Second California Appeals Court Refuses To Review Police Unions' Challenge Of State Public Records Law

from the best-part-of-bashing-your-head-against-the-wall-is-when-you-stop dept

California law enforcement's losing streak continues. Since the new state law went into effect at the beginning of the year, California police unions have been battling the new transparency, claiming the public records law does not apply to historical records of police misconduct or use of force.

So far, the unions are finding no one who agrees with them. The law's author says the law is retroactive. So have a couple of state courts. The only person siding with unions on the retroactivity issue is the state's top cop, Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

The state's Supreme Court has turned down two requests by law enforcement unions to step in and clear up the retroactivity question. In both cases, it rejected the petition without comment. Now, a second state appellate court has refused to review a lower level decision finding the state's new law applies to old misconduct records.

Appellate judges found no reason to consider that Superior Court Judge Charles Treat's Feb. 8 decision that the state's new police transparency law, Senate Bill 1421, covered past years would be overturned on appeal and declined to hear the case. A stay on the release of records will end on March 19 unless the unions appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The unions will undoubtedly appeal. But it likely won't make any difference. The two rejections by the state Supreme Court include a petition by one of the state's sheriff's unions, which filed its petition right after the state court lifted the temporary injunction. This rejection, however, came with a comment from the appeals court -- one that indicates this will all end in tears (and released records).

"For the reasons stated by the trial court, appellants' argument is without merit," the court's order says.

The argument unions are pushing is a non-starter. At best, it's just delaying the inevitable. And the stance the state's unions are taking isn't even directly aligned with the departments whose employees they represent. Some law enforcement agencies are already turning over documents to records requesters without making them jump through litigation hoops or wait for a final call from the state's top court.

Sooner or later, the inevitable conclusion will arrive. And then agencies can get back to their usual stonewalling and foot-dragging. No matter what the courts decide on the retroactivity issue, it's still going to take some form of litigation to pry these records loose.

Filed Under: california, police, police misconduct, police unions, public records, transparency

Sheriff Decides The Best Way To Prep Teachers For School Shootings Is To Frighten And Injure Them

from the you-beat-a-dog-if-you-want-it-to-be-mean,-right-Sheriff? dept

Indiana law enforcement has apparently figured out a solution to the school shooting problem: round up the teachers and shoot them. Here's a jolly little anecdote from the Indiana State Teachers Association, detailing an issue brought up during a recent state Senate education committee meeting.

If you can't see/read the tweet, it says:

During active shooter drill, four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles - resulting in injuries to the extent that welts appeared, and blood was drawn.

The next tweet in the thread provides more details:

The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened. Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.

I guess terrorizing teachers will somehow prep them for an actual shooting. Not sure how that's supposed to work, but who am I to question the sadism knowledge of law enforcement professionals.

The man behind the training defends the actions of his trainers -- trainers who went unsupervised for at least part of the drill.

White County Sheriff Bill Brooks, whose department led the training in question, said it has conducted active-shooter training with schools for several years and has previously used the airsoft gun.

The plastic pellets they used are 4.6 mm in diameter — slightly larger than a standard BB.

"It's a soft, round projectile," he said. "The key here is 'soft.'"

Maybe so, but at close range they can still leave welts and break skin. And "execution style" generally means the gun is only inches from the person being "executed." Sheriff Brooks defends his officers, but can't specifically say what happened during the active shooter simulation because he wasn't there.

He was present for part of the January training, but not the portion in which the airsoft gun was used.

"They all knew they could be [shot]," Brooks said. "It's a shooting exercise."

The teachers who had the drill imposed on them beg to differ. While they were given face protection and warned the weapons might be fired, they were not notified they would be rounded up in small groups, taken to another room, lined up against the wall, and shot multiple times in the back.

There are no guidelines or laws regulating these active shooter drills. They're left up to the discretion of law enforcement agencies. It seems at least one agency has interpreted this lack of guidance to mean it can engage in sadistic but useless pantomimes that involve emptying their faux firearms into the backs of teachers they're supposed to be instructing.

The problem (well, one of the problems) with this "training" is it does very little to prep teachers for an active shooter scenario. The most likely outcome is a new fear of law enforcement, rather than the polished skill set needed to confront shooters and/or ensure the safety of as many students as possible. It also does not appear to do much to protect kids, as noted in another recent story:

There’s little data to show they do and some evidence that they can make things worse. At Stoneman Douglas, for example, the shooter is said to have used his knowledge of the school’s lockdown procedures to rack up more casualties during his assault. The biggest concern for some experts, though, is that the vast majority of schoolchildren, whose classrooms will never come under attack, are left worse off after they’re made to seriously contemplate their deaths at the hands of a madman.

Active shooter drills “can be very traumatizing for students,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and an outspoken critic of the trend. “Particularly if they are staged in a very realistic manner with fake blood and guns loaded with blanks, running around the school, chasing students. It’s a constant reminder that the bad guys are out to get them.”

The training for law enforcement appears to be at least as free-flowing and scattershot as the downstream byproduct inflicted on educators. There doesn't appear to be a standard set of active shooter best practices, which has resulted in law enforcement officers abandoning their posts and walking away from the sound of gunfire. Instruction should come from nationally-recognized trainers, not just whoever happens to be available at the local cop shop.

Filed Under: active shooter drill, indiana, police, school shootings, teachers

Officer's Body Cam Fails To Capture Footage Of Woman Shooting Herself In The Head While Her Hands Were Cuffed Behind Her

from the another-law-enforcement-miracle dept

There's more than one contortionist performance going on here. (h/t Greg Doucette)

A 19-year-old woman whose hands were cuffed behind her back when she committed suicide during a traffic stop in Chesapeake died of a gunshot wound through the mouth, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

This is the official line -- one repeated several times by local journalists. The traffic stop leading to this highly unlikely conclusion occurred July 25, 2018. Here's what the Chesapeake Police Department said then:

Officers pulled over the car at 4:24 p.m. Wednesday near the intersection of Berkley Avenue and Wilson Road, police said in a news release Wednesday afternoon.

The exact timeline is not clear, [spokesman Leo] Kosinski said. As officers used a stun gun on the driver, Wilson, who was a passenger, shot herself, he said. Police attempted life-saving measures and called for medical assistance, but she died at the scene, the news release said.

The original report also noted the PD was looking at body cam footage from the scene to determine what happened.

Less than a week later, the initial impression was the official narrative.

Police had handcuffed Wilson when Medlin began resisting arrest and trying to flee, said Officer Leo Kosinski, police spokesman. Wilson was left standing next to the passenger side of the car while police rushed to help the officer who was trying to arrest Medlin, he said.

It was then that Wilson somehow got a gun and shot herself in the head, Kosinski said. It was not immediately clear how Wilson got the gun, but it was not a police weapon, he said.

“We clearly ruled that it was a suicide,” Kosinski said.

"We." I guess that means the PD since the medical examiner didn't hand down his declaration until March 14, 2019. The police department, however, made its own unscientific findings public twice in one week.

As for the body camera footage, there was nothing usable there.

One officer was wearing a body camera, but it was “knocked offline” while Medlin was fighting the officer, Kosinski said. If the camera hadn’t gone offline, it still wouldn’t have recorded the shooting, Kosinski said, because the officer was struggling with Medlin.

The police department has 356 cameras and deploys "40-60 per shift." The department has 525 officers so it seems the odds were in favor of there being multiple cameras on the scene. But the only footage recorded didn't capture the incident. Multiple police cruisers were on the scene, but the Chesapeake PD decided to eliminate dash cams when it acquired body cameras, removing one more impartial witness.

With the official word from the state, the Chesapeake PD closes the book on an extremely dubious "suicide." Whether this is just a bunch of lies or some very terrible police work, the end result is the same: someone in handcuffs ended up dead. The odds that this person decided to escalate a traffic stop to a successful suicide attempt are incredibly low. Something fucked up happened that afternoon and the police department hasn't even attempted to explain how something like this might have happened. Since the medical examiner has spoken, the Chesapeake PD has decided it's no longer obligated to provide an explanation.

The CPD launched an internal investigation into Wilson's suicide in July. Kosinski confirmed that the department has since concluded that investigation, but declined to comment on its outcome.

Worse, there's been no pushback from the local media covering this arrest and its ensuing, and completely unbelievable, suicide. This isn't journalism. It's stenography.

Filed Under: arrest, body cam, chesapeake, handcuffs, holden medlin, journalism, police, sarah wilson, suicide

FBI, DA's Office Open Investigation Of Fatal Houston PD Drug Raid

from the this-is-not-an-anomaly dept

The Houston Police Department has a huge problem. A recent no-knock drug raid ended with two "suspects" killed and four officers wounded. The PD says no-knock entrances are safer for officers, not that you'd draw that conclusion from this raid.

The problem the PD has is its drug warriors are dirty. The raid was predicated on a tip from a confidential informant who doesn't appear to exist. The warrant contained sworn statements about a heroin purchase that never happened and a large quantity of heroin packaged for sale that was not among the things seized from the dead couple's residence. The heroin central to the raid appears to have been taken from the console of an officer's squad car and run to the lab for some very unnecessary testing.

Houston police officer Gerald Goines is the person behind this completely avoidable chain of events. After initially backing his officers, Police Chief Art Acevedo has reversed course in the face of contrary evidence he's unable to ignore. His initial defense of officers who participated in a drug raid that only turned up personal use amounts of cocaine and marijuana was perhaps understandable, given his position. But it went against the image he'd made for himself as a reformer -- someone who would clean up the department and repair its reputation.

A leaked recording of Acevedo speaking to officers after the killing of an unarmed, mentally ill man seemed to make it clear there was zero tolerance for the usual cop bullshit. Acevedo criticized his officers for needlessly escalating interactions, bullying citizens for failing to show the respect officers feel is owed to them, and teaming up on post-incident paperwork to ensure most bad deeds went unpunished.

But in the three years since that recording leaked, it appears little has changed. Officer Goines' willingness to fabricate a story to engage in a no-knock drug raid -- a narrative that included a nonexistent informant and drugs not purchased from the raided residence -- shows he had little worry of being outed by other officers, much less criticized for his lawless behavior. Here's how defense lawyer Mark Bennett phrased it after it was discovered Goines used a fictional informant and drugs from his own vehicle to craft a search warrant:

If you can't read/see the tweet, it says:

This doesn't happen if the cops don't feel safe doing it.
They don't feel safe doing it if there are honest cops around.
They always feel safe doing it.

Incidents like these aren't isolated. It's not a rare bad apple. You don't get to this point if you're surrounded by good cops. You get to this point because no one cares about smaller violations of trust or bent rules. The cops who get caught are the ones who have everything come off the rails at once. That happened to Goines: his drug raid produced death and injuries, resulting in a ton of public scrutiny and whole lot of questions Goines and the officers that enabled him aren't going to be able to answer satisfactorily.

And there will be questions. The FBI has announced it will be investigating the fatal drug raid. If Goines doesn't want to go to jail for lying to federal agents, he's going to have to provide truthful answers that will possibly see him jailed for other charges.

There's also a chance a whole lot of lawsuits will be filed against Goines and the Houston PD in the near future. The Harris County District Attorney says it's going to be looking into every criminal investigation Goines touched during his years as a law enforcement officer.

The Harris County District Attorney's Office has launched a review of more than 1,400 criminal cases spanning Houston Police Officer Gerald Goines' 34-year career.

Twenty-seven of those cases are active.

“Our duty is to see that justice is done in every case,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “Although the criminal investigation of Officer Goines is ongoing, we have an immediate ethical obligation to notify defendants and their lawyers in Goines' other cases to give them an opportunity to independently review any potential defenses."

One case may have already been dismissed simply because Officer Goines was present during the arrest. His fellow officers, who were unwilling to step up and report Goines for previous misconduct, will now see their work undone as the DA's office makes it way through Goines' three decade paper trail. Current prosecutions are likely to end up dismissed and any ongoing investigations he was involved in will probably be put on hold. Any one of the 1,400 cases being looked at could result in litigation that could drag his fellow officers into court to defend themselves against civil rights violation allegations.

Does this mean everything Goines did was illegal? Of course not, but the ease with which he fabricated a narrative to support a deadly drug raid suggests he's been coloring outside the lines for a long time and receiving zero pushback or criticism for doing so.

Filed Under: art acevedo, da, drug raid, fbi, gerald goines, houston, police

Deputies Sued After False ALPR Hit Leads To Guns-Out Traffic Stop Of California Privacy Activist

from the too-important-to-implement-cautiously dept

Law enforcement agencies love their automatic license plate readers. ALPRs do what cops physically can't: scan millions of plates a year and run them against a number of shared databases. The systems are black boxes. The public is often given little information about how many plate images databases store or for how long. Law enforcement agencies rarely audit the data, providing zero insight on the number of false positives ALPRs return. Non-hit photos are sometimes held indefinitely, creating databases of people's movements.

All of these negatives are supposed to be outweighed by the fact that cops sometimes catch criminals with ALPRs. How often this happens is anyone's guess. Officials will tout the tech's ability to track down criminals, but these anecdotes are usually only provided when government officials start asking questions about the tech -- questions they should have asked during the approval process.

Getting tagged as a hit by an ALPR is a frightening experience for innocent drivers. The tech tells cops they have a potentially dangerous criminal on their hands and they react accordingly. Drivers are somehow supposed to prove a negative at gunpoint and their inability to do only ratchets up the tension.

A false hit by an ALPR has resulted in a federal lawsuit [PDF]. And the Contra Costa (CA) Sheriff's Department quite possibly found the worst person to pull over because a machine told it to.

As chair of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, [Brian] Hofer, 41, has railed against what he describes as the seemingly arbitrary use of Automated License Plate Readers -- cameras that ping police and private agencies by matching plate numbers with "vehicles of interest."

So the irony is not lost on him when he said he and his brother, a 23-year-old political science student at UC Berkeley, were detained, sometimes at gunpoint, on Nov. 25 when a license plate reader near the San Pablo Lytton Casino off Interstate Highway 80 alerted police that they were riding in a stolen car.

Out came the guns, attached to officers sure they had caught a car thief. Hofer and his brother were detained at gunpoint while their rental vehicle was searched. Nearly a half-hour passed before any deputy attempted to determine whether the rental vehicle/contract was legit. Compounded errors are always a potential problem, but they reach critical mass quickly when government power attached to deadly force is involved. Here's the backstory to the stop -- a string of system failures that could have resulted in injury or death.

Turns out though, that while the rental car he was driving had indeed been stolen from San Jose in October, either the police or the rental car agency hadn't updated the proper authorities that the white Getaround Kia had been recovered and should therefore be removed from the “hot list” database.

The question isn't necessarily whether or not officers responded to the hot list hit inappropriately. The question is whether this response -- which has the potential to see people not only wrongfully detained, but possibly injured or killed -- is worth the tradeoff. Law enforcement will always say the errors are worth the labor tradeoff when it comes to ALPRs. Citizens held at gunpoint and warrantlessly searched will always disagree with this assessment.

It's up to those policing the police -- city/county/federal authorities -- to make the right call when it comes to ALPRs. Without better data on these devices' potential for error, government officials are literally trading citizens' live and liberty for law enforcement convenience.

Filed Under: alpr, brian hofer, civil liberties, contra costa sheriff's department, license plates, police, privacy

Fatal Houston PD Drug Raid Apparently Predicated On Drugs A Cop Had Stashed In His Car

from the this-is-insane dept

The ugly Houston PD drug raid that resulted in four injured officers and two dead "suspects" just keeps getting uglier.

Officers swore a confidential informant purchased heroin from 59-year-old Dennis Tuttle in the house he shared with his wife of 21 years, Rhogena Nicholas. They swore the CI told them the house was filled with heroin packaged for purchase.

On the strength of this confidential informant's claims, officers obtained a no-knock warrant and raided Tuttle's house. The officers claimed Tuttle opened fire on them and that his wife tried to grab a shotgun from a downed officer. This was the supposed reason for SWAT team's killing of Tuttle and Nicholas.

This was the narrative everyone was given. Not a single officer was wearing a body cam, despite the department possessing dozens of them. The only footage that survived -- captured by a neighbor's security camera -- was confiscated by the Houston PD.

Even in this vacuum of information, the PD's narrative quickly fell apart. No large amounts of heroin were found during the raid -- just personal use quantities of heroin cocaine and marijuana. The inventory also included a few guns, which the PD has treated as inherent evidence of criminality despite the fact both Tuttle and his wife could legally own the weapons found in the house. The only criminal history either of them had was an old misdemeanor charge for a bad check.

Now that the PD's investigation into this raid is underway, it's becoming clear the official narrative -- a daring no-knock raid that took out dangerous heroin dealers -- isn't going to survive. The new narrative already includes multiple lies by police officers and a lot of supporting evidence.

First off, the raid inventory does not include the weapon officers claimed Tuttle fired at them.

The other four items in the inventory are guns: a 20-gauge Beretta ALS shotgun, a 12-gauge Remington 1100 shotgun, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, and a .22-caliber Winchester 190 semi-automatic rifle. The list does not include the .357 Magnum revolver that police say Tuttle fired at the officers who broke into his home, shot his dog, and killed his wife.

It also doesn't include the money the CI paid for the heroin or the weapon he claimed Tuttle was carrying.

Nor does it mention the 9mm semi-automatic handgun that the C.I. supposedly saw in the house the day before, which apparently disappeared along with the heroin and the money.

The PD also claimed the investigation was initiated by an anonymous call claiming the couple were selling drugs from their house. Since that initial press salvo by Chief Art Acevedo, information has come out indicating the "tip" was neither anonymous nor did it reference drug dealing.

A 911 call from the mother of now-deceased suspect Rhogena Nicholas put 7815 Harding Street on police radar. Sources close to the investigation say her mother called reporting the 58-year-old was doing drugs inside her own home.

It only gets worse. According to statements from officers now under investigation, it appears the Houston PD raided a house, shot a dog, and killed two people over drugs a police officer had stashed in his vehicle. (As is pointed out in the comments, the current version of the Chronicle's article has reworded these two paragraphs slightly. Here's a link to an archived version containing this pull quote.)

In the original warrant - the one used to justify the raid - [Officer Gerald] Goines wrote that he watched the buy and, along with Bryant, identified the substance as heroin. But when investigators went back to talk to [Officer Steven] Bryant, he admitted that he'd actually just retrieved two bags of heroin from the center console of Goines' car, at the instruction of another officer.

Though he then took the two bags of drugs for testing to determine that they were heroin, he eventually admitted that he had never seen narcotics in question before retrieving them from the car. That, the investigator noted, contradicts the search warrant affidavit filed before the raid, which indicates that Bryant "recognized the substance purchased by the CI as heroin."

This is absolutely terrifying. Investigators can't seem to locate the informant both officers claimed was a reliable source of intel, which suggests this person -- relied on in other Houston PD investigations -- doesn't even exist. None of the CIs interviewed by Houston investigators said they'd made the purchase detailed in the warrant affidavit.

How do citizens protect themselves against police officers willing to fabricate every aspect of an investigation in order to perform armed raids of their houses? Legally owning weapons means nothing when cops (and many courts) consider homeowners defending themselves from armed intruders a crime in and of itself. Two people are dead and no amount of late-arriving indictments is going to change that. Officers took a concerned mother's call about her daughter's drug use and turned it into a criminal conspiracy involving heroin and dangerous drug pushers armed to the teeth.

We have to grant law enforcement a massive amount of power in order for them to do their job. Time after time, they abuse the powers we've given them, wielding them like weapons against the same citizens they're supposed to answer to. Vast power has been paired with nearly nonexistent accountability to create an atmosphere where officers feel comfortable manufacturing evidence to support their adrenaline habits. This should be nightmare fuel for all Americans. Unfortunately, outside of those already attuned to the miserable state of American policing, this will appear to be nothing more than a couple of bad apples they can safely ignore.

Filed Under: dennis tuttle, gerald goines, heroin, houston, houston pd, no knock warrant, police, rhogena nicholas, steven bryant, swat team

Minnesota Judges Spent Only Minutes Approving Warrants Sweeping Up Thousands Of Cellphone Users

from the redefining-bulwark dept

Tony Webster, writing for MPR News, has obtained court documents showing Minneapolis, Minnesota law enforcement agencies are deploying "reverse warrants" in hopes of tying suspects to crime scenes. A normal warrant targets a known object. Reverse warrants are loaded with unknowns -- an attempt to wrangle cell site location info into something that might lead police to a suspect. That's what these agencies are trying to do, but the approved warrants guarantee a sizable number of non-criminals will be swept up in the data haul.

Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a "reverse location" search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

This new brand of warrant was first spotted last spring. Later that year, it was confirmed the feds were also using reverse warrants. These warrants are becoming more common, urged on by a private company pitching investigative methods and tools to law enforcement agencies.

[Brooklyn Park Deputy Police Chief Mark] Bruley said detectives learned about the potential value of the practice and how to write the warrant applications at an August training seminar held by ZetX, an Arizona-based company that teaches police about cellphone investigations, and sells software called TRAX that generates legal documents and maps cellphone data to assist in analysis. The company holds trainings all across the country.

[...]

The week after detectives attended the ZetX training in the Twin Cities, they wrote up their first three reverse location search warrants. By the next month, they had a dozen, each ordering Google to turn over information on devices located in the vicinity of crimes.

The warrants [PDF] demand Google turn over a bunch of data on every phone that happened to wander into a geofenced area around the time a crime was committed.

This warrant is directed to Google LLC, headquartered at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California, and applies to (1) GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth or cellular sourced location history data generated from devices that reported a location within the geographical region bounded by the following latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, dates, and times ("Initial Search Parameters")...

[...]

For each location point recorded within the Initial Search Parameters, Google shall produce anonymized information specifying the corresponding unique device ID, timestamp, coordinates, display radius, and data source, if available (the "Anonymized List").

As Webster notes, the warrants likely don't give judges any idea how many people will be swept up in these data requests. The warrants contain GPS coordinates but no map of the area covered. It's unlikely a judge can visualize the area covered just by looking at four coordinates. Judges may be able to enter those points into Google Maps to get some idea how much area is covered, but it doesn't appear any of the judges approached did anything more than briefly browse the warrants before signing them.

Here's how long it took to approve one requested by the Brooklyn Park PD:

No map was provided in the application to illustrate the area or accuracy level to the judge. This warrant was also issued within about 10 minutes of the detective requesting it.

Things moved even faster for Edina investigators:

About four minutes after the detective signed the application — which included no map of the targeted area — the judge approved it.

Webster has provided the maps the police wouldn't, which illustrate exactly how big an area is being covered by these reverse warrants. (Click through for a larger version.)

Given the scope of the area covered and the imprecise nature of location data, each warrant has the potential to generate a ton of false positives -- people who happen to live, work, or travel through these busy areas. If a map had been provided, there's a good chance judges would have taken a little longer considering these requests.

Or not.

Of the 22 reverse location search warrants issued in Hennepin County, only three times did the warrant applications include map demonstrating the geographic area being targeted by the warrant. And yet, the time difference between an officer signing a warrant request, and a judge approving it, was sometimes just a few minutes.

There's not a lot of good news from the law enforcement perspective either. Most of the reverse warrants failed to generate possible suspects. They also failed to generate false positives either, so that's a (very limited) plus. But I don't think a lack of success will deter investigators from seeking these warrants. Reverse warrants allow officers to perform a virtual canvassing of the neighborhood for possible suspects without expending much in the way of time or manpower.

Google appears to be pushing back when requests are excessive. This is all well and good, but Google's a one-stop shop for law enforcement thanks to its expansive data harvesting over the years. The initial pushback should be coming from judges, not the private sector. When it's up to a data-hungry megacorp to provide the first layer of protection for cellphone users' privacy, the judicial system is failing to do its job.

Filed Under: general warrants, hennepin county, location info, minneapolis, police, reverse warrants
Companies: google