Ex-Kenosha officer admits planting evidence in homicide case
Source: WBAY-TV, ABC affiliate in Green Bay, WI
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) – Defense attorneys are crying foul after an ex-Kenosha police officer admitted he planted evidence in a homicide investigation.
The Kenosha News reports (http://bit.ly/1w2xBwl ) that Kyle Baars admitted during a homicide trial this week that he planted an ID and a bullet in a backpack seized in a search stemming from an investigation into a fatal robbery.
Baars resigned in January amid an internal investigation into his actions.
Read more:
http://wbay.com/2015/03/04/ex-kenosha-officer-admits-planting-evidence-in-homicide-case/
"Resigned" so he can get hired at some other cop shop that doesn't check into his background of planting evidence.
Bastard should be in jail himself.
They shoot Ponies don't they?..No seriously-Oregon Sheriff shoots beloved family pony
http://www.katu.com/news/local/Clackamas-County-family-says-sheriffs-deputy-shot-and-killed-beloved-pony-for-no-good-reason-294958641.html
This is horrendous & callous & just so wrong. He shoots a PONY-A freakin PONY and tells the family it was badly injured & had to be put down.
Vet examination shows Pony was in perfect health before he was shot.
I doubt I'd ever call the police unless I was being robbed & I'd still go for my 12 guage 1st.
Shooting a PONY-WTF is the Easter Bunny next?.
I hope the town fires this A-hole pos scumbag
8 horrifying revelations in the Justice Department’s Ferguson report
From unconstitutional searches to racist emails, here are some of the most revolting findings
Luke Brinker Follow
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Topics: Ferguson, U.S. Department of Justice, Race, Racism, Policing, fourth amendment, First Amendment, constitutional rights, Police brutality, News, Politics News
8 horrifying revelations in the Justice Department's Ferguson reportPolice officers guard as protesters react to the announcement of the grand jury decision, Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo. (Credit: AP/David Goldman)
The Justice Department released its full report on the Ferguson Police Department on Wednesday, seven months after Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed African American teen Michael Brown — an event which galvanized demonstrators against racial bias in policing and triggered the Justice Department’s probe. Though a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson and the Justice Department opted not to bring federal civil rights charges in the case, the department’s report makes clear that Wilson was part of a local law enforcement system tainted by racial bias, abuses of citizens’ constitutional rights, excessive use of force, and an over-reliance on fines and fees to generate revenue.
Such systemic injustices poisoned police-community relations in Ferguson, where 67 percent of the population is African American but the police force is 94 percent white. The Justice report depicts a law enforcement system in deep need of a overhaul — and offers a horrific look at how white supremacy functions in 21st-century America.
Below, Salon looks at eight of the most revolting revelations in the report.
1. Over-reliance on fines and fees for revenue — and pressure to generate more
For years, Ferguson has relied heavily on law enforcement fines and fees to keep city operations running, with the percentage of city revenues generated by such fees gradually increasing over time. In 2011, fines and fees collected by the municipal court accounted for $1.38 million of the city’s $11.07 million in general fund revenue, rising to $2.46 million by 2013. Last year, the city budgeted for the court to collect $2.63 million in revenue.
After sales taxes, traffic fines constitute Ferguson’s second-largest source of revenue. City officials made no secret of their desire to generate more revenue from stops and other law enforcement-imposed penalties, increasing the budgeting for court-generated revenue and stepping up pressure to impose tough penalties. In April 2014, for instance, the finance director of Ferguson wrote city officials to recommend an “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative” in order to “fill the revenue pipeline.”
The fees can be financially punishing for the city’s many poor residents, many of whom can’t afford to pay the burdensome penalties assessed on them — including $302 for a manner of walking violation, $427 for disturbing the peace, and $777 for resisting arrest.
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2. Disproportionate targeting of African Americans
While black people account for 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, they comprise 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations, and 93 percent of arrests.
Despite disproportionate targeting of African Americans for searches, the report found, police were actually more likely to find contraband on white people.
3. Baselessly accusing an African American man of pedophilia
In one summer 2012 case, an officer approached a 32-year-old black man cooling off in his car, on the grounds that his windows were more darkly tinted than city regulations allowed. But “[w]ithout cause,” the report states, the officer went on to accuse the man of being a pedophile; the officer would not allow the man to use his cell phone, subjected the man to a pat-down, and demanded that he be allowed to search the car. The man refused the latter request, prompting the officer to point his gun at him and arrest him.
The case fit a larger pattern of police conducting searches without probable cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
4. Arresting people for exercising their First Amendment rights
Despite federal court rulings that recording police activity is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment, an officer wrestled a 16-year-old African American boy for his cell phone after the teen recorded the officer’s traffic stop of his mother; more officers later arrived and arrested the boy, his mother, and his brother.
In another case, a man was arrested for failure to comply after attempting to record his traffic stop; the man had been pulled over on a tail light violation. Once the man was booked into jail, the officer told a jail official that the man was arrested because he “watches CNBC too much about his rights.”
5. Tasing a woman for not removing her bracelets
The report exposes widespread excessive use of electronic control weapons (ECWs) like tasers. In a 2010 case, a lieutenant used such a weapon in “drive-stun mode” against a Ferguson City Jail inmate who did not remove her bracelets after being asked to do so; the woman never posed any physical threat, the Justice inquiry states.
The case illustrated a larger problem plaguing the law enforcement system, where officers and their supervisors “seem to believe that any level of resistance justifies any level of force,” the report says.
6. Using canines to bite nonviolent civilians
Officers deployed canines against low-level, nonviolent offenders, including minors, according to the report. In December 2011, officers allowed a canine to bite an unarmed 14-year-old African American boy who was waiting at an abandoned property for his friends. Officers justified the arrest by stating that the boy had a committed a burglary — if anything, the boy had only trespassed, Justice finds — and asserting that the boy was hiding from officers and was warned that the dog would bite him if he continued to do so.
The boy says he never hid from officers and did not hear any such warnings.
7. Deploying violent force against the mentally impaired
While court rulings hold that an individual’s mental impairments must factor into use-of-force decisions, officers used violent force against mentally impaired people in a number of cases. In a notorious 2011 case, officers shot and killed a man who was running nude through Ferguson and pounding cars while proclaiming that he was Jesus; the man was schizophrenic.
Two years later, officers approached a “suspicious” man spotted running in public pushing around a shopping cart. The man, who was intellectually disabled, pulled away when officers patted him down. In response, “[t]he officers drive-stunned him in the side of the neck.”
8. Racist emails
Underscoring the deep-seated racial prejudices and bias that plagued the local law enforcement system, officials sent numerous racist emails over the years, the probe finds. An email written shortly after then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2008 election the presidency said that he would not last long in the Oval Office because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” Another email depicted the president as a chimpanzee, while others took digs at Michelle Obama and stereotyped racial minorities as shiftless welfare recipients.
“[E]ach of these email exchanges involved supervisors of FPD’s patrol and court operations,” the report states. “The racial animus and stereotypes expressed by these supervisors suggest that they are unlikely to hold an officer accountable for discriminatory conduct or to take any steps to discourage the development or perpetuation of racial stereotypes among officers.”
Luke Brinker is Salon's deputy politics editor. Follow him on Twitter at @LukeBrinker.
Rikers Island inmates save female prison guard from rape by fellow convict
EXCLUSIVE: Rikers Island inmates save prison guard from rape by fellow
A group of inmates rescued a female correction officer who was nearly raped by a hulking prisoner inside a locked vestibule on Rikers Island Saturday night, The Daily News has learned.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/exclusive-rikers-island-inmates-save-prison-guard-rape-article-1.2135187
The inmates helped responding correction officers frantically tear away Plexiglas on the outside of the bubble-like watch post inside the Anna M. Kross Center at 8:15 p.m., according to multiple sources.
A skinny inmate slipped inside the so-called “A station” bubble through the small crack and opened the security door. A team of inmates then took down the assailant, Raleek Young, 27, until other officers arrived.
During the attack, Young, who is 5-foot-9 and weighs 290 pounds, pulled down his pants and began masturbating while choking the officer, court records show.
.....
“I appreciate (them) helping a sister officer because that could have been their mother, wife or sister,” Seabrook said, noting 90% of the inmates “are there to do their time and go home.”
@bobsal u1553115,
Thanks for this uplifting news story, bobsal. It's nice to hear about people helping others. This also shows we shouldn't demonize all convicts.
@wmwcjr,
Thats my point. Its not all so all one way or another.
Whittier police officers sue, say they were forced to meet quotas
Source: LA Times
Six Whittier police officers are suing the city, saying they faced retaliation when they complained and refused to meet alleged ticket and arrest quotas.
Officers Jim Azpilicueta, Anthony Gonzalez, Mike Rosario, Nancy Ogle, Steve Johnson and Cpl. Joseph Rivera say they spoke out against the quotas, which they claim were imposed by the Whittier Police Department in 2008, according to a suit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The officers said their “careers have been materially and adversely affected, and irreparably harmed” by the city.
City Manager Jim Collier and Whittier police spokesman Officer John Scoggins declined to comment and said they had not seen the lawsuit.
Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-whittier-ticket-quotas-20150304-story.html
Yes, Black America Fears the Police. Here’s Why.
Shots were fired in Long Island, but there was no rush to call 911. It made perfect sense to ProPublica’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
ProPublica, March 4, 2015, 8:14 p.m.
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This story was co-published with Politico Magazine.
Last July 4, my family and I went to Long Island to celebrate the holiday with a friend and her family. After eating some barbecue, a group of us decided to take a walk along the ocean. The mood on the beach that day was festive. Music from a nearby party pulsed through the haze of sizzling meat. Lovers strolled hand in hand. Giggling children chased each other along the boardwalk.
Most of the foot traffic was heading in one direction, but then two teenage girls came toward us, moving stiffly against the flow, both of them looking nervously to their right. “He’s got a gun,” one of them said in a low voice.
I turned my gaze to follow theirs, and was clasping my 4-year-old daughter’s hand when a young man extended his arm and fired off multiple shots along the busy street running parallel to the boardwalk. Snatching my daughter up into my arms, I joined the throng of screaming revelers running away from the gunfire and toward the water.
The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.
“Someone was just shooting on the beach,” she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.
Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.
“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”
My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.
We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons.
As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks. It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed in the back of a squad car. Some of us knew of black professionals who’d had guns drawn on them for no reason.
This was before Michael Brown. Before police killed John Crawford III for carrying a BB gun in a Wal-Mart or shot down 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park. Before Akai Gurley was killed by an officer while walking in a dark staircase and before Eric Garner was choked to death upon suspicion of selling “loosies.” Without yet knowing those names, we all could go down a list of unarmed black people killed by law enforcement.
We feared what could happen if police came rushing into a group of people who, by virtue of our skin color, might be mistaken for suspects.
For those of you reading this who may not be black, or perhaps Latino, this is my chance to tell you that a substantial portion of your fellow citizens in the United States of America have little expectation of being treated fairly by the law or receiving justice. It’s possible this will come as a surprise to you. But to a very real extent, you have grown up in a different country than I have.
As Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, puts it, “White people, by and large, do not know what it is like to be occupied by a police force. They don’t understand it because it is not the type of policing they experience. Because they are treated like individuals, they believe that if ‘I am not breaking the law, I will never be abused.’”
We are not criminals because we are black. Nor are we somehow the only people in America who don’t want to live in safe neighborhoods. Yet many of us cannot fundamentally trust the people who are charged with keeping us and our communities safe.
As protest and revolt swept across the Missouri suburb of Ferguson and demonstrators staged die-ins and blocked highways and boulevards from Oakland to New York with chants of “Black lives matter,” many white Americans seemed shocked by the gaping divide between law enforcement and the black communities they are supposed to serve. It was no surprise to us. For black Americans, policing is “the most enduring aspect of the struggle for civil rights,” says Muhammad, a historian and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. “It has always been the mechanism for racial surveillance and control.”
In the South, police once did the dirty work of enforcing the racial caste system. The Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement were often indistinguishable. Black-and-white photographs of the era memorialize the way Southern police sicced German shepherds on civil rights protesters and peeled the skin off black children with the force of water hoses. Lawmen were also involved or implicated in untold numbers of beatings, killings and disappearances of black Southerners who forgot their place.
In the North, police worked to protect white spaces by containing and controlling the rising black population that had been propelled into the industrial belt during the Great Migration. It was not unusual for Northern police to join white mobs as they attacked black homeowners attempting to move into white neighborhoods, or black workers trying to take jobs reserved for white laborers. And yet they strictly enforced vagrancy laws, catch-alls that gave them wide discretion to stop, question and arrest black citizens at will.
Much has changed since then. Much has not.
Last Fourth of July, in a few short minutes as we adults watched the teenager among us talking to the police, we saw Hunter become a little more like us, her faith a little shaken, her place in the world a little less stable. Hunter, who is biracial and lives with her white mother in a heavily white area, had not been exposed to the policing many black Americans face. She was about to be.
On the phone, she could offer only the most generic of suspect descriptions, which apparently made the officer on the other end of the line suspicious. By way of explanation, Hunter told the officer she was just 16. The police called her back: once, twice, then three times, asking her for more information. The interactions began to feel menacing. “I’m not from here,” Hunter said. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
The fourth time the police called, she looked frightened. Her interrogator asked her, “Are you really trying to be helpful, or were you involved in this?” She turned to us, her voice aquiver. “Are they going to come get me?”
“See,” one of us said, trying to lighten the mood. “That’s why we don’t call them.”
We all laughed, but it was hollow.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, at front; with her friends Carla Murphy, left, and Monifa Bandele; and her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. (Ben Baker/Redux Pictures)
My friend Carla Murphy and I have talked about that day several times since then. We’ve turned it over in our minds and wondered whether, with the benefit of hindsight, we should have called 911.
Carla wasn’t born in the United States. She came here when she was 9, and back in her native Barbados, she didn’t give police much thought. That changed when she moved into heavily black Jamaica, Queens.
Carla said she constantly saw police, often white, stopping and harassing passersby, almost always black. “You see the cops all the time, but they do not speak to you. You see them talking to each other, but the only time you ever see them interact with someone is if they are jacking them up,” she said. “They are making a choice, and it says they don’t care about you, it tells you they are not here for your people or people who look like you.”
Carla herself was arrested at a young age—because she was present when her cousin pushed through a subway turnstile without paying. The teenagers were cuffed, thrown in a paddy wagon, booked and held overnight. At 15, Carla, then a student at The Dalton School, a prestigious private academy in Manhattan, had an arrest record.
That experience, along with many others, informed Carla’s decision on July 4.
“I am a responsible adult, but I really can’t see having a different reaction. Isn’t that weird?” she told me. “By calling the police, you are inviting this big system—that, frankly, doesn’t like you—into your life. Sometimes you call and it is not the help that comes.”
“So, no, I wouldn’t call the police,” she said. “Which is sad, because I want to be a good citizen.”
I moved to the historic Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2011. Before then, I had been living in Portland, Oregon, and when I chose my new home in the gritty big city, it was partly because it was only a block away from a police precinct. That proximity made me feel safer—I figured crime would be less common with so many police nearby. Inadvertently, however, I also picked a prime target area of the city’s stop-and-frisk program—a system of policing that caught so many innocent black and brown men in its dragnet that a federal judge found it unconstitutional in 2013.
My block is fairly typical of Bed-Stuy. My neighbors, until recently, were all black and included everyone from laborers to college professors. Both immaculately kept brownstones and boarded-up townhouses line my street. We have block meetings and a community garden. Police are a constant presence, speeding down the street to the precinct or walking the beat. Sometimes, I escort my daughter to the store underneath police watchtowers with tinted windows that pop up around the neighborhood with no warning, then disappear just as suddenly—their entire existence ambiguous yet alarming. I have witnessed from my window, countless times, police stopping someone, usually a young man, who is walking down the street. These men are often searched and questioned as they go to the bodega or head home from work or school.
A few months ago, a police officer approached my neighbor as he was leaving the bodega and began questioning him. My neighbor is quiet and respectful, but he also is poor and transient. He tends to look disheveled, but the worst thing I’ve seen him do is drink beer on the stoop.
When he asked why he was being stopped, the police grabbed him and threw him to the ground. As someone recorded the incident on a cellphone, police shot my neighbor with a Taser gun and then arrested him.
He was never told why police stopped him. The only thing they charged him with was resisting arrest. But this arrest cost him his job and a fine he will struggle to pay. If he doesn’t pay, a judge will issue a bench warrant, and instead of preventing crime, the police will have created a criminal.
Across the street and a few doors down from me, my neighbor Guthrie Ramsey has his own story. Guthrie was born in Chicago and grew up in a family that did not emphasize the obstacles their children would face. “I was socialized to believe that the police were our friends,” he said.
Yet one night, some years ago, while driving his teenage son to a soccer game, Guthrie was pulled over by police. Within minutes, he and his son were sprawled on the ground, with guns drawn on them. The police believed Guthrie fit the description of a suspect. Guthrie, a short, easy-going guy with a contagious laugh, managed to point the police to his University of Pennsylvania faculty ID. That’s right: He’s an Ivy League professor. And a noted musician.
“It was so frightening. It was humiliating. You get so humiliated that it’s hard to even get to the anger,” he told me. “You just don’t get to experience interactions with the police as a garden-variety circumstance.”
These types of stories in black communities are so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. If my husband is running very late and I cannot get hold of him, my mind does not immediately go to foul play. I wonder if he’s been detained.
This fear is not unjustified. Young black men today are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men. Still, it’s not that black Americans expect to die every time they encounter the police. Police killings are just the worst manifestations of countless slights and indignities that build until there’s an explosion.
Since 1935, nearly every so-called race riot in the United States—and there have been more than 100—has been sparked by a police incident, Muhammad says. This can be an act of brutality, or a senseless killing. But the underlying causes run much deeper. Police, because they interact in black communities every day, are often seen as the face of larger systems of inequality in the justice system, employment, education and housing.
In the months since Ferguson, many pundits have asserted that black Americans deserve this type of policing, that it is a consequence of their being more likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violent crime. “White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani argued on Meet the Press as the nation awaited the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown shooting. It should be noted that Giuliani oversaw the NYPD during two of the most notorious cases of police brutality in recent memory, the sodomy of Abner Louima and the death of Amadou Diallo, who was unarmed, in a hail of 41 bullets. Both were black men.
What Giuliani was saying, in essence, is that law-abiding citizens deserve to be treated with suspicion because they share racial traits with the tiny number among them who commit crimes.
Black communities want a good relationship with law enforcement because they want their families and property to be safe. After all, it is true that black communities often face higher rates of crime; in 2013, more than 50 percent of murder victims across the country were black, though only 13 percent of the total population is. But it’s also true that crime reduction efforts by black people in black communities have contributed to the recent, historic drop in crime across the country.
So why are black Americans still so often denied the same kind of smart policing that typically occurs in white communities, where police seem fully capable of discerning between law-abiding citizens and those committing crimes, and between crimes like turnstile-jumping and those that need serious intervention?
“You can be protected and served,” Muhammad says. “It happens every day in communities across America. It happens all the time in white communities where crime is happening.”
During the height of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, a mentally ill man shot and killed two police officers a few blocks from my home. I lay up that night thinking about those two men and their families. No one wants to see people killed. Not by police, not by anyone. The next morning, my husband and I took food and flowers to the grim brick precinct right around the corner from us that the officers were working out of when they were killed.
The officer at the front desk did not greet us when we came in. And he looked genuinely surprised by our offering, his face softening as he told us we didn’t have to do this, but thank you. That people who should be allies somehow felt like adversaries troubled me.
The next day, I drove by the precinct on my way to the store. It had been cordoned off with metal barricades. Two helmeted officers stood sentry out front, gripping big black assault rifles, and watching. The message felt clear.
They weren’t standing out there to protect the neighborhood. They were there to protect themselves from us.
Related coverage: For more of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work on race and inequality in the nation’s schools and neighborhoods, see School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones has covered civil rights and fair housing for ProPublica since 2011. Previously, she covered governmental issues, the census, and race and ethnicity at The Oregonian.
Follow @nhannahjones
Man Acquitted of Crime, Cops Still Take His Cash
Iowa State troopers can keep more than $30,000 in cash taken during a traffic stop, even though the owner was found not guilty, the Iowa Court of Appeals ruled last week.
In June 2012, Robert Pardee was riding in a car through Powesheik County, Iowa on I-80, when an Iowa State trooper pulled the driver over for a non-working taillight and tailgating. During the stop, state troopers found “a small amount of marijuana” and $33,100 in cash. Pardee was arrested and charged with possessing cannabis. In Iowa, first-time offenders can face up to six months in jail and/or $1,000 in fines.
One year later, a district court found him not guilty. As the criminal case proceeded against Pardee, the state also filed a civil forfeiture case against his seized cash. Despite his acquittal, first the district court and then the Iowa Court of Appeals ordered Pardee to forfeit his cash to the state.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2015/03/04/man-acquitted-of-crime-cops-still-take-his-cash/
