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Only a few bad apples huh?...Bad Cops Thread

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/109668252-132.html

Supreme Court denies appeal by Baltimore police officers against Marilyn Mosby

The Supreme Court denied an appeal from five Baltimore police officers against Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. The officers allege they were wrongfully prosecuted for the death of Freddie Gray.

The Supreme Court denied an appeal from five Baltimore police officers against Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. The officers allege they were wrongfully prosecuted for the death of Freddie Gray.
 
https://www.azcentral.com/story/new...d-freeway-overpasses-poder-action/1999729002/

Stop PHX police violence': Banners unfurled on freeway overpasses protest police shootings

Two banners were unfurled on overpasses above Valley freeways Wednesday to raise awareness against police shootings, officials said.

The 100-foot-long banners were hung along Colter Street and State Route 51 as well as 31st Avenue and Interstate 10.

The Poder in Action organization set up this protest to help decrease the number of police shootings in Phoenix this year.

"Every nine days, they are shooting a resident in our city," said Parris Wallace, Poder in Action organizer. "We refuse to let this be our new normal."

There has been a total of 39 officer-involved shootings in Phoenix reported in 2018, records maintained by The Arizona Republic show.

Poder in Action Director Viridiana Hernandez said they have received support and are watching out for ourselves and our community.

The activist group will be at the city council meeting 2:30 p.m. Wednesday at 200 W. Jefferson St. to protest against police shootings.
 
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-to-begin-collecting-national-police-use-of-force-data/

In a first, FBI to begin collecting national data on police use of force


The FBI is set to begin collecting data that will track use-of-force incidents reported by law enforcement, but experts say the collection could prove problematic and the data could provide an incomplete picture of the scale of the incidents across the country.

The National Use-of-Force Data Collection will track use-of-force incidents by police that result in death or serious bodily injury, and also incidents in which an officer fired a gun at a person, the FBI announced Wednesday. Local, state, tribal, and federal jurisdictions can begin submitting data to the FBI via a web application on Jan. 1, 2019. Once the information is collected, it will be released at least twice a year.

Law enforcement agencies across the country have come under fire for high-profile incidents of deaths and injuries by police officers. No statistics have been available to track the incidents on a national scale, though some agencies collect their own data at the state and local level.

The FBI says the data collection, a first-of-its kind effort, will allow the law enforcement community to identify areas of improvement when it comes to training and tactics. Members of a use-of-force data collection task force convened by the FBI also say they hope the data will increase transparency and in turn strengthen trust between the community and law enforcement.

"This transparency is not all the time easy -- it may involve us owning up to, 'We could have made a better decision, we could have better policies, we could have better tactics, we can train better,'" Fayetteville, N.C. Chief of Police Gina Hawkins, a member of the FBI's use-of-force data collection task force, said in a video released on the FBI's website. "Being transparent leaves us vulnerable, but being vulnerable means we want you to trust us, because we need your support, because we work for the community."

The FBI says the data won't assess whether the officers acted lawfully or within the bounds of department policy or include the final adjudication of the incident, but will aim to "offer a comprehensive view of the circumstances, subjects, and officers involved in such incidents nationwide." Data collection criteria include age, sex, race, ethnicity, height, and weight for the officer or officers and the person killed or injured. Jurisdictions will also be asked to detail information such as why officers initially approached the person, whether the person was armed or threatening an officer or someone else, and the type of force used against the person.

While the data collection effort will help departments identify mistakes, it will likely prove problematic because participation is voluntary, according to Charles Gruber, a police practices expert and federal police reforms monitor with the U.S. Department of Justice. Departments across the country are also "all over the map" when it comes to defining use-of-force, said Gruber, a former police chief.

"We're going to get something from [the data collection,] but we're not going to be able to maximize it, to use it to the extent that we could if we collected the data better and made everybody do it," Gruber said.

Some jurisdictions may not track use-of-force incidents within their own departments at all, rendering them unable to participate, while others may be reluctant to report data that will be widely publicly available, Gruber said.

The data collection program will be administered under the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program, the same arm that collects and releases national hate crime data. That data, which is also based on voluntary reporting by law enforcement agencies, has repeatedly faced criticism of being incomplete or inaccurate. While participation is improving --about 1,000 additional law enforcement agencies contributed data in 2017 as compared to 2016 -- the Anti-Defamation League says a "serious gap" in reporting remains. At least 92 cities with populations exceeding 100,000 either did not report data to the FBI or reported zero hate crimes, according to the group.

Last month, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the Justice Department's new hate crime initiative was "taking on the challenging task of addressing the gap in hate crime statistics" and officials were reviewing the "accuracy of those reports," the Associated Press reported.

The FBI has said is doesn't have legal authority to mandate reporting of any data to the Uniform Crime Reporting program. For the use-of-force data collection effort, it says it's working with major law enforcement agency organizations to "obtain broad support and forge commitments from these members to report this critical information."

The FBI also says they will offer data collection training for departments who participate.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/us/politics/supreme-court-free-speech-police-power.html

Supreme Court Considers a Thorny Question of Free Speech and Police Power



WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court considered on Monday whether to allow lawsuits claiming abuse of police power in retaliation for exercising free speech rights. The case concerned a claim for retaliatory arrest at a festival in a remote part of Alaska, but several justices seemed to have an array of controversies in mind.

“You can think of it,” Justice Elena Kagan said, “as a case where an individual police officer, you know, decides to arrest for jaywalking somebody wearing a ‘Black Lives Matter’ T-shirt or, alternatively, a ‘Make America Great Again’ cap.”

Some courts have said the existence of probable cause for the arrest — the person was, after all, jaywalking — is always enough to bar lawsuits claiming retaliation in violation of the First Amendment. Others have allowed juries to decide whether the officers involved intended to suppress protected speech.

The Supreme Court has been struggling to find a line separating two kinds of arrests, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said, noting that “there are a range of cases.”



At one extreme, he said, were people arrested after mouthing off to the police in heated and confusing settings.On the other, were serious abuses. “A journalist has written something critical of the police department,” he said. Some time later, that hypothetical journalist, he said, was arrested for exceeding the speed limit by five miles per hour.

Justice Alito suggested that the Supreme Court would have a difficult time fashioning a standard that would bar the first kind of suit but allow the second one.

“Which of these unattractive rules should we adopt?” he asked.

The case argued Monday arose from an encounter at the Arctic Man ski and snowmobile event in the remote Hoodoo Mountains of interior Alaska. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested that the setting alone should give officers some leeway.

“You’ve got 10,000 mostly drunk people in the middle of nowhere and you’ve got eight police officers,” he said.

The plaintiff, Russell P. Bartlett, was arrested after yelling at police officers and refusing to answer questions. Afterward, Mr. Bartlett said, one officer told him, “Bet you wish you would have talked to me now.”

He was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, but prosecutors dropped the charges, saying it was too expensive to pursue them given the distances involved. Mr. Bartlett sued, saying he had been arrested for exercising his First Amendment rights.

Justice Alito suggested that Mr. Bartlett’s statements were not especially worthy of protection.

“Did your client say anything that was of social importance?” Justice Alito asked Zane D. Wilson, a lawyer for Mr. Bartlett. “He’s not protesting some social issue or making some important point. He’s involved in a personal dispute with a police officer.

Mr. Wilson disagreed. “The right to criticize a police officer,” he said, is “one of the distinguishing features between a police state and a free country.”

The case, Nieves v. Bartlett, No. 17-1174, was the court’s third attempt to answer the thorny question of whether the existence of probable cause was always enough to defeat a lawsuit claiming retaliatory arrest.

In June, the court ruled that Fane Lozman, a critic of a Florida city who was arrested at a City Council meeting, could pursue a case for retaliatory arrest, but only because the city appeared to have had an established and official policy of harassing him.

In 2006, the court ruled in Hartman v. Moore that government officials could not be sued under the First Amendment for retaliatory prosecutions where there was probable cause to pursue the prosecution. The question on Monday was whether the same rule should apply to arrests.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer seemed eager to find a compromise that would allow dismissal of many suits at an early stage but allow ones with substantial, objective proof that officers intended to retaliate.

Justice Breyer added that allowing such suits could have unpredictable consequences, among them the possibility that police officers “will be very careful and not arrest people whom they should arrest.”
 
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/...lice-chief-prison-sentence-frame-black-people

Ex-Police Chief Gets 3 Years In Prison For Framing Innocent Black People


MIAMI (AP) — The former police chief of a small Florida city will serve three years in prison for a conspiracy in his department to frame black people for crimes they did not commit.

A federal judge in Miami imposed the sentence Tuesday on ex-Biscayne Park chief Raimundo Atesiano, who had faced a maximum 10-year sentence. Three other former officers have also pleaded guilty in the case, which centered around efforts by Atesiano to improve his department’s crime-solving rate.

Atesiano’s lawyer says the victims were not randomly selected but were known to police as having criminal pasts.

Prosecutors say the crimes for which black people were falsely arrested included burglaries and vehicle break-ins.

Two ex-officers were sentenced to a year each in prison, while the third got just over two years behind bars.
 
https://www.freep.com/story/news/lo...involved-fatal-shootings-michigan/2140694002/

Michigan sees big increase in fatal police-involved shootings

Footage from a police dash cam and White Castle surveillance camera show the officer-involved fatal shooting of April 10, 2018. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press

Police officers have been involved in at least 21 fatal shootings in Michigan this year, including four this month alone, a Free Press review shows.

The number of fatal, police-involved shootings in the first 11 months of this year represents a 50 percent increase from all of 2017.

The latest one occurred last Friday when a Wayne County Sheriff’s officer shot and killed a jail inmate during a struggle inside an ambulance. Two days before that, deputies in Clare County shot and killed a man after they responded to a felonious assault in progress near the mid-Michigan town of Harrison, the Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun reported.

And two other fatal, officer-involved shootings happened earlier this month, within one day of each other, in Macomb County.

Still, November wasn't the most deadly month for police-involved fatal shootings: There were six in April.

The numbers don’t include non-fatal police shootings, such as one on Monday, in which a Michigan State Police trooper shot and wounded a man following a car chase on I-96 in Livonia. Authorities said the 26-year-old man was shot in the head after shooting and wounding his wife and abducting her from her job.

The 21 fatal police shootings in Michigan this year compared to 14 in 2017, according to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force project, which has been tracking fatal police shootings since 2015. That database shows there were 13 officer-involved fatal shootings in Michigan in 2016 and 16 in 2015.

As of Wednesday, there had been at least 876 fatal police shootings this year across the U.S., the database shows. California, the most populous state, led the country with 98 police involved shootings, followed by Texas with 75, according to the database.

In most of the incidents this year in Michigan, the suspect was reported to have been armed with either a gun or knife.
 
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/n...op-charged-assault-woman-hospital/2193608002/

Detroit police officer charged with assault on woman in hospital

Detroit — An 18-year veteran of the Detroit police force has been charged with misconduct in office, and assault and battery in connection with allegations that he punched a naked woman in Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Prosecutors said on Aug. 1 at about 7:10 p.m., Cpl. Dewayne Jones was on duty when he arrived at Detroit Receiving Hospital and encountered a 29-year-old female at the front desk.

Investigators allege the woman was spitting, shouting profanities at the staff and bit a police officer on the forearm and thigh. When Jones attempted to restrain her, he allegedly punched her in the face and upper body, according to investigators.

Detroit police officials suspended Jones the day after the incident and launched a criminal investigation.

Jones, 47, was in 36th District Court on Monday for a probable cause hearing. Jones faces up to five years in prison on the misconduct charge and 93 days in jail on the assault charge.

A preliminary examination in the case is scheduled for Dec. 19 before 36th District Court Judge Cylenthia Miller. He is free on a $5,000 bond.

Jones' attorney, Pamella Szydlak, said she had no comment on the charges or the case on Monday.

The incident was captured on cellphone video by a hospital visitor who provided it to a local television news station. The officer's body camera also captured the incident, Detroit police Chief James Craig said.

Craig called parts of the footage "troubling" in August.

Jones, who is assigned to the Third Precinct, has had six instances of using force, although none were considered "category one," which is when someone is injured, Craig said.

There weren't complaints about those instances of use of force, the chief said. All officers are required to report whenever they use force, "even if it's grabbing them by the wrist," Craig said. He said the six incidents fall into that category.
 
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