After Repeatedly Failing To Document Stops/Frisks, NYPD Ordered To Record All Encounters

from the 'unpossible,'-says-department-unwilling-to-try dept

The NYPD's stop and frisk program was declared unconstitutional in 2013. As deployed by the NYPD, the program involved high numbers of suspicionless stops disproportionately targeting the city's minorities. Judge Shira Scheindlin heavily modified the program to steer it back in the direction of the Constitution, resulting in claims of a criminal apocalypse that completely failed to materialize.

One of the modifications was the deployment of body cameras. These were supposed to record stops, preserving a record of these incidents. Officers were also given additional paperwork to fill out for each stop/frisk to provide evidence of the perceived suspicion supporting the stop.

Neither of these mandates worked out particularly well. The number of stops was already decreasing rapidly before Judge Scheindlin issued her order. The stops that were still being made, however, weren't by the (new) book. A court monitor report suggested plenty of unconstitutional stops were still being made by officers without filling out the mandated form.

That's where the cameras could have helped, theoretically. The NYPD's body camera program is in full effect, but it appears officers believe certain stops don't need to be recorded. Once again -- a decade into this litigation -- the stop and frisk program is being modified, as Zuri Davis of Reason reports.

[T]he court wants to bring "the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies and practices into compliance with federal and state law." To that end, [Judge Analisa] Torres has ordered both the NYPD and those who have brought suit over the practices to design a "pilot program" that would record "low-level" police interactions, referred to as "Level 1 and 2 investigative encounters."

Until this modification, the NYPD's body cam mandate only required recordings of Level 3 and 4 stops. Those are stops in which a person is detained (either by force or suggestion) and/or an arrest is likely to occur. Since the NYPD's documentation of the stops central to the lawsuit (low-level stops based on minimal -- if any -- suspicion) has been subpar, this order should result in at least some form of documentation for these stops.

Or not.

The plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk case have largely supported supported the facilitator’s recommendations, with some minor tweaks, while the NYPD has rejected them, saying that they are “neither practical nor feasible.”

That's the initial reaction: the pride of US law enforcement finds camera deployment during most police/citizen interactions unfeasible. The NYPD has issued this same reaction to almost every modification of its stop and frisk program: everything's impossible until the department actually starts to make an effort to comply.

It may be difficult to record every stop initiated by an officer, but it's not unfeasible. If the NYPD finds it burdensome, perhaps it should have made sure its officers kept up with their stop/frisk paperwork back when it was only paperwork. Instead, NYPD brass didn't make this a priority for low-level officers so now their body-mounted ride-along buddies will have to provide the documentation officers have avoided filling out for much of the last two years.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, body cameras, civil rights, nypd, police, stop and frisk

Miami Cops Forced To Give $20,000 Back To Person They Stole It From After Screwing Up Their Supposed Drug Bust

from the failed-to-deactivate-body-cam dept

The schadenfreude dripping from this case is positively delicious.

This story of the spectacularly swift rise and fall of a profitable drugs-and-guns bust comes to us via C.J. Ciarmella at Reason, who has his own particularly sumptuous line summing up the debacle.

[F]or police, what looked like a delicious nougat of a drug bust turned out to be the coconut cream of disappointment.

Let's head back to May 18, 2018, when a local media outlet breathlessly acted as law enforcement stenographers to "inform" their viewers about dangerous individuals being taken down by their fearless blue protectors.

A traffic stop by Miami-Dade Police lead to a stunning discovery this week: a car filled with a half dozen assault rifles and pistols, $20,000 in cash and more than 10 bottles with liquids that you normally need prescriptions for including promethazine with cocaine.

“It’s amazing how something as simple as a traffic stop can lead us to crack a lot of cases,” said Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta. “A lot of serial killers are behind bars because of traffic stops. These traffic stops lead to so many things in the criminal world and they are never routine. We warn our officers that there is no such thing as a routine traffic stop. You never know what you are going to get.”

First off, it was "promethazine with" codeine, not "cocaine." Second, this is all speculation because the seized bottles weren't tested -- not even with a shit $2 field drug test more prone to producing false positives than a drug dog. Third, the weapons were all legal, and the person who owned them had a permit to conceal them. Fourth, the other person in the car was a stripper.

Why is number four relevant? Well, it has a lot to do with this case falling apart. And that makes this sentence from CBS Miami's obsequious coverage particularly hilarious.

The Miami-Dade Police narcotics bureau is taking a close look at this case and Zabaleta said it is one that shows how risky such traffic stops can be.

The closer look isn't going to help. Because a closer look has already revealed a number of problems with this daring roadside drug/gun bust.

Miami-Dade police is on the hook for legal bills after cops illegally seized a cache of guns — and nearly $20,000 in stripper cash.

The department has agreed to pay more than $3,000 to defense lawyers hired by Ras Cates, 33, and his wife, Lizmixell Batista, a 20-year-old stripper at Cheetah Gentleman's Club in Hallandale Beach.

Up at the top of the list of things that made this all fall apart under closer inspection is officers' decision to bypass the Fourth Amendment on their way to turning a moving violation (police claimed the driver cut them off when entering the road) into splashy drug/gun headlines (with bonus stripper!). That ended the prosecutor's case before it could even get started.

[B]ody-camera footage showed that an officer, while friendly with Cates, never got permission to search the trunk but instead "commanded defendant to pop the trunk," prosecutors wrote.

"Search of the trunk was illegal," prosecutor Johnathan Nobile said in a memo explaining why the state declined to press charges.

Then there was this, which produced an immediate and plausible explanation for the cash:

As for the money, the bills were discovered in Batista's purse. Body-camera footage obtained by the Miami Herald showed she immediately told cops about her cash-only job.

Goodbye, case. Goodbye alleged drug bust. Goodbye $20,000. Goodbye $3,000 in taxpayer funds. Goodbye self-congratulatory statements that probably would have aided the defense had this gone to trial.

But wait! Convictions are never much of an obstacle to legalized theft via civil asset forfeiture, right? Normally, no. But in this case, it appears the county would like to distance itself as quickly as possible from this embarrassment. Plus, there's a really good reason someone might have a ton of cash in small, unmarked bills just laying around. The lawyer for the violated couple says it best:

“I felt that the glitter on the seized cash was compelling evidence, but apparently the police department disagreed," said defense lawyer [Jude] Faccidomo.

The judge saw enough compelling evidence to block the illegal seizure. Another stripper testified on Batista's behalf and the body cam footage apparently did the rest. In less than sixty days, this drug bust has gone from a local triumph (as seen exclusively on CBS Miami!) to the city being $3,000 poorer than it was prior to this officer deciding he could turn a traffic stop into headlines and a cash payout.

Filed Under: 4tha mendment, asset forfeiture, cash, drug post, guns, miami, police

If You Value The Reputation Of Your Restaurant, Maybe You Should Stop Serving Cops

from the time-to-start-kicking-against-the-pricks dept

Cops lie. This is a fact. As a business owner, it is in your best interest to oust known liars from your premises, if only for liability reasons. Sure, this will result in backlash from cop supporters, but so will the alternative.

Cops have placed themselves on a plateau of humanity far above their fellow citizens. Any perceived slight becomes a reason to drape themselves in an appropriated American flag and decry the masses for failing to show them the respect they feel they have no duty to earn.

There have been several reports of low-wage fast food employees saying and/or doing mean things to cops in their restaurants. Sometimes, these things have actually happened. What officers fail to understand is that most employees of restaurants have zero respect for a majority of their customers. Add a blue uniform and an air of sanctimoniousness, and cops can easily fly up the ranks of the disrespected.

But cops don't help their own case by lying about things that happened. And even if they're not outright lies, they're severe miscontruals of the actual events. In April of 2016, an officer claimed he was drugged by a Subway employee who supposedly spiked his soda as he went through the drive-thru. Drug tests of the drink and the cop cleared Subway and its employee of any wrongdoing. It also netted the accused teen -- who was arrested and charged -- a $50,000 payout from the city of Layton, Utah.

Roughly a year after that, a Raleigh (NC) police union's Facebook post -- accusing a local restaurant of serenading officers with N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police" -- went viral. A review of the restaurant's CCTV footage showed this never happened. An employee apparently mouthed the words at an officer from 25 feet away. That employee quit when the investigation began. The backlash only halted when the police department itself stepped up to say the union's post was full of shit.

Raleigh Police Department Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown [...] released a statement Wednesday concurring with the owner, David Harris, and his attorney Mark O’Mara.

[...]

On Wednesday, Deck-Brown said two officers saw one employee make eye contact with them and mouth the words “F--- the Police.”

“There was no singing. There were no other employees involved,” Deck-Brown said. “Because of the subtle nature of this act, it was not witnessed by anyone else in the store.”

After looking at video, Harris and O’Mara and others could find no evidence that employees were singing at the police or even speaking with them during the nearly half-hour they were in the restaurant.

The restaurant suffered severe reputational damage. Meanwhile, the police union refused to apologize for the lies it had posted to Facebook. The restaurant may have been cleared by the Chief of Police, but the union representing the lying cops who had fabricated a story about a cop-hating restaurant downplayed its own involvement in this debacle, stating only that not "all" of the info in its original post had been "accurate."

Now, there's this: a police officer who's apparently never consumed any spices and/or a burger grilled on a grill raised social media hell because he thought some cop-hating fast food worker screwed with his food.

A police officer's complaint that a fast food burger he ordered came sprinkled with dirt created a flame-broiled Facebook sensation Wednesday before an investigation found that a seasoning mix was the likely culprit.

Fort Myers police Officer Tim McCormick posted on Facebook about a meal he was recently served at the Burger King on Cleveland Avenue at Winkler Avenue. He said that the burger looked like it had dirt on it but didn't notice it until he was down to the last bite. He then tossed the sandwich.

18,000 Facebook shares later, Officer McCormick has deleted his post. But he has yet to offer his apology for being unable to identify substances present on almost all Burger King burgers.

Given the damage officers can do when they act before all the facts are in, why would any restaurant want their business? When officers are fabricating stories and misidentifying rare substances like, um... black pepper, why would any business owner want to serve such supremely risky customers?

Sure, not every cop is going to lodge a bullshit complaint because he didn't like how a restaurant employee eyeballed him during service, but why roll the dice? Officers and their unions can do an incredible amount of damage to small businesses in a short period of time. When the facts do come out, they simply delete posts and walk away from wreckage they've left behind without so much as an apology. And if they do find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit for their actions, it's the taxpayers left footing the bill -- a group of unwilling lenders that includes the same small business owners victimized by the officers' lies and exaggerations.

Play it safe, restaurant owners. Invite officers to start making their own meals at home where the only parties likely to receive collateral damage for food and service-based complaints will be officers' spouses and children. It just makes financial sense.

Filed Under: lies, police, restaurants

Police Chief Tries To Blame Newspaper Shooting On The Loss Of Social Media Monitoring Tool, But It Doesn't Add Up

from the please-show-your-work dept

The first response to a tragedy by many public officials is to capitalize on it. That's what the Anne Arundel County police are doing in the aftermath of the shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper that left five journalists dead. Police Chief William Kampf seems to believe this could have been prevented if the department hadn't been locked out of its social media snooping tool. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

The acting police chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department said a controversial tool could've helped investigators track down the Capital Gazette gunman before his deadly rampage.

Geofeedia is a social media intelligence tool that helps identify a user’s location based on where they post to their social media account. Acting police chief William Kampf said his department lost access to the tool, which has limited their abilities to track individuals like suspected gunman Jarrod Ramos.

I don't think Chief Kampf is lying. But he is wrong. Very wrong. And he should have gathered all the facts before using a shooting in his town to complain about this loss of access. At the very least, he perhaps should have demonstrated Geofeedia's crimefighting value using other cases in which something was actually prevented. But nothing was presented -- not even Kampf's ability to fully apprise himself of the situation before opening his mouth.

Geofeedia's social media monitoring service was a big hit with both local and federal government agencies. Documents obtained by the ACLU showed the company marketed the software with a "stay ahead of the rioters" tagline in the wake of Ferguson protests. This implicitly encouraged the monitoring of First Amendment-protected activities since the dividing line between "riot" and "protest" is sometimes nothing more than law enforcement's response to the situation.

Once these documents were made public, Facebook and Twitter revoked Geofeedia's access to their respective firehoses. This drastically limited the usefulness of the tool. This appears to be what Chief Kampf is referring to when he says his department "lost access." This cutoff happened in October of 2016. This cutoff date makes the chief's assertions about Geofeedia's usefulness highly suspect. By the time the cutoff happened, there would have been nothing to monitor.

Since Nov. 20, 2011, [the shooter] mentioned in tweets @ethartley or his last name 107 times, Marquardt by name or as "Evil Tom" nearly 100 times and @capgaznews more than 50 times, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

The account regularly attacked the newspaper and its journalists, including a reference to the deadly shooting at the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015.

It had been dormant since January 2016.

Even if Geofeedia hadn't lost its API access, the monitoring tool would have done nothing to warn the police about the shooter's activities or plans. Social media monitoring software is useless when targets aren't using social media.

It's also unclear why the police would have continued to monitor a dormant account belonging to someone it had already investigated and found nothing to arrest him for.

A detective who investigated threats shooting suspect Jarrod Ramos made years ago against The Capital Gazette told the newspaper's staffers he did not believe Ramos was a threat to them.

The newspaper itself declined the detective's offer to forward what he had to the State Attorney's Office to see if it thought there was something criminal about the shooter's social media activities, but the paper demurred, feeling it would be "a stick in a beehive."

For this to work out the way Chief Kampf wants us to believe it does, the shooter's social media account would had to have been active and his posts would have needed to contain enough targeted keywords to make his tweets appear on the PD's Geofeedia dashboard. Even if all of that were true, the tweets would have needed to be unambiguously threatening to give law enforcement a reason to interact with the shooter again. Nothing stated by the police department in multiple comments indicates the shooter was being monitored with Geofeedia prior to the newspaper bringing its threat/harassment complaints to the police.

There are too many unresolved "ifs" to make Chief Kampf's complaint plausible. And there is one undeniable fact that makes his claim completely bogus: the account was dormant -- invisible to Geofeedia. The tool would not have helped police head off this tragedy before it could occur. Claiming it would have after the fact is nothing more than opportunism.

Filed Under: capital gazette, monitoring, police, shooting, social media, surveillance, william kampf
Companies: geofeedia, twitter

Cops Are Telling Paramedics To Inject Arrestees With Ketamine. Worse, EMS Crews Are Actually Doing It.

from the horrific-behavior-by-all-involved dept

Something strange and disturbing is going on in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cops have been instructing paramedics to use certain drugs to subdue arrestees, which is about as advisable as allowing paramedics to instruct officers on use of force. Cops don't know what's best for arrestees in terms of medical care. The fact that paramedics have been following their instructions is the most disturbing fact of all. As the Star Tribune reports, cops telling EMS personnel what to do has put people's lives in jeopardy.

Minneapolis police officers have repeatedly requested over the past three years that Hennepin County medical responders sedate people using the powerful tranquilizer ketamine, at times over the protests of those being drugged, and in some cases when no apparent crime was committed, a city report shows.

On multiple occasions, in the presence of police, Hennepin Healthcare EMS workers injected suspects of crimes and others who already appeared to be restrained, according to the report, and the ketamine caused heart or breathing failure, requiring them to be medically revived. Several people given ketamine had to be intubated.

The paramedics are fully complicit in this horror show. They're overriding their own knowledge and medical training with catastrophic results. This atrocious behavior was exposed by a report from the Office for Police Conduct Review. The report showed ketamine injections increased from three in 2012 to 62 in 2017. It wasn't until this report was delivered to police that anyone decided to do anything about it. The Minneapolis Police Commander has now forbidden officers from instructing EMS crews to sedate a subject.

Ketamine is a dangerous drug. The police know this. They classify it as a "date rape" drug, capable of putting people into deep sedation and altering their memories. Healthcare providers know this, too, which is why they're often hesitant to use it as a sedative if the subject has preexisting breathing problems. Ketamine can kill under these circumstances. When used as a first response in the sedation of detainees, medical histories aren't available and the outcome can be death.

Allowing police to "prescribe" sedatives is a horrible idea. The report shows Minneapolis cops nuked arrestees with a powerful sedative just because. In many of the cases examined, there appeared to be no reason to escalate to a dangerous sedative.

To evaluate how the sedative was being used, the Office of Police Conduct Review investigators looked for mentions of the word in police reports, and then reviewed body camera footage from those cases.

“Multiple videos showed individuals requiring intubation after being injected with ketamine, and [police] reports indicate that multiple individuals stopped breathing and/or their hearts stopped beating after being injected with ketamine,” the report said.

The police encounters that led to EMS using ketamine ranged from cases of obstruction of justice to jaywalking, according to the report. One man was dosed with ketamine while strapped to a stretcher and wearing a spit hood.

Unbelievably, the story gets worse. Those dosed with ketamine at the suggestion of police officers suffered rude awakenings at Minneapolis hospitals. Hennepin Healthcare went ahead and enrolled detainees in its ketamine study without their consent. Supposedly consent isn't actually required by law, which makes a sort of cosmic sense when you're studying the effects of a date rape drug. "Enrollees" could opt out afterward, but that offers little comfort when you've been sedated so heavily you need a machine to breathe for you.

This study exacerbated Hennepin Healthcare's ketamine problem. Ramping up dosings at the request of cops had already increased the number of life-threatening reactions to the drug. This incentive allowed this to carried over to day-to-day work, resulting in EMS personnel using ketamine whenever possible, even without verbal shoves from under-educated cops.

Body camera footage from one case showed a woman, after being Maced by police, asking for an asthma pump, the draft report said.

Instead, a paramedic gave her an injection of ketamine.

“If she was having an asthma attack, giving ketamine actually helps patients and we’re doing a study for agitation anyway so I had to give her ketamine,” the unnamed paramedic told a police officer, according to the report.

After receiving ketamine, the woman’s breathing stopped, and medical staff resuscitated her, according to the report.

Of course, there's an explanation for all of this. It comes courtesy of Hennepin Healthcare's top official. And it sounds like something written by police officers, rather than an expert in the medical field.

Dr. William Heegaard, chief medical officer for Hennepin Healthcare, said ketamine can be a lifesaving tool when paramedics encounter people showing signs of “excited delirium,” a condition when severe agitation can lead to death.

When you're fighting a losing battle against negative press, the worst thing you can do is name a condition that originated with the pseudoscience of 19th century insane asylums and was revived by the manufacturer of Tasers to help law enforcement agencies bullshit their way through court cases involving citizens tased to death by cops.

In the past, Taser has hosted seminars and sent out pamphlets on excited delirium to police and medical examiners’ groups across the country; sued medical examiners who listed their stun guns as a cause of death; and even gave law enforcement agencies a ready-made statement for when someone dies after police shock them with a stun gun: “We regret the unfortunate loss of life. There are many cases where excited delirium caused by various mental disorders or medical conditions, that may or may not include drug use, can lead to a fatal conclusion.”

Heegaard's hospital and staff engage in highly-questionable behavior and he's trying to pin it on a condition most of the medical community doesn't recognize as an actual syndrome. This whole debacle shows just how far cops have strayed from the "serve and protect" ideal. This is all about making things as easy as possible for officers accompanying detainees to medical care facilities. They want them knocked out, even if it raises the risk of killing them.

It also shows how easy it is for abusive behavior to spread when it's originating from law enforcement officers. Paramedics know better. They know they're the first line of defense against further injury or trauma. And they're willing to throw that all away just because a cop tells them to dope up compliant detainees.

On top of everything, there's the skewed incentives of Hennepin Healthcare, which has found a way to gather subjects for studies by sedating them so heavily they can't possibly object to anything. There should be a whole lot of people in both fields filing for unemployment. But that isn't how thing work when cops are involved. New policies will be put in place and everyone who fucked citizens with unneeded ketamine injections will just go back to work with a mental note in place reminding them to be a bit more careful when abusing the public's trust.

Filed Under: ems, ketamine, minneapolis, minnesota, police, studies, wtf

Another Police Accountability Miracle: Five Officers, Zero Body Cam Footage, One Dead Body

from the back-the-blue...-into-a-corner dept

We know body cameras haven't been the police accountability godsend some imagined they would be. (I admit I saw a far rosier future when they first started being put into service.) So far, the research jury's still out on the effectiveness of cameras in deterring misconduct and excessive force deployment. And, so far, they've been far more useful to prosecutors than plaintiffs in civil rights lawsuits.

You can put a camera on a cop but you can't change the system that leads to abusive behavior and practices. Nothing's changing much for officers other than the attachment of a lightweight ride-along. Policies may require officers to activate their cameras in nearly every situation, but if no one's willing to hold them accountable for refusing to do so, then nothing's going to improve.

Since law enforcement agencies maintain control of equipment and recordings, there's not much the public can do when critical footage goes missing. Cops learned early on device tampering can reduce discrepancies in paperwork and shore up lies delivered as testimony. What went unpunished when it was just dashcams and body mics has continued forward to swallow the accountability body cams seemed to promise.

For the Albuquerque PD, destroying recorded evidence is allegedly just part of its daily duties. A former contractor employed by the department claimed officers and supervisors routinely altered or deleted body cam footage. It's a serious allegation. And it assumes there's even footage to alter. In the case of the Mary Hawkes, a 19-year-old woman killed by an Albuquerque PD officer in 2014, there was no footage to be had when her family's attorney Laura Ives asked for it.

The narrative provided by the PD when asked what happened to the footage that could possibly have been captured by the five officers on the scene is literally unbelievable. It's a chain of coincidences the world's worst novelist would have been ashamed to hammer together to hold a flimsy story together. Five officers. Zero useful footage of a shooting by police officers that resulted in a person's death.

The sergeant on scene, Brian Maurer, said he believed he turned his camera on during the incident, but the department later said he hadn’t recorded anything. In his deposition, the sergeant testified that his camera had never malfunctioned like that before.

"Never malfunctioned like that before." Unlucky that. But that leaves four officers…

There was another officer who was standing nearby when the shooting happened. He originally said he hadn’t seen the shooting at all. But when confronted with the only images of the shooting that we have — very vague footage from an officer’s lapel camera who was parking his car at the time of the shooting — it was clear that this officer lied about not seeing the shooting.

What did get recorded by this officer (who can be seen pointing a gun towards the shooting victim in the 10 seconds of captured footage) wasn't even enough to fill the camera's default buffer. Taser body cams create a rolling 30 second buffer that's retained when cameras are activated. The reason this officer only had 10 seconds is because he shut his camera off. That's according to the APD itself. Rolling buffer defeated and 20 seconds of footage that would have captured the shooting is now nonexistent.

That leaves three officers.

Yet another officer could have captured important footage of the shooting, but his recording was so heavily pixelated it was impossible to glean anything from the images. No one in the department had ever seen footage corrupted like this before, and APD claimed that this was the result of yet another malfunctioning camera.

Two officers.

The fourth officer said he was recording on his Scorpion camera at the time of the incident, but there was no video on his camera’s SD memory card.

The official excuse here? Another "malfunction" right during the critical moments of a shooting. The APD kept the "malfunctioning" camera in service which went on to live a full and useful life capturing random cop events without another malfunction.

One officer left. And this is the one who actually shot Mary Hawkes.

He claimed that his cord had come unplugged. The department sent his camera off to Taser for analysis, and Taser found that the camera had been powered on within 8 minutes of the shooting, but was powered off in the moments before.

Taser examined the camera and said it was possible a loose cord could have powered it down. It also said it could have been turned off with the power switch. The cord was damaged but did not affect the camera's functionality.

Only a couple of the cameras that mysteriously malfunctioned during the shooting were examined by the PD or Taser. None of the cameras were preserved so they could be inspected by experts to see if the issues could be duplicated or if any footage could be obtained from the "faulty" cameras. The cameras all went back into service despite having proven to be utterly useless when it mattered most.

So, is it likely all of these officers conspired ahead of time to ensure there was no usable record of this shooting? Of course not. These events unfold quickly. And what likely happened is far more nefarious than a conspiracy. All of these cops -- independently -- recognized the developing situation to be the sort that might result in damaging recordings. And they all acted independently to ensure nothing of value to anyone outside of the force was saved.

These five simultaneous "malfunctions" are the product of a corrupt system that values the lives and careers of cops above all else, even the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve. This is an ingrained mindset that circles the wagons whenever officers' actions might be called into question. When a citizen gets killed, it's a cop's word against the victim's. And the victim can't say shit. The only thing that might leak some inconvenient truths are the body worn tattletales. They might upend the official bullshit scrawled across department paperwork after everyone involved has agreed on a narrative.

That's the way it works. That's the nastiness of US policing. It's the uncanny ability of multiple officers to act defensively in support of their careers while in the middle of a situation so very dangerous they need their guns drawn. They'll defend questionable decisions in court by claiming they had no time to think about what they were doing, but they obviously have enough of a self-preservation instinct to ensure nothing but the official narrative survives an officer-involved shooting.

Filed Under: accountability, albuquerque, albuquerque pd, body cameras, malfunctions, mary hawkes, police
Companies: taser

Court Calls Out Cops For Altering Interrogation Transcript To Hide Suspect's Request For A Lawyer

from the inconvenient-facts dept

The opening of this recent decision [PDF] by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals is eye catching. It quotes Breaking Bad prequel, Better Call Saul. More specifically, it quotes Jimmy McGill, who gradually morphs into the more-huckster-than-lawyer Saul Goodman over the course of the series. The case has to do with a murder suspect's request for a lawyer, one that was ignored by law enforcement. The quote sets the stage, letting readers know anyone accused of anything by law enforcement is better off exercising their right to be represented. (h/t Keith Lee)

Craig Kettleman: I just think I'd look guilty if I hired a lawyer.

James McGill: No, actually it's getting arrested that makes people look guilty, even the innocent ones, and innocent people get arrested everyday. And they find themselves in a little room with a detective who acts like he's their best friend. “Talk to me,” he says, “Help me clear this thing up. You don’t need a lawyer, only guilty people need lawyers” and BOOM! Hey, that’s when it all goes south. That’s when you want someone in your corner. Someone who will fight tooth and nail.

Mynor Vargas-Salguero was arrested and convicted of second-degree murder, robbery, and theft. The lower court sided with the government, finding his demands for a lawyer "ambiguous." The Appeals Court disagrees, finding it clear enough, especially when the recording of the interrogation is compared to law enforcement's transcript of the recording's contents.

That's where the real ambiguity lies. Or rather, there doesn't seem to be much ambiguous about law enforcement's attempt to retcon the post-arrest questioning to make Salguero's request for a lawyer vanish into the ether.

There was a language barrier but not an insurmountable one. Salguero's first language is Spanish but he knows some English. Two of the detectives present spoke Spanish. One spoke only English. Occasionally, translation was needed for the single English-only speaker in the room. But, for the most part, the interrogation flowed. The detectives told Salguero he wasn't being charged with anything, despite hauling him in with an arrest warrant. Salguero made it clear he wasn't interested in talking if he didn't get a lawyer.

The first demand came early in the interrogation when the detectives tried to determine Salguero's daily routine.

[DETECTIVE DELEON]: Okay. Tha—that’s why I asked you.

A: At 5:30 my ride wakes me up, there at the house where I live—lived right now with my sister, that I just moved in. [DETECTIVE DELEON]: Right.

A: And I go to work. That’s all I have to say to you. And if you accuse me of something I better want an attorney. (underlining added).

The detectives apparently understood this as a request for a lawyer. But they forged ahead with the interrogation after a brief pause. One of them acknowledged this during the interrogation, but that was conveniently left out of the transcript prepared for the court.

A: Right. Ask me whatever you want.

[DETECTIVE BELLINO]:Okay. Maybe…

A: People confuse me and—this has to be this way, man.

[DETECTIVE BELLINO]: Hold up, just a moment ago you said you wanted a lawyer but you’re willing to talk to us right now, right?

The footnote exposes the alteration by law enforcement.

The bolded text represents the words Mr. Vargas-Salguero spoke during the interrogation—as the circuit court and we can see on the video—that the police left out of the transcript they prepared and submitted to the court.

[...]

The record does not reveal, nor do the police explain, why their transcript deviates from the interrogation. The discrepancies were not identified to the circuit court, and the court made no findings about them; the court reviewed both the transcript and the video, and thus could consider the full interrogation, but didn’t address the differences. We cannot help but notice, however, that the officers’ transcript omitted words Mr. Vargas-Salguero in fact said at two critical points in the interrogation, and that the omitted language bears directly on whether the officers understood that Mr. Vargas-Salguero invoked his rights to counsel and to remain silent.

Here is the second critical point where the transcript deviated from the video:

A: In what moment did – did – I don’t want to say anything else now. Because I have nothing else to say. I have nothing else to tell you. Me, killing a poor man. (unintelligible.)

[DETECTIVE BELLINO]: Go ahead here.

[DETECTIVE DELEON]: Here.

A: There, what? Go ahead, what? What you got in there? What do you say? I don’t see anything there. Nothing.

[DETECTIVE BELLINO]: Look are you willing to talk to us? I thought you said you didn’t want to talk. Do you want to talk to me? Are you willing to talk to me?

A: Yeah.

The cop version:

The police-prepared transcript says only “I understand you want to talk.”

The transcript also fails to show what actually occurred during this moment. The Spanish-speaking detectives chose not to translate this assertion of Salguero's right to remain silent for Detective Bellino. Instead, the Detective DeLeon decided to stand back and let Bellino keep hammering away at Salguero in the suspect's non-native language.

The government argued Salguero's statement was ambiguous. The court points out it wasn't -- not when the context is considered.

Now back to Mr. Vargas-Salguero. The condition “if you accuse me of something” in the first half of his statement had indisputably been met, at least in the way that a normal person—and a reasonable police officer—would consider himself “accused of something.” At the time he made these statements, he had been arrested at his home in the middle of the night pursuant to an arrest warrant, issued by a court, that included serious crimes, and was being questioned in an interrogation room by three detectives. He mentioned (and lamented) several times that he felt like he could be going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit. It doesn’t matter for these purposes whether the charging documents had triggered his Sixth Amendment rights (we’ll deal with those below), or that the detectives claimed that he wasn’t being accused of anything. Maybe he “sought to couch [his] request [for an attorney] in polite or (more likely, given the context) deferential terms,” Ballard, 420 Md. at 493, but he was there because he had been, and was being, accused of serious crimes.

With that condition met, Mr. Vargas-Salguero’s statement that he’d “better want an attorney,” the officers’ translated understanding of his statement in Spanish, sufficiently invoked his desire for an attorney. Other cases have held “I think I want an attorney” or “I’d rather have an attorney” was sufficient. See, e.g., Harris, 305 S.W.3d at 489 (suspect invoked right to counsel by stating “I’d rather appoint a lawyer”); McDaniel, 506 S.E.2d at 23 (suspect invoked right to counsel by stating “I think I would rather have an attorney here to speak for me”). This statement was at least as strong as those.

Furthermore, the detectives' own actions indicate they at least thought Salguero had exercised his right to demand an attorney. They stopped the interview and stepped out of the room to discuss his "if you accuse me of something…" statement before apparently deciding they might be able to get away with ignoring his request. Detective DeLeon's statement -- conveniently excised from the official transcript -- further indicates he understood Salguero's statement to be a request for a lawyer. ("Hold up, just a moment ago you said you wanted a lawyer…")

The same goes for Salguero's right to remain silent. This was invoked when he said he had nothing more to say and pushed back from the table. This statement -- made in Spanish -- went conveniently untranslated and the Spanish-speaking detective too pushed back from the table to let the single non-Spanish person in the room override the invocation of a Fifth Amendment right.

The Appeals Court reverses the lower court's decision and sends it back, pointing out it clearly erred by allowing the government to submit an illegally-obtained confession as evidence. No evidence is as harmful to a criminal defendant as a confession, so there's no chance the lower court can claim the two violations of Salguero's rights were "harmless."

The examination of the transcript and the recording by the Appeals Court clearly indicates why all in-custody interrogations should be recorded. Relying only on a version of events written by those with a stake in the outcome results in the sort of malfeasance exposed here. The court won't go as far as to accuse law enforcement of lying, but it does make it clear it will trust videotape more than it will trust cops.

Filed Under: interrogation, lawyers, maryland, mynor vargas-salguero, police, transcript

Cops Perform Guns-Drawn Raid Of Chelsea Manning's Home Because Someone Reported Her Suicidal Tweets

from the ARE-YOU-OK-IN-THERE-CITIZEN-[bullets-flying] dept

We've discussed the divide between police and the policed, but perhaps none is more pronounced than law enforcement's handling of those with mental health issues. Dozens of times a year, someone in need of intervention or caretaking is killed by police officers who have responded to relatives, friends, or family calling for help.

911 is a dumb pipe. It will route the info to all, but it's usually police who end up acting as first responders, even when the crisis is health-related. Any combativeness is viewed as a threat, rather than a rational response to loud, violent stimuli. If the person needing help has a criminal record (and many people with mental health issues do), the "threat" is perceived before officers even make contact. In rare cases, these "wellness checks" end peacefully and with a resolution in line with the terminology used by law enforcement.

In most cases, an arrest is involved. In many cases, the "wellness check" ends in someone's death. Nearly 250 people suffering mental health crises were killed by officers in 2017. The story here is unique in that it didn't end in death, a violent arrest, or something else not even roughly aligned with the idea of community caretaking. But that's possibly due to the fact no one was home.

Shortly after Chelsea Manning posted what appeared to be two suicidal tweets on May 27, police broke into her home with their weapons drawn as if conducting a raid, in what is known as a “wellness” or “welfare check” on a person experiencing a mental health crisis. Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower and U.S. Senate candidate, was not at home, but video obtained by The Intercept shows officers pointing their guns as they searched her empty apartment.

The footage, captured by a security camera, shows an officer with the Montgomery County Police Department in Bethesda, Maryland, knocking on Manning’s door. When no one responds, the officer pops the lock, and three officers enter the home with their guns drawn, while a fourth points a Taser.

Granted, some people use firearms to end their lives, but guns drawn appears to be the default response in welfare checks. Officers are operating with limited information, but that should indicate a need for both caution and de-escalation tactics, rather than responding to a third-hand account of suicidal tweets with something that could pass for a rather low-key drug bust.

The responding agency -- the Montgomery County Police -- appears to know this isn't the proper response. Its first reaction when reached for comment was to accuse The Intercept of posting a possibly-unauthentic video. Police Captain Paul Starks also questioned The Intercept's facts, asking how it knew "no one was home."

Then he defended the guns-first approach to community caretaking.

“They don’t know what kind of circumstances they are entering when they enter a home,” Starks said, increasingly flustered. “The fact that a weapon is drawn doesn’t mean that they are going to shoot it.”

Perhaps not. But it makes it far more likely that they will use weapons, sometimes inadvertently. Unless you're intending to kill something or someone, the guns should remain holstered. That's just common sense, especially when multiple officers are exploring an unfamiliar space with limited information. It's not just the person being "helped" who might end up shot. It's other officers responding to the same call possibly startling another responder already on edge with a gun drawn.

Being a police officer in America is an astoundingly safe (in terms of risk of death, if not secure, lifelong employment) career choice. And yet, officers respond to many welfare checks as though the person in need of physical or psychiatric health is determined to Bonnie and Clyde their way through the attempted intervention. Cops are rarely killed in the line of duty -- even less so by firearms -- but the mentality is that every member of the general public is just dying to escalate a car stop or frisk into Murder One charges with a law enforcement sentencing enhancement tacked onto it.

The militarization of police has turned community servants into combatants despite the level of violent crime dropping precipitously over the last three decades. As public violence continues to decline, police keep amping up their response to "threats" only they can see, feel, or hear. The only sure way to make it through a wellness check alive is to be like Chelsea Manning -- nowhere near the address reported by people who thought they were doing the right thing.

Filed Under: chelsea manning, mental health, montgomery county police, police, suicide, wellness check

Boys In Blew: Australian Cops Caught Faking 258,000 Breathalyzer Tests

from the blowing-on-the-nipple-of-what's-easy dept

Reason number a billion why quotas for law enforcement are a bad idea: they encourage the worst behavior. The Victoria (AUS) Police recently performed an internal investigation into breathalyzer tests deployed 17.7 million times over the last 5-½ years. Prompted by an "anomaly" in the data, investigators uncovered something horrific and ridiculous all at the same time: Victorian cops blow… thousands of times a year.

Victorian police faked more than a quarter of a million roadside breath tests in what appears to be a deliberate ruse to dupe the system.

An internal investigation has found 258,000 alcohol breath tests were falsified over 5½ years, The Age has learned.

If there's an upside (and is there?), it's that it did not result in false arrests. These weren't faked tests used to prosecute people for driving under the influence. These were tests "performed" to meet quotas given to officers by supervisors. Never underestimate the reluctance of many workforce members to, you know, actually perform work.

Police believe officers may have been blowing into the breathalysers themselves, most likely due to laziness and the need to meet targets.

The anomaly first spotted by the Transport Accident Commission was the lack of a credible gap between test results. In most cases, several minutes at the very least would elapse between tests of motorists. Paperwork needs to be filled out, drivers need to be conversed with and/or cited, etc. That gap wasn't present in hundreds of thousands of tests which were performed in batches with no time gap between them. The only explanation? Police snow blow jobs.

[T]he faked tests were occurring one after the other.

This suggests two things: an officer is either placing a finger over the straw entry hole or they were blowing into the straw themselves.

Upside: faked negative tests don't result in false arrests or prosecutions. Downside: everything else. The Victorian Police have proven a quota system doesn't work. The officers have proven they can't be trusted to do their jobs. The latter is at least as significant as the quota issue. If officers are too lazy to hit quotas on breathalyzer tests, what other corners are they cutting while chasing numbers -- whether it's traffic citations or closing investigations?

The investigation does prove at least one thing: officers are abusing the trust placed in them, both by their superiors and the general public. The only factor that appeared to deter test fakery was direct oversight.

It was not a practice found at supervised drug and alcohol bus testing sites.

What will happen to all these lazy officers who abused the trust placed in them? Probably not much of anything. Despite this having been made public, accompanied by statements from police officials confirming the accuracy of the report, government officials further up the ladder -- the oversight -- appears to be withholding judgment until they are "comprehensively briefed." If heads roll, it will hopefully start up top and continue through the rank-and-file.

But heads won't start rolling. The culling will probably target the inanimate objects first. The quota system is effectively dead. It will be the scapegoat sacrificed so lazy cops can keep their jobs. It definitely should go, precisely because it encourages this sort of behavior. But it shouldn't be the only thing on the chopping block as the Victorian police seek to bring an end to this unflattering news cycle. Laziness is ingrained behavior and faking breath tests may prove to be the tip of the iceberg. Everything still underwater potentially contains serious civil liberties violations. The sooner the Victorian Police digs into officers' behavior in all areas of their jobs, the sooner it can began regaining the public's trust.

Filed Under: australia, breathalyzer, fake tests, law enforcement, police, quotas