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

The BBQ Pit
11162

No-one is attempting to claim cops are a race, we are pointing out that the rhetoric used by the more ridiculous anti-cop posters is very similar to that used by racists and other bigots, and from that claiming that it’s reasonable to call those anti-cop sentiments bigotry.

The far left (by which I mean something approaching Stalinism, not anything that’s been widely supported here) has long been just as intolerant as the far right, and often to some of the same targets - notably Jews and gays - but also anyone seen as supporting the (conservative) establishment. Just as bigotry seems to be creeping back into the mainstream on the right, it is doing so on the left - look at the misogyny and envy that surrounded the Saunders campaign, or the anti-semitism and outright disdain for the wealthy in Corbyn’s Labour party.

Preaching hate towards individuals for their membership in a group is wrong, whether that group is Jews, politicians, rich white men, Muslims, or the police. People here who actually want things to improve need to stop doing so, to stop assuming that someone is their enemy because of their job or political affiliation. There are several posters here (although not in this thread, at least recently) who call anyone who’s not a left winger literally evil, which is ridiculous.

11163

Remember those two bodycam videos of Baltimore cops planting evidence? Well, apparently there another shady video. This time, an officer admitted that the video of him or her seizing evidence was actually a re-enactment!

This is amazing. Now that they have body cameras, cops are apparently developing their skills as producers of true crime shows, with re-enactments and everything!

Anyway, the Baltimore States Attorney’s Office has “identified 43 criminal cases to be dropped” as a result of the latest shenanigans by Baltimore’s finest…

11164

No idea. I just followed the link above and found there was a part 2 out. Captivating story, though.

11165

When they are caught planting evidence and/or suppressing evidence (that happens too) and swearing false statements, etc,

WHY are they themselves not facing charges of tampering and perjury, etc?
WHY?

11166

Good luck with your head.

Regards,
Shodan

11167

Because they was afraid.

11168

If the far left is starting to make its presence known, it still has a far way to go to come close to matching that on the right. Those on the left are not all that tolerant of the types of behaviors that radicals of either persuasion involve themselves in.

You will always be able to point to someone and say that they are saying these things, that we should hate the cops, that we should riot or commit violent acts. But those of us on the much more moderate left ignore them for the most part, and ask them to tone it down when they start to make a fuss. We let them know that the grownups are trying to run things, and if they want to leave the kiddie table, they need to grow up.

On the right, the kiddie table gets its own radio shows, its own TV network, and a substantial portion of congress. There are few moderates on the right with whom to have a conversation.

Sometimes, you can have a productive conversation, but often times, you are talking to the people behind me at the kiddie table, the ones that I’ve already asked to keep it down. Then you insist that my argument is the same as the one that the kiddie table is making.

We are not calling for hate here. We are not calling for violence. We are calling only for accountability among the people we entrust to carry the monopoly on violence that is supposed to make our communities safer.

We can have a debate as to what reforms, if any are needed to assure that officers are held accountable for their actions, but when you insists that any attempt at having that conversation is hating cops, or using the same language as a bigot, then you have insisted that no, you are not ready for that conversation.

I have not called for hate, I have not called for violence, I have not called for mob justice. I have called for an impartial system of investigating and prosecuting officers accused of misconduct. That is all. I have pointed out examples of situation where I do believe that justice was thwarted by those involved. That I do not believe that justice was served in these instances, and seek to find remedies to ensure that it is in the future, is not calling for vigilante justice, or any of the other things you have alleged.

That you turn around, and try to make this some sort of discrimination issue means that you have no logical leg to stand on, and are instead, trying to appeal to emotion, trying to equate two things that are completely different, in order to make them seem similar.

Yes, it is. And I don’t doubt it at all. I am just a bit wary of it, as it has no real sources, and I have no idea what “Medium” is as a paper of record.

I do appreciate the concern, liar.

11169

oh! OK, never mind :smiley:

11170

Ok boys and girls, here’s an outstanding example of good policing, one we should be holding up as a paragon of ummm I dunno stuff, AND DEFINITELY NOT BE HATING ON BECAUSE THAT IS BIGOTED…
https://apnews.com/2a7be40a2aa5447f907b3d6ad338a572

The case of 30-year-old former Oklahoma City cop Daniel Holtzclaw attracted widespread national attention. He was tried for raping and sexually abusing women on the job. Now his defense team is appealing his guilty verdict, but they’re happening behind closed doors. The Associated Press reports:

Daniel Holtzclaw, now 30, was sentenced to 263 years in prison for preying on black women he encountered while patrolling poor neighborhoods of the city in 2013 and 2014. Defense attorneys appealed the conviction in February.

During his 2015 trial, 13 women testified against him.
I guess Blue Dicks matter.

11171

A Bronx narcotics detective was charged with 49 counts of perjury Thursday for repeatedly lying to a grand jury and judge about witnessing a supposed drug sale.

Detective Francisco Payano gave false testimony to a grand jury 13 times and also lied under oath 36 times during two court hearings in January 2010, prosecutors said.

Payano said he saw Omar Tawdeen, 31, sell crack to three people in the lobby of a building on Bronxwood Ave. in January 2009.

But a surveillance video from the lobby proved Tawdeen wasn’t even there, prosecutors said. The video, obtained by the Daily News, shows nothing but an empty sidewalk where Payano claimed Tawdeen was making a drug deal.

The charges against Tawdeen were tossed in February 2010.

“These are very serious charges,” Bronx Assistant District Attorney Donald Levin said at Payano’s arraignment Thursday. “The surveillance video proves the defendant was never even in the area.”

11172

To Brooklyn defense lawyers and convicts, he might be the worst detective in NYPD history — a rogue investigator who, they claim, invented confessions, tampered with lineups, railroaded suspects and jailed the innocent.

His self-defense comes as six convictions he won have been vacated and seven men exonerated, 40 more cases are under review, and a Brooklyn judge recently ruled in another case that he and former partner Steve Chmil engaged in “corrupt investigative processes.”

Attorneys claim innocent men have served, cumulatively, 143 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit — all cases that involved Scarcella.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A former police detective, who has been accused of coercing confessions, testified Friday in a wrongful conviction case.

Former NYPD detective Louis Scarcella came to the witness stand again in a hearing for a man who claims he was wrongfully convicted in the 1995 murder of a 4-year-old Brooklyn girl.

Sundhe Moses served 18 years for the crime and when he was paroled in 2013, he insisted he was innocent claiming that Scarcella beat him to give a false confession.

“He wasn’t the one who took the statement from me, but he was the one that sort of did all the physical things so that I would,” Moses said

Scarcella has been the center of an investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney’s conviction review unit. Their work has led to seven convictions being overturned for defendants including those of Richard Rosario and Derrick Hamilton, who a judge determined were coerced into confession.

11173

Lawyers have long complained that some police officers will give clearly false testimony to protect themselves, other officers, or just maintain the “thin blue line.” This week, we saw two detectives in Michigan indicted with a judge and prosecutor for false testimony. The latest such case out of New York involves New York City detective, Debra Eager, 41, who was indicted on three felony perjury charges after her testimony before a grand jury in 2007 drug case was contradicted by a videotape.

For months, we have been following various cases like the ransacking incident where New York police have found to have lied about arrest. That includes the abuse of cyclist Christopher Long by Patrick Pogan, here. A video shows Pogan striking Long without provocation. Notably, Long was charged with assault and resisting arrests, common charges used when officers stack counts to try to force the defendant to plea guilty in a deal (and thereby avoid a trial).

In January, two undercover narcotics officers, Officer Henry Tavarez and Detective Stephen Anderson, were charged with official misconduct and conspiracy when they learned that they were captured on such a videotape. They stated that they arrested men on a “buy and bust” in a bar in Queens, but the video showed that they had no contact with the men.

Likewise, in February, police officer Maurice Harrington, was confronted with a videotape showing him hitting truck driver, Michael Cephus, 10 times with a metal baton without cause. Click here for the video.

11174

An off-duty housing cop committed suicide early yesterday near his Suffolk County home, hours after he was subpoenaed by the feds to explain his false testimony in a gun case, officials said. …

Sullivan, married and the father of two children, apparently was distraught over the prospect of appearing in Brooklyn Federal Court yesterday to answer under oath why he had lied in a state trial. Subpoenas for Sullivan and his partner, Detective James Melin, had been delivered to their command, Police Service Area No. 2, in East New York, Brooklyn, around 6:30 p.m. Monday. …
The cops admitted to federal prosecutors last week that they lied in a state trial about who had picked up a silver handgun discarded by a suspect during a 1998 arrest, and where the weapon was placed in the radio car, according to court documents. Sullivan said he “felt stuck” with his grand jury testimony. Melin said he told an assistant district attorney the truth. Police Commissioner Howard Safir had instituted a tough policy of firing cops who give false testimony. Sullivan had not been placed on modified assignment - stripped of his guns and badge - despite the probe. Melin was placed on modified assignment yesterday.

11175

Police perjury: It’s called ‘testilying’

The difference between what the video showed and what the officers described to the judge is the difference between a permissible search and an illegal one. … But the judge threw out the evidence after the video was played in court. Prosecutors dropped the charges. Sperling not only went free — he filed a federal lawsuit and got a $195,000 settlement from Chicago and Glenview.

And four of the cops are now charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and official misconduct. They face up to five years in prison if convicted. The fifth is on leave pending an internal investigation. “There’s strong evidence it was conspiracy to lie in this case, for everyone to come up with the same lie,” an angry Circuit Judge Catherine Haberkorn said after seeing the video. “Many, many, many, many times they all lied.” …

Sometimes you have to bend the rules to get the bad guys off the street.

That logic was carried to the extreme in the 1970s and '80s by Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his crew of rogue officers, who coerced confessions out of suspects by shocking their genitals, putting plastic bags over their heads, hitting them with phone books and other forms of torture.

The results: Dozens of wrongful or questionable convictions, more than $100 million in attorneys fees and legal settlements paid by Chicago and Cook County, $5.5 million set aside by Chicago aldermen earlier this year to pay reparations to Burge’s victims — not to mention the immeasurable damage to the credibility of the police department.

Testilying isn’t a Chicago thing. A 1994 report by the Mollen Commission, charged with investigating corruption in the New York Police Department, attributed the term to the New York cops themselves. …

Researchers trace the rise of “testilying” to a 1961 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that evidence obtained from an illegal search can’t be used in court. After that, there was no decline in arrests, but a big increase in “dropsy” testimony — officers swearing they frisked a suspect because they saw him drop a bag of drugs on the sidewalk. Maybe they saw a bulge in a suspect’s clothing and thought it was a gun. Maybe they pulled someone over for a minor traffic infraction and the contraband was in plain sight.

11176

Stephen Anderson, Ex NYPD Cop: We Planted Evidence, Framed Innocent People To Reach Quotas

A former New York City narcotics detective testified in court that planting drugs on innocent people was common practice, a quick and easy way to boost arrest numbers.

According to the New York Daily News, the practice is known among NYPD officers as “flaking,” and officers in Brooklyn and Queens narcotics squads were doing a whole lot of it.

Stephen Anderson, the former detective, was snared along with a group of other officers for “flaking” four men in Queens back in 2008. He is now cooperating with prosecutors and is spilling the beans on the crooked practice of framings and false arrests, often to reach arrest quotas.

“It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators,” Anderson testified in Brooklyn Supreme Court last week. “It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway.”

“One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people,” said Gabriel Sayegh of the DPA. “The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices.”

This latest case isn’t the first time corrupt police practices and numbers fudging by the department has been exposed. A few years ago, an officer also in Brooklyn began secretly taping the activity around the department and uncovered a more sinister side to city policing.
…

According to the DPA, the NYPD has recently come under fire recently for the arrests of more than 50,000 people last year for low-level marijuana offenses – 86% of whom are black and Latino – making marijuana possession the number one offense in the City. The group is also critical of the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk practice.

The marijuana arrests, the group says, are the result of “illegal searches” by the NYPD, as part of stop-and-frisks.

The statement continued:
Marijuana was decriminalized in New York State in 1977 – and that law is still on the books. Smoking marijuana in public or having marijuana visible in public, however, remains a crime. Most people arrested for marijuana possession are not smoking in public, but simply have a small amount in their pocket, purse or bag. Often when police stop and question a person, they say “empty your pockets” or “open your bag.” Many people comply, even though they’re not legally required to do so. If a person pulls marijuana from their pocket or bag, it is then “open to public view.” The police then arrest the person.

11177

Great last line of article about the union and the tarnishing of the d-bag cop’s reputation. Everyone of the people he falsely put in prison or beat down should get 5 minutes with him while he is cuffed.

11178

When are senior officers going to be held to account for the actions of these juniors?

11179

Not going to happen. It ruins the whole government sense of entitlement if judges, prosecutors, chiefs and union officials get held accountable for things that lower level cops do. The whole system is corrupt and nothing will change it. Just thank blue for all they do.

11180

25 years of this guy’s life lost due to a bad apple. Cops didn’t lose anything during that time.

11181

But don’t call the cops out on it, that’s bigotry. :rolleyes: