The Day Ferguson Cops Were Caught in a Bloody Lie

OMG, when does the torrent end.......

Why Does America Arrest So Many People — and How Can We Stop It?

Law professor Rachel Harmon asks if the costs of arresting people outweigh the benefits.

By Tana Ganeva / AlterNet
October 26, 2015


Last winter, New York City police officers inadvertently conducted a telling criminal justice experiment. In an act of apparent protest against Mayor Bill de Blasio and goaded on by police unions, rank-and-file cops began a work slowdown that resulted in a sharp drop in arrests. In one December week, overall arrests fell by 66 percent compared to the same period the year before.
Shop ▾

As many criminal justice activists pointed out at the time, a drop in arrests for low-level crimes is exactly the kind of police reform they were fighting for. Police Commissioner William Bratton was less enthused, pledging to deal with NYPD's work stoppage, "very forcefully.” But even the commissioner admitted that the slow-down, which mostly decreased arrests for low-level crimes like public drinking, did not result in a jump in serious crime. As the Daily Beast reported, some officers were all too happy to participate, since they didn't see busting drunk people for public urination as the stuff of heroic police work.
ADVERTISING


But thanks to decades of tough-on-crime rhetoric and the spread of the broken-windows theory, high rates of arrest for minor crimes are the norm nationwide. (And as many have pointed out, the race and class disparities for this kind or enforcement are staggering.)

In an essay published this month on the Social Science Research Network, law professor Rachel Harmon asks whether the costs of arrests might outweigh the benefits in all but the most extreme cases. Harmon notes that our current model causes immeasurable harm to arrestees, their families, communities—even police officers themselves. Given the risks and costs involved, even when everything goes according to plan and everyone conducts themselves in a manner consistent with the Constitution, arrest may not be the ideal way to deal with most common criminal activities.

AlterNet's Tana Ganeva spoke with Harmon about the invisible costs of arresting and jailing people, and the alternatives.

Tana Ganeva: What are the concrete harms and costs that arrests cause that people tend to overlook?

Rachel Harmon: For the person arrested, arrests can be frightening and humiliating. An arrestee loses income during the length of his (most arrestees are men) arrest, and perhaps his job, if he is fired for not showing up. He often pays arrest fees, booking fees, lawyers’ fees, and sometimes towing and storage fees for his car, if the arrest happened during a traffic stop. And he loses privacy: he will be searched, and so will the area around him when he is arrested. He will be booked, which includes being asked about his home address, his birth place, his medical history, and his psychological conditions. He will be photographed and fingerprinted; he may be strip-searched; and he may have his DNA taken and entered into the federal database.

In addition, of course, if an arrest does not go smoothly, an arrestee risks being injured or killed. Remember Eric Garner? He didn’t cooperate with police, but we know that often happens, so if we’re thinking from a welfare perspective about the costs and benefits of arrests, deaths that occur when people resist are costs that matter too.

I’m not talking about illegal arrests or circumstances where police use more force than the law allows. I’m talking about perfectly legal arrests by officers who are doing their job and following policy. As a matter of good public policy, we should take into account that the risks imposed by an arrest in a minor case may outweigh the benefit to the public. If a non-arrest measure, such as issuing a citation, is a viable alternative, it is hard to justify creating the risk of a violent confrontation.

Arrests also have longer term consequences. An arrestee’s family can be kicked out of public housing, he can lose custody of his kids, and he can be deported if he’s a non-citizen. Arrests also affect employment opportunities and income well into the future.

TG: What about the arrestee's family and community?

RH: Even if you are not sympathetic with the costs experienced by arrestees, it is worth remembering that families suffer too. An arrestee’s financial losses are also his children’s, both immediately and in the long run, and the losses aren’t just financial.

Harms to bystanders are less common, but they can be caught in the crossfire if a fight ensues, or injured during a high-speed chase to secure an arrest.

The effect of arrests on communities is more complicated. Some people feel safer if a lot of folks are arrested, but it makes others more fearful and alienated by the police. When people are uncomfortable with the police, they don’t call them when they are victims of crime, and they refuse to cooperate as witnesses, and that can make it harder for police to do their jobs.

Whatever people feel about arrests, arrests cost taxpayers a lot of officer time and money. An arrest can easily take five hours of officer time. Officers get paid around $30 an hour, not including overtime or the costs of overhead and benefits. More than 12 million arrests take place each year. That means in officer time alone—not jail costs, court costs, booking costs, or anything else—we are talking about spending nearly 60 million officer hours, which means something like $1.8 billion. If there are cheaper, non-arrest methods to achieve the same ends in some cases, it’s simply good policy to pursue them.

TG: You point out that arrests aren't even good for cops. How so?

RH: Arrestees are not the only ones injured and killed during arrests. In 2013, for example, nearly 20% of nearly 50,000 officers assaulted were injured attempting to arrest suspects. By contrast less than 10% were assaulted during traffic stops, a far more common activity. Moreover, when the frequency of arrests alienates communities, officers may suffer low morale and high stress.

TG: The opposing argument would be that these risks and bad outcomes on the individual level are worth it to maintain public safety. What would you say to that?

RH: Some arrests are important to public safety. If we think a dangerous suspect is likely to flee or hurt someone if he isn’t arrested, then arresting him helps protect us. But overwhelmingly, arrests aren’t like that.

Mostly, we arrest people in order to bring criminal charges or to stop them from doing something at the moment. They aren’t dangerous. If they are told to show up in court, they likely will, and if not, they can be often be easily found. Even if some people fall through the cracks, it seems like, all things considered, the world might be better off if we arrested fewer people. At least, we should seriously consider which arrests are necessary and which aren’t.

Right now, we default to arrest as a way to start the criminal process, and we put the decision to arrest in the hands of police departments and individual officers.

TG: So even when everything goes right —no one is hurt or killed, no one’s constitutional rights are too badly trampled—you argue that the arrest model is still not ideal. Why?

RH: Constitutional rights prohibit an arrest unless there is probable cause to believe that the person committed a crime. They prohibit the police from selecting a person for arrest because he is black or because of his national origin. And they prohibit a police officer from using unreasonable force to make an arrest. All of these protections are important.

But they fall far short of ensuring that we conduct arrests only when they are worthwhile. Arrests come with considerable costs. Our current practices reflect that fact to some extent. For example, officers generally issue traffic tickets for minor traffic offenses rather than conduct arrests, and some states don’t permit arrests for very minor offenses. But under current Supreme Court doctrine, it is constitutional for the police to conduct an arrest even for a trivial offense, such as failing to wear a seatbelt, even if the punishment for the crime is only a minor fine and even if the arrest is prohibited under state law.

Constitutional rights can only determine what police may not do. They don’t help us figure out what they should do under a wise policy. I wrote about that in an earlier article.

TG: What's the alternative?

RH: It depends what the purpose of the arrest is. If it is to start criminal charges, then police can often give someone a summons or citation demanding that he show up in court to answer charges. If we are worried that they might not show up, we can make it easier to do so. It turns out that many people fail to appear pursuant to a summons because they are sick or forgot the date rather than because they are attempting to avoid going to court. New York City is experimenting with robocalls and text message to help people remember.

Many arrests arise because of social problems, like homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness that really should be addressed before they become visible in disorder. But since that hasn’t yet happened, we should encourage officers confronting public disorder to use less intrusive alternatives to arrest: dropping someone off at a day shelter or giving them a ride home, or even a brief field detention to let someone calm down, is better in many cases than an arrest that will lead to a permanent criminal record.

The alternatives are tricky, and they have risks of their own. I worry that efforts to reduce arrests could backfire or exacerbate the unequal impact of law enforcement on minority communities. After all, tickets, fines and outstanding warrants for failure to appear can be as effective as arrest at reinforcing inequality and holding people down, as the Justice Department report on the use of these practices in Ferguson made clear. But arresting more 12 million people a year can’t be the best way to avoid loading people with fines they can’t pay or to deal with inequality.

TG: Most criminal justice reformers would agree that the broken windows model of policing, where people are busted for minor crimes like loitering or public urination, is not worth it. But you argue that arrest is not ideal even when it comes to more serious crimes.

RH: It isn’t that I think that we should never arrest people for serious crimes, but I think we could be a lot more discriminating. Consider that, even for felonies, most arrestees are released shortly after arrest either on their own recognizance or on bail. For serious crimes, those decisions are often made based on risk assessment tools that use criminal history and other factors to predict how likely it is that the person will fail to appear or commit a new crime before trial or a plea. I suggest in the essay that we should start developing similar tools for officers to use when they are making arrest decisions.

Impact Justice, a great new criminal justice non-profit in California, is exploring the feasibility of developing risk assessment tools along the lines I have suggested. With some work, we may be able to equip officers to make evidence-based decisions about when to avoid arrests.

Tana Ganeva is AlterNet's managing editor. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].

Is A2K flush with money these days and no one told me?

Has the NYPD Become a Paramilitary Force?

"I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh largest army in the world," former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted back in 2011.

Since that time, the New York Police Department has become even more militarized, practiced in command-and-control practices that Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale describes as "paramilitary policing."

The federalization and militarization of the NYPD following 9/11 created the model of paramilitary policing that's reshaping law enforcement throughout the country.

Vitale identifies these seven qualities as the principal aspects of the increasingly popular framework of paramilitary policing:

1.Surveillance and infiltration of nonviolent political organizations.
2.Denial of protest permits and tight restrictions on demonstration locations.
3.Heavy deployment and use of defensive equipment, such as body armor.
4.The use of 'less lethal' weapons on non-violent protestors.
5.Deployment of highly trained specialized police units to control demonstrations.
6.Preemptive arrests and targeting of protest leaders.
7.Coordination between local and federal law enforcement officials.

Other practices often accompanying paramilitary policing include the use of sophisticated cyber technologies, video surveillance and agents provocateurs.

More: Truthout

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33535-has-the-nypd-become-a-paramilitary-force

Worth the read.

Or is this rather a case of BOB deciding that he is entitled?

How Chicago Police 'Disappeared' 7,000 People in an Off-the-Books Interrogation Warehouse

Lawsuit exposes more detail what looks like a kind of paramilitary operation.
By Spencer Ackerman / The Guardian
October 19, 2015


Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
Shop ▾

From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.
ADVERTISING


The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules.”

The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone.” A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.

“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.”

According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable.

But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian."Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” said David Gaeger, an attorney whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 after being arrested for marijuana. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.”

The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist.

Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.

“The reality is, no one knows where that person is at Homan Square,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who studies policing. “They’re disappeared at that point.”

A Chicago police spokesman did not respond to a list of questions for this article, including why the department had doubled its initial arrest disclosures without an explanation for the lag. “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” the police claimed in a February statement.
Numbers are ‘hard to believe’

Twenty-two people have told the Guardian that Chicago police kept them at Homan Square for hours and even days. They describe pressure from officers to become informants, and all but two – both white – have said the police denied them phone calls to alert relatives or attorneys of their whereabouts.

Their accounts point to violations of police directives, which say police must “complete the booking process” regardless of their interest in interrogating a suspect and must also “allow the arrestee to make a reasonable number of telephone calls to an attorney, family member or friend”, usually within “the first hour” of detention.

The most recent disclosure of Homan Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit – but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional access to legal counsel.

82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population.
11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population.
5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population.
Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.

“Operating a massive, red-brick warehouse between two of the most crime-filled areas in the city of Chicago, equipped with floodlights, cameras, razor-wire – this near-paramilitary wing of the government that we’ve created, I would say that people who live close to it know what purpose it serves the most,” said the attorney Gaeger. “The demographics that surround it speak for themselves.”

Despite the lack of booking and minimal attorney access at Homan Square, it is not a facility for detaining and interrogating the most violent of Chicago’s criminals. Drug possession charges were eventually levied in 5,386 of the disclosed Homan Square arrests, or 74.9%; heroin accounted for 35.4% of those, with marijuana next at 22.3%.

The facility’s use by police has intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan Square.)

The 68 documented attorney visits are actually slightly higher, statistically speaking, than the extremely minimal legal access Chicago police provide suspects in custody during the initial stages of their arrest. The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations, according to First Defense Legal Aid, was 0.3%. On face value, the lawyer visit rate at Homan Square, according to the newly disclosed documents, was 0.9% over nearly 11 years.

But those documents do not tell the entire story of Homan Square. Chicago police have not disclosed any figures at all on people who were detained at Homan Square but never ultimately charged. Nor has it released any information about detentions or arrests before September 2004, claiming that information is burdensome to produce because it is not digital. (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995.)

“It’s hard to believe that 7,185 arrests is an accurate number of arrestees at Homan Square,” said the University of Chicago’s Futterman. “Even if it were true that less than 1% of Homan arrestees were given access to counsel, that would be abhorrent in and of itself.”
‘Try finding a phone number for Homan’

Chicago attorneys say they are not routinely turned away from police precinct houses, as they are at Homan Square. The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their attorneys.

“Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” said Gaeger. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”

The difficulty lawyers have in finding phone numbers for Homan Square mirrors the difficulties that arrestees at the warehouse have in making phone calls to the outside world. Futterman called the lack of phone access at Homan Square a critical problem. “They’re not given access to phones, and the CPD’s admitted this, until they get to lockup – but there’s no lockup at Homan Square,” he said. “How do you contact a lawyer? It’s not telepathy.

“Often,” Futterman continued, “prisoners aren’t entered into the central booking system until they’re being processed – which doesn’t occur at Homan Square. They’re supposed to begin that processing right away, under CPD procedures, and at Homan Square the reality is, that isn’t happening or is happening sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole find-your-client game.”

Additionally, some of those who Chicago police listed as receiving lawyer visits at Homan Square disputed the accounts or said the access provided was superficial.

According to police, when they took a woman the Guardian will identify as Chevoughn to Homan Square in May 2007 regarding a theft, they allowed her attorney to see her. Chevoughn says that never happened.

“I was there a very long time, maybe eight to 10 hours,” said Chevoughn, who remembered being “petrified”, particularly as police questioned her in what she calls a “cage”.

“I went to Harrison and Kedzie,” Chevoughn said, referring to the cross streets of central booking. “That’s where I slept. It’s where they did fingerprinting, all that crap. That’s when my attorney came.”

Police arrested another man, whom the Guardian will call Anthony, in 2006 on charges of starting a garbage fire, and moved him to Homan Square. Police identified him as receiving an attorney there. But Anthony told the Guardian: “That’s not true.”

Lawyer Rajeev Bajaj was allowed into Homan Square to see one of his clients in 2006. Police stopped Bajaj from entering for approximately an hour, and by the time they let him in he saw “the secretive nature” of officers and prosecutors there – exactly what he visited the warehouse to stop them from doing.

“When I got there, there were two prosecutors questioning, knowing fully that I was down there to see him,” Bajaj said. “When I walked in, they seriously walked away, acting like they weren’t speaking to him or anything. It’s typical Chicago police, typical Homan Square, typical Cook County prosecutors’ office.”
‘They squeeze people. That’s what they do’

Jose, a 30-year-old Chicagoan whose last name the Guardian agreed not to publish, did not have access to his attorney at Homan Square. He is among 19 people identified among the 7,185 arrests who turned themselves into police at the warehouse – and whose access to a lawyer ended inside.

According to court and police documents from Jose’s case, an anonymous informant told officers a man nicknamed “Chuie” sold him marijuana from the address where Jose lived. (Not only did the search warrant not name Jose, it described a taller man.) Police showed up at his house in force in February 2013, guns drawn.

Jose wasn’t home. But his wife and 10-year-old daughter were, as well as his daughter’s friend, who had come over to work on a school project.

Police took a substantial amount of marijuana and what Jose said was about $10,000 in cash. The arrest report listed the cash at $4,670. Jose said he never got his money back.

After consulting with his attorney, Jose and lawyer Nick Albukerk traveled to Homan Square the following month. Albukerk said he advised officers that Jose was invoking his rights against self-incrimination and was not to be questioned. But the lawyer did not enter Homan Square as his client was led inside and placed in a room by himself. According to the police report, it was 10pm. Jose took a Xanax for his nerves. He began to nod off, until he heard banging on the door and a demand to “get up”.

“Are you going to help yourself?” Jose remembered the officer telling him.

“What do you mean, help myself? ‘Are you going to talk to me?’ ‘Nah, my lawyer was just here. You could have just said this in front of my lawyer. I know my rights’ … He wasn’t trying to hear it. He was just blabbing away, like ‘Oh, you think you’re a smart-ass,’ this and that.

“That’s what they do, man: they get people who don’t know their rights,” Jose continued. “That’s probably how they came upon me and my house – probably someone ended up talking to them and they dry-snitched on me. All they knew was that I lived there.

“They squeeze people, and then they go get somebody else. That’s what they do.”

Additional reporting by Zach Stafford and Phillipp Batta in Chicago and the Guardian US interactive team

Spencer Ackerman writes for The Guardian from Washington, DC.

Equiring minds would like to know.

7 Ways Police Will Break the Law, Threaten or Lie to You to Get What they Want

Cops routinely break the law. Here's how.
By Larken Rose / The Free Thought Project
October 19, 2015

Print
Comments

Because of the Fifth Amendment, no one in the U.S. may legally be forced to testify against himself, and because of the Fourth Amendment, no one’s records or belongings may legally be searched or seized without just cause. However, American police are trained to use methods of deception, intimidation and manipulation to circumvent these restrictions. In other words, cops routinely break the law—in letter and in spirit—in the name of enforcing the law. Several examples of this are widely known, if not widely understood.
Shop ▾
1) “Do you know why I stopped you?”

Cops ask this, not because they want to have a friendly chat, but because they want you to incriminate yourself. They are hoping you will “voluntarily” confess to having broken the law, whether it was something they had already noticed or not. You may think you are apologizing, or explaining, or even making excuses, but from the cop’s perspective, you are confessing. He is not there to serve you; he is there fishing for an excuse to fine or arrest you. In asking you the familiar question, he is essentially asking you what crime you just committed. And he will do this without giving you any “Miranda” warning, in an effort to trick you into testifying against yourself.
ADVERTISING

2) “Do you have something to hide?”

Police often talk as if you need a good reason for not answering whatever questions they ask, or for not consenting to a warrantless search of your person, your car, or even your home. The ridiculous implication is that if you haven’t committed a crime, you should be happy to be subjected to random interrogations and searches. This turns the concept of due process on its head, as the cop tries to put the burden on you to prove your innocence, while implying that your failure to “cooperate” with random harassment must be evidence of guilt.
3) “Cooperating will make things easier on you.”

The logical converse of this statement implies that refusing to answer questions and refusing to consent to a search will make things more difficult for you. In other words, you will be punished if you exercise your rights. Of course, if they coerce you into giving them a reason to fine or arrest you, they will claim that you “voluntarily” answered questions and “consented” to a search, and will pretend there was no veiled threat of what they might do to you if you did not willingly “cooperate.”
(Such tactics are also used by prosecutors and judges via the procedure of “plea-bargaining,” whereby someone accused of a crime is essentially told that if he confesses guilt—thus relieving the government of having to present evidence or prove anything—then his suffering will be reduced. In fact, “plea bargaining” is illegal in many countries precisely because it basically constitutes coerced confessions.)
4) “We’ll just get a warrant.”

Cops may try to persuade you to “consent” to a search by claiming that they could easily just go get a warrant if you don’t consent. This is just another ploy to intimidate people into surrendering their rights, with the implication again being that whoever inconveniences the police by requiring them to go through the process of getting a warrant will receive worse treatment than one who “cooperates.” But by definition, one who is threatened or intimidated into “consenting” has not truly consented to anything.
5.) We have someone who will testify against you

Police “informants” are often individuals whose own legal troubles have put them in a position where they can be used by the police to circumvent and undermine the constitutional rights of others. For example, once the police have something to hold over one individual, they can then bully that individual into giving false, anonymous testimony which can be used to obtain search warrants to use against others. Even if the informant gets caught lying, the police can say they didn’t know, making this tactic cowardly and illegal, but also very effective at getting around constitutional restrictions.
6) “We can hold you for 72 hours without charging you.”

Based only on claimed suspicion, even without enough evidence or other probable cause to charge you with a crime, the police can kidnap you—or threaten to kidnap you—and use that to persuade you to confess to some relatively minor offense. Using this tactic, which borders on being torture, police can obtain confessions they know to be false, from people whose only concern, then and there, is to be released.
7) “I’m going to search you for my own safety.”

Using so-called “Terry frisks” (named after the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1), police can carry out certain limited searches, without any warrant or probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, under the guise of checking for weapons. By simply asserting that someone might have a weapon, police can disregard and circumvent the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.

U.S. courts have gone back and forth in deciding how often, and in what circumstances, tactics like those mentioned above are acceptable. And of course, police continually go far beyond anything the courts have declared to be “legal” anyway. But aside from nitpicking legal technicalities, both coerced confessions and unreasonable searches are still unconstitutional, and therefore “illegal,” regardless of the rationale or excuses used to try to justify them. Yet, all too often, cops show that to them, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—and any other restrictions on their power—are simply technical inconveniences for them to try to get around. In other words, they will break the law whenever they can get away with it if it serves their own agenda and power, and they will ironically insist that they need to do that in order to catch “law-breakers” (the kind who don’t wear badges).

Of course, if the above tactics fail, police can simply bully people into confessing—falsely or truthfully—and/or carry out unconstitutional searches, knowing that the likelihood of cops having to face any punishment for doing so is extremely low. Usually all that happens, even when a search was unquestionably and obviously illegal, or when a confession was clearly coerced, is that any evidence obtained from the illegal search or forced confession is excluded from being allowed at trial. Of course, if there is no trial—either because the person plea-bargains or because there was no evidence and no crime—the “exclusionary rule” creates no deterrent at all. The police can, and do, routinely break the law and violate individual rights, knowing that there will be no adverse repercussions for them having done so.

Likewise, the police can lie under oath, plant evidence, falsely charge people with “resisting arrest” or “assaulting an officer,” and commit other blatantly illegal acts, knowing full well that their fellow gang members—officers, prosecutors and judges—will almost never hold them accountable for their crimes. Even much of the general public still presumes innocence when it comes to cops accused of wrong-doing, while presuming guilt when the cops accuse someone else of wrong-doing. But this is gradually changing, as the amount of video evidence showing the true nature of the “Street Gang in Blue” becomes too much even for many police-apologists to ignore.

Larken Rose is an anarchist author best known for challenging the IRS to answer questions about the federal tax liability of citizens, and being put in prison with no questions answered. You can view his work at www.larkenrose.com

The asshole committed suicide, TonyRM because he was about to be arrested for stealing from the Police Athletic Fund. His wife and son have been arrested as accessories and he tried to hire someone to kill a city official.

You would protect a scoundrel.

No unlike you I feel bad for anyone even police officers who are driven to end their lives with special note when young children are involve.

Next I had not seen any notice of this wife or son having been arrested to date.

Ask the cops...

the Hamsters have a no information is to be published policy, so that would be useless.

EDIT: Remember I was the first, oh 9 years ago or so, to say on A2K that the citizens are being abused by the state through the " Justice" system. I got tons of **** for saying it. REMEMBER? My bonafides in this thread can not be in dispute by rational people.

What rational people?

We dont have enough this is true. I am trying to be optimistic. Rational plus open minded plus tolerant is a tough nut to crack in America 2015. Add in educated and it is almost hopeless.

I still cant get over how all these years in so many people at A2K think they can bully me into silence.

Must be some slow learners.

Wrong the SC had upheld all you are complaining about as being both legal and constitutional.

You do have the right not to have the police interview you and that every lawyer in the world will tell you not to talk to the police if there is any chance they are thinking about charging you with a crime even if you are as innocent as snow white.

An they do have the right to lied to you however they can charge you with a crime if you lied to them.

I had not seen any news that his son and wife had been as yet been arrested would you like to provide a link to such news?

Just for you, TonyRM! Looks like Fox Lake is VERY disappointed with this sorry-assed POS, too.




http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/11/05/Fox-Lake-Ill-cops-wife-son-under-investigation-in-scheme/7501446717521/

Fox Lake, Ill., cop's wife, son under investigation in scheme
By Amy R. Connolly | Nov. 5, 2015 at 5:53 AM Follow @upi

The wife and son of Fox Lake, Ill., Police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz are allegedly under investigation in connection to a scheme to embezzle thousands from the police explorers. Photo by Charles Gliniewicz/Facebook

FOX LAKE, Ill., Nov. 5 (UPI) -- The wife and son of a Fox Lake, Ill., police officer who staged his suicide to look like a suspect chase gone wrong are under investigation in connection to a scheme to embezzle thousands of dollars.

Several media outlets, citing unnamed sources, said Melodie and D.J. Gliniewicz played a role in the elaborate ruse to steal some $50,000 from the explorers unit, a youth training program in the Fox Lake Police Department. Text messages between Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, and his wife and son showed them plotting ways out of the embezzlement investigation.
ADVERTISING

"With those partners, our investigation strongly indicates criminal activity on the part of at least two other individuals," Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Commander George Filenko said.

Investigators said Joe Gliniewicz, a veteran police officer, had allegedly been stealing and laundering thousands of dollars over a period of seven years from the explorers. Gliniewicz spent the money on adult websites, vacations, a gym membership and mortgage payments, among other things.

Gliniewicz, 52, was found dead on Sept. 1 after he radioed he was pursuing three suspicious men on foot. Investigators found Gliniewicz staged his death to look like a murder, leaving equipment around the scene. GPS data from the night he died showed he was on foot near the crime scene for about 20 minutes before calling in suspicious activity.

In one text exchange, Gliniewicz's son said he hoped Anne Marrin, the new village administrator in Fox Lake, who was reviewing the police explorer's finances, gets a DUI.

"One [text] in particular was bothersome about possibly hiring somebody to take care of the problem," Filenko said.

In another text exchange, Joe Gliniewicz warned his son, "You are borrowing money from that 'other' account, when you get back you'll have to start dumping money into that account or you will be visiting me in JAIL!!"



Fox Lake, Ill., cop tried to hire hitman to kill city leader
By Amy R. Connolly | Nov. 6, 2015 at 6:34 AM Follow @upi

Fox Lake Police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, who killed himself amid an embezzlement investigation, tried to hire a hitman to kill a city administrator, investigators said. Photo by Charles Gliniewicz/Facebook

FOX LAKE, Ill., Nov. 6 (UPI) -- The local-hero police officer who staged his suicide to look like a murder amid an embezzlement investigation tried to hire a hitman to kill a city administrator, investigators said.

Fox Lake Police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz sent text messages to an unnamed woman asking her to help find a motorcycle gang member to kill Anne Marrin, the village manager who was auditing the Fox Lake Police Explorers unit, police said. Investigators later found Gliniewicz embezzled some $50,000 from the youth training club over a period of seven years to pay for travel, gym memberships and adult websites.
ADVERTISING

Gliniewicz also mentioned the possibility of planting something on Marrin, police said. Packets of cocaine were found in his desk, but it is unclear if they were to be used on Marrin.

"It's very unsettling. My concern is my family. It's quite unbelievable and almost surreal," Marrin said. "It's a very scary thought that an officer sworn to uphold the law would even think to do that to an administrator."

Gliniewicz, a respected 30-year veteran of the police department, was found shot to death Sept. 1 after he radioed he was chasing suspects through the woods. The community mourned the military veteran who locals affectionately called G.I. Joe. Thousands attended his funeral.

Police launched a days-long manhunt to apprehend three men suspected of killing Gliniewicz before determining the office killed himself.

Investigators said Gliniewicz's death was a "carefully staged suicide" to cover up the embezzlement. Investigators are also trying to determine what role, if any, his wife Melodie and son D.J. played in the ongoing theft.

Lord you can not read as being investigated and being arrested are too very very very far apart matters indeed.

They had not and may never be arrested for anything at this point.

TonyRM, tell you what, ace, If they get arrested and convicted you leave a2k. If they don't get arrested and convicted, I leave a2k.

I am amused how you've ignored what a piece of crap this cop was. He even warned his son that if he didn't start watching his shenanigans they were going to jail.