
Moments later, a police cruiser behind him flipped on its overhead lights. According to a police report on the incident, Dent, 57, had failed to use a traffic signal and disregarded a stop sign. He continued to drive at roughly the same speed for about three-quarters of a mile, to a well-lit area where he says he felt comfortable. There, near an old police station, he pulled to the side of the road.
The police say Dent was driving with a suspended license. According to the office of Dent's attorney, Greg Rohl, his driving record indicates the suspension was related to an unpaid driving ticket from several years ago.
Dent opened his door and put both his hands out of the window.
"I wanted to let them know I'm unarmed," he told the Guardian.
But officer William Melendez – believing Dent was reaching for a gun – approached with firearm drawn. What happened next was captured on a patrol car camera.
The uncounted: why the US can't keep track of people killed by police
No audio of the incident exists. According to Dent, one of the officers told him to "get out the car, before I blow your fucking head off".
Dent opened his door and was dragged out of his Cadillac; almost immediately, Melendez put him in a chokehold. Melendez then proceeded to deliver 16 blows to Dent's temple. This all took place in about 15 seconds. Another officer arrived moments later and proceeded to use a taser stun gun against Dent, three times. In the video, Dent, with blood dripping from his forehead and cheek, appears not to be resisting Melendez's efforts to arrest him.
In the police report, Melendez contended that as he had approached Dent's open car door, the 37-year veteran Ford employee, who had no criminal history, looked at him "with a blank stare as if on a form of narcotic" and plainly stated: "I'll kill you."
Dent says Melendez choked him so tightly he couldn't breathe.
"At one point, I just gave up," he said in an interview on Sunday at his attorney's office. "I thought that was it for me."
At a later hearing, Melendez testified that even before any traffic violation occurred, he planned to investigate Dent simply because he had stopped to visit someone in a part of Inkster known for problems with drugs.
Melendez, 46, claimed Dent was immediately combative and bit his forearm, though he would later testify there were no marks because he was wearing several layers of clothing. Dent denies the accusation. Melendez said the bite was enough reason to begin repeatedly punching Dent.
"I was afraid that I might contract something," Melendez testified, earlier this month. "I needed to assure that Mr Dent would not do that again."
For that, Dent says he spent two days in hospital for a fractured left orbital, blood on the brain and four broken ribs.
'Not all cops are bad, just the ones I ran into'
Floyd Dent, Greg Rohl Floyd Dent stands with his attorney, Greg Rohl, as they address the media. Photograph: Jessica J Trevino/AP
Inkster, with a population of about 25,000, is 73% black. Melendez is Hispanic; the other eight officers who arrived to the scene on 28 January were white.
While Dent was sitting in the back seat of a cruiser, police say they found a small bag of cocaine underneath the passenger seat of his vehicle.
Dent, whose post-arrest drug test came up negative, says police planted that evidence. Rohl, Dent's attorney, contends that a close review of a video released this week shows Melendez pulling a bag of drugs from his pocket.
"I saw [an officer] with drugs in his hand, and I thought, 'Look at them dirty dogs,'" Dent said. "After that I just held my head down."
Dent has two children, including a 30-year-old son who says he is now unsure if he wants to pursue his dream of being a Michigan state trooper.
"He told me, 'If cops are like this, I don't wanna be a state police officer'," Dent said. "I told him not all cops are bad, just the ones I ran into."
Hilton Napoleon, a former Inkster police chief, said the allegations levied by Dent came as no surprise.
Citizens told him during his three-year tenure that officers planted evidence at a crime scene, he said.
"I tried to get them to come forward and make an official complaint … but they're scared," said Napoleon, who resigned in 2014. "And rightfully so."
Police departments across the US have "bad apples", Napoleon said, but officers often fail to report their actions.
"People are up in arms, everywhere," Napoleon, who is black, told the Guardian. "And they're looking at the police with a jaundiced eye now."
According to local activists, the incident involving Dent is just one among a number that have pointed to a larger problem of police brutality nationwide. Following the deaths last year of two unarmed African Americans, Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Missouri, protests have spread across the US.
In the wake of the video showing Dent's beating, demonstrations took place in Inkster – where the police force is estimated to be 80% to 90% white.
Bishop Walter Starghill, president of the Western Wayne office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said he immediately met officials in Inkster, seeking ways to engage the community and let residents know the incident involving Dent would not be "swept under a rug".
"I was shocked," Starghill told the Guardian, when asked what he thought of the video. "It wasn't a pretty sight; it brought a lot of concern to see somebody to be actually treated that way."
Starghill compared the clip to the infamous beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, saying it afforded the public an opportunity to witness what took place. King's beating, captured on camera, sparked serious riots.
"We realize there's two different kinds of justice," Starghill said. "There's American justice and then there's black justice. And America says that you are innocent until proven guilty; in black America we feel we are guilty until we are proven innocent."
Inkster's police chief, Vicki Yost, who is white and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian, told other media outlets Melendez had been taken off street patrol. A criminal investigation by Michigan state police is under way, with no timeline for completion, said spokeswoman Shannon Banner.
"The investigation will include a review of all video evidence and interviews," Banner told the Guardian. Its report will be forwarded to the county prosecutor's office for review, she said.
The only person who has been prosecuted since the incident is Dent.
Initially, he faced charges of assault, resisting arrest and possession of cocaine. Upon viewing the patrol car video at a preliminary hearing earlier this month, a district court judge tossed out nearly all the charges. A court date on the drug charge is scheduled for Wednesday.
Regardless of this, said Rohl, the kind of treatment Dent received is unacceptable.
"I don't care if he's got a kilo of cocaine and two dead bodies in that car, I don't give a shit," he said. "It's never appropriate ever to see that kind of brutality visited upon someone being arrested."
In the case of Inkster, the question of a financial settlement with Dent comes at a difficult time for the city. Since 2012, Inkster has been under a consent agreement with the state of Michigan to address its dire financial problems. During Napoleon's short stint as police chief, the number of officers in the department dropped from 73 to 24.
"You have a city that can barely keep its doors open, and now they're gonna have to come up with a bunch of money and throw it on the backs of taxpayers," he said.
'RoboCop'
Floyd Dent beating video A frame from a dashcam video provided by the Inkster police department shows an officer punching Floyd Dent many times in the head while another officer tries to handcuff him.
Melendez's record shows he has faced similar allegations before. At one point, he garnered more citizen complaints than any officer in Detroit, where he started his career in 1993 and served until his resignation in 2009. He entered Inkster's police force a year later.
Over nearly two decades, Melendez has been named as a defendant in a dozen federal lawsuits, accused of planting evidence, wrongfully killing unarmed civilians, falsifying police reports and conducting illegal arrests. Some suits were settled out of court. Others were dismissed.
In 1996, Melendez, who was known in Detroit as "RoboCop", and his partner shot and killed Lou Adkins. While Adkins was on the ground, several witnesses said the officers shot him 11 times, according to the Detroit Free Press. The case was settled for $1.05m, court records show.
Later, in 2002, Melendez and a group of officers arrested Detroit resident Darrell Chancellor, a convicted felon, for possession of a firearm. Chancellor testified that he was sitting in a car with a group of friends when Melendez drove by with his partner. Chancellor and his friends exited the vehicle quickly "because it was RoboCop", Chancellor testified.
Accounts of the incident between Chancellor and Melendez vary wildly. The officer claimed Chancellor threw a gun; Chancellor denied he had one. About 15 minutes later, according to Chancellor's testimony, Melendez put a gun on top of the vehicle and said: "Chancellor, this is your gun." Chancellor denied the accusation.
While Chancellor was being transferred to the police precinct, an argument broke out. Melendez, Chancellor said, told him to "shut the F up" or he would also plant drugs on him.
Chancellor spent 213 days in jail. When federal prosecutors reviewed the case, the firearm possession charge against him was dismissed.
The US prosecutor's office examined Chancellor's case as part of an investigation into allegations against Melendez, who was cited as the ringleader of numerous officers indicted by a federal grand jury in 2003 on civil rights violations. The officers were acquitted in 2004; jurors who spoke with the Detroit News explained they didn't believe the government's witnesses, many of whom had criminal records.
Around the time Chancellor's case was concluded, in 2007, the city of Detroit settled another suit involving Melendez for $50,000. The lawsuit alleged Melendez and his partners knocked on Ernest Crutchfield III's door in November 2003. When they received no response, they entered the premises without a search warrant and, in the kitchen, shot Crutchfield dead. According to the case, the officers planted a gun near his body before falsifying statements and lying under oath.
Between 1987 and 2004, more than 3,400 Detroit officers were named as defendants in a lawsuit, according to a 2005 city report on police settlements. By that time, court records indicate, Melendez had been sued nine times. Only 26 officers in Detroit had been involved in as many cases, the report stated.
Melendez, who could not be reached for comment, is currently named as a defendant in one case related to conduct in Inkster. In July 2011, he is alleged to have assaulted Deshawn Acklin, choking him until he lost consciousness. Acklin was using the bathroom at a friend's house when Melendez and other officers arrived, on suspicion of an alleged shooter being inside.
Melendez – who would later contend Acklin resisted arrest – is alleged to have beaten Acklin until another officer said "that's enough". While being treated in hospital, Acklin testified that Melendez asked him how he liked his "wrestling moves" while he was choked. Melendez denies ever saying that.
Eventually, a court filing stated, Acklin "succumbed to the pain and lack of oxygen and passed out while defecating on himself".
After he was treated at a hospital for a closed head injury, a left foot sprain and bleeding from his eyes, Acklin spent three days in custody, according to the case. He was never charged with a crime.
'People can have a collective voice'
Floyd Dent Protesters stand behind Dent as he speaks to the media.
Dent says the video of his incident is a painful reminder of treatment he never expected to receive.
"My hope with him having the courage to step forward is that people who have not been heard can come and have a collective voice," said Rohl.
A demonstration is scheduled for Wednesday – the day Dent will be back in court on the drug charge – at 4.30pm, outside Inkster police headquarters. Protesters also plan to convene on 3 April at the spot where Dent was pulled over, and then march to Inkster police headquarters.
Dent is a spiritual man. "Sometimes I just wanna be by myself and think, 'Why did this have to happen to me?'" he said.
"But then again, I thought, the man upstairs
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/30/politics/federal-agents-charged-with-stealing-bitcoin/
2 former federal agents charged with stealing Bitcoin during Silk Road probe
Updated 1:30 PM ET, Mon March 30, 2015
Silk Road founder's parents speak out
Silk Road founder's parents speak out 04:00
Washington (CNN)The federal government became owners of one of the biggest troves of Bitcoin, thanks to seizing millions of dollars in the digital currency from criminals associated with the online black market Silk Road.
Two federal agents who led the probe allegedly decided they wanted some of the money for themselves, according to a new federal court documents.
The two now-former agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Secret Service are charged with wire fraud, money laundering and other offenses for allegedly stealing Bitcoin during the federal investigation of Silk Road, an underground illicit black market federal prosecutors shut down last year.
The charges in a criminal complaint filed in San Francisco federal court paints a picture of corrupt federal agents trying to enrich themselves as they tried to bring down one of the Internet's top cybercriminals.
The charges against the agents could end up causing complications for the government's case against Ross Ulbricht, also known as "Dread Pirate Roberts", the Silk Road founder. Ulbricht was found guilty last year of aiding drug trafficking with his site. He is awaiting sentencing. As a result of the case against Ulbricht and others, the federal government seized bitcoin that it said at the time was valued at over $33 million.
The agents are: Carl Force, 46 years old, of Baltimore, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service.
Sent: Mon, Mar 30, 2015 1:10 PM EDT
Subject: Bill inquiry - HB 193 - Prohibit Discriminatory Profiling
Thank you for calling the Legislative Library. Here's the information I promised to send.
Bill history pages:
HB 193, currently in the House Judiciary I committee (Rep. Daughtry, Chair)
SB 613 (filed 3/26; not yet referred to committee)
Bill text (HTML):
You may sign up to receive committee notices and calendars if you'd like to track bill activity. http://www.ncleg.net/calendars/calendars.html#Subscribe
Cathy L. Martin
Legislative Librarian
300 N. Salisbury Street
love that word " rogue"
2 reads one from Serpico the cop
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20150331_At_trial_of_rogue_narcotics_officers__a_war_of_words.html
Prosecutors on Monday accused six Philadelphia narcotics officers on trial in a wide-ranging federal corruption case of "disrespecting their badge" by shaking down suspects, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and lying about it on their police reports.
But that mild disparagement paled next to the invective defense lawyers unleashed in their opening statements to refer to their clients' accusers.
"Trashy," "disreputable," "greedy," "sociopathic," and even "odoriferous" were deployed to describe the government's 19 primary witnesses, many of them admitted drug dealers, who are expected to testify that they were targeted by the group.
"If you have 19 bags of trash," defense attorney Jack McMahon told jurors, "you don't have better trash. You just have a pile of trash."
With that exercise in insult, the racketeering conspiracy trial began Monday for Officers Thomas Liciardello, Brian Reynolds, Michael Spicer, Perry Betts, Linwood Norman, and John Speiser, former members of the Philadelphia Police Department's elite Narcotics Field Unit accused in what Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has called "one of the worst cases of police corruption I have ever seen."
It also laid bare what will likely become the central question for the jury of six men and six women weighing the officers' fate: Whose testimony is more credible - a group of cops accused in kidnappings, extortions, brutal assaults, and drug dealing, or admitted criminals who say their pasts are no excuse for police to break the law?
Prosecutors allege that from 2006 to 2012, the officers, led by Liciardello, ran roughshod over the rights of drug suspects, stealing more than $400,000 in cash, drugs, and personal property while using extreme force and falsifying police records.
Targets who resisted, they said Monday, were dangled over balconies, threatened with the seizure of their homes, or held in dank hotel rooms for days.
Already, the allegations have prompted dozens of civil rights lawsuits against the officers and led local courts to toss about 450 of their former drug cases.
"Make no mistake about it," Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Wzorek told jurors. "Taking money while armed and using your authority as a Philadelphia police officer is robbery even if it's illegal drug money."
Wzorek offered jurors a preview of testimony to come, including that of Rodolfo Blanco, a Northeast Philadelphia heroin dealer who accused Liciardello and others of stealing $12,000 from him in 2006 and holding him in an airport hotel room for days while they threatened his family.
Victor Rosario, Wzorek said, will testify that Liciardello and Reynolds took nearly $12,000 from him in 2010 as well as an iPod, jewelry, and a Rolex watch they found during a search of his house. Rosario later told agents when he ran into Reynolds in court, he was wearing the stolen watch.
The defense was quick to offer alternate versions Monday of each incident.
The Rolex Rosario spotted on Reynolds wrist had been purchased years before the man's arrest, said McMahon, Reynolds lawyer, adding that he has the paperwork to prove it.
Defense lawyers said Blanco agreed to cooperate with Liciardello's crew to set up drug dealers higher up the chain. They housed him, with the approval of the District Attorney's Office, in the hotel to protect him while he worked with investigators, McMahon said.
"They all went out and played pool and had beers together one night," he said. "Mr. Blanco was there voluntarily."
Overall, McMahon said, the FBI's eight-year investigation of the officers was plagued by similar sloppiness. He accused agents of failing to interview key witnesses including the officers' supervisors, who were present at many of the incidents that now make up the government's case.
Defense lawyers said Monday that they planned to call many of the department's top brass to testify on behalf of their clients. Many of the indicted officers are also expected to take the stand.
But the defense reserved its harshest words Monday for the star witness of the government's case: Jeffrey Walker, a 24-year police veteran and former member of the drug squad who agreed to testify against the others after being arrested in a 2013 sting operation.
FBI agents caught him planting nearly 28 grams of cocaine in the car of a South Philadelphia drug dealers and later stealing $15,000 and five pounds of marijuana from the man's house.
Records of Walker's interviews with the FBI, mentioned in court Monday, suggest he began giving up his colleagues almost from the moment of his arrest, and he has not stopped talking since.
At various points, he has implicated lawyers, more than a dozen fellow officers, and even two barmaids at the unit's favorite watering hole, the Post Office Café in Bridesburg, in illegal activity.
Defense lawyers various
Frank Serpico - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
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Oct 23, 2014 - In the opening scene of the 1973 movie "Serpico," I am shot in the face—or to be ... It's because the cop is black and the dead man is white.
Frank Serpico - Biography - Law Enforcement - Biography.com
http://www.biography.com/people/frank-serpico-9542108
Police officer Frank Serpico became a New York City policeman in 1960. By the early 1970s, he had gained both kudos and notoriety as the man who blew the ...
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Serpico (1973) - IMDb
Rating: 7.8/10 - 66,644 votes
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134 Minutes With Frank Serpico -- New York Magazine
nymag.com/news/intelligencer/encounter/frank-serpico-2013-10/
Sep 27, 2013 - Four decades ago, in 1971, Frank Serpico—bohemian cop, Brooklynite, whistle-blower—was shot in the face during a drug bust and left for ...
http://articles.latimes
/1987-08-21/local/me-2117_1_police-officer
Retired Police Officer Arrested in Child Pornography Case
A retired San Diego police officer who taught recently at the Police Academy has been arrested on child pornography charges, authorities said Thursday.
Donald Lindsley, 52, was arrested Aug. 12 and booked into County Jail on four counts of using minors to produce obscene material, a felony that carries a maximum of eight years in prison, said Sgt. Ron Cottingham of the Sheriff Department's child abuse unit in Santee.
If convicted on all four counts, Lindsley, who has been released on his own recognizance, would face up to 32 years in prison.
Lindsley was arrested after authorities obtained a search warrant for his El Cajon home and found about 100 photos of two girls and Lindsley in various poses, Cottingham said.
Recognized by Co-Worker
Cottingham said "a source" gave the San Diego Police Department child abuse unit photos of Lindsley posing with the two girls, who are between 6 and 9 years of age. Lindsley, who retired from the Police Department on Nov. 23, 1985, after nearly 20 years of service, was recognized by one of his former co-workers.
The San Diego Police Department turned the case over to the Sheriff's Department because the photos had apparently been taken outdoors in East County, Cottingham said. The terrain of the area indicated where the photos were taken, he said.
Cottingham said Lindsley owned "a substantial private collection. It doesn't appear that he was trading with anybody or selling. It was just for his own personal use."
Lindsley apparently had been taking the photos for about a year, Cottingham said. He added that there is no evidence that Lindsley molested the two girls, nor is there any indication that any other children were involved.
The girls will probably go through counseling to help them deal with their victimization, Cottingham said. "(Child pornographers) are very remarkable in spotting kids that will be vulnerable and enticing them into this," he said.
Lindsley has taught
http://m.utsandiego.com/news/2010/aug/18/region-county-jail-worker-accused-of-distributing/
County jail worker accused of distributing child porn
An employee at the San Diego County Jail was arrested there Tuesday on suspicion of distributing child pornography.
About 1,500 videos and tens of thousands of still images that appeared to be child pornography were found on 11 computers at Lee's home, he said.
Agents also learned that Lee previously had custody for 18 months of a 9-year-old boy in foster care, Foxworth said.
Convicted of Killing Michael Jordan's Father in 1993 Wants New Trial
Man Convicted of Killing Michael Jordan's Father in 1993 Wants New Trial
http://www.complex.com/sports/2015/04/michael-jordan-father-killer-new-trial
Daniel Green, the man convicted in 1996 for the 1993 shooting of James Jordan, could be granted a new trial nearly 20 years after being put behind bars for life.
For two decades, the story behind the murder went like this: Michael Jordan's father was shot and killed inside his Lexus on July 23, 1993, and his body was later dumped in a swamp. It happened after James Jordan pulled over on the side of a North Carolina highway to take a nap while driving back from a wedding. During the nap, his car was run up on by two men.
According to testimony from Green's co-defendant, Larry Demery, the plan was to steal the Lexus and tie up Jordan, but Green went ahead and shot him. Demery received a lesser sentence in a plea deal to testify against Green, and is eligible for parole in 2016. The testimony from Demery, in addition to blood evidence found in the car that purportedly supported Demery's version of events, was key in getting Green locked up.
Green's lawyers contend that's not how Jordan's murder went down. Green has always maintained that he didn't pull the trigger, and based on a new investigation into the case, he may get another chance to prove his innocence. In 2010, a former FBI agent released a report on the crime lab that processed the blood evidence in Jordan's case. As it turns out, that lab mishandled 200 cases during a 16-year period, and Jordan's was one of them.
Jennifer Elwell, the lab analyst who worked on the Jordan case, allegedly gave false testimony during Green's trial. She had stated that the blood tests were "inconclusive," when in fact, other labs testing the same samples returned a "negative" result. Rather conveniently, the negative lab reports never made it to the trial. To add to the doubt, the blood evidence in question was mysteriously destroyed when Green appealed his verdict.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/03/idaho-police-shootings-jeanetta-riley-justice-for-arfee
A tale of two killings: what happened when Idaho police shot a dog and a pregnant woman in one day
Fourteen hours and 45 miles apart in rural Idaho, two stories began. A community campaign led to 'justice for Arfee' after a pet's killing outside a coffee shop. But there is no justice yet for the family of Jeanetta Riley
craig jones and dog, shane and jeanetta riley
Craig Jones with his other dog Larry, and Shane and Jeanetta Riley. Photograph: Jed Conklin for the Guardian (Jone
Friday 3 April 2015 08.17 EDT Last modified on Friday 3 April 2015 20.10 EDT
Two fatal police shootings unfolded within 14 hours, both in lakeside towns in the same corner of north-west Idaho.
The first victim was Jeanetta Riley, a troubled 35-year-old pregnant woman, shot dead by police as she brandished a knife outside a hospital in the town of Sandpoint. Her death barely ruffled the tight-knit rural community, which mostly backed the officers, who were cleared of wrongdoing before the case was closed.
The second shooting, in nearby Coeur d'Alene, sparked uproar. There were rallies, protests, sinister threats against the officer responsible, and a viral campaign that spread well beyond the town and drew an apology from the mayor. The killing was ruled unjusti
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/09/05/abraham/iCJsoQ3nJDsuHOTaC0jO7L/story.html
George Perrot has spent 29 years in prison for a rape he always said
he did not commit. Until recently, it looked like he would die there.
Now, a single strand of hair stands between him and freedom. And that
slender manacle may just have been snapped by federal authorities.
Even if you believe he's guilty — as Hampden County prosecutors say
they still do — there is plenty in Perrot's case to trouble even the
hardest of hard-liners, to shake our trust in those who are supposed
to protect us.
Perrot was 17 in the fall of 1985. A series of horrendous attacks on
elderly women in Springfield had begun the previous year, and police
believed the crimes were connected. Some women were raped more than
once; on Nov. 30, one of them, aged 78, was raped for the third time
in 18 months.
Back then, Perrot was every parent's nightmare, committing crimes and
using drugs. Early on the morning of Dec. 7, 1985, he was arrested for
breaking into a house in the 78-year-old's (and his) neighborhood and
for snatching a purse at a nearby Denny's. Because of the way he broke
into the house, investigators suspected he was also responsible for
all of the rapes.
FBI evidence often mishandled
A highly critical internal investigation discovered errors with nearly
half the pieces of evidence it reviewed.
Hair matches overstated in many cases
His attorneys say Perrot was incoherent and high during the
interrogation, which extended over 12 hours and was not recorded. The
minor had no parents or attorney present. At one point, Perrot began
to cry and asked for a gun so he could shoot himself. Prosecutors say
this suggested he knew he had been found out. Defense attorneys say it
showed he was exhausted and at the point where he would have agreed to
An hour later, prosecutors said, Perrot signed a confession saying he
had broken into the 78-year-old's house on the night of the rape,
though he always denied the sexual assault. He has no recollection of
signing the confession, and says he wasn't in the woman's home.
There's no getting around the fact that, without the falsely
incriminating power of that single hair, things would have gone very
differently.
Quote Icon
None of the three women attacked in those weeks, each of whom had been
raped before, picked Perrot out of a line-up (and tests on semen found
at the scene of another of the rapes excluded him). Defense attorneys
say the victims failed to pick him even though the line-up, which
included five easily-identifiable police officers, was highly
suggestive. None of the men in the line-up fit the description the
78-year-old had given. The woman had known Perrot, who lived on her
street, since he was small. She said her attacker was clean-shaven.
Perrot had a shaggy moustache and goatee.
George Perrot was tied to a rape by an FBI analysis of a strand of
hair, a method that has since been discredited.
"How can I say it was [Perrot]?" she said at trial. "This fellow [who
attacked me] didn't have any beard. He didn't have any mustache."
A footprint left on an earlier rape victim's door was not Perrot's
size. A palm print found on the window of another rape victim's house
he was initially accused of breaking into that night did not match
his. On the stand, the victim said somebody added a paragraph to her
statement after she signed it.
But the prosecution team said they had a strong link between Perrot
and the attack on the woman (he was charged only with that one rape),
something that proved he was in her bedroom that night. Though the
attack took place on the floor, investigators said they found
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/ex-tennis-star-james-blake-mistakenly-tackled-white-cops-article-1.2353983
EXCLUSIVE: James Blake, former tennis star, slammed to ground and handcuffed outside midtown hotel by white NYPD cops who mistook him for ID theft suspect
ay, September 9, 2015,
James Blake, seen here during his match against Marcel Granollers at the 2012 U.S. Open, calls the incident 'definitely scary and definitely crazy.'
CHARLES KRUPA/AP
Former tennis great James Blake was slammed to the ground, handcuffed and detained by five plainclothes city cops Wednesday outside his midtown hotel before heading out to the U.S. Open, Blake told the Daily News.
The officers, who were all white, mistook Blake for a suspect in an identity theft ring
BAY AREA & STATE
Oakland demonstrators march against law-enforcement exercises
http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-demonstrators-march-against-6499947.php
Regine Neptune, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, protests the Urban Shield convention, Friday, Sept. 11, 2015, at the intersection of 14th Street and Lakeside Drive in Oakland, Calif. The convention, which critics say increases the militarization of police, moved to a different venue after last year's event was the scene of large protests. Urban Shields presents training exercises to first responders. Neptune travelled from San Jose for the demonstration. Photo: Santiago Mejia, Special To The Chronicle
Photo: Santiago Mejia, Special To The Chronicle
Image 4 of 2513-year-old Maria Calvillo (left) hugs her school dean Sagnicthe Salazar as she cries during a demonstration against the Urban Shield convention, Friday, Sept. 11, 2015, at the intersection of 14th Street and Lakeside Drive in Oakland, Calif. The convention, which critics say increases the militarization of police, moved to a different venue after last year's event was the scene of large protests. Urban Shields presents training exercises to first responders. Calvillo attends Elmhurst Community Prep. Both are part of the Xicana Moratorium Coalition.
Regine Neptune, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, protests the Urban Shield convention, Friday, Sept. 11, 2015, at the intersection of 14th Street and Lakeside Drive in Oakland, Calif. The convention, which critics say increases the militarization of police, moved to a different venue after last year's event was the scene of large protests. Urban Shields presents training exercises to first responders. Neptune travelled from San Jose for the demonstration.
Dressed in fake police uniforms, banging drums and chanting antiviolence slogans, a diverse group of roughly 100 protesters took over an intersection near Lake Merritt in Oakland on Friday afternoon to demand an end to Urban Shield, a multiday law enforcement and first-responder training exercise taking place in the Bay Area over the weekend.
Among their demands, the protesters called for the funds spent on the exercise, which are provided by the federal government through the Bay Area Urban Areas Security Initiative, to be invested in programs that benefit their communities.
"What we're talking about today is investing in things that keep us safe," said Kamau Walton, 28, with Critical Resistance, a group that advocates against the prison industrial complex. "We don't want Urban Shield. We want housing, we want jobs, and we want safe spaces for our young people."
Now in its ninth year, the expo is billed as a series of comprehensive training events, which brings together dozens of local, national and international law enforcement organizations for a "full-scale regional preparedness exercise."
Called the largest "tactical exercise" in the nation, participants in Urban Shield are thrust into lifelike scenarios.
Critics, however, see the event, which features a weapons expo, as a way for an already militarized police force to further use weapons and technology originally intended for war.
Omar Ali, with the Arab Resource & Organizing Center of San Francisco, said that many of the scenarios are based on threats of a terrorist attack, which is of particular concern to him as a man of Middle Eastern descent.
"A lot of their trainings are based on stereotypes centered around counterterrorism under the guise of emergency preparation," he said. "If a disaster strikes, what you need is a good community response, not an overmilitarized police response."
J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, conceded that law enforcement had become more militarized but had been doing so out of necessity.
"It's a sad state of affairs, but we don't get to pick and choose the calls we go out on," he said.
Buoyed by the success of last year's protests, after which then-Mayor
Former Chicago cop threatens investigators to rule Fox Lake officer's death a suicide: police
Monday, September 14, 2015,
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ex-chicago-threatens-investigators-officer-death-article-1.2359379
LAKE COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE
Police said retired Chicago cop Joseph A. Battaglia, 54, phoned in a threat to all officials investigating the death of Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz on Friday afternoon.
A retired Chicago cop phoned in threats to all investigators probing the death of Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, authorities said Sunday.
Joseph A. Battaglia, 54, called the Lake County Coroner's Office on Friday afternoon and threatened officials with harm if they don't rule Gliniewicz's Sept. 1 death a suicide, according to the county sheriff's office.
Deputies said Battaglia has called other law enforcement agencies and may have provided reporters covering the case with false tips as well.
Battaglia has "zero involvement" with the investigation, but he has phoned severa
FBI's role in Tomah VA case under Senate scrutiny
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/benefits/veterans/2015/09/15/fbis-role-tomah-va-case-under-senate-scrutiny/72305356/
September 16,2015
Jason Simcakoski died at the Tomah (Wisconsin) VA Medical Center on Aug. 30, more
A Senate committee has asked the FBI to explain why a veteran who died at the Tomah, Wisconsin, VA Medical Center contacted law enforcement before his accidental overdose death in August 2014.
Heather Simcakoski, the widow of Marine veteran Jason Sim
http://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Texts-suggests-prior-jail-abuse-in-South-Bay-6512279.php
Officers charged in South Bay inmate death texted of prior abuse
September 17, 2015 Updated: September 17, 2015 4:35pm
Rafael Rodriguez, left, Jereh Lubrin, center, and Matthew Farris, right, are the three Santa Clara County correctional officers accused of killing inmate Michael Tyree. Rafael Rodriguez, left, Jereh Lubrin, center, and Matthew Farris, right, are the three Santa Clara County correctional officers accused of killing inmate Michael Tyree.
Starkly contrasting pictures are emerging of the correctional officers charged with the beating death of a mentally ill Santa Clara County jail inmate last month, as lawyers from both sides filed motions over whether the three defendants should be eligible for bail.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-high-bac-charged-drunken-driving-police-article-1.2366723
NYPD officer with blood alcohol level 5 times the legal limit charged with drunken driving: prosecutors
Updated: Saturday, September 19, 2015, 10:41 PM
NYPD Officer John Finley was charged with drunken driving after he crashed into a guardrail in Staten Island and officers found his blood alcohol level to be .430%, more than five times the legal limit, officials said.
It's NYPD blew .43%.
A veteran NYPD highway cop found himself on the other side of the law after crashing his SUV and registering a blood alcohol content more than five times the legal limit of .08%, authorities said Saturday.
Police Officer John Finley, 45, along with the rest of the department, is tasked with putting the brakes on traffic accidents and drunken drivers as part of the city's Vision Zero initiative.
But those lofty goals were chucked out his passenger-side window when his blood-alcohol level landed at a mind-boggling .43% during the Aug. 8 crash on Staten Island, stunned officials said.
"That means that nearly half the blood in his body had alcohol in it," a law enforcement source with knowledge of the case said. "At
http://boingboing.net/2015/09/21/fbi-agent-faces-discipline-for.html
FBI agent faces discipline for alleged polygraph countermeasures
The unnamed career FBI agent could lose their job for allegedly gaming the widely discredited, unscientific polygraph tests that are the US government's equivalent to witch-ducking stools.
Retired FBI scientist, supervisory special agent, and polygraph critic Dr. Drew Richardson published his (eye-wateringly detailed and especially damning) memo to the FBI in support of the agent:
6. In a general sense, no physiological lie response has ever been identified within the human body. Furthermore, I believe probable-lie control question test (PL-CQT) polygraphy, a group of polygraph exam formats widely known by the general public as the so-called "lie detector" test and which are commonly used in FBI polygraph examinations, have little to no value as a diagnostic instrument for determining truth and falsehood. I believe this to be the case for a variety of reasons, one overriding one to be subsequently discussed.
Previous surveys of the members of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Fellows of the American Psychological Association's Division I (General Psychology) would indicate that my previously-stated general opinion regarding CQT polygraph testing is shared by a large majority of scientists with relevant scientific backgrounds. If, on average, the polygraph examinee is found to have greater responses to relevant questions, he is found to be deceptive, and is found to be non-deceptive, if again, on average, the responses are greater for control questions. These consequences could include (in a criminal matter) further investigation, prosecution, conviction, imprisonment, loss of family, friends, money, reputation, etc. In an administrative and/or screening setting, an inquiry subsequent to a false positive polygraph result might include loss or denial of employment, loss of income, reputation, and general embarrassment amongst many possible consequences and outcomes. Again this has absolutely nothing to do with lying, but with an innocent examinee being concerned about the consequences of being branded a liar; these consequences are those aforementioned and which are clearly associated with the relevant question issues and not the "stealing while in high school" type of control/comparison questions.
This is perfectly consistent with the autonomic nervous system (ANS) physiology being measured by a polygraph examiner and a variable that cannot be reasonably controlled for by that examiner. Peer-reviewed research published in the scientific literature has suggested that the false positive rate (falsely accusing an innocent examinee of being deceptive) could
1.Bonus read
http://www.copblock.org/141422/12-deputies-arrested-since-january-all-from-one-sheriffs-office/#disqus_thread
12 Deputies Arrested Since January, All From One Sheriff's Office
SEPTEMBER 22, 2015 BY STEVEN THOMAS
Sheriff Susan L. Pamerleau
San Antonio – It's becoming more and more common to see police officers being arrested for their criminal actions. However, one sheriff's office seems to employ the 'creme of the crop' when it comes to inept, incompetent, and unqualified officers – the Bexar Sheriff's Office.
Despite Sheriff Susan Pamerleau's contention that she runs her office with 'professionalism and excellence', 12 of her deputies have been arrested since January of this year.
Instead of taking a tougher stance against her criminal cops, she simply brushed off the crimes of her deputies, saying the crimes committed by her deputies "are all crimes that plague the community".
Here are the deputies that have been arrested this year, since January:
Detention Deputy David Ramos — arrested May 31 — Criminal Mischief misdemeanor
Detention Deputy Adrian Ambriz — arrested Aug. 4 — Tampering with Evidence
Detention Deputy Juan Medrano — arrested Aug. 6 — DWI
Detention Deputy Mark Hernandez — arrested Aug. 17 — DWI
Detention Deputy Billy Torres — arrested Jan. 9 — Burglary of a Building
Detention Deputy Erich Arredondo — arrested March 6 — Possession of marijuana
Detention Deputy Robert Serros — arrested May 23 — Assault with Bodily Injury-Family
Detention Deputy Mario Rios — arrested June 7 — DWI
Detention Deputy Joseph Barbier — arrested June 22 — Assault with Bodily Injury-Family
Detention Deputy Ronald Bailey — arrested June 25 — Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon indictment
Detention Deputy Termaine Elliott — arrested July 31 — Bribery, and Possession of a Controlled Substance in a Correctional Facility
Detention Deputy Omar Echeverria — arrested Sept. 10 — DWI
Adultery, a Love Child and Claims of a Police Conspiracy Heat Up Princeton
Wednesday, September 23, 2015 |
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/adultery-a-love-child-and-claims-of-a-police-conspiracy-heat-up-princeton-7617220
Princeton sits in an ocean of cookie-cutter suburbs about 40 miles northeast of Dallas, at the edge of a gold coast of development washing away horse country. To the west is McKinney; to the east, Farmersville. In between, there's Princeton, where they love God, country and family and the divorce rate is well below the national average.
But sometimes, just one bad marriage is bad enough. In Princeton, that's the case with Dr. Glen David Hurlston and his ex-wife Suzanne Besse, the lead characters in a soap operatic story of alleged sexual obsession, violence, secret affairs and out-of-wedlock children. Toss in the accusation of murder solicitation, secret recordings, drug addiction and alleged police abuse, and Princeton, population 6,800, begins to look like General Hospital's Port Charles.
The center of the drama is the house on Sage Drive that Hurlston bought for his wife, Suzanne Besse, in July 2010, so she could be closer to her two older children from a previous marriage. Two years later, on New Year's night, it's where Princeton police handcuffed Hurlston and hauled him to jail, accused of beating his wife.
He says he doesn't remember beating Besse. He only remembers his daughter's eyes as officers led him away in handcuffs. "I saw little tears in her eyes," he says. "It was just like, 'I'm sorry ... I don't know what to say.' But I wanted to say, 'Hey, it's OK. Don't worry about it. The police aren't bad people,'" he recalls. "I didn't know they were bad people."
Hurlston would soon learn his wife was having an affair with Princeton's former police chief, Jeff Barnett, now the chief in Kyle, a town south of Austin. Besse had given birth to Barnett's son, whom Besse passed off as Hurlston's, Hurlston says.
The affair, Hurlston believes, is what led to his arrest and what he claims was continuing harassment by Princeton police. In a lawsuit pending in federal court in Sherman, Hurlston contends Besse and Barnett schemed to take the doctor's money, and he accuses Barnett, the cities of Princeton and Kyle, and Princeton police Lieutenant Robert Michnick of violating his civil rights. Hurlston claims Princeton police officers did not have probable cause to arrest him on a family violence charg
Officials: Police Officer Arrested For Murdering 2-Month-Old Son
http://news.yahoo.com/officials-police-officer-arrested-murdering-193400288.html
A Tennessee police officer was arrested for allegedly murdering his infant son, law enforcement officials said.
Christopher Warren Page, 28, an officer with the Paris Police Department, was arrested on Thursday and charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse for the death of his two-month-old son, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Baby Gunner Page suffered life-threatening injuries in his Puryear home on September 2, TBI officials said, noting TBI Special Agents
Brandon Mayfield is a practicing lawyer.
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/readers/2015/09/26/going-inside-osp-forensics-division/72854498/
The recent revelations about a forensic analyst at Oregon State Police's crime lab in Bend likely tampering with evidence will have shocked many Oregonians. As many as 1,000 cases may now have to be reopened, causing added stress to victims and potentially revealing that innocent defendants have been wrongfully convicted.
Add to that the news that a second OSP analyst has been investigated in a separate incident for providing inflated testimony in court cases and a casual observer might well conclude that there is a need for a thorough examination of what exactly is going on inside the OSP forensics division.
These news stories came as no surprise to me, however. I know from personal experience that when it comes to forensic examination without proper safeguards, the opportunity for bias is virtually certain. Sometimes the bias in the examination is against the target and sometimes it is a refusal to admit that police departments and their labs make mistakes.
In March 2004, ignoring contrary findings from Spanish police, the FBI wrongly identified my fingerprints as matching a print discovered after the Madrid train bombing which killed nearly 200 people. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office had no evidence to link me to the bombing other than the print which Spanish police's own tests had concluded was not a match to my fingerprints.
Instead of admitting their mistakes, the FBI continued to pursue me. I was arrested and held for more than two weeks without charge in connection to a case that I knew could see me eligible for the death penalty if convicted.
A 2006 review by the U.S. Department of Justice into what went wrong in my case found that the FBI overlooked "important differences" between my prints and those found in Spain and that "the FBI Laboratory's overconfidence in the skill and superiority of its examiners prevented it from taking the [Spanish police report] as seriously as it should have."
My case and the subsequent investigations also revealed a serious lack of standardization and blind review in fingerprint identification procedures.
The simplest and single most effective way of ensuring that bias and a desire to prosecute at any cost, regardless of the facts and evidence, does not taint forensic evidence and analysis is to make crime labs completely separate from police departments. This is common practice, for example, in many British police forces. In the U.S., most forensic work is done inside police departments despite recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences that this should end.
It is therefore high time we follow the example of a growing number of countries around the world and put up real walls between law enforcement and crime labs to ensure that bias and the desire to make a case against an individual regardless of the strength of the evidence against them is kept to a minimum.
Brandon Mayfield of Beaverton is a lawyer. He and his daughter, Sharia, a Georgetown law student, have written a detailed account of Brandon's 2004 arrest and its implications in their book, "Improbable Cause." Mayfield can be reached at mayfieldbrandon@hotmail.com.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa-dea-fbi-snowden-doj-oig/
FBI and DEA under review for use of NSA mass surveillance data
Sep 29, 2015, 7:00am CT | Last updated Sep 29, 2015, 7:54am CT
The Justice Department is investigating the FBI's use of information taken directly from mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)'s collection of telephone metadata.
The yield of that NSA spying program was described by a judge as a "staggering" amount of data when the agency's ability to collect it was struck down as illegal in court earlier this year. The program was resumed in June and will run until at least December.
Another ongoing Justice Department investigation is examining the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)'s use of "parallel construction."
Parallel construction is a controversial investigative technique that takes information gained from sources like the NSA's mass surveillance, covers up or lies about the sources, and then utilizes them in criminal investigations inside the United States. The information was passed to other federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The technique was described as "decades old, a bedrock concept" by a DEA official.
Critics at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) described the technique as "intelligence laundering" designed to cover up "deception and dishonesty" that ran contrary to the original intent of post-9/11 surveillance laws.
Both the FBI and DEA, which operate under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, are under review by the department's Office of Inspector General (OIG). The details of the NSA's mass metadata collection program were first publicly revealed in 2013 by contractor Edward Snowden. The DEA's use of parallel construction was revealed by Reuters a few months later.
The OIG is charged with identifying and investigating fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. Although OIG reports cannot on their own force change, detailed information is always shared with Congress and often the public which can lead to the investigated party agreeing to the suggested changes and conclusions from the OIG or other entities.
The NSA sent daily metadata reports to the FBI from at least 2006 to 2011, according to the director of national intelligence.
The ongoing review will examine how the FBI processed the NSA's information, how much information was passed along, and the results of the initiated investigations.
The NSA's mass collection of telephone metadata was thought to be authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations argued for and renewed authorization until the program expired in Congress earlier this year.
The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General is also investigating the FBI's use of Patroit Act Section 215 from 2012 to 2014 that allowed it to obtain "any tangible thing" from any business or entity as part of investigations against international terrorism or spying.
A previous investigation revealed that every single Section 215 application submitted by the FBI to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) was approved.
That amount data collected was a "staggering" amount of information, Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote in his decision. "Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans."
Watch: US Justice System Hits Rock Bottom, Admits It Has Problem
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/LegalizationNation/archives/2015/09/29/watch-us-justice-system-hits-rock-bottom-admits-it-has-problem
Addiction specialists often say admitting a problem is the first step toward recovery. Well, VICE magazine, in conjunction with HBO, released on Monday for free an hour-long bombshell documentary that depicts the US criminal justice system hitting rock bottom, with both President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder saying the system is broken.
The president says it could be anyone's family that can be shattered by this system, which Senator Cory Booker says is set up to "crush" low-income Americans. The criminal justice system is institutionally biased according to race, "particularly when you think about non-violent drug offenses," Holder says. "It's not normal."
In related news, the FBI released new data yesterday showing US marijuana arrests rose to more than 700,000 in 2014. Almost 90 percent of those arrests were for simple possession. One person will be arrested for marijuana about every minute, which means while you read this, someone just got cuffed. Blacks are up to thirty times more likely as whites to be arrested for pot in the United States, despite similar usage rates.
As VICE documents, one out of every three black children born in the United States today will go to jail at least once in their lives. VICE features a former federal judge who says mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted by Congress in the Eighties and Clinton in the Nineties are wildly unjust. Sex offenders and rapists get far less time than fathers and sons with non-violent drug offenses.
Folks are pleading guilty and serving fifteen years in federal prison rather than face potentially life for "ghost dope" — conspiracy charges based on hearsay evidence. Mandatory minimums are so terrifying, the federal system has a 97 percent guilty plea rate. It is prosecutors, not judges, who now decide time served.
America is also dealing with the generational consequences of fifty years of mass incarceration. The nation has families in which three generations of males have done time. There are 1.1 million fathers behind bars. There are more Black folks in state custody than there were slaves in 1850.
When convicts get out, they're barred from getting a job, credit, food stamps, college loans, and housing. States are also releasing citizens with huge debts and re-arresting them when they can't pay them. With no diploma and a record, it's no wonder 50 percent reoffend within one year. It's barbaric.
A bipartisan effort is underway in Congress to reform the entire system, due to both its immense fiscal and human costs. We're spending $80 billion a year on "corrections" systems that do not c
Loretta Lynch: government shouldn't require reports of people killed by police
The attorney general says local police are encouraged to maintain records on such killings, but improving police-community relations is more important
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/02/loretta-lynch-reports-killed-by-police
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-police-shoot-man-van-nuys-window-shatters-20151004-story.html
L.A. police shoot a man to death after patrol car window shatters
Fatal shooting
Los Angeles police officers shot a man to death after the rear window of their police cruiser shattered while the officers were at a stoplight in Van Nuys, authorities said Sunday.
The two officers were in their patrol car at the intersection of Sepulveda and Victory boulevards about 11:30 p.m. Saturday when they "suddenly hear and saw their rear window shatter," said LAPD Officer Mike Lopez.
Both officers got out of their car and fired an unknown number of shots at a man, described as in his 30s, who was later pronounced dead at the scene.
The man's identity was not released pending notification of his family, and it's unclear if he was carrying a weapon.
LAPD investigators are working to determine what caused the window in the patrol car to shatter, Lopez said.
Neither of the officers was injured in the shooting.
The LAPD, the district attorney's office and the L.A. police commission's inspector general are investigating the incident, as is customary in officer-involved shootings that result in someone's death.
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This was the fourth fatal LAPD officer-involved shooting in the last two months. On Sept. 27, officers fatally shot a woman armed with a knife following a confrontation near downtown L.A.
LAPD officers have shot 32 people this year, 18 of whom wer
Three Former East Cleveland Police Officers Charged with Fabricating Evidence, Stealing Cash
Northern District of Ohio (216) 622-3600
Three former East Cleveland police officers were charged in federal court for their roles in a conspiracy in which they kept thousands of dollars from alleged drug dealers, much of which was seized through illegal searches and fabricated reports, said Steven M. Dettelbach, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.
Torris Moore was arrested this morning following the unsealing of a five count federal indictment, which charged Moore with one count each of conspiracy against rights, Hobbs Act conspiracy and false statements to law enforcement and two counts of theft concerning programs receiving federal funds.
At the same time, a criminal information was filed in U.S. District Court. Antonio Malone and Eric Jones were both charged with one count of conspiracy against rights and one count of Hobbs Act conspiracy.
"The three officers charged today—unlike the overwhelming majority of police officers—did not protect and serve, but rather pillaged and plundered," Dettelbach said. "They viewed the drug trade as an opportunity to enrich themselves, and lied to the court, their fellow officers and the citizens of East Cleveland to pull off their criminal conspiracy."
"These three officers acted like cunning criminals rather than honorable public servants that are sworn to protect and serve," Anthony said. "They will be held accountable for their reprehensible conduct."
Moore, 42, of South Euclid, was a sergeant at the East Cleveland Police Department, where he supervised the Street Crimes Unit. Malone, 33, of Cleveland, and Jones, 38, of Cleveland Heights, were detectives assigned to the Street Crimes Unit. The unit, including Moore, Malone and Jones, were familiar with several drug traffickers, according to the indictment.
The defendants, between 2012 through June 2014, conspired to unlawfully enter premises and exceed the scope of lawful entry, thereafter conducting unlawful searches and seizures, used their power to seize money and property for themselves under the
http://portlandcopwatch.org/
How Colorado laws give fired police officers from other states a second chance here
Colorado Attorney General's Office refuses to release database that would help shed light on second-chance officers from other states
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28952022/colorado-home-second-chance-police-officers-from-other
As a Los Angeles police officer, David Guiterman shoved a handcuffed homeless man into a squad car and leaned in to drench his face with pepper spray.
Video of the incident showed Guiterman closing the car's door, a move that cut off ventilation and created what critics later called a "gas chamber" of horror. The mentally ill suspect pleaded for help, his face twisted in pain.
Despite Guiterman's past in California, which also included a $50,000 settlement of an excessive-force lawsuit, he found work across state lines.
He ended up in Colorado, a state that does relatively little to keep cops with blemished records from being rehired in law enforcement. Soon Guiterman was causing controversy again after his new employer, the Vail Police Department, arrested him on charges of domestic violence and stalking.
Colorado is vulnerable to officers such as Guiterman coming from other states seeking to resurrect their careers, according to experts. Only a criminal conviction on a felony charge or certain misdemeanors automatically bar a cop from getting hired in law enforcement in Colorado, a lesser standard than in many states.
But the extent of the problem is unknown, in Colorado and nationally.
"We know it happens," said Roger Goldman, a nationally recognized expert on officer misconduct who has helped write laws establishing state police review panels. "But we don't know how frequently it happens. Anecdotally, we know there have been high-profile cases of it."
He noted that malpractice litigation and adverse licensing actions are tracked federally for physicians, but no such system exists for law enforcement officers, who have the power to take a life and make arrests.
"We have it for docs but not for cops," Goldman said. "That's a problem."
The Denver Post made multiple requests for a state database of certified and decertified law enforcement officers from the state attorney general's office to research the backgrounds of those trained in other states. The office refused to release key information to enable that analysis.
The state provided limited data that revealed that nearly 1,100 of the officers who held police certificates in Colorado in the past 10 years had received their original training outside the state.
But the attorney general's office refused to identify those officers still working or the state where they received their training. Also excluded were all the agencies where those officers had worked in Colorado.
In a letter denying the newspaper's request for information, David Blake, Colorado's chief deputy attorney general, said making the database available to the public risked revealing the identity of officers working undercover. He refused to redact those undercover officers from the database.
"While the public has a right to inspect certain public records involving criminal justice matters, it does not have the right to pursue them at the expense of the safety of officers or when it may compromise ongoing investigations," Blake said in his letter.
The Post has argued the information should be released as a matter of public safety.
"I find it unconscionable that our state attorney general's office takes the position that it has no obligation to produce to The Denver Post or to a member of the public these database records," said Steven Zansberg, the lawyer who represented The Post in its negotiations with the state's lawyers.
Taxpayers helped build the database. A recent contract shows the state plans to spend up to $820,000 on upgrades to the database through 2018.
"The additional, highly disturbing aspect of this entire set of negotiations with the attorney general's office and The Denver Post, aside from the amount of time it took to get them to dribble out any amount of information, is that they take the position that the public, who helped maintain and create this database, has no right to access those records," Zansberg said.
National database
Despite the obstacles from the state, The Post found examples of officers who were hired in law enforcement in Colorado after getting into trouble in jobs in other states.
Guiterman resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department and was hired in Vail in 2005 before the completion of an internal affairs investigation into the pepper-spray incident, the results of which remain sealed. Vail Police Chief Dwight Henninger said he was aware of the incident when he hired Guiterman.
The officer successfully defended a federal lawsuit over that arrest in Los Angeles, which prompted national outrage when a lawyer released video of the spraying after Guiterman resigned. In sworn testimony, Guiterman said he used the pepper spray to subdue an uncooperative suspect he feared would spit on him. He resigned from the Vail police force in 2009, nearly a year following his arrest on the domestic violence charges in Colorado. Guiterman did not respond to Denver Post efforts seeking comment.
In 1991, the police department in Davenport, Iowa, fired Anthony Chelf after authorities found he used excessive force when he beat a man with his department-issued flashlight. Records show the man ran a red light on a motorcycle, and Chelf gave high-speed chase. Chelf beat the man with his flashlight after other officers had subdued him, facedown, on the ground, according to court records.
It was the second time Davenport authorities found Chelf had used his flashlight with excessive force. After his firing, Chelf found police work in Colorado. The Ouray Police Department hired him, and he went on to become police chief there. He retired in 2011 and now works as a security supervisor at a casino in Iowa.
"I had a very successful career in Ouray and was very involved in the community," said Chelf, who added that he disclosed his Davenport firing before his hiring in Ouray.
In a court challenge, Chelf argued his firing was politically motivated, but the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the termination.
The issue of troubled officers moving across state lines attracted the attention of President Barack Obama's task force on policing, formed in the wake of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo. Among its recommendations, the task force urged the U.S. Justice Department to bolster a piecemeal police decertification database that agencies can use to check applicants.
So far, only 37 states, including Colorado, feed information to the database. And the laws for what warrants a decertification vary widely from state to state. While Florida and Arizona allow decertifications for personnel transgressions or misconduct, others, such as Colorado, have no state investigative authority and allow decertification only for criminal convictions. Six states don't allow for the decertification of officers at all.
Surveys show only about 20 percent of police agencies even know the database exists. "We don't have the money to advertise it," said Mike Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, which maintains the database.
High threshold
In Colorado, where a criminal conviction is required to decertify a cop, an officer with a history in other states of lying under oath, past misconduct, even brutality is eligible to find work here.
Colorado's laws also provide little guidance to smaller, often rural, agencies struggling to find qualified applicants to patrol the streets. Unlike Arizona, which requires rigorous background investigations of those seeking police work, Colorado for the most part leaves the thoroughness of such investigations up to local authorities.
At least 39 states have laws that make it easier to ensure a rogue officer never polices again in those states, The Post found.
In Oregon, dishonesty or misconduct on the job is enough to bring an end to a career in law enforcement. State officials there have no qua
Officer says he's being punished for speaking with FBI
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/article39261711.html
This means creation a volunteer civilian police review board
with subpoena powers.
The board will not work without subpoena powers and a Volunteer
civilian membership.
Otherwise the hacks will appoint their favorite predators.
http://www.latimes.com/local/cityhall/la-me-crime-stats-20151015-story.html
LAPD underreported serious assaults, skewing crime stats for 8 years
LAPD officers arrest a suspected gang member in 2009, during the period when violent crimes were underreported by 7%.
The Los Angeles Police Department misclassified an estimated 14,000 serious assaults as minor offenses in a recent eight-year period, artificially lowering the city's crime levels, a Times analysis found.
With the incidents counted correctly, violent crime in the city was 7% higher than the LAPD reported in the period from 2005 to fall 2012, and the number of serious assaults was 16% higher, the analysis found.
When presented with the findings, top LAPD officials acknowledged the department makes errors and said they were working to improve the accuracy of crime data reporting.
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"We know this can have a corrosive effect on the public's trust of our reporting," said Asst. Chief Michel Moore, who oversees the LAPD's system for tracking crime. "That's why we are committed to ... eliminating as much of the error as possible."
Assaults drop
The Los Angeles Police Department misclassified an estimated 14,000 serious assaults from 2005 to 2012. Even with the errors factored in, serious assaults and violent crime still showed a decline.
The misclassified cases often involved attacks that resulted in serious injuries, such as a 2009 incident in which April L. Taylor stabbed her boyfriend in the stomach with a 6-inch kitchen knife during a domestic dispute, police and court records show.
Police arrested Taylor, who later was found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon. In the LAPD's crime database, however, the attack was recorded as a "simple assault." Because of this, the case — like other misclassified incidents — was left out of the department's tally of violence in the city.
The errors occurred during a time when the LAPD was reporting major drops in crime across the city. The Times analysis found the misclassified cases were not numerous enough to alter the overall downward trend.
Still, the findings are a mark against a department that has long been viewed as a national leader in usi
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-federal-officer-shooting-20151018-story.html
Federal officer arrested after fatal shooting of boyfriend in Chula Vista
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer has been arrested on suspicion of fatally shooting her boyfriend in their apartment in Chula Vista.
Tony PerryContact Reporter
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was arrested Saturday on suspicion of fatally shooting her boyfriend in their apartment in Chula Vista.
Melissa Hayes-Spencer, 30, was arrested after a daylong investigation into the early
Time for more oversight of police in Pasadena: Larry Wilson
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinion/20151020/time-for-more-oversight-of-police-in-pasadena-larry-wilson
http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/rapper-inmates-solitary-confinement-20-years-article-1.2406526
Rapping inmates get solitary confinement for almost 20 years
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: 10/21/2015 11:44 PM ET
FBI director: Planes over Dearborn not for mass spying
By Daniel Bethencourt, Detroit Free Press
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2015/10/22/dearborn-spy-plans-fbi-james-comey/74431132/
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20151023/PC1002/151029736/
Federal watchdogs need access to agency records
BY MICHAEL E. HOROWITZ
One of the most significant post-Watergate reforms was the passage in 1978 of the Inspector General Act, which has put in place 72 federal inspectors general to serve as agency watchdogs responsible for ensuring the integrity and efficiency of our government's operations.
An inspector general's ability to accomplish that ever-challenging mission depends on the bedrock principles enshrined in the IG Act: independence and access to all an agency's records without interference. I emphasize "all" because unrestricted access to agency records ensures that our essential functions cannot be thwarted.
Over the past 35 years, that access has empowered IGs to root out government corruption and save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.
For decades, there was no controversy over what the words "all records" meant. But that changed in 2010 when FBI attorneys suggested, soon after several critical reports by my office as inspector general at the Justice Department, that "all records" might not include some records the FBI was seeking to withhold. This was the first time anyone in the department had asserted that the broad powers of the IG Act did not apply fully to our oversight.
Not surprisingly, once the FBI started raising legal challenges, several other federal agencies challenged their IGs' independent oversight authority.
For example, when the Peace Corps inspector general sought to review the agency's response to sexual assaults against corps volunteers — oversight that was mandated by Congress — the agency put in place policies that prevented IG access to key records.
Making matters worse, recently an arm of the Justice Department issued a 68-page opinion that supported the FBI's position and concluded that IGs do not have the right to independently access certain records involving grand jury testimony, wiretap information and some credit reports, no matter how critical they might be to our oversight.
Indeed, these kinds of records have been central to some of our most significant reviews of FBI and Justice Department programs, and for more than 21 years the department had provided them to us without once accusing us of not properly safeguarding them. As a result of this decision, it is now up to agency officials to decide whether to grant, or refuse, an IG permission to review these types of records.
This leads to the absurd situation where the words "all records" in the IG Act no longer mean "all records."
Without independent access to agency records, our ability as IGs to conduct the kind of sensitive reviews that have resulted in widespread improvements in the effectiveness of government programs will be significantly compromised.
For example, since 2010, many of my office's most important reviews, including those affecting public safety, national security, civil liberties and even whistleblower retaliation, have been impeded or delayed.
Allowing officials whose agencies are under review to decide what documents an inspector general can have turns the IG Act on its head and is fundamentally inconsistent with the independence that is necessary for effective and credible oversight.
This safeguard was vital when Congress passed the IG Act in 1978, and it remains vital today. Actions that limit or delay an inspector general's access can have profoundly negative consequences for our work:
They make us less effective, encourage other agencies to raise similar objections and erode the morale of our dedicated professionals.
As chair of the Council of Inspectors General, I know that inspectors general everywhere are deeply concerned about this attack on our independence.
Thankfully, a substantial bipartisan group in Congress shares our view that the IG Act must not be interpreted in a way that would render it toothless. Pending legislation in the Senate and the House would restore inspectors general independence and empower IGs to conduct the kind of rigorous, independent and thorough oversight that taxpayers expect.
I urge Congress to pass legislation quickly that clarifies that "all records" means "all records" and reject any interpretation that would allow government agencies to shield their misdeeds from inspector
Criminal justice system in need of help
http://www.dailystarjournal.com/opinion/article_1501d01e-0780-5e71-9058-8c5180c9bfb2.html
Posted: Saturday, October 24, 2015 6:00 am
The Republican Party, like Sisyphus, is again putting its shoulder to a boulder, hoping to make modest but significant changes in the Electoral College arithmetic by winning perhaps 12 percent of the African- American vote. To this end, they need to hone a rhetoric of skepticism about, and an agenda for reform of, the criminal
Branstad Announces New Division Designed to Help Wrongly Convicted People
Posted 4:53 pm, October 26, 2015,
http://whotv.com/2015/10/26/branstad-announces-new-division-designed-to-help-wrongly-convicted-people/
DES MOINES, Iowa -- Governor Branstad announced he's launching a new division designed to help people who are wrongly convicted of crimes.
"We also know in a system operated by humans, mistakes can be made including wrongful convictions," Branstad said.
The Wrongful Conviction Division will focus on hair comparison analysis. The FBI recently admitted to serious errors in testimony on those tests, many times overstating how close hair from a crime scene matched a defendant.
The FBI trains the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation on hair analysis methods, so the Public Defender's Office wants to review cases where hair comparison analysis was used.
They're looking at cases from 1980-2000, which was a time when DNA analysis wasn't widely used.
"One of the things that is exciting about this is, if we are able to identify any cases in which those mistakes were made, that hair should be under glass somewhere," said Iowa State Public Defender Adam Gregg. "We could be able to use DNA technology in order to test those hairs and find out whether they got the right person, and if they didn't, then we will
South Carolina sheriff's deputy on leave after dragging student from her desk
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/south-carolina-sheriffs-deputy-on-leave-after-forceful-classroom-arrest
Video shows officer making forceful arrest in case that stokes tensions among black and white parents in Richland County School District Two
Sheriff's deputy manhandles high school student in classroom arrest.
Tuesday 27 October 2015 10.51 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 27 October 2015 11.16 EDT
Video of a South Carolina sheriff's deputy manhandling a black student in a high school classroom has prompted an investigation by local authorities after the footage was widely circulated on Monday.
The video shows a school monitor reported to be Ben Fields – who is also a Richland county sheriff's deputy – confronting the female student.
When she refuses to leave her seat in a classroom at Spring Valley high school in Columbia, he tells her: "I'll make you." He then wraps his arm around her neck, flips her desk backward, then drags her across the floor. He arrested both the girl, and a male student.
According to a classmate, the student in question had peeked at her cellphone during class. When the teacher tried to take the phone away, the student refused to hand it over, and when a school administrator told her to leave the class, she stayed at her desk, which is when Fields was summoned.
The sheriff's department has placed Fields on administrative leave while it investigates the case.
A spokeswoman for the school district, Libby Roof, said on Monday night that the administration was "deeply concerned". "We are investigating it, along with the sheriff's office," she said.
A spokesman for the Richland county sheriff did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Steve Benjamin, the mayor of Col
FBI agent talks to students about dangers of drugs
Sixth through eighth grade students at Horizon Montessori III in Harlingen attended a presentation by an FBI agent as part of their Red Ribbon Week activities.
http://www.valleymorningstar.com/news/local_news/article_04ab64b4-7d8c-11e5-8c66-8f4ff0966837.html?mode=jqm
All week long the students took part in drug prevention and awareness programs. They wore red clothes on Monday to show they were "RED-y to be Drug Free."
Another day they wore tropical/Hawaiian clothes to send the message that students and teachers "Lei Off Drugs."
Today the students heard from an FBI agent and
FBI agent who stole heroin sentenced to 3 years in prison - The ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/ex-fbi-agent-who-stole-heroin-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison/2015/07/09/5bd82e8c-262c-11e5-aae2-6c4f59b050aa_story.html
Jul 9, 2015 - A onetime FBI agent who fed his drug addiction by stealing heroin seized as evidence in criminal
Agents admit filter to screen private attorney-client emails had holes
http://www.sltrib.com/home/3116874-155/agents-admit-filter-to-screen-private?fullpage=1
FBI agents didn't filter out attorney email addresses, law firm Internet domain names or the names of associate attorneys and support staff when processing emails seized from the accounts of indicted St. George businessman Jeremy Johnson, according to testimony in federal court on Thursday.
And an agent on the team prosecuting Johnson said he went through a database that contained emails even before those involving at least two of Johnson's attorneys were filtered out.
The agents testified Thursday at a federal court hearing called to gather evidence about whether the prosecution had access to, or read, private emails between Johnson and his attorneys after gathering them up through a sealed search warrant.
Communications between attorneys and their clients are considered privileged in the U.S. legal system, meaning they are normally supposed to be private, so prosecutors, investigators and outside parties are not to have access to them.
But in Johnson's case, where he and three other officers in his online marketing company face charges related to bank fraud, the FBI used a May 17, 2013, search warrant to obtain emails from Johnson's Gmail accounts, including thousands between Johnson and his attorneys.
FBI Special Agent Randy Kim, who works at the agency's local computer forensics lab, said after receiving the emails from a member of the prosecution team he filtered out those that contained the names of attorneys from a list provided by another agent. But under questioning from Johnson attorney Rebecca Skordas, Kim said he filtered out emails using names only.
"So if there were email addresses associated with these individuals you didn't do a search of those addresses?" Skordas asked.
"Correct," Kim responded, answering the same way when asked about the domain names of law firms and names of others associated with those firms such as paralegals.
Skordas is expected to file a motion to dismiss the case based on assertions the team of prosecutors and investigators violated Johnson's attorney-client privilege by gathering and then having access to thousands of his emails with attorneys.
FBI Special Agent Jason Henrikson, who obtained the warrant that sought evidence of alleged witness tampering by Johnson, testified that he was aware that the search warrant would gather up all Johnson's emails from those accounts, including ones with attorneys.
Henrikson said he provided Kim with discs from Google and a list of attorneys for filtering that he had obtained from the U.S. attor
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/us/fbi-tool-to-identify-extremists-is-criticized.html?_r=0
F.B.I. Tool to Identify Extremists Is Criticized
There is a difference between mentally ill mass murderers and fundamentalist religious murderers, although the lines may seem blurred at...
Shireen 32 minutes ago
I think this is a good opportunity for the people of the FBI to examine their biases. It is making them blind to serving in the best way.
The F.B.I. is about to introduce an interactive program it developed for teachers and students, aimed at training them to prevent young people from being drawn into violent extremism. But Muslim, Arab and other religious and civil rights leaders who were invited to preview the program have raised strong objections, saying it focuses almost entirely on Islamic extremism, which they say has not been a factor in the epidemic of school shootings and attacks in the United States.
The program, according to those who saw it at F.B.I. headquarters, called "Don't Be a Puppet," leads the viewer through a series of games and tips intended to teach how to identify someone who may be falling prey to radical extremists. With each successful answer, scissors cut a puppet's string, until the puppet is free.
In the campaign against terrorists such as the Islamic State, law enforcement agencies have been stepping up efforts to identify those susceptible to recruitment. The agencies have enlisted the cooperation and advice of religious and community leaders. But the controversy over the Federal Bureau of Investigation's new online tool is one more indication that there is no consensus on who should be involved in detecting and reporting suspects, and where to draw the line between prevention and racial or religious profiling.
"The F.B.I. is developing a website designed to provide awareness about the dangers of violent extremist predators on the Internet," a spokeswoman for the agency said late Sunday, "with input from students, educators and community leaders."
The F.B.I. had told the community organizations that the program would be available online as soon as Monday. The organizations' leaders spoke to a reporter only after learning that the F.B.I. was likely to proceed despite their concern that the program would stigmatize Arab and Muslim students, who are already susceptible to bullying.
"Teachers in classrooms should not become an extension of law enforcement," said Arjun S. Sethi, an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Mr. Sethi, who specializes in counterterrorism and law enforcement, was invited by the F.B.I. to give feedback on the program.
"The program is based on flawed theories of radicalization, namely that individuals radicalize in the exact same way and it's entirely discernible," he said. "But it's not, and the F.B.I. is basically asking teachers and students to suss these things out."
He said the F.B.I.'s program amounted to "misplaced priorities."
"The greatest threat facing American schoolchildren today is gun violence," he said. "It's not Muslim extremism."
Teachers do not always have the training or judgment to identify extremists, said several religious leaders who mentioned the Muslim student in Texas who was detained and handcuffed after taking a clock he built to school.
The F.B.I. held several meetings last summer to present the online program, along with a larger strategy for involving community leaders in preventing radicalization. The Arab and Muslim groups received an email inviting them to a meeting to give feedback on Oct. 16.
About six organizations representing American Muslims, Arabs, Yemenis and Sikhs were at the meeting, where they were given a quick run-through of portions of the online program. It covered different types of violent groups and ideologies, and enumerated some personality changes that might indicate radicalization, according to those who attended. It showed a map of places terrorists have targeted, and included interviews with victims of terrorist attacks.
Abed A. Ayoub, the legal and policy director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, recalled: "They were getting blowback from everybody. It was a very tense meeting."
"They wanted teachers in social studies, civics and government classes to show this to their students," said Hoda Hawa, the director of policy and advocacy for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "But the website will be accessible by anyone."
She and others interviewed were particularly troubled by a question that she said asked the user to identify which of four or five posts on social media should raise alarm. Among the choices were a person posting about a plan to attend a political event, or someone with an Arabic name posting about going on "a mission" overseas. The correct answer was the posting with the Arabic name.
"What kind of mission? It could have been humanitarian. It could have been religious," Ms. Hawa said.
Mr. Ayoub said, "If this is shown to middle and high school students, it's going to result in the bullying of these children."
A report issued by the 9/11 review commission in May suggested that the F.B.I. , as a law enforcement and intelligence agency, was not "an appropriate vehicle" for producing prevention programs to counter violent extremism.
FBI Agent Convicted of Assault Caught on Camera Knocking Teen ...
An FBI agent has been found guilty of second-degree assault after jurors saw a cell phone video of him knocking a teenager to the ground .
Jack Cloherty
Nov 4, 2015, 5:43 PM ET
http://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-agent-convicted-assault-caught-camera-knocking-teen/story?id=34972374
An FBI agent has been found guilty of second-degree assault after jurors saw a cell phone video of him knocking a teenager to the ground and threatening him with his service weapon.
The video, made public by the court late Tuesday, shows Gerald Rogero appearing to forcefully shove the teenager in the chest, sending him flying backwards and then landing on his back. Moments later, the video shows Rogero pulling out his gun and shouting at the 15-year-old, "If I have to shoot you I will. Don't make me shoot you."
The incident began as an argument over a child custody hand-over in Chevy Chase, Maryland, last December, authorities said. Rogero, his fiancée, and a woman he said is the child's mother, had been waiting for the child. The video shows Rogero aggressively berating Edward Moawad, the father of the little girl, for being late. Rogero was off-duty, in plain clothes, and did not identify himself on the video as an FBI agent to Moawad or the people with him -- Moawad's fiancée and her 15-year-old son.
The argument escalated as Moawad's fiancée repeatedly asked Rogero who he was, according to the video, which also shows Rogero responding, "Who are you?" When told the custody exchange was not his business, he is seen on the video saying, "I'm making this my business." When the group moved outside, the bickering turned belligerent, and the teenager stepped up to Rogero, angrily confronting him.
"Don't act stupid or you are going to get yourself locked up," Rogero told him.
But the arguing continued, and apparently expletives were exchanged -- the exact words are bleeped out of the video released by the court. Following the harsh language, Rogero shoved the boy to the ground, then scuffled with him after the teen got back on his feet. Finally, the boy followed Rogero's order to "get on the ground" face down, and was handcuffed. The boy was not arrested.
The jury convicted Rogero of second-degree assault on Friday, but acquitted him of the more serious charges of first-degree assault and a gun charge. Rogero was back in court Tuesday to set a sentencing date, and for a ruling on whether he could continue to carry his weapon. The judge decided Rogero would get to keep his service weapon -- at least until he is sentenced on Jan. 20.
Rogero's attorney, Marlon Wheat, told ABC News in a statement today that "Agent Rogero exercised his right to defen
SEE IT: Controversial scheme that saw Connecticut cops steal from cars to teach locals a lesson stopped after one day
Saturday, November 7, 2015, 4:43 AM
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/connecticut-cops-steal-cars-controversial-scheme-article-1.2426633
A controversial scheme that saw Connecticut police breaking into cars to teach locals a lesson has been halted after just one day.
Cops were stealing valuables from vehicles to warn people not to leave their cars unlocked – and leaving a note to let them know where they could reclaim their belongings.
But the controversial scheme has now been stopped after just one day, with one lawyer insisting the program was illegal.
"In effect what they're doing is stealing these people's property," said John Williams, a New Haven civil rights attorney, told Q13 Fox.
"They have no right to enter their car at all because just because the fact it's not locked doesn't mean it's not your private property."
New Haven police are stealing valuables out of cars if they have left their doors unlocked to teach locals a lesson. Q13 Fox News
New Haven police are stealing valuables out of cars if they have left their doors unlocked to teach locals a lesson.
Williams claimed the pilot program is a violation of the fourth amendment and added: "They ought to get sued."
Police said the idea was to highlight the importance of being keeping cars locked ahead of holiday season.
"I thought it was a brilliant initiative but the city was concerned that it could have legal complications," Chief Dean Esserman told the New Haven Register.
"So, I asked our officers to stop that initiative but keep on working on car break-ins."
"In effect what they're doing is stealing these people's property," said John Williams, a New Haven civil rights attorney. Q13 Fox News
"In effect what they're doing is stealing these people's property," said John Williams, a New Haven civil rights attorney.
City representatives had argued there is a "caretaker" provision in state law that allowed them to carry out the scheme.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/11/09/police-shootings-immunity-federal-state-prosecution-supremacy-column/75213044/
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents near Ruby Ridge in 1992.
Do federal agents need a license to kill in order to protect us? Unfortunately, federal judges are giving law enforcement agents blanket immunity when they shoot Americans while the agents are on the job. It would be difficult to imagine a greater violation of equal rights under the law or a bigger mockery of due process.
After Larry Jackson, Jr., of Austin, Texas, was killed by a policeman in 2013, a local prosecutor indicted the policeman on manslaughter charges. Jackson's family claimed that he had been executed by the policeman but a federal judge granted immunity from prosecution because the policeman "was acting in his capacity as a federal officer." The ruling in the Austin case could extend federal immunity from prosecution for shootings to "hundreds, if not thousands, of state and local police officers who participate in federal task forces," the Washington Post noted.
Federal officers have been involved in 33 killings so far this year. The Justice Department almost never prosecutes federal agents for shootings in the line of duty, and the feds have invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to block state and local prosecutions of federal agents in recent decades. The ruling in the Austin case "raises the question of when, if ever, a federal law enforcement officer can be charged with a crime for killing someone in the line of duty," the Post noted.
The best-known case of immunity for federal officers involves Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who in 1992 gunned down 42-year-old Vicki Weaver as she stood in a cabin doorway in Ruby Ridge, Idaho holding her 10 month-old-baby. Horiuchi previously shot her husband, Randy Weaver, who was outside the cabin and under indictment on a federal firearms charge. A confidential Justice Department report condemned Horiuchi for taking a shot with a high-powered rifle through a cabin door when he believed someone was standing behind it. But other Justice Department and FBI officials warned that permitting Horiuchi to be prosecuted would have "an enormously chilling effect on federal operations, especially law enforcement." A local prosecutor indicted Horiuchi on manslaughter charges anyhow.
But federal judge Edward Lodge ruled in 1998 that Horiuchi could not be tried for killing Vicki Weaver because he was a federal agent on duty, and thus effectively exempt from any jurisdiction of state courts. Lodge focused on Horiuchi's "subjective beliefs": as long as Horiuchi supposedly did not believe he was violating anyone's rights or acting wrongfully, then he could not be guilty. The judge even blamed Vicki Weaver for her own death. Lodge decreed that "it would be objectively reasonable for Mr. Horiuchi to believe that one would not expect a mother to place herself and her baby behind an open door outside the cabin after a shot had been fired and her husband had called out that he had been hit." Thus, if an FBI agent unjustifiably shoots one family member, the government apparently receives a presumptive right to shoot any other family member who fails to hide.
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
The U.S. Marshals Service has been involved in 18 killings this year — more than any other law enforcement agency in the nation. But U.S. marshals enjoy de facto immunity for any use of force in the line of duty. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade told the Washington Post that "he could not recall a case that led to criminal charges."
Prior to Horiuchi killing Vicki Weaver, 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and a family friend encountered a team of three undercover U.S. marshals who had taken up a "defensive position" not far from the Weaver's residence; one of the marshals fatally shot Sammy. According to the friend, Sammy was leaving the scene when he was shot.
Even though the marshals' statements and testimony on the conflict were riddled with contradictions, the Marshals Service gave its highest valor award to the marshal who killed the young boy and the other undercover marshals who provoked a firefight (in which one marshal was killed).
Judges tend to presume that killings by federal agents are immune from prosecution even though agencies are notorious for covering up the confrontations. As the Post noted, "details about shootings involving federal officers tend to be particularly closely held." It took the Post almost two months to simply learn the name of a man killed during a recent FBI pornography raid in Chester, Penn.
It is absurd to presume that police are guilty any time they shoot a private citizen during a confrontation. But it is equally absurd to presume that all law enforcement agents are sacrosanct and all their killings justified. America is at risk of becoming a two-tiered society: those whom
Victims' hopes for justice fade as rape kits are routinely ignored or destroyed
Tens of thousands of boxes have collected in 'rape kit backlog' as some states lack rules on how long evidence should be kept while some police departments destroy kits after a year
Tens of thousands of rape kits have created a 'rape kit backlog' over decades.
Tuesday 10 November 2015 07.30 EST
Last modified on Tuesday 10 November 2015
Susan Kendrick Shuenemann was on the phone with her sister blocks from her new home in Savannah, Georgia, when a man interrupted and asked for directions. She didn't know the area, and told him so.
She was watching him walk away when he turned, snapped his fingers and marched back. She turned away from him. Moments later she heard a pistol cock next to her head.
She said he forced her to the backyard of an abandoned house, made her undress, and shot her in the gut. He dragged her under the vacant building and raped her in a filthy crawlspace, she said. Then, he walked away.
She made her way to an ambulance hours later after performing a grim mental calculus: if she died right here, would her family find her?
"Just help me to survive it," she thought when she passed out in the back of the ambulance. "Now, that would change over the course of time, because you become aware that it would have been easier to not have survived it."
Shuenemann was just 19 years old then, a beauty school student in Savannah in 1985. She passed out for most of her ambulance ride and some time at the hospital, as doctors worked to remove a bullet that pierced her liver and colon, fragmented and lodged a quarter-inch from her spine.
She wouldn't find out for nearly 20 years, working on another rape victim's case at the Barrow County district attorney's office, that doctors collected evidence in a rape kit that night, and that it made it all the way to the Georgia bureau of investigations. It would be almost two years more before she discovered it was destroyed, discarded by police in 1988. She said she reported her assault to police at the time, but her case was closed less than a year later. Savanah-Chatham police did not comment on Schuenemann's allegations, despite multiple requests.
"There was always the question, and there's still the question honestly, could it still exist somewhere? But I do believe that Savannah [police] and the GBI as well as the DA's office have looked thoroughly," she said. "I drove myself crazy for a couple years about it, because it was so hard to fathom. To find out it once existed, and to find out it was gone – it was devastating."
Her case is not uncommon.
For decades, tens of thousands of boxes of DNA evidence that nurses meticulously gathered from the bodies and clothing of sex assault victims sat stacked in storage rooms, ignored. Later, this mountain of untested evidence would be known as the "rape kit backlog".
As scrutiny of disregarded rape kits mounted, a portrait of a more difficult to tally sort emerged – rape kits police destroyed. As with the rape kit backlog, there is no national tally of the kits police destroyed. But increasingly, local media have published reports of police destroying rape kits in states as disparate as Utah, Kentucky and Colorado.
In some cases, police destroyed kits because they deemed allegations unfounded, alleged that victims didn't cooperate or arrested suspects without the benefit of DNA. In others, victims never filed a police report and relinquished DNA to a group of anonymous rape kits known as non-reporting or "Jane Doe" evidence, collected in case they one day decide they can report.
In 2013, in Aurora, Colorado, police department workers derailed a prosecution when they destroyed a rape kit from a 2009 assault. The error was discovered when a detective got a hit on an offender DNA profile, went to pick up the rape kit and was told it no longer existed. Shortly thereafter, police stopped all evidence destruction while they investigated, and found workers destroyed evidence in 48 rape cases between 2011 and 2013.
In Salt Lake City, 222 of the 942 kits collected between 2004 and 2014 were destroyed. Of those, just 59 were tested and went to court.
In Hamilton County, Tennessee, sheriff's employees destroyed rape kits with marijuana and cocaine from drug busts, angering the local prosecutor who said he wasn't consulted.
In Kentucky, the state auditor discovered some police departments routinely destroyed rape kits after a year, even though the state had no statute of limitations for rape. The perpetrators could have been prosecuted as long as they were alive. He wouldn't hazard a guess at how many kits had been destroyed by police.
"You may have a hit against the national DNA database, and when law enforcement or prosecutors are notified, [they] find out evidence has been destroyed," said Kentucky state auditor Adam Edelen. "That's a scandal – it's a tragedy."
The destruction of rape kits comes as lawmakers take a keen interest in adding arrestee DNA to CODIS (short for the Combined DNA Index System). That national database was designed to serve as a bank of DNA from both suspects and from crime scenes. Advocates, however, contend that the destruction of rape kits represents the nation's prioritization of offender DNA over crime scene DNA.
"[What] we are seeing is very retarded movement in the testing of crime scene evidence. In other words, you can collect all the offender evidence you want; if you have nothing to compare it to – in other words, crime scene evidence – you're going to solve very few crimes," said Rebecca Brown, policy director at the Innocence Project. Studying evidence retention policies was one of her first projects when she started at the agency in 2005, she said.
Most state lawmakers, she said, fail to provide guidance on when to test and retain crime scene evidence, which in the case of a sexual assault is a rape kit.
Alabama, for example, collects DNA from everyone arrested for any felony, and from people arrested for some misdemeanor sex crimes. But the state has no statute governing how long police should keep DNA evidence collected from crime scenes, such as rape kits, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Center for Victims of Crime (both in 2013).
"We are seeing huge changes in policy around the collection of evidence from offenders: in other words, a huge increase in the collection of swabs of people," she said.
Experts said about half of states have laws to tell police how long to preserve evidence, everything from DNA to handguns involved in serious crimes, but even those tend to focus on keeping evidence after conviction. That leaves unsolved crimes in legal limbo.
Contrast Alabama's lack of a statute with Mississippi: there, evidence must be preserved for the length of time a crime is unsolved or until a convicted person is released from custody, the National Center for Victims of Crime reported. This kind of statute, advocates say, provides greater protection not just for victims of crimes but for the wrongfully convicted.
States lacking evidence retention laws are not split between liberal or conservative, nor are they geographically grouped. They span from Vermont to Tennessee and from Pennsylvania to Utah.
"There is no rhyme or reason," said Brown. "We can't even divine a pattern to share with you. We've seen good laws in states like Texas … My home state [of New York] has no [evidence] preservation law, so there's just an incredible mix."
One kind of kit in particular, called a "non-reporting" or "Jane Doe" kit, is particularly vulnerable to destruction. Beginning in 2009, the Violence Against Women Act required states accepting grant money to provide a way for women to undergo a rape exam without reporting a crime to police. VAWA also allowed states to determine how long to keep those kits, who offers them and where they are kept.
The provision, meant to encourage rape victims to preserve evidence, even if they weren't ready to report, means that thousands of anonymous kits sit untested in rape crisis centers, hospitals and police departments for as little as a month or indefinitely.
For example, in Florida, policies for how long to keep anonymous rape kits varied widely between crisis centers where they were collected. As of 2009, kits at a Tampa Bay Area clinic were kept for as little as 30 days, but kits from victims in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties will be held for up to four years by the sheriff's department, according to data collected by the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence.
Shuenemann said her case was closed within nine months of the incident, after she couldn't identify her perpetrator from dozens of mugshots. A former police chief, Michael Berkow, told the Denver Post in 2007 that the loss of her evidence was a failure.
"Think about all of the cases, not just rape but any form of sexual assault, murder, all the cases where evidence has not
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/10/sexual-assault-rape-kit-backlog-ignored-destroyed
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/10/fmr-fbi-agent-early-wetterling-investigation-was-a-bad-mistake/
FBI Agent: Early Wetterling Investigation Was 'A Bad Mistake'
MINNEAPOLIS — A former FBI agent who supervised the Jacob Wetterling investigation says the agency botched how it first handled the man now considered a person of interest in the case.
Al Garber wrote in "Striving To Be The Best," his out-of-print 2009 memoir, that the FBI's encounter with Danny Heinrich in 1990 was a "comedy of errors" and "a bad mistake."
The book details Garber's career, including his work as an FBI supervisor in charge of the Wetterling investigation from 1989 to 1992.
While Garber does not identify Heinrich by name, the account matches details in documents made public when Heinrich was arrested last month.
(credit: U.S. Attorney's Office)
(credit: U.S. Attorney's Office)
It was on Dec. 14, 1989, seven weeks after Wetterling's kidnapping, that the FBI announced they believed there had been another victim.
"These facts match up with Jacob's abduction," FBI Special Agent Jeff Jamal said in 1989.
That victim was 12-year-old Jared Scheierl. Nine months before Wetterling, Scheierl was abducted, sexually assaulted and let go in nearby Cold Spring.
Jared Scheierl (credit: CBS)
Scheierel told us in 2014 that his abductor let him go after threatening him.
"I was dropped off and told to run," Scheierl said. "Don't look back or he would shoot."
At that same press conference in 1989, investigators unveiled a sketch that Scheierl had helped create — which bears a striking resemblance
https://personalliberty.com/fbi-agents-busting-ass-to-blow-the-top-off-hillary-clintons-email-problem/
FBI infiltrated nonvoilent protest outside Georgia army base
Young people join a rally during the SOA Watch protests outside Fort Benning, Ga., Nov. 22, 2009.
A Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that School of the Americas Watch, a nonviolent human rights organization founded by a Maryknoll priest, was investigated and infiltrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for at least a decade.
The 429 pages of documents, which were obtained by Washington D.C.-based lawyer Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, also show SOA Watch was under surveillance by a consortium of law enforcement agencies that included the FBI's counter-terrorism division, said Loyola Law School Professor Bill Quigley of the SOA Watch Legal Collective, and who is referred to in one FOIA document without mentioning his name.
In comments to NCR, Quigley, who authored a summary of the FBI documents, said the FBI surveillance has had a chilling impact on some SOA Watch activists. "Even people who have been involved in this movement for a long time were chilled by the fact that they were being subject to counter-terrorism monitoring and surveillance," Quigley said.
The released files, which are heavily redacted and did not include 75 pages that were withheld from the release, cover the years 2001-2010. The report was released just a week prior to the SOA Watch's 25th anniversary gathering at Ft. Benning in Columbus, Ga., where most of the FBI's surveillance was conducted.
The annual protest, began as an effort to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas, an Army training school for Latin American soldiers, some of whom carried out human rights abuses and murders in their native countries. The school is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. SOA Watch was founded in 1990 by former Maryknoll priest, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a former Latin American missionary.
Support the independent Catholic news source that's on the ground bringing you the full story. Subscribe to NCR today!
In a document, dated Oct. 3, 2005, the FBI requested that the SOA Watch protest be designated as a "Special Events Readiness Level" (SERL). Quigley said SERL events involve coordination between local law and state law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency "with the U.S. Secret Service designated as the lead agency."
Despite no incidents of violence over the multi-year period of the gatherings, the FBI justified its activities by claiming that other groups, such as anarchists, could join SOA Watch events and cause problems. "The peaceful intentions of the SOA Watch leaders has been demonstrated over the years," the 2005 report noted. "The concern has always been that a militant group would infiltrate the protestors and use of the cover of the crowd to create problems. At this time, there are no specific or known threats to this event."
An Oct. 23, 2003, FBI memo refers to "The Americas Anarchist Movement" and notes that the bureau was "concerned that factions of a radical cell will travel to [the SOA protest] and may implement or instigate violent and destructive behavior."
Past media accounts in NCR have shown that nothing like that has ever occurred at any of the two dozen annual SOA Watch protests at Ft. Benning.
Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the group that made the FOIA request, said the FBI has an institutional history of justifying its actions as necessary to prevent otherwise nonviolent groups from being infiltrated by those with bad intentions.
"When you criminalize dissent or make peaceful dissent have the appearance of criminal character because of its response to it, it can't help but impact people's ability to come out and express their point of view," Verheyden-Hilliard told NCR.
"But at the same time, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security engage in this following a long tradition of American law enforcement and intelligence agencies acting this way against political and social justice movements in the United States. …
"It's basically where federal and local enforcement begin to set themselves up as if they're engaged in paramilitary operations against peaceful protesters."
Verheyden-Hilliard said the SOA Watch files show a pattern used by the FBI to justify its actions from year to year.
"Every year they acknowledge that it's peaceful and just about every year they have some type of alarmist warning that 'While it's peaceful, you never know when something will turn unpeaceful. While it's peaceful you never when someone will infiltrate it and more radical groups will show up.' And by that logic every single mass gathering in the United States could be deemed by the FBI to have potential terrorist activity," she said.
Verheyden-Hilliard said the FBI's monitoring of SOA Watch was "a significant expenditure of taxpayer dollars" used to monitor the activities of what she called a group of "pacifist nuns." Ironically, said
Verheyden-Hilliard, "SOA Watch is an organization that had dedicated itself to actually trying to find U.S.-trained terrorists, who are then sent to other countries. They're as far from terrorists themselves as you can get."
FOIA documents show that in September 2004 the FBI communicated with a confidential informant who handed over a "compiled manual for affinity groups, with telephone number of Legal Advisor from Loyola University (Louisiana)" and provided the FBI with the names and email addresses of people associated with SOA Watch.
"To have this event and this movement for human rights categorized as subject to counter-terrorism and these sorts of things is scary to people, and it's very sad," Quigley said.
Bourgeois said local law enforcement and other groups like the FBI, were never able to show that SOA Watch was anything but peaceful.
"Our actions were always rooted to nonviolence; connected in solidarity with the people of Latin America, Bourgeois said. "Our goal to shut down the School of the Assassins as it became known. There were times that I felt they [law enforcement agencies] were kind of hoping maybe to find something they could use to discredit us. They never did."
SOA Watch has made all 429 pages from the FBI files available on its website along with a summary of the material.
couple of reads
FBI launches investigation into rancher killed by deputies
POSTED: 10:57 AM MST Nov 13, 2015
http://www.localnews8.com/news/fbi-launches-investigation-into-rancher-killed-by-deputies/36428714
The FBI has launched a separate investigation into the death of an Idaho rancher who was shot and killed by sheriff's deputies after one of his bulls was hit by a car and charged emergency crews.
Jack Yantis died Nov. 1 ago after an altercation with two Adams County deputies. Police say the deputies were planning to shoot the animal when the 62-year-old rancher
The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed-agents-faultless.html?_r=0
An apartment complex in Orlando, Fla., where Ibragim Todashev was killed by an F.B.I. agent last month.
F.B.I. Shooting Incident Reviews, 1993-2011JUNE 18, 2013
document F.B.I. Shooting Database Overview, 1993-2009JUNE 18, 2013
WASHINGTON — After contradictory stories emerged about an F.B.I. agent's killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being questioned over ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up the murky episode.
"The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally," a bureau spokesman said.
But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 "subjects" and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings.
Differing accounts have emerged about the shooting of Mr. Todashev. Credit Orange County Corrections Department, via Associated Press
In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.'s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a knife, was unarmed or was brandishing a metal pole. But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what happened.
"We had nothing to do with it," said Sgt. Jim Young, an Orlando police spokesman. "It's a federal matter, and we're deferring everything to the F.B.I."
Occasionally, the F.B.I. does discipline an agent. Out of 289 deliberate shootings covered by the documents, many of which left no one wounded, five were deemed to be "bad shoots," in agents' parlance — encounters that did not comply with the bureau's policy, which allows deadly force if agents fear that their lives or those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical punishment involved adding letters of censure to agents' files. But in none of the five cases did a bullet hit anyone.
Critics say the fact that for at least two decades no agent has been disciplined for any instance of deliberately shooting someone raises questions about the credibility of the bureau's internal investigations. Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha who studies internal law enforcement investigations, called the bureau's conclusions about cases of improper shootings "suspiciously low."
Current and former F.B.I. officials defended the bureau's handling of shootings, arguing that the scant findings of improper behavior were attributable to several factors. Agents tend to be older, more experienced and better trained than city police officers. And they generally are involved only in planned operations and tend to go in with "overwhelming
Why the FBI Shouldn't Be Trusted to Investigate the Death of Ibragim ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/...fbi...to-investigate.../277040/
Jun 20, 2013 - Implicit in those calls is a judgment that the FBI itself can't necessarily ... In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.'s internal investigation was the only ...
The FBI's Nearly Unbelievable Record of "Justified" Shootings - Slate
http://www.slate.com/.../ibragim_todashev_shooting_fbi_says_its_never_unjustifi...
Jun 19, 2013 - The FBI's Nearly Unbelievable Record of "Justified" Shootings. In this booking photo provided by the Orange County Sheriff's Office, Ibragim Todashev poses for his mug shot after being arrested for aggravated battery May 4, 2013 in Orlando, Florida. ... We're still waiting for the FBI ...
The FBI's License to Kill: Agents Have Been Deemed "Justified" in ...
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/21/the_fbis_license_to_kill_agents
Jun 21, 2013 - "The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings. ... what happened; they defer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate itself.
Ibragim Todashev investigation: FBI agent still anonymous ...
articles.orlandosentinel.com/.../os-ibragim-todashev-investigation-2014032...
Mar 28, 2014 - A report on the FBI shooting of Ibragim Todashev answered a number of ... "When you have an agency investigating itself, there is a natural ...
Report to shed light on what really took place when FBI shot Ibragim ...
http://www.theguardian.com › US News › Boston Marathon bombing
Mar 24, 2014 - But on May 22, an FBI agent shot Ibragim Todashev – a 27-year old former ... by state and local police as well as the FBI shooting investigation. ... That homicide is itself one of the great counterfactuals of the case: an extensive ...
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/all-50-states-were-given-corruption-test-all-3-made-ds-and-fs
All 50 States Were Given a Corruption Test, All But 3 Made D's and F's
Eleven states flunked the 2015 State Integrity Investigation.
By Andrew Emett / The Free Thought Project
A recent study found that 47 state governments scored a D or lower in providing transparency and accountability while repeatedly engaging in public corruption.
Photo Credit: The Free Thought Project
A recent study found that 47 state governments scored a D or lower in providing transparency and accountability while repeatedly engaging in public corruption. The only three states
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1115-mcmanus-candidates-mizzou-yale-20151115-column.html
Despite sound bites, presidential candidates are resisting the urge to polarize on police violence
In August, Sen. Marco Rubio called growing resentment in the African American community toward the criminal justice system "a legitimate issue." (John Raoux / Associated Press)
Are we heading back to the 1960s, when cities and campuses spiraled into chaos and conservatives won elections by demanding law and order? In a period that has seen riots over police conduct in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, attacks on police officers in New York and other cities, and now student protests, it sometimes feels that way.
Last week, several Republican candidates sounded as if they were reviving the tough justice theme that helped Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon rise to power almost half a century ago. Donald Trump derided university presidents who bow to student demands as "weak, ineffective people," and said he wouldn't have quit if he had been in charge at the University of Missouri. Ben Carson warned that if society coddles students, "We will move much further toward anarchy than anybody can imagine." And Chris Christie said it was all President Obama's fault: "This is a product of the president's own unwi
Posted 1447860864 · Edited Reply with quote #100
couple of Orwells coming your way..,,.
http://www.newsweek.com/jamar-clark-federal-agencies-investigate-police-involved-shooting-minneapolis-395812
FBI Agrees to Investigate Officer-Involved Shooting of Minneapolis Black Man Jamar Clark
11/18/15 at 9:28 AM
A makeshift memorial is seen at the location where Jamar Clark was shot by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 16. Todd Melby/Reuters
Filed Under: U.S., Minneapolis, Minnesota, Police, Shootings, Black Lives Matter, U.S. Department of Justice
The FBI will conduct a criminal civil rights investigation into a police-involved shooting of a black man in Minneapolis
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/13727
FBI's License to Kill: Agents Have Been Deemed "Justified" in Every Shooting Since 1993
New documents reveal the FBI has cleared its agents in every single shooting incident dating back two decades. According to The New York Times, from 1993 until today, FBI shootings were deemed justified in the fatal shootings of 70 people and the wounding of 80 others. Out of 289 shootings that were found to be deliberate, no agent was disciplined except for letters of censure in five cases. Even in a case where the bureau paid a shooting victim more than a million dollars to settle a lawsuit, the internal review did not find the agent who shot the man culpable. The issue of FBI accountability has recently re-emerged following last month's fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev during questioning by agents in Orlando, Florida. He was reportedly unarmed. We speak to Charlie Savage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who co-reported the story.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As President Obama prepares to nominate James Comey today to head the FBI, the agency is facing new questions over how it handles shootings involving FBI agents. A new look at the FBI's internal investigations has found the bureau has cleared its agents in every single shooting incident dating back two decades. According to The New York Times, from 1993 until today, FBI shootings were deemed justified in the fatal shootings of 70 people and the wounding of 80 others. Out of 289 shootings that were found to be deliberate, no agent was disciplined except for letters of censure in five cases. Even in a case where the bureau paid a shooting victim over a million dollars to settle a lawsuit, the internal review did not find the agent who shot the man culpable.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of FBI accountability has recently re-emerged following last month's fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev during questioning by agents in Orlando, Florida. A Chechen native, Todashev who was interrogated over his ties to one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. The Washington Post and several TV news organizations reported he was unarmed, citing unnamed law enforcement officials.
Well, on Thursday, I spoke to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage, the Washington correspondent for The New York Times who co-wrote the recent article called "The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings." I began by asking Charlie Savage to lay out what he found.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well before this recent shooting incident in Orlando, which remains murky—you said that the FBI admitted he wasn't armed. That's one story. Another version is, oh, he was—attacked an agent with a knife. And yet another one says he was brandishing a pole. All these, of course, cited to anonymous law enforcement officials, so who knows what happened in that room at this stage?
But well before that incident, I had been looking into FBI shooting incidents over many years. And, in fact, we filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the internal records of FBI shooting reviews—every time an agent pulls a trigger, they conduct an internal review of that incident—for all deliberate shootings dating back to 1993. And, of course, now it was suddenly very timely, because the FBI had just shot this man under very murky circumstances. And as typically the case when the FBI kills someone or shoots someone, local homicide detectives—in this case, the Orlando Police Department—are not conducting an independent investigation to try to figure out what happened; they defer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate itself.
And what this enormous pile of documents that we eventually obtained, all shooting—deliberate shooting incidents going back to 1993, showed was that in every instance in that 20-year span, so presumably for some time beyond that, but that's all we have, where an FBI bullet hit somebody and either killed them or wounded them, that was deliberately fired, the agency cleared the agent of any wrongdoing, found that it was a justified shoot, a "good shoot," in agent's parlance. There were five supposed, what they would call "bad shoots," where agents did get letters of censure for doing things like firing a warning shot above a crowd. None of those incidents, though, involved anyone getting hit by a bullet.
AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage, you quote Professor Samuel Walker, who teaches criminal justice, about the problem with this.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Yes. See, this is a professor who studies internal law enforcement investigations, and he said that this very low rate of finding bad shoots, basically zero when someone was actually hurt, or an animal, for that matter—a subset of these are shooting dogs that were menacing while serving an arrest warrant for something—was suspiciously low, in his words. But, of course, you don't know that it means that in fact something was wrong; it's just suspiciously low. And one of the problems in evaluating this document set—this is over over 2,000 pages of documents—is because, as I mentioned earlier, there's very often, overwhelmingly often, with very few exceptions, no independently produced investigative report by some other authority where you could put the two reports side by side and see: Is this an accurate portrayal of what happened or not?
And, you know, there's good reason to believe that the FBI would have a generally low rate of bad shootings, because unlike a city police force, FBI agents tend to be older, better trained, more experienced, and perhaps most importantly, they're not patrolling the streets and responding to in-progress crimes and chaotic situations. When they go into sort of arresting people and so forth, it tends to be preplanned operations where they go in with overwhelming force, and that's going to minimize chaos. And yet, they still killed or wounded 150 people over 20 years, and it's kind of remarkable that not once in all that time, even in an instant where the bureau ended up paying over a million dollars to someone who was shot by an agent, did they find internally that that was not a justified shooting.
AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage, you referred in this piece to the settlement of a million dollars of a man shot in 2002. Can you describe that case?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Yes, and let me first preface this by saying why this is a case worth looking at. It's not that this case is particularly, you know, different than others, although there are some oddities about it, but for—and it's over a decade old. But what's interesting about it is it's a rare exception to the rule that there's nothing to look at but the FBI's own narrative of what happened. In this case, there was an independent investigation by a local police detective with the Anne Arundel County police, and there was a lawsuit that led to discovery before it was finally settled, and there were some additional investigations that were conducted as part of that litigation. And so, there was a lot of alternative information to put alongside the FBI's own version of events to see at least whether they dovetailed or there were some discrepancies. And there were discrepancies.
So, this was a bizarre case. The FBI was looking for a bank robbery suspect that they thought was going to be coming by a convenience store in a white baseball cap in a car driven by his sister. And, unfortunately, another man fitting that description, who was innocent, Joseph Schultz, came by in a white baseball cap in a car driven by his girlfriend. And so the FBI thought he was the bank robbery suspect and chased the car down, turned on the sirens, swarmed around it, forced it over, surrounded it with guns, and just a moment later shot Mr. Schultz—an agent shot Mr. Schultz in the face. And he miraculously survived. The bullet deflected off of a piece of metal on the clip that holds the seat belt, and so it sort of hit his jaw rather than his hea
The FBI Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings - The New York ...
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Jun 18, 2013 - In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.'s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been ...
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