And of course there was the Robert Dziekański Taser incident in 2007, where a man was killed because he couldn’t understand what people were saying to him and no one could understand him, creating a situation that escalated until he was killed by police.
She was certifying them by taking them herself, rather than using the appropriate lab equipment and procedures, but that’s gotta count for something, right?
As I mentioned a while ago in this thread, the standard of what passes as justifiable use of deadly force is not clear evidence of a threat but the mere perception of one. And since jurors tend to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt, the fuzzy and highly subjective standard of a perceived threat is basically enough to allow deadly force in situations where it may not truly be called for.
To repeat something I’ve said before, “I was afraid” is a pretty low standard in justifying the killing of another person. If we allowed ordinary citizens to kill each other because they simply feared them, an already violent society such as ours would resemble a war zone.
There was a story a few months back stating (at the time) that the Salt Lake police had not killed anyone in almost two years. They have implemented de-escalation training, instituted a de-escalation award and had avoided shooting even when it might have been justified.
There may have been police violence since then, I have not kept up. But before you say otherwise, SLC is a very large urban area full of non-Mormons and other weirdos. Reducing police violence is not quite a River City Iowa piece-of-cake there.
Then you have the Seattle police who sued to block the then newly implemented policies for use of force and de-escallation claiming the new policy violates their second amendment rights.
Five ICE agents in civilian clothes with no identification or warrants stopped a Latino couple (both US citizens) in Washington County, Oregon, demanding their IDs and claiming the man was a person with an arrest warrant. Only when ACLU showed up with a camera did they leave.
That is pretty fucking ironic, since so many police ad “law 'n order” types want to strip the rest of us, of OUR 2nd Amendment rights – All. The. Time. Because they’re so fucking scared. Uh huh.
I don’t know when the arrest of the homeless man took place, exactly, but apparently the lawsuit against the LEOrganizations that took part in it was filed back in March; sorry I missed this item back then:
Get a load of the picture of the house at the top of the page, eh.
Here’s a case: a Texas Jury just awarded a man 1.3 million dollars after he proved that police lied about his arrest. The story is begins when the man’s sun called the police because he was angry about be grounded and claimed his father was drunk and waving around a gun. The police came and arrested him, beating him up in the process, and then claimed that he had attacked them. The man was looking at a lengthy prison sentence (the evidence was incontrovertible, 3 cops agreed the man had attacked them) for felony assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and aggravated assault with a firearm. Unfortunately for the tax payers in that county, the man had a security camera that showed that everything the police claimed was a lie.
As far as I can tell, the officers were never charged with perjury or otherwise punished. Their 5 minutes of lying could have resulted in up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine as assaulting a police officer is a 3rd degree felony in Texas, yet there seems to be no consequences for the officers, only the taxpayers. I wonder how often this kind of shit happens. I also wonder what happened to the son…
Really sad to watch; one of the boys is crying and they are all scared. One is begging the cops not to shoot him and states he doesn’t want to die. I will let you guess the race of the kids.
The police were searching for two adolescents that were in a fight earlier, one of which reportedly displayed a gun. The reports were unconfirmed by any other witnesses. No shootings had occurred. Nobody had come forward claiming to be assaulted. Just a guy called the cops and said he saw two teenagers fighting and one had a gun. This was enough for the police to justify pointing guns on any kids they saw in the neighborhood while they made them drop to their faces. The only thing the police had to go on was the color of their clothing. Cops are too scared.
They’ve arrested a guy who created a parody Twitter account making fun of the police. They claim that he is “impersonating a police officer”, a felony. If Leslie Nielsen were alive he could be sharing that cell.
In 2014 a guy was arrested over a parody Twitter account aimed at the mayor of Peoria, Illinois. It cost Peoria $125,000 to apologize to the guy. Hope the dude in Miami gets at least that much.