Prison mistreatment and death leads to largest settlement in Texas history: Family Of Woman With HIV Who Died After Texas Jail Stay Receives $7 Million | HuffPost Latest News
"Barlow-Austin was arrested for a misdemeanor probation violation and taken to the Bi-State jail in April 2019. At the time, she was on medication to manage her HIV and mental health. Once she was in jail, staff denied her access to her medications, the lawsuit alleged, and she developed an infection that left her blind and unable to walk. Barlow-Austin went long periods of time without eating or drinking because she was unable to see the food and water in her cell, according to the lawsuit.
“She spent the last week of her confinement in a so-called ‘medical observation’ cell—isolated and alone, in constant pain, blindly crawling around her cell, dehydrated and malnourished, living in filthy and inhumane conditions, decompensating—with no medical help,” Heipt wrote in the Thursday statement."
Slapping the city with a $7 million fine is a good start, but this shit will keep happening again and again until we start holding the fuckers who’d do something like this CRIMINALLY responsible.
You’d think monetary economy alone would make a lot of these cities and states put an arm around these rogue law-enforcement agencies, smile in a avuncular and yet predatory fashion, and say, “Tell your gorillas to cool it so we don’t keep having to shell out millions to families of people you kick the crap out of. Or some of your boys will be watching TV in the daytime.” You’d think the GOP, the Party of Fiscal Responsibility, would be bleating this from the rooftops.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But somehow that’s never how it works out. That’s why I think some of these assholes need to get a taste of what prison is like from the other side.
And come out as “soft on crime”? You must be joking!
Someone the only crimes politicians are eager to be hard on are those committed by “those people”; crimes committed by law enforcement officials or big businesses or - heavens forbid! - politicians never seem to get nearly as much attention, despite the fact that in terms of dollars stolen or damage done these are all much bigger deals than street crime.
“And what ‘crime’ was Breona Taylor committing in her bed in the middle of the night?”
(I’m not arguing with you, just imagining the response…)
I heard Minneapolis was getting close to having to declare bankruptcy because they’ve had to shell out one 7-figure wrongful-death/police brutality settlement after another. It adds up pretty fast.
I’ve read on the CNN website that insurance companies are starting to not insure police departments if they have high rates of paying out judgments on behalf of brutal police officers. Maybe this problem will push communities to reform and closely supervise police behaviors so they don’t get slapped with financial problems.
Our little town has paid out over $1M in settlements for police misconduct in the last three years (most of it for sexual harassment and assault on female employees of the police department). No one would dare suggest that these be paid out of the police budget. We just cut teachers, other school employees, road maintenance, whatever. Police budget just grows and grows, double digit salary increases, they decide what overtime is required.
News story that overtime fraud is not a crime in Boston literally because everyone is doing it.
A standard of X hours minimum is not unusual for call outs, although I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of it for OT. I think the real question is whether a superintendent, a deputy superintendent, and or certainly the commissioner have now specified the actual overtime reporting rules.