Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread #2

For a nice change of pace, how about a story with a relatively happy outcome.

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/09/16/how-a-discarded-candy-led-to-dismissal-of-san-bernardino-county-sheriffs-deputy/

TLDR version: Sheriff’s deputy and rookie trainee show up at a sporting good store being looted. Deputy smacks suspect with a baseball bat, reminds the suspect that he got his injuries “falling”, steals the bat and some candy from the store. Trainee says he’s not comfortable with the shadiness; deputy threatens to fail him from the trainee program. Trainee reports him anyway. Deputy gets busted and fired.

Let’s hope the new generation of cops are more like this trainee and do the right thing instead of holding to the blue code.

[A] new study digs into the reasons people are wrongly convicted, and it has found that 54 percent of those defendants are victimized by official misconduct, with police involved in 34 percent of cases, prosecutors in 30 percent, and some cases involving both police and prosecutors.

The study [PDF] by the National Registry of Exonerations reviewed 2,400 exonerations it has logged between 1989 and 2019, nearly 80 percent of which were for violent felonies. Of the 2,400, 93 innocent defendants were sentenced to death and later cleared before they were executed.

Wapo summary is (soft) paywalled. The linked study is not.

The Sheriff of Williamson County, Texas awarded deputies who used force on suspects with gift cards to a steakhouse.

On a lighter note, from a fortnight ago,

Are these people insane? The article says that John Merrifield made an effort to embed satire signals in his event postings, but I guess they are hard to spot when you are seeing red.

Merrifield didn’t learn anything from this joke event?

Portland police used tear gas on protesters eight days after the mayor banned its use.

You must take great comfort in whiny ad hominem arguments.

In life, as in comedy, timing is everything.

Except that, according to your link, they didn’t. They stood by while Feds used tear gas, and then made arrests, or something like that. It must be handy to have tame Feds around to do your dirty work for you.

Salt Lake City:

from that story

“Whatever happened, it was a 13-year-old boy who was unarmed. The police were called for a mental-health call, not a criminal act,” Weyher [the boy’s attorney] said. “A child is laying in a hospital bed … there has to be a better response.”

QFT

From one of the bodycam videos, as the police are screaming “SHOW US YOUR HANDS!”:

“Tell my mom I love her.”

Unarmed 13 year old with autism, walking away, shot in the back. Fuck dem cops.

What the ever loving fuck? I watched the video and they unloaded on this kid! What fucking monsters!!! They should rot the rest of their lives in prison.

NYPD caught a suspected spy in their midsts.

This is fucked up:

That’s why they went ahead and boarded the police station and other govt offices the last couple days. They knew that they were going to let these murderers skate.

The only charge was wanton endangerment of the neighbors. Not for the murder of Breonna Taylor.

One of the cops involved in the murder of Breonna Taylor sends out an email calling protesters “thugs” who have created a “good versus evil” mentality.

It is probably what the DA wanted. Remember the old saying, “You can get a grand jury to ‘indict a ham sandwich.’”

Statistics on federal grand jury indictments show the saying isn’t that far from reality: A prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

Out of 162,000 federal cases prosecuted in 2010 (the most recent year for which statistics are available), grand juries declined to indict in only 11 cases, the FiveThirtyEight blog reports.

SOURCE: Grand juries almost always indict, federal stats show; is there a shooting exception for cops?

What did they charge him for? Failure to properly tamper with evidence?