The Day Ferguson Cops Were Caught in a Bloody Lie

Walter Scott Was Not the Only One—North Charleston Police Have Stunning Record of Abuse

Horrific tales of brutality towards black citizens are shockingly easy to find.
By Jeff Stein / Salon
April 9, 2015



Sheldon Williams was sleeping at a Budget Inn in North Charleston, South Carolina, when five police officers entered his motel room. After finding Williams hiding under a mattress, the officers pinned the unarmed man to the concrete floor, handcuffed him, and then began stomping on his face. Williams, an African-American, was unarmed and never accused of resisting arrest.
Williams would later be diagnosed with several broken facial bones, but the five officers first brought him to the jail. Jail officials had to turn Williams away because of the severity of his injuries. More than two hours after he was beaten, Williams finally arrived at the Roper St. Francis Hospital and was diagnosed with a fracture to his cheekbone, a depressed fracture to the left orbital floor of his face, and a third fracture of the left sinus wall.

When Williams was released, the hospital staff gave law enforcement explicit instructions that he would have to see a special surgeon within one week. That information was somehow ignored, and Williams’ broken facial bones were never treated. Needless and agonizing pain followed: Williams now struggles to sleep at night and faces long-term neurological damage. Sometimes, because of the extent of the nerve damage, Williams “experiences a sensation of insects crawling on the left side of his face.”

The above account comes from just one of the many federal lawsuits filed against the North Charleston Police Department over the last 10 years. That police force is now under the national spotlight for the outrageous slaying of Walter L. Scott, an unarmed black man who was gunned down as he was running away from police, according to a report in the New York Times. North Charleston Police Officer Michael T. Slager, who is white, was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video emerged showing the shooting and its aftermath in excruciating detail.
It’s hardly surprising that Slager remained un-prosecuted prior to the release of the video: South Carolina police have fired on 209 suspects over the past five years, but only a few have been charged and none have ever been convicted, according to The State, a South Carolina newspaper.

The situation in North Charleston appears particularly bleak. Based on a review of public records, the North Charleston Police Department has been sued 46 times since 2000 in federal court alone. Many of the suits have been unsuccessful. Some were written by hand from jail and immediately thrown out. Others ran into trouble over evidentiary and procedural obstacles. Taken together, however, the legal documents present a stunning account of police brutality in North Charleston, where the population is 47 percent black but the police force is about 80 percent white, according to the Times.
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None of the officers accused of assaulting Williams in that motel room on Nov. 19, 2011, were fired, according to Chris Robertson, a member of Williams’ legal team: Officer J. Byrum, Officer J. Fogel, Officer Habersham, Officer K. Beckman and Sgt. Kruger were all still on the force as of about two months ago, and there’s no reason to believe that’s changed, Robertson said.

What follows are just a handful of the accusations of police brutality made against the North Charleston Police Department over the last 15 years, according to court records reviewed by Salon. (The department directed a request for comment to City Hall. A message to the city’s Public Information Office was not immediately returned.)

— September 2000 | North Charleston police break arm of woman upset about jail time

After she was convicted of possessing marijuana, Melissa Faith Gardner was sentenced by a judge in North Charleston to either pay a $373 fine or spend 30 days in jail. She didn’t have the money.

Gardner grew terribly upset and started “crying hysterically,” according to a lawsuit. In response, North Charleston Police Officer Timothy J. Blair reacted with “excessive force” and broke Gardner’s arm, according to the lawsuit.

“Blair did not break the plaintiff’s arm maliciously or with the intent to harm her, but broke her arm as a result of a willful, wanton, reckless, careless, negligent, and grossly negligent use of force,” the lawsuit said.

— November 2003 | Mentally ill man killed in disputed incident

On Nov. 7, 2003, North Charleston police shot and killed Asberry Wylder, a mentally ill shoplifting suspect.

A shocking federal complaint says police were warned that Wylder was mentally unstable. It says that Wylder was pepper-sprayed and beaten before being shot twice. Witnesses say that Wylder was shot after he was in handcuffs, according to newspaper reports at the time.

North Charleston Police Chief Jon Zumalt called witness reports “an absolute fabrication of what happened,” according to the Associated Press.

The case was decided in favor of the police department in 2007 and an appeal for a new trial was denied.

— December 2008 | Decorated soldier claims assault during traffic stop

Brian Yates, a U.S. soldier whose military awards included the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, sued the North Charleston Police Department in 2012. According to the Post and Courier, Yates was driving to pick up his wife and daughter in 2008 when he was pulled over by an officer. “Yates claimed the officer ordered him out of his car, twisted his arm, then deployed his stun gun onto Yates’ back,” the newspaper reported. “The officer stunned him three times, police and court records show.”

The case is still winding its way through the federal court system and is expected to go to trial in May.

— August 2011 | North Charleston police call woman “wetback,” then arrest her

At around midnight on Aug. 7, 2011, Evelyn DeVillegas was standing in the parking lot of the Market Street Saloon in North Charleston with her husband, brother and friends.

North Charleston police arrived, asked for DeVillegas’ ID and then arrested her. They told the U.S. Citizen that you “are probably a wetback, …I bet you’re not legal,” according to federal court records. She was held in jail and forced to pay $485 to be released.

DeVillegas sued the police department in federal court in August 2013. Law enforcement disputed the claims and said the officers had “acted reasonably and in good faith.” The claims against the North Charleston Police Department, City of North Charleston, and County of Charleston were dropped toward the end of 2014.

— December 2011 | KFC trip leads to arrest, beating

After going through the drive-through at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Robert Wayne Bishop drove down Rivers Avenue in North Charleston before being pulled over. The officer told Bishop that “he was stopped randomly because he was driving through a high drug trafficking area,” according to federal court documents, and was ordered out of the vehicle.

Bishop was then pushed “face-first” onto the pavement, had the officer’s knees pushed into his neck and was dragged by his feet, according to records submitted by Bishop’s attorney.

“Another North Charleston Police Officer, Daniele, arrived on the scene with his canine and allowed the dog to ‘nip’ at Plaintiff, who sat in the road while handcuffed and bleeding from his nose and face,” the lawsuit states.

“As a result of the force … Plaintiff suffered a broken nose, a broken tooth, and a lacerated lip, all of which required surgery.”

The police officer had a different memory of the events, telling officials instead that Bishop had resisted arrest.

The case was dismissed in April 2013.

As has been said previously, there's a culture at work here, that's what needs to change. If the book is thrown at Scott, as the one who was caught out, but the culture stays the same, this will just go on and on.

Absolutely true.

Read this one!


Unlike Walter Scott's Horrific Killing, Deaths By Police Are Rarely Recorded -- They're Not Even Counted by the Government

Through his crowdsourced site, FatalEncounters, D. Brian Burghart hopes to count and ultimately reduce deaths caused by police.
By Don Hazen, D. Brian Burghart / AlterNet
April 7, 2015

Print
Comments

It's not easy to watch the video of Walter Scott running from officer Michael T. Slager, as Slager pumps not one, not two, but eight shots into his back. It's an unspeakable horror. But the existence of that video also means that Scott may be one of the few victims of police brutality whose attacker could face justice. Slager has been fired, and charged with murder.

But most violent encounters with police, including killings, are not recorded on video. In fact, they are not even tracked by the government. It seems incomprehensible that with all the data that is collected about Americans, there is no official count of the number of people killed by the nation’s law enforcement officers—let alone the reasons they were killed. D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the alternative weekly, Reno News & Review, is hard at work trying to rectify that. His FatalEncounters.org is a project that uses crowd-sourcing and media accounts to create a national database of people who are killed through interactions with police.

AlterNet's executive editor, Don Hazen, interviewed Burghart via email about the shocking necessity for this project and what Burghart hopes to accomplish.

Don Hazen: Why did you start Fatal Encounters?

D. Brian Burghart: I started the project because there is no adequate database by which citizens, researchers or law enforcement can track trends in officer-involved homicides across regions or time. Frankly, our government knows who I call on my cell phone, who I email, and probably even the contents of those calls and emails. The fact that it hasn’t kept track of the names of the people it kills and the circumstances under which it killed them is beyond my comprehension.

DH: Why is there no national database of homicides caused by law enforcement?

DBB: I don’t know the answer to that question, although I’ve thought about it for years. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act mandated “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers,” and to publish an annual report, but it’s been ignored for 20 years and across administrations. In December of last year, Congress passed, and Obama signed the Death in Custody Reporting Act. It wasn’t very effective when it was last authorized 2002-2006, but maybe the political will to make it work has changed. We’ll see.

I’m kind of a cynic, but I think a lot of people will hope to sweep under the rug the discussion this country has been having about race when there’s a new president and a new attorney general.

DH: How many sources do you monitor? What can you share about your methodology?

DBB: We really only “monitor” the Internet. When we find a big source, for example, if a newspaper has done its city’s officer-involved homicides for the last decade, we’ll incorporate that. For a few states, there were central locations, like attorneys general websites, for the results of officer-involved homicide investigations, and we got those in. Sometimes reporters will send me their datasets. There are groups like Copwatch that keep an eye on this kind of stuff, but it’s pretty spotty. We get many of our current day-to-day links from KilledbyPolice on Facebook, which tracks officer-involved homicides on a daily basis.
ADVERTISEMENT

Our general procedure goes like this: We have our development queue. This is just partial information we scraped off the web, including sources like the FBI. Anyone who wants to volunteer a few minutes can research an incident, and send it to fact-checking, using this web form.

From there, it goes to the main spreadsheet, where the new records get scraped off once a day or so and moved to the fact-check queue (the bottom spreadsheet) where I or another editor checks them against published accounts. These records are then moved back onto the main spreadsheet, given a unique identifier and uploaded into the database.

Sometimes people follow this procedure; sometimes they upload new incidents that aren’t in the development queue. If I receive a big dataset, I will build a separate spreadsheet and ask a volunteer to focus on it. We’ve done more than 2,000 public records requests so far.

DH: How many people have submitted new information? How reliable have you found these submissions to be?

DBB: More than 1,000, probably. One reason I can’t say precisely is because we allow people to post anonymously, otherwise, they wouldn’t submit. Many contribute because they’re afraid of the police so they don’t want their names attached. Accuracy, as opposed to reliability, has run the gamut. People aren’t generally professional researchers or journalists, so they’ll often get things wrong. We check against published accounts, but that’s no guarantee of accuracy either. Media bias, reporter experience, lots of things can affect how accurate the information is.

Our ultimate plan is to make public records requests for every law enforcement agency in the U.S., but those are also rife with errors, things like whether an address is a street or an avenue. It’s pretty amazing, really. As the submit form was refined, data got more and more accurate, but crowdsourcing is always going to be problematic. That’s why we have editors.

DH: Have you reached out to government agencies to help get data for Fatal Encounters? What was their response?

DBB: I’ve done many public records requests at the federal level and in several states. The responses have covered the gamut, from sending the information without comment or delay, to a delayed response to the request in such a way as to make the information useless, to outright refusal to obey public records laws and challenging me to sue for the information to which every American is entitled.

DH: Even if you could correctly identify every police homicide, how would this information help people? How would this data help us police the police?

DBB: I believe that being able to see outcomes over time and across regions will help Americans to identify agencies and policies that get better or worse outcomes in their interactions between police and the rest of us. We’ll be able to see trends like whether people of various races are killed at a rate that’s greater or less than the population. Also, comparing this data to other giant data sources, we’ll be able to research whether veterans are killed at a high rate. We’ll be able to see the effects of poverty on policing and officer-involved homicides. We’ll be able to see which communities kill mentally ill people, and at what rates. We’ll be able to see if communities where police kill more people have more people killing police. With this information, police will be able to look at crime rates and other factors to determine the policies that work in other communities to get the best outcomes for both police and citizens.

Most fundamentally, we’ll know the numbers of officer-involved homicides in our own communities, so we’ll know whether our own communities have particular problems, and whether we as citizens need to change things.

DH: What, in your opinion, would make a homicide by police “justified”?

DBB: Every human being has the right to defend themselves. I’ve looked at thousands of these things now, and most are clearly self-defense. I just don’t think there should be any officer-involved homicides that don’t get a full public scrutiny. These are public employees paid with tax dollars. This is how we are supposed to manage our government personnel in this country.

DH: Looking at your site, it looks like homicides skyrocketed in recent years. Why is that?

DBB: While I believe police homicides are increasing, we don’t have the data to prove that yet. Our data makes it look like they skyrocketed in recent years, but that’s just because we haven’t begun the systematic day-by-day searches beginning in 2000, yet. Part of the apparent increase is because of the growth of the Internet, which means we have access to more information each year progressing from 2000. Part of that is because in the early 2000s, digital memory was expensive, so media outlets routinely purged their archives. Also, because of the crowdsourced aspect, people tend to remember the more recent homicides, so they are more likely to report those.

We have 12 states we believe are “complete”: Montana, South Dakota, Oregon, New York, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. (Florida is within a week or so of completion.) I say “complete” because no matter how complete we think it is, there are homicides that are not reported either in the media or in public records requests, and they’ll crop up from time to time. For example, Las Vegas police reported a homicide to the Wall Street Journal that they did not report to me. I don’t know which it was, because the WSJ just did raw numbers, but we’ll eventually get it.

DH: Of the data you have collected so far, are there any trends you can extrapolate from it? Is there anything that has shocked you? Is there one specific area of the country where police homicides are most prevalent?

DBB: I always hesitate to try to extrapolate except in states for which we have “complete” data. This project, the public face of it anyway, has only been going since March. We estimate we’ve only collected 30 percent of the data. Here’s what can be said, though. People of color are killed at greater rates than they exist in the population. Mentally ill people are a high percentage, maybe 25-30 percent, of the people killed by police, particularly when you consider that drug abuse is considered a mental illness. Most people, around 96 percent, of people killed by police are men.

It sure looks like law enforcement in the western states kill more people per capita than eastern ones, but as Florida progresses, I may have to reassess that statement.

Some other trends that become apparent aren’t even in the data. One thing that becomes obvious is how lazy the mainstream media is. For example, the race of victims and police are often not reported by media. The media gutlessly lets police withhold names of people they’ve killed on the thinnest of rationales. Media rarely get photos of victims from families, so often the only publicly available image is a mug shot, which of course, works to support the narrative that the person killed is a career criminal.

The official dispositions of officer-involved homicides are rarely reported. Again, it seems as though the media just assumes if an officer killed somebody, it’s justified, but that creates a de facto collusion to tell the law enforcement story, but not another side.

DH: What does it say about the state of law enforcement in America that a project like yours is even necessary?

DBB: Honestly, I don’t think it says that much about law enforcement, but more about government. These numbers are tracked in most developed countries. My feeling is, just as with other data, if the government collected this data, law enforcement would use it to modify policies and procedures.

Law enforcement doesn’t like to kill people, and some of my reporting in the Reno News & Review has shown that officers almost always have severe psychological and emotional trauma when they kill somebody in the line of duty.

DH: What do you need from people to take Fatal Encounters further? How can people reading this article help?

DBB: Like everything, it comes down to time and money. The government ignored the need to comprehensively collect this information for a very long time, and there’s a lot of data to collect. We have an army of volunteers out there, helping with data entry, helping with a redesign of the site, doing visualizations, doing research with the data. People can donate money to the 501(c)3 on the website. People can research and submit information here.

DH: Anything else you think readers should know about the database and your work?

DBB: I think the biggest thing that people should know is that we’ve only just begun. Assuming we continue at the rate we’ve gone for the last year, as of April 1, we expect to require 100 more weeks to complete the “media reports” portion of the database. The public records portion is being done concurrently, but it’s much more expensive and time consuming. The more data that goes into the database, the more accurate it is, and the more we can do with it.

It won’t be very long before we can compare what we have to other big datasets, like the U.S. Census data, to see the racial makeup or socio-economic characteristics of areas where people are killed. We’ll be able to do overlays with GPS coordinates to see how every law enforcement agency is performing in this particular area. We’ll be able to check names against Veteran’s Administration roles to see rates at which veterans are killed by police (and I’m pretty sure we’re going to find out it’s much higher than the general population rates).

In less than two years, we’ll be able to see what agencies get the best outcomes using what policies, and when the best policies are in place, we’ll have fewer police killed by criminals and fewer individuals killed by police, which is the whole purpose of this thing.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet
Unlike Walter Scott's Horrific Killing, Deaths By Police Are Rarely Recorded -- They're Not Even Counted by the Government
Through his crowdsourced site, FatalEncounters, D. Brian Burghart hopes to count and ultimately reduce deaths caused by police.
By Don Hazen, D. Brian Burghart / AlterNet
April 7, 2015

Print
Comments

It's not easy to watch the video of Walter Scott running from officer Michael T. Slager, as Slager pumps not one, not two, but eight shots into his back. It's an unspeakable horror. But the existence of that video also means that Scott may be one of the few victims of police brutality whose attacker could face justice. Slager has been fired, and charged with murder.

But most violent encounters with police, including killings, are not recorded on video. In fact, they are not even tracked by the government. It seems incomprehensible that with all the data that is collected about Americans, there is no official count of the number of people killed by the nation’s law enforcement officers—let alone the reasons they were killed. D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the alternative weekly, Reno News & Review, is hard at work trying to rectify that. His FatalEncounters.org is a project that uses crowd-sourcing and media accounts to create a national database of people who are killed through interactions with police.

AlterNet's executive editor, Don Hazen, interviewed Burghart via email about the shocking necessity for this project and what Burghart hopes to accomplish.

Don Hazen: Why did you start Fatal Encounters?

D. Brian Burghart: I started the project because there is no adequate database by which citizens, researchers or law enforcement can track trends in officer-involved homicides across regions or time. Frankly, our government knows who I call on my cell phone, who I email, and probably even the contents of those calls and emails. The fact that it hasn’t kept track of the names of the people it kills and the circumstances under which it killed them is beyond my comprehension.

DH: Why is there no national database of homicides caused by law enforcement?

DBB: I don’t know the answer to that question, although I’ve thought about it for years. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act mandated “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers,” and to publish an annual report, but it’s been ignored for 20 years and across administrations. In December of last year, Congress passed, and Obama signed the Death in Custody Reporting Act. It wasn’t very effective when it was last authorized 2002-2006, but maybe the political will to make it work has changed. We’ll see.

I’m kind of a cynic, but I think a lot of people will hope to sweep under the rug the discussion this country has been having about race when there’s a new president and a new attorney general.

DH: How many sources do you monitor? What can you share about your methodology?

DBB: We really only “monitor” the Internet. When we find a big source, for example, if a newspaper has done its city’s officer-involved homicides for the last decade, we’ll incorporate that. For a few states, there were central locations, like attorneys general websites, for the results of officer-involved homicide investigations, and we got those in. Sometimes reporters will send me their datasets. There are groups like Copwatch that keep an eye on this kind of stuff, but it’s pretty spotty. We get many of our current day-to-day links from KilledbyPolice on Facebook, which tracks officer-involved homicides on a daily basis.
ADVERTISEMENT

Our general procedure goes like this: We have our development queue. This is just partial information we scraped off the web, including sources like the FBI. Anyone who wants to volunteer a few minutes can research an incident, and send it to fact-checking, using this web form.

From there, it goes to the main spreadsheet, where the new records get scraped off once a day or so and moved to the fact-check queue (the bottom spreadsheet) where I or another editor checks them against published accounts. These records are then moved back onto the main spreadsheet, given a unique identifier and uploaded into the database.

Sometimes people follow this procedure; sometimes they upload new incidents that aren’t in the development queue. If I receive a big dataset, I will build a separate spreadsheet and ask a volunteer to focus on it. We’ve done more than 2,000 public records requests so far.

DH: How many people have submitted new information? How reliable have you found these submissions to be?

DBB: More than 1,000, probably. One reason I can’t say precisely is because we allow people to post anonymously, otherwise, they wouldn’t submit. Many contribute because they’re afraid of the police so they don’t want their names attached. Accuracy, as opposed to reliability, has run the gamut. People aren’t generally professional researchers or journalists, so they’ll often get things wrong. We check against published accounts, but that’s no guarantee of accuracy either. Media bias, reporter experience, lots of things can affect how accurate the information is.

Our ultimate plan is to make public records requests for every law enforcement agency in the U.S., but those are also rife with errors, things like whether an address is a street or an avenue. It’s pretty amazing, really. As the submit form was refined, data got more and more accurate, but crowdsourcing is always going to be problematic. That’s why we have editors.

DH: Have you reached out to government agencies to help get data for Fatal Encounters? What was their response?

DBB: I’ve done many public records requests at the federal level and in several states. The responses have covered the gamut, from sending the information without comment or delay, to a delayed response to the request in such a way as to make the information useless, to outright refusal to obey public records laws and challenging me to sue for the information to which every American is entitled.

DH: Even if you could correctly identify every police homicide, how would this information help people? How would this data help us police the police?

DBB: I believe that being able to see outcomes over time and across regions will help Americans to identify agencies and policies that get better or worse outcomes in their interactions between police and the rest of us. We’ll be able to see trends like whether people of various races are killed at a rate that’s greater or less than the population. Also, comparing this data to other giant data sources, we’ll be able to research whether veterans are killed at a high rate. We’ll be able to see the effects of poverty on policing and officer-involved homicides. We’ll be able to see which communities kill mentally ill people, and at what rates. We’ll be able to see if communities where police kill more people have more people killing police. With this information, police will be able to look at crime rates and other factors to determine the policies that work in other communities to get the best outcomes for both police and citizens.

Most fundamentally, we’ll know the numbers of officer-involved homicides in our own communities, so we’ll know whether our own communities have particular problems, and whether we as citizens need to change things.

DH: What, in your opinion, would make a homicide by police “justified”?

DBB: Every human being has the right to defend themselves. I’ve looked at thousands of these things now, and most are clearly self-defense. I just don’t think there should be any officer-involved homicides that don’t get a full public scrutiny. These are public employees paid with tax dollars. This is how we are supposed to manage our government personnel in this country.

DH: Looking at your site, it looks like homicides skyrocketed in recent years. Why is that?

DBB: While I believe police homicides are increasing, we don’t have the data to prove that yet. Our data makes it look like they skyrocketed in recent years, but that’s just because we haven’t begun the systematic day-by-day searches beginning in 2000, yet. Part of the apparent increase is because of the growth of the Internet, which means we have access to more information each year progressing from 2000. Part of that is because in the early 2000s, digital memory was expensive, so media outlets routinely purged their archives. Also, because of the crowdsourced aspect, people tend to remember the more recent homicides, so they are more likely to report those.

We have 12 states we believe are “complete”: Montana, South Dakota, Oregon, New York, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. (Florida is within a week or so of completion.) I say “complete” because no matter how complete we think it is, there are homicides that are not reported either in the media or in public records requests, and they’ll crop up from time to time. For example, Las Vegas police reported a homicide to the Wall Street Journal that they did not report to me. I don’t know which it was, because the WSJ just did raw numbers, but we’ll eventually get it.

DH: Of the data you have collected so far, are there any trends you can extrapolate from it? Is there anything that has shocked you? Is there one specific area of the country where police homicides are most prevalent?

DBB: I always hesitate to try to extrapolate except in states for which we have “complete” data. This project, the public face of it anyway, has only been going since March. We estimate we’ve only collected 30 percent of the data. Here’s what can be said, though. People of color are killed at greater rates than they exist in the population. Mentally ill people are a high percentage, maybe 25-30 percent, of the people killed by police, particularly when you consider that drug abuse is considered a mental illness. Most people, around 96 percent, of people killed by police are men.

It sure looks like law enforcement in the western states kill more people per capita than eastern ones, but as Florida progresses, I may have to reassess that statement.

Some other trends that become apparent aren’t even in the data. One thing that becomes obvious is how lazy the mainstream media is. For example, the race of victims and police are often not reported by media. The media gutlessly lets police withhold names of people they’ve killed on the thinnest of rationales. Media rarely get photos of victims from families, so often the only publicly available image is a mug shot, which of course, works to support the narrative that the person killed is a career criminal.

The official dispositions of officer-involved homicides are rarely reported. Again, it seems as though the media just assumes if an officer killed somebody, it’s justified, but that creates a de facto collusion to tell the law enforcement story, but not another side.

DH: What does it say about the state of law enforcement in America that a project like yours is even necessary?

DBB: Honestly, I don’t think it says that much about law enforcement, but more about government. These numbers are tracked in most developed countries. My feeling is, just as with other data, if the government collected this data, law enforcement would use it to modify policies and procedures.

Law enforcement doesn’t like to kill people, and some of my reporting in the Reno News & Review has shown that officers almost always have severe psychological and emotional trauma when they kill somebody in the line of duty.

DH: What do you need from people to take Fatal Encounters further? How can people reading this article help?

DBB: Like everything, it comes down to time and money. The government ignored the need to comprehensively collect this information for a very long time, and there’s a lot of data to collect. We have an army of volunteers out there, helping with data entry, helping with a redesign of the site, doing visualizations, doing research with the data. People can donate money to the 501(c)3 on the website. People can research and submit information here.

DH: Anything else you think readers should know about the database and your work?

DBB: I think the biggest thing that people should know is that we’ve only just begun. Assuming we continue at the rate we’ve gone for the last year, as of April 1, we expect to require 100 more weeks to complete the “media reports” portion of the database. The public records portion is being done concurrently, but it’s much more expensive and time consuming. The more data that goes into the database, the more accurate it is, and the more we can do with it.

It won’t be very long before we can compare what we have to other big datasets, like the U.S. Census data, to see the racial makeup or socio-economic characteristics of areas where people are killed. We’ll be able to do overlays with GPS coordinates to see how every law enforcement agency is performing in this particular area. We’ll be able to check names against Veteran’s Administration roles to see rates at which veterans are killed by police (and I’m pretty sure we’re going to find out it’s much higher than the general population rates).

In less than two years, we’ll be able to see what agencies get the best outcomes using what policies, and when the best policies are in place, we’ll have fewer police killed by criminals and fewer individuals killed by police, which is the whole purpose of this thing.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet

State Puts Innocent Man on Death Row for 30 Years, Admits Error, Then Refuses to Pay a Cent in Compensation


In many states, exonerated inmates face an uphill (or impossible) battle when seeking compensation.
By Aaron Cantú / AlterNet
April 9, 2015


Hours after Shreveport, Louisiana prosecutor Marty Stroud persuaded a jury to sentence Glenn Ford to death in 1984, he went out to celebrate, toasting his success with other revelers from his office. Ford, meanwhile, was about to be shipped off to prison for the next 30 years, many of them spent in solitary confinement. Three decades later, Ford was released following a 2003 DNA test confirming his innocence. But with only a few months to live because of lung cancer he developed in prison (which went undiagnosed until his release), Ford may as well have been sent to the gallows.

Ford gets by with meager benefits from the federal government, because the state of Louisiana has refused to provide him any restitution as his life draws to a close. This has weighed heavily on Marty Stroud, the prosecutor who has since become a vocal opponent of the death penalty. He wrote a letter to the Shreveport Times strongly condemning the death penalty, his arrogant younger self and the state, for its refusal to compensate Ford. “Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system that effectively destroyed his life. The audacity of the state's effort to deny Mr. Ford any compensation for the horrors he suffered in the name of Louisiana justice is appalling,” wrote Stroud.

Louisiana isn't the only state that fails to provide compensation for innocent people who spent years of their lives in prison.

Nationally, the system of restitution for exonerated inmates is a mess. At the end of 2014, 30 states had policies mandating payments for people wrongly convicted by the state; 20 states have no compensation laws, and exonerated inmates must either sue the state for money or lobby for an individual bill granting compensation. The states that do provide restitution vary widely in the amount of money they give, whether they offer other support (like job training) in addition to money, and the process of attaining the funds. Some states that offer compensation, including Florida, Missouri, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, also prohibit exonerees from pursuing civil suits against the state. Where lawsuits do occur, they're typically directed against the state, municipalities, and/or police departments, and can result in settlements of over a million dollars. But they're very difficult to win, according to the Innocence Project, a non-profit dedicated to freeing wrongly convicted prisoners.
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This patchwork system is mostly a result of how relatively new the concept of exonerations in the criminal justice system is. Waves of prisoners have been exonerated since crime labs began using DNA tests in the 1990s, and in recent years exonerations have progressed more rapidly: A record 125 defendants had their convictions overturned last year, up one-third from 2012. The majority of 2014's exonerations did not result from DNA testing, but from a new type of oversight committee materializing in district attorney's offices across the country known as Conviction Integrity Units (CIU), which review old cases involving innocence claims by inmates.

Even with CIUs and DNA tests, it is still incredibly difficult to overturn convictions. That's because the process is designed to make convictions ironclad, says Gordon Rahn, who chairs the University of New Mexico School of Law’s Innocence and Justice Project.

“We tell our students that procedural and constitutional rules are for the benefit of the defendant, but once convicted, all the rules change,” he told AlterNet. “It's all about protecting the conviction, the burden completely shifts, and it is uphill the whole way.”

That battle continues as released prisoners fight a state loathe to admit any wrongdoing. Glenn Ford, who only wanted to leave his family with something after he's gone, will likely not get a cent from the state of Lousiana.

Here's a snapshot of six states with no statutes for restitution.

Georgia: In Georgia, exonerated former prisoners have to petition for individual bills granting compensation. Some have been successful; others have had to make due with non-monetary support (like job training) provided by groups like the Innocence Project.

Two men (Willie Williams and Clarence Harrison) have received around $1 million each in compensation for decades combined in prison. Often even this sum isn't enough to guarantee a viable life on the outside. As BuzzFeed reports, after a freak roadside accident, Harrison had to pay steep medical bills on top of mortgage payments and back taxes to the IRS. His accident also forced him to close the profitable laundromat he ran after his release. Worst of all, he was hoodwinked into giving most of his money to a company promising fast cash in exchange for future payouts of his annual innocence payments. Even with over $1 million and a successful business, Harrison ended up flat broke in just a few years.

Michigan: Michigan had a record seven exonerations last year, one of the highest in the nation, but there are no restitution laws on the books. There are men in Michigan who claim to be wrongfully imprisoned because of corruption within the Detroit Police Department's homicide division. If proven true in court, their potential release coupled with the accelerating pace of exonerations across the country makes the issue of restitution more salient than ever for Michigan.

“Nobody has obtained compensation for wrongful imprisonment from the state of Michigan because there is no compensation law,” says Samuel Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan and editor of the National Registry of Exoneration. “Some exonerees have received funds as a result of law suits against particular police officers, or police departments, or counties and cities,” he added, but pursuing any of these routes do not guarantee success.

Oregon: Three people were exonerated in Oregon last year, tying it with five other states for 6th highest number of exonerations nationwide. One man convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison was released after nine years; another young woman had a manslaughter conviction struck from her record (she was only sentenced to 100 hours of community service, but the conviction hung heavy on her life in other ways).

Steve Wax, the director of Oregon's Innocence Project, isn't sure whether the state will adopt a law mandating restitution in the future. “There may well be a proposal for compensation and assistance legislation in the next legislative session (2017). [We] would likely be involved in any such proposal.”

But exoneration-legislation may be gaining strength in Oregon: A few weeks ago, an exonerated former inmate testified before the state legislature for DNA testing for any relevant crime, not just murder and sex crimes.

Kentucky and New Mexico: When Gordon Rahm was director of the Innocence Project in Kentucky, state legislators told him it was unlikely that a law mandating restitution would ever pass in the conservative state. Yet during Rahm's 10 years there, he oversaw two multimillion payouts for two former prisoners, with the help of Innocence Project clinics outside the state.

He relocated to New Mexico, another state with no compensation laws, to direct the Innocence and Justice Program at the University of New Mexico School of Law. Rahn says he has not overseen any exonerations yet, and the state has not used DNA testing to set anybody free. He admits that until that bridge is crossed there probably will not be a statute: “Until we have an exoneration that we can kind of hang our hat on, trying to get some legislation passed in New Mexico won't happen. We're going to have to have an exoneration first.”

Arizona: Fifteen people have been exonerated in Arizona over the last two decades, but none have received any sort of compensation from the state, according to Katie Puzauskas, executive director of the Arizona Justice Project. Some have filed successful civil suits for compensation.

Puzauskas couldn't say how likely it was the state would adopt compensation laws in the future—it is, after all, a red state that seems to be growing redder. “The AZ Justice Project worked on a bill several years ago that was not passed by the legislature,” she told AlterNet. “We have talked recently about trying again and we may look to do something next session.”

Regardless, Puzauskas says, her organization helps exonerees in other ways: “The Project tries to assist its clients upon release with housing, identification, benefits, donations, rides, looking for employment, [and] referrals to other organizations.”
Aaron Cantú is an investigator for the Marijuana Arrest Research Project and an independent journalist based in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter @aaronmiguel_

Officer Loses It Online, Openly Calls for the Extermination of Black People

http://filmingcops.com/officer-loses-it-online-openly-calls-for-the-extermination-of-black-people/

Officer Aaron McNamara has resigned after he was caught making highly inflammatory violent and racist statements online.

The statements were alarming because they did not appear to be mere jokes — Officer McNamara literally called for the extermination of the black race, and expressed wishes to “beat the living **** out of” what he called “jungle monkeys” and “n****r.”...

While there, he was “regularly dropping racial and gay slurs, unambiguously expressing hatred toward minorities and anyone who dare not comply with police,” reports the Cleveland Scene.

This included him expressing a wish to “beat the living **** out of that n****r,” a comment that he left under a video of what appears to be a black child.

Prosecutors dismiss cases linked to racist ex-Fort Lauderdale cops

Racists texts, video lead to dismissal of charges in cases that cops made arrests
By Mike Clary and Tonya Alanez Sun Sentinel contact the reporters

Crime Howard Finkelstein

Nearly three dozen criminal cases dismissed, more to come, because of racist ex-Fort Lauderdale cops
Broward prosecutors are dismissing criminal cases associated with four racist ex-Fort Lauderdale cops

The latest fallout tied to four Fort Lauderdale police officers who lost their jobs because of racist text messages and a homemade video is the dismissal of nearly three dozen criminal cases the cops were linked to as arresting officers.

Nearly 20 more dismissals are in the works, prosecutors said. As of Thursday, the Broward State Attorney's Office had dropped 12 felony and 19 criminal misdemeanor cases and one juvenile case in which one or more of the four officers were involved.
Sherman Bynes
Sherman Bynes, 36, had his drug-possession case dropped last week by the Broward State Attorney's Office. He was arrested by fired Fort Lauderdale Officer Jason Holding. (Mike Clary/Sun Sentinel)

"All the defendants were black; all the cases were dropped because at least one of the officers was the principal officer involved in the arrest," said Ron Ishoy, a spokesman for the Broward State Attorney's Office. "This is a serious matter. We continue to review each case in which these former policemen were the principal officers involved in the arrest. We are dropping charges against the defendants where it is appropriate."

Among the dismissed felony charges are burglary, cocaine possession and aggravated assault with a firearm, Ishoy said.

Fort Lauderdale police declined to comment, agency spokeswoman Detective Tracy Figone said in an email.

At the conclusion of a five-month investigation into the racist video and a series of text messages laden with the N-word and other slurs, three officers were fired last month: Jason Holding, 31, James Wells, 30, and Christopher Sousa, 25. A fourth officer, Alex Alvarez, 22, resigned in January.

Alvarez made the video, a mock movie trailer titled "The Hoods," that depicted a doctored image of President Barack Obama wearing gold teeth, images of a Ku Klux Klan hood, and a police dog attacking a black man.
Four Lauderdale cops out after racist texts, video discovered
Four Lauderdale cops out after racist texts, video discovered

The text messages they exchanged ranged from "I'd have that noose ready" to "I had a wet dream that you two found those two n------ in the VW and gave them the death penalty right there on the spot."

One of the first felony cases to be dropped by prosecutors was Holding's March 2014 arrest of Sherman Bynes, 36, "a classic case of driving while black," said Gordon Weekes, a chief assistant in the Broward Public Defender's Office.

Bynes, who is black, was driving a new Kia owned by his employer — a rental car agency — when Holding pulled him over for rolling through a stop sign at Northwest 22nd Avenue and Eighth Street.
cComments

@Dispatcher5 Why would they, since the cops were white and displayed clear racial bias?
thelaziestape
at 12:41 PM April 10, 2015

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24

After calling for a police dog to search Bynes and the car, Holding said he found a baggie of marijuana in Bynes' pocket and 14 grams of marijuana, a digital scale and several small plastic bags in a backpack in the trunk. He also reported that Bynes was not wearing a seat belt.

Bynes was charged with possession with intent to sell cannabis and the traffic violations and taken to jail.
Racist cops could still get hired as police officers elsewhere in Florida
Racist cops could still get hired as police officers elsewhere in Florida

Bynes said that although Holding did not use racially offensive language during the stop, the officer "was extremely aggressive toward him in his demeanor," according to Bynes' lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Marissa Fallica.

"I believe the SAO was forced to drop Bynes' case because the initial stop was a classic case of driving while black," Weekes said in an email. "Holding's bias was insurmountable as he was clearly engaging in racially predatory policing that was consistent with his offensive text conversations."

In a March 20 news conference announcing the firings, Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Frank Adderley and Mayor Jack Seiler denounced the officers' behavior and invited the FBI's civil rights division to delve in.

Days later, Broward State Attorney Mike Satz said all cases involving the officers would be reviewed.

Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein said the officers were involved in 56 felony arrests of black and other minority suspects since Jan. 1, 2014.

The three fired officers — Holding, Wells and Sousa — are disputing their terminations and are fighting to regain their jobs. They have arbitration hearings scheduled for April 15.

Staff writer Erika Pesantes contributed to this report.

10 San Bernardino deputies placed on leave after beating caught on video

Pursuit end with suspect being punched by deputies

By Paloma Esquivel, Richard Winton and Veronica Rocha contact the reporters


San Bernardino sheriff's deputies repeatedly punch, kick man after pursuit, video shows
Mother of man beaten by deputies calls for lawmen to be fired
10 San Bernardino County deputies placed on leave following videotaped beating

Ten San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies were placed on paid administrative leave Friday after TV news video showed them beating and kicking a suspect.

Sheriff John McMahon announced the move to place the deputies -- including a sergeant and a detective -- on leave during a news conference Friday afternoon. He said some of the actions on the tape appeared "excessive."

“I am disturbed and troubled by what I see," he said. "It does not appear to be in line with our policies and procedures.”

He asked the public to have patience as the use-of-force case is being investigated. Since the video was released, the sheriff’s department has received numerous threatening phone calls, emails and posts on social media, he said.
Mother of beaten man

Anne Clemenson holds a photo of her son, Francis Pusok, who was beaten by San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies following a pursuit. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

McMahon said that while he could not say the deputies in the incident knew Pusok, those involved in the initial pursuit were familiar with him.

On a prior domestic call, McMahon said, Pusok “made threats to kill a deputy sheriff and in fact shot a puppy in front of part of his family."

In the video, captured Thursday afternoon by a KNBC-TV news helicopter, deputies can be seen kicking and punching Francis Pusok, 30, at the end of a horseback pursuit. The video appears to show the deputies striking him after he was on the ground with his hands behind his back.

The sheriff's department has said Pusok was the “prime suspect” in an identity theft case, a claim his girlfriend of more than 13 years, Jolene Binder, said "is not true."
lRelated
O.C. judge who gave child molester reduced sentence is asked to resign

L.A. Now
O.C. judge who gave child molester reduced sentence is asked to resign

See all related
8

In interviews Friday, Anne Clemenson, Pusock's mother, and Binder said they had not been able to see Pusok, who was being held at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga on suspicion of felony evading, theft of a horse, possessing stolen property and on a warrant for reckless driving.

Clemenson said she wanted the deputies involved to be fired.

"I want them done," she said. "I've always thought that police are to serve and protect and what they did ... it was not called for."

Pusok and Binder have three children and one on the way, Binder said.

"I feel like they're trying to paint a picture of him as a bad guy and deserving of it," she said. "He was jumped."

The sheriff has ordered an internal investigation into the pursuit and a separate criminal investigation into Pusok’s actions and those of the deputies who subdued him.
Francis Pusok

Francis Pusok was arrested by San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies. (San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department)

“It is disturbing and it appears on its face that there are violations of policy, but that will ultimately be determined in the investigation and to what degree,” he said.

Deputies are equipped with digital audio recorders, which will be reviewed by investigators along with video of the incident and interviews with witnesses, McMahon said.

“We’ll figure out exactly what happened and proceed from there whether there was criminal wrongdoing on the part of our deputies,” McMahon said.

Former Los Angeles police Capt. Greg Meyer, an expert on police use of force, described the video as “ugly.”

“This is a highly concerning video,” he said.
cComments

You can see only his right arm during most of the video and it is out to his side not behind his back as the article says. And the taser was an obvious failure, probably because of the jacket.
steelmelt
at 5:36 PM April 09, 2015

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369

Pusok had “obviously surrendered, followed commands to keep his hands behind his back -- that would be the time for the deputies to drop the knees on him and get him handcuffed,” Meyer said. “But it didn’t happen, and they will have to answer for the force they used on him.”

The chase began about 12:15 p.m. Thursday when deputies arrived at a home in unincorporated Apple Valley to serve a search warrant in an identity theft investigation, according to a statement from the sheriff's department.

But when deputies arrived at the home, Pusok was already in a car, sheriff's department spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said.

He fled, starting a nearly three-hour chase through Apple Valley and Hesperia, the department statement said. He led deputies through narrow trails and rugged terrain in Hesperia, requiring the California Highway Patrol and the sheriff’s department to bring helicopters and motorcycle teams to help track him, Bachman said.
I want them done. I've always thought that police are to serve and protect and what they did ... it was not called for. - Anne Clemenson, mother of suspect Francis Pusok, who wants deputies involved in her son's beating to be fired

After Pusok fled his vehicle, he stole a horse from a group of people at Deep Creek Hot Springs, Bachman said.

A team of deputies came upon him around 3 p.m. near Highway 173 and Arrowhead Lake Road, sheriff's officials said.

Deputies used a Taser on Pusok but it "was ineffective due to his loose clothing," according to the sheriff's department.

Pusok had his hands behind his back as he lay on the ground when two of the deputies began striking him, including a kick to the groin, according to the video. More deputies soon arrived, and the video shows one trying to get one of the original deputies to step away from Pusok, who was later taken to the hospital.

During the beating, which involved as many as 11 deputies and lasted for about two minutes, Pusok was kicked and kneed about a dozen times and punched more than two dozen times, according to the video.

Three deputies were also taken to the hospital; two were treated for dehydration and one was kicked by the horse, according to the sheriff's department.

Pusok’s previous brushes with the law span more than a decade through several counties in California, according to public records.

He pleaded no contest to felony attempted robbery in a 2006 incident as well as to several misdemeanor charges, including disturbing the peace and animal cruelty. In December, he was charged in San Bernardino County with a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest; he pleaded no contest.

But his girlfriend said his past doesn’t matter at this point.

"The focus" now, she said, "needs to be on what happened yesterday ... regardless of what happened in his past or anybody's past, they shouldn't be beat."

For breaking news in California, follow @MattHjourno and @LAcrimes
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times
UPDATES

2:09 p.m.: This post has been updated with remarks from McMahon about Pusok having allegedly shot a puppy in front of his family.

1:18 p.m.: This post has been updated with the announcement that 10 deputies have been placed on leave.

April 10, 11 a.m.: This article has been updated with comments with Pusok's mother and girlfriend.

9:50 p.m.: This article has been updated with additional details and comments from San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon.

5:49 p.m.: This article has been updated with a statement and incident details from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

This article was originally published at 5:15 p.m., April 9.

Get ready for a crime wave, the cops did what they were told to do and are now getting attacked. Morale is in the crapper. More and more they will refuse to put their life on the line for use, they will sit in their squad car eating donuts and coffee, then cash their paychecks.

Respect and dont challenge the agents of the state. Present your challenge to the state through proper legal channels if you should be arrested. THis is how it should be. THere are bad cops who need to be removed or reformed, but the duty of the citizen to obey must be front and center.

I was only following orders has never been an acceptable defense.

Broken window policing may or may not have been a good idea, using the police to aggressively collect revenue for the state was for sure not a good idea, but most cops have followed legal orders. And are now being condemned for it. Our politicians are the main problem, the ones who keep aggressively expanding the law books with vague laws and then demand that DA's constantly grab the biggest hammer that they can find to pound on the citizens. The ones who dont have the stones to tell the citizens that either expenses have to go down or taxes need to go up and instead tell the cops to hit the streets and look for people to collect revenue from either through fines or forfeiture are the problem.

The level of ignorance on this matter from "journalists" and from the public is astounding, even for me, one who has low expectations for both.

Police Just Shot Unarmed 17-Year-Old In the Back
http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/04/police-just-17-year-old-in-the-back/

Chicago area police officers just shot an unarmed 17-year-old boy in the back. Justus Howell was fatally shot by a Zion police officer on Sunday.

Police officials confirmed that Justus was shot in the back.

Witnesses suggest that police planted a gun on Justus, as they all say that he was completely unarmed at the time he was fleeing officers and when they shot him. Only after the fact did a gun “magically” appear at the crime scene.

Witnesses are unanimous in their agreement on this. There is not one person who saw the fatal shooting or the foot pursuit who claims that Justus was armed.

It was a mistake.

That’s the blasé explanation Oklahoma officials gave after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white deputy who accidentally pulled his gun when he meant to use his Taser.

The botched encounter was captured on a disturbing video released by police on Friday — nine days after the fatal Tulsa shooting.

“He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath,” Eric Harris says as he struggles on the ground following the April 2 shooting, which flew under the radar until video emerged a week later.

“F--- your breath,” a callous officer can be heard saying. “Shut the f--- up!”

MORE:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/video-shows-tulsa-man-shot-deputy-meant-stun-article-1.2181787


another video:
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=576444525791519

EricHarris: Another Black Man Shot & Killed By Police, Who Tell Him ‘F*ck Your Breath’

Before we can properly mourn the loss of the latest unarmed Black man being shot and killed by police (in this case: Walter Scott), our worlds are rocked by yet another graphic video displaying the final moments of unarmed Black man, Eric Harris’ life.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it’s being reported that after chasing Eric Harris down following a sting operation, police had him on the ground, restrained. And one of the officers yelled at Harris,“You shouldn’t have f—–g ran!” as Harris is held down by his neck and head.

The White officer who pulled the trigger, Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, 73 shouted, “Taser! Taser!” before pulling the trigger on his gun, firing a round into Harris. “I shot him!” the former policeman says, dropping his gun. “I’m sorry.”

So killing Harris was a mistake and that’s the excuse the police are running with? And what is a reserve deputy? This is the same position held by actor, Steven Seagal, who essentially volunteers his time in the line of duty. Reserves are duly sworn law enforcement personnel who have trained to serve in a Law Enforcement capacity but do so as a volunteer. Usually comprised of people who enjoy their current careers but are looking for additional ways to serve their local communities. So Bates is not a real officer, but for some reason was “on the clock,” given a gun and allowed to shoot it.

“He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath,” Eric Harris says as he struggles on the ground following the April 2 shooting, which flew under the radar until video emerged a week later.

“F— your breath,” a callous officer can be heard saying. “Shut the f— up!”

Eric Harris died about an hour after his violent interaction with the police. Reportedly, Harris was accosted by police after being caught trying to arrest him for selling a 9 mm. semiautomatic pistol and ammunition to undercover cops. Harris was unarmed at the time, but Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark claimed at a news conference that Harris was “absolutely a threat when going down.”

*snip*

http://hellobeautiful.com/2015/04/12/eric-harris-shot-and-killed-tulsa-oklahoma/


GRAPHIC VIDEO

Cop on Paid Leave After Allegedly Tickling Body of Man (unarmed) Killed by Police

Source: Mediaite



A California police officer has been placed on paid leave after he allegedly tickled and tampered with the dead body of a man who was shot and killed by police, according to the New York Daily News.

Lawyer Mark Geragos told the NYDN that the Bakersfield, California officer, Aaron Stringer, pulled on Ramiro James Villegas‘s toes and said “tickle tickle” while touching Villegas’s feet. He also allegedly told a trainee probationary officer that he “loved” to play with dead bodies, and tried opening Villegas’s mouth, according to KBAK.

“We are grossly disturbed by the ghoulish behavior of the police,” Geragos told the NYDN. “The family wants answers and accountability.”

The Bakersfield Californian newspaper published an internal report on Friday which detailed the allegations. Bakersfield Police Chief Greg Williamson called Stringer’s alleged comments “disturbing,” placing him on paid leave. According to that newspaper, the alleged incident occurred at a hospital as Villegas’s body was laying on a gurney.


Read more: http://www.mediaite.com/online/cop-on-paid-leave-after-allegedly-tickling-body-of-man-killed-by-police/

This is such a sad situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWEiQK3KcUI

Is there no vetting process for these police officers? There should be some kind of way to determine if police officers have weird fetishes or psychological problems before they inflict those problems on the unsuspecting public.