Wow. The victim is suing the cop, and the state is claiming the lawsuit should be dismissed because he has sovereign immunity. So apparently the state of Illinois believes it’s OK for cops to steal whatever they want, as long as it’s part of an arrest.
So dirty cops have immunity now? I guess it’s OK for them to accept bribes, deal drugs and murder people… What a world we live in.
This thread is 5 years old and, over the intervening years, we certainly have had a goodly number of “controversial encounters” of this nature. My personal feeling, however, is that the number as well as the severity of “controversial encounters” has slowly declined over time. I believe this has happened because police accountability aided by body cams and independent review boards, etc, has increased, and political pressure due to a strong public response has increased.
Is this a false impression of mine, or is this true?
This is going to be hard to pin a definite number on. It’s certainly not my impression, especially with all the ICE fuckery going on. Just overall, as one very rough metric, there have been more police killings post-pandemic than pre-pandemic, with the highest recorded in 2024. They did go down a little in 2025:
Now, how many of them are “controversial”? I don’t know. I’m not sure there is any hard data about that. It’s possible that justified killings have gone up and controversial have gone down, I suppose.
And this is just police killings, not controversial encounters in general with other outcomes. But it’s the only data point I could find so far.
I think it has more to do with the thread just kind of dying out as fewer people participate, or as police actions once seen as outrageous, and worthy of being posted in this thread, become more commonplace. I think plenty of fuckery still goes on.
Just because the frog has adjusted to the heat, that is not evidence that water isn’t hot…and perhaps getting hotter all the time.
Surely no one would complain about this drinking water:
And if they did surely they deserve to be locked up!
Cop pulls over a woman for driving with a cell phone in her “right hand”. Even as she shows the cop she doesn’t actually have a right hand, he still insists she had a phone in her right hand. Even when ask her to say she didn’t do it ‘hand to god’ and as she says ‘hand to god’ and raises her right arm and he says ‘the other hand’, he’s still adamant that she had a phone in her non-existant right hand.
Anyways, here’s the bodycam footage.
https://i.imgur.com/9gbu6TK.mp4
The case has since been dropped…
The Police Chief doubled down on arresting her and basically said he’d do it again. AND, a guy showed up to town and stood outside the Police Department with a sign that said “Fuck The Police.” Was arrested within 18 minutes.
Tell me Texas doesn’t care about freedom of speech without telling me that Texas doesn’t care about freedom of speech.
Pretty horrendous story out of the UK that’s drawing attention because there was new footage of the police’s interactions with the victim that was released.
A college kid was stabbed by a guy in his early 20s. When police arrived, the stabber - who was Sikh - told them that the college kid was racially harassing him and trying to pull off his turban and mess with his hair. The police believed the stabber (the court has now called that into serious question) and handcuffed the kid. As they did, he told them he had been stabbed, but (from the body cam footage) one of the officers doesn’t believe him, at one point responding “I don’t think you have been”. When another officer expressed concern and wants to check the kid more thoroughly, he tells her that she’s wrong and he’s lying about being stabbed.
The college kid, who was indeed stabbed, died of his wound.
As far as I can tell, none of the officers involved are in any sort of trouble over this.
This falls into “WTF were you thinking?” territory. Confirming an obvious injury on the scene should be a no-brainer. Where the hell does “of course he’s lying!” come from?
It sounds like they did give him a quick once over but the wound was deep and most of the bleeding was internal so they missed it at first - they lifted his shirt but not high enough to get to the wound, and he wasn’t soaked in blood yet or anything, so from there they just assumed he was lying to get out of trouble.
Since Sikhs carry knives for religious reasons, they might have assumed that an anti-Sikh racist would make up lies about being stabbed by a Sikh person.
Obviously these are all incredibly stupid assumptions to make that in this case cost a boy his life.
After a few minutes they did figure out he was actually dying, uncuffed him, performed CPR, and then found the wound. Incredible levels of incompetence, that’s for sure. The officers involved should lose their jobs at a minimum.
I mean, even if he was harassing the Sikh guy and trying to pull off his turban, that makes him an asshole, but it doesn’t mean he deserved to die.
I don’t imagine the chain of logic went “He harassed a Sikh man, now he must pay the ultimate price”. I imagine it was more like, “Oh no, this hooligan is attacking a Sikh man for his race! What’s that? You claim to have been stabbed by the Sikh man? Oh, I get it, Sikh men carry knives, so they’re all stabbers, is that it, you racist piece of shit? No way you were stabbed, you racist liar.”
Even so, “He stabbed me!” is a really easy thing to check, and if you check and he wasn’t, then you can add false police reports or whatever to the list of things you’re arresting him for.
This is very much a cause celebre in the UK, and has been seized on by the far right as an excuse for rioting, on the ostensible basis that white people are a) under threat from a swarthy horde and b) treated as second-class citizens by the authorities.
The best account can be found in the sentencing remarks from the trial which found the killer guilty of murder.
The critical point with respect to the police and their decision about who to believe is that they didn’t just turn up, nor were they called by some bystander. It was the killer who called them, claiming to be the victim of a racist attack. This story was backed up on their arrival by his brother. Meanwhile, the killer’s mother had hidden the weapon in their home (she’ll be on trial for this shortly.)
- You then showed a callous disregard for his wellbeing, knowing you had stabbed him to the chest. You continued to make films of Henry suffering, ignoring much of his desperation at having been stabbed. You told him that had not happened, no doubt to convince others who were nearby. Your attitude did not change even though Henry was clearly going downhill very fast. Your brother did much the same, although he may just have been accepting that which you had told him, rather than lying himself. You lied to him that you had been attacked, picking up on his question about whether it had been accompanied by racism by falsely claiming that Henry had called you a "Paki.” I am sure that Henry had said nothing racist. You are the only person to make that claim and it is completely at odds with his previous character.
- You joined your brother in relating these lies to the police. By then your mother and father were at the scene. Gurpreet explained that no weapons had been involved or were present. In fact, whilst he was talking to the call operator, you told your mother to take the murder weapon, sheath and belt away which she did. You did not tell your father what had really happened. Much of the time you just stood by as he, at least, tried to do something to help Henry.
- You carried on telling these wicked lies when police attended on the scene, hampering them in doing their job and, effectively, obstructing the course of justice. You kept Henry’s phone with the incriminating recording of you on it. You had no intention of handing it over. It was found on you after you had been arrested and taken into police custody.
So when the police show up they are a) disposed to believe that the person who called them to the crime scene is in fact the victim, b) presented with a corroborating witness, c) see neither a wound nor a weapon. Their initial but short-lived tendency to take this all at face value is not, as Nigel Farage would have it, anti-white bias but a mix of incompetence and a culture of treating every call out as a a typical call out.
The incompetence in particular lies in failure to adequately check Nowak for a wound or to address his statement that he couldn’t breathe in decent time (although the sentencing remarks suggest the wound was fatal regardless of delay in treatment). The callousness with which they treated him while regarding him as a suspect is abhorrent, and sadly standard practice. There is an investigation by the independent police standards body into police conduct - it will take some time to report, as ever.
Honestly, while not one to defend the police normally, I’m hesitant to say that in particular they shouldn’t have arrived on the scene pre-disposed to believe the person who called them there. It would be a very difficult world if people who reported crimes were habitually treated by them at the scene as suspects. (Indeed, in circumstances where police do seem to habitually treat those who report crimes with disbelief, such as domestic violence or sexual assault, we tend to see that as bad!). They should certainly have treated Nowak’s health much more seriously, and even if he were the suspect should have been a lot less quick to dismiss him.
(Also, worth noting that Digwa’s plan to get away with murder was evil, but also stupid. Of course Nowak’s wound was going to be discovered at some point, even if he had somehow survived. He was still carrying a phone with evidence of the stabbing. In any circumstances, his false report was going to be found out pretty damn quickly. And indeed, the police did arrest him, and confiscate teh phone, on the spot. And then recorded him confessing “in secret” to allow a quick and succesful prosecution.)
From teh sentencing remarks:
Another consequence of those lies is that the attending police officers honestly believed that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Henry had committed an offence and arrested him with the consequence he was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR. The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not life threatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become. It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.
There are definitely competence issues here, but “really easy” to check isn’t I think quite right
OK, I wasn’t aware that there was another (less serious) wound to the face. On the one hand, that explains the blood (even minor face wounds can bleed a lot), but on the other hand, it also definitively establishes that there was a knife attack of some sort.
Did the victim ever tell the police where the stab wound was?
I don’t know, haven’t seen the point made one way or the other - I believe the body-cam footage can be found online but I haven’t attempted to find it.