WV cop fired for not shooting after trying to talk down an armed black man who appeared to be going for suicide by cop.
To the cops, it’s “us or them”, and “if you ain’t with us, you must be against us”. To them, firing this guy makes perfect sense because they can’t trust him to choose the side of the cops over the side of the public.
The fucked up thing is that the cops think these two sides exist and continue to act as if they should exist.
Did we do this one yet? I don’t think we did…[
“This whole city is under a siege of cameras,” said Pritchett, a house painter who helps run a youth center in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood called Johnston Square. “In fact, they observed Freddie Gray himself the morning of his arrest on those cameras, before they picked him up. They could have watched that van, too, but no—they missed that one. I thought the cameras were supposed to protect us. But I’m thinking they’re there to just contradict anything that might be used against the City of Baltimore. Do they use them for justice? Evidently not.”
Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.
Since the beginning of the year, the Baltimore Police Department had been using the plane to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings. The Cessna sometimes flew above the city for as many as 10 hours a day, and the public had no idea it was there.
](http://www.vice.com/read/baltimore-police-secret-street-surveillance-plane-vgtrn )I found this story thru VICE and they condense some information well so:[
The aerial surveillance program consists chiefly of flying planes more than 8,000 feet in the air and gathering video footage across a roughly 30-square-mile radius, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported. The program was funded secretly by Texas billionaires, Laura and John Arnold, who say they are looking to support new tools that can help police departments more effectively solve crime. The planes have flown about 300 hours in Baltimore since January.
For its part, the police department denies that officers have done anything wrong, or that the planes even amount to a form of surveillance.
](http://www.vice.com/read/psurveillance-baltimore-police-cops-reform )
Snowboarder_Bo:
It’s true that it is perfectly legal to record people while they are out in public but this seems excessive to me. I don’t doubt that this kind of thing will become commonplace or even normal (we are already tracked and trackable in so many ways it’s ridiculous), but it still seems like an excessive and egregious use of information technology to me.
I guess I would like to know how its being used. Ideally I would like the tapes to be viewed only after obtaining a warrant from a judge and only for a specific entity and infraction. So if you are following a kidnappers car on tape and they happen to pass by someone selling drugs you couldn’t use that information as probable cause to search that guys car.
UNC Student raped. UNC Cops laugh about it with suspect (football player)
Robinson said Tuesday that an audio recording of campus police interviews with Artis revealed investigators joking with the accused rapist.
“Rather than accusing him of anything, the investigators spoke to him with a tone of camaraderie,” Robinson said. “They provided reassurances to him when he became upset. They even laughed with him when he told them how many girls’ phone numbers he had managed to get on the same night he raped me.
“They told him, ‘Don’t sweat it, just keep on living your life and playing football.’”
UNC’s Finest!
Reyemile
September 15, 2016, 5:38pm
8707
13-year old shot while wielding a BB-gun.
Unlike many other cases here, though, this looks to be police acting reasonably. When a fleeing suspect stops and turns with a weapon in hand, you are justified in firing even if the suspect was a kid.
That said, the real question I have is about the stop itself. Did the kid actually match the description of the robber? Or was the description, as is too often the case, one so vague and nonspecific that it gave cops the excuse to stop any black children they happened to see?
Shodan
September 15, 2016, 8:23pm
8708
The player in question has apparently turned himself in, and has been charged with a misdemeanor. I’m guessing there is more to the story than what the woman’s lawyer says.
Regards,
We should probably hear the tape of the cops cozying up and laughing about the victim. Wonder when that will be released to the public.
If they were trying to put him at ease, get him to relax and get him to say something to hang himself, I guess that would possibly be standard MO for an interrogation. It will be interesting to read what questions they asked him.
Typo_Negative:
If they were trying to put him at ease, get him to relax and get him to say something to hang himself, I guess that would possibly be standard MO for an interrogation. It will be interesting to read what questions they asked him.
“Can you get us tickets to a home game?”
Some potentially good news :[
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Tustin Police Officer Osvaldo Villarreal couldn’t reasonably have feared for his safety when he shot 31-year-old Benny Herrera after responding to a domestic dispute call in December 2011.
That determination ran counter to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which said in 2013 that the shooting was reasonable and justified because Villarreal fired after Herrera ignored orders to show his hands.
A video captured by a police dashboard camera shows otherwise, according to the 9th Circuit judges who cited the footage.
“Less than a second elapsed between Villarreal commanding Herrera to take his hand from his pocket and Villarreal shooting him,” the court wrote. “Just as Herrera’s hand came out of his pocket, Villarreal fired two shots in rapid succession … The command and the shots were almost simultaneous.”
](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/631a657961a3419c8519e4f2eed07143/court-officer-killed-man-less-second-after-command )
Sonia Balleste, the senior deputy district attorney who wrote the review, said Friday that she didn’t immediately recall the case or why the review didn’t mention the video but that she was sure she “looked at all the evidence that was available.”
“As a general practice it wasn’t my custom and habit to write down everything I looked at,” she said, adding that her office has since changed how such reviews are written to include more information.
I don’t believe that she is being exactly truthful.
I hope that this case doesn’t end here. I hope the cop is prosecuted, found guilty and does time in prison. I’d hope to see the DA charged as well with being an accessory after the fact (for covering it up) as well. I hope for these things but I’m not all that hopeful.
[A Tulsa police officer shot an unarmed man in the middle of the street after tasering the unarmed man:
A police officer shot and killed a black man who ignored repeated requests to put up his hands before reaching into an SUV that was stalled in the middle of a street, the police department said.
Terrence Crutcher, 40 years old, died in the hospital after he was shot by the officer around 8 p.m. local time Friday, police said.
Police spokeswoman Jeanne MacKenzie earlier told reporters that two officers were walking toward the stalled SUV when Mr. Crutcher approached them from the side of the road.
“He refused to follow commands given by the officers,” Ms. MacKenzie said. “They continued to talk to him, he continued not to listen and follow any commands. As they got closer to the vehicle, he reached inside the vehicle and at that time there was a Taser deployment and a short time later there was one shot fired.”
Ms. MacKenzie said that as of 9 p.m., police hadn’t searched the SUV and didn’t know if there was a weapon inside.
](http://www.wsj.com/articles/tulsa-police-shoot-kill-black-man-in-street-1474146770 )
Unfortunately, there is no body cam footage, as Tulsa officers do not wear body cams. There may be dash cam footage, however.
[Mr. Crutcher’s sister has made some statements to the press:
Solomon-Simmons told reporters that Crutcher was in the area because his car stalled and officers saw him while on an unrelated call and approached.
“From that point, I do not know what occurred. We have no idea, and that’s what is so difficult for us and the family,” Solomon-Simmons said. “That’s our job, to try to get answers for this family as they’re mourning.”
MacKenzie said an officer responding to another call saw the vehicle in the middle of the road and called for backup, and the two officers were walking toward the SUV when Crutcher approached them from the side of the road.
“He refused to follow commands given by the officers,” MacKenzie said. “They continued to talk to him, he continued not to listen and follow any commands.”
](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_KILLING_BY_POLICE_TULSA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-09-17-19-29-24 )
I have no doubt at this point that these officer will be found to have acted appropriately and will not face charges, despite an innocent man being dead from their actions.
Civil asset forfeiture: the police take your money and stuff as evidence, and sometimes they just keep it. How much do they take?
(NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers | Ars Technica )"]The New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would “lead to system crashes.”
“sorry, we can’t tell you”
Error 405 - Cash Not Found
Trial for the 2 officers who killed James Boyd begins .
James Boyd was a homeless man who was killed by Albuquerque police March 2014.
eschereal the seriously twisted:
Civil asset forfeiture: the police take your money and stuff as evidence, and sometimes they just keep it. How much do they take?
“sorry, we can’t tell you”
Strange. It’s my understanding that simply implementing a 120-second wait between searches will prevent any system from crashing.
This happened the week I moved to ABQ. From Wikipedia :
Two hours before the shooting, officer Keith Sandy encountered New Mexico State Police Sergeant Chris Ware on the street closest to Boyd’s campsite. Sandy, who had once worked for the State Police, greeted Ware and Ware’s dash cam continued to record as they spoke. Sandy told Ware that Boyd was “a fucking lunatic” and that Sandy planned to shoot Boyd’s penis off.[14][16]
ABQ’s Finest, there.
More about Terrance Crutcher (the Tulsa man shot dead by police last week; see post #8705 above):[
A lawyer for the family of a black man killed by a white Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer says video of the shooting is so disturbing that it kept him awake at night.
Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons says the video shows that 40-year-old Terence Crutcher didn’t make any sudden movements before he was shot Friday by a Tulsa officer who was responding to a report of a stalled vehicle.
Solomon-Simmons says the video also calls into question police statements that Crutcher died at a hospital following the shooting. He says Crutcher “died on that street by himself in his own blood without any help.”
The Tulsa Police Department plans to release videos of the encounter Monday afternoon.
](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a35a1a477563493e99200b6a7f0d946a/latest-relatives-view-tulsa-police-shooting-videos )I guess we’ll be able to see for ourselves in a few hours.
[
A black man fatally shot by a white Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer responding to a stalled vehicle had no weapon on him or in his SUV, the city’s police chief said Monday.
](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d579b4424f3a4494ae5c5b31b12e54b3/tulsa-police-release-dashcam-video-fatal-shooting )