Police Chief Demands Holes In Encryption Because Some Cops Decided To Participate In The DC Insurrection

from the sure,-make-this-all-about-us-when-it's-really-just-about-you dept

As more evidence comes to light showing a disturbing amount of law enforcement participation in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, police departments around the nation are finally being forced to face something they've ignored for far too long.

The law enforcement officers who participated in the insurrection attacked officers attempting to defend the building, or, at the very least, did nothing to discourage the lawless actions occurring all around them. The officers that went to DC and engaged in a riot aren't an anomaly. They've been part of law enforcement for as long as law enforcement has existed: bigots with a penchant for violence and a thirst for power.

These officers are finally beginning to be rooted out, but only because they did things no one can ignore. Hundreds of participants produced hundreds of recordings, turning their own celebration of their attempted election-thwarting into the evidence needed to identify them and charge them with federal crimes. Posts made to social media platforms provided more evidence, tying incriminating statements to location data to place off-duty cops on the scene.

Now that agencies are finally confronting their in-house white supremacist/militia problem, they're asking for everyone to be made less secure so they can handle the problem that's been hiding in plain sight for years.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo -- who presides over an agency with more than its share of bad cops -- was asked what officials like himself are doing to confront this problem. In response, Chief Acevedo asked for Congress to do him -- and other law enforcement agencies -- a favor:

Acevedo... said anonymous online platforms on the “dark web” are making such [internal] investigations impossible, even for departments with sufficient resources. He expects the move away from public platforms like Facebook and Twitter to grow rapidly in response to the FBI arrests of those who rioted at the Capitol.

This month, Acevedo was asked by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to explain what actions police chiefs are taking, and responded by asking for help. For years, law enforcement officials have asked for passage of a federal law that would require such platforms to have a “back door” that law enforcement can access if they have “a legitimate investigative need and a court order” to gain entry.

Then he blamed social media platforms for his own inability to police his police, calling them out as the real lawbreakers here:

“Congress’s failure to act has enabled industry giants to flaunt the law and operate with impunity,” Acevedo wrote in response.

First off, if the bad cops are shifting to "dark web" platforms in response to their own opsec failures during the January 6th riot, mandating backdoors that affect "industry giants" isn't going to make it any easier to track down cops who've moved on to "darker" web services.

Second, law enforcement agencies' continuous failure to hold officers accountable or to perform rigorous background checks should not be used as leverage to make services and devices less secure for millions of Americans. Citizens have already had to watch their tax dollars pay the salaries of brutal thugs whose loyalty to each other often supersedes their sworn duties as public servants. They don't need to be punished further just so it's a little easier for cops to perform the occasional internal investigation.

Finally, the encryption offered by device makers and communications platforms also protects cops -- not just from accountability, as Acevedo implies here -- but from malicious hackers and criminals who would love access to cops' devices, communications, and sensitive files. A backdoor for bad cops is a backdoor for good cops -- and a backdoor that strips a layer of security away from everyone who uses these devices and services.

The ugliness that permeates law enforcement needs to be rooted out. But the security of millions of Americans shouldn't be weakened just because those policing the police haven't done much of this policing for decades. They've had open access to evidence for years and rarely used it. Now that their sins are too big to ignore until the next news cycle hits shouldn't be the impetus for backdoor mandates.

Filed Under: art acevedo, backdoors, encryption, going dark, insurrection, washington dc

Houston Officer Behind Deadly Botched Raid Hit With Two Felony Murder Indictments

from the some-people-earn-their-indictments dept

Former Houston PD officer Gerald Goines is going to face murder charges. At least he's alive to face them. The victims of Goines' botched no-knock raid -- Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas -- don't have the luxury of watching justice be done. The residents of the house were killed by police officers performing a raid targeting heroin that never existed, utilizing a warrant filled with lies based on statements made by a confidential informant who didn't exist, and drugs pulled from a cop car console.

Goines is facing both state and federal charges. And the charges are still coming in. Multiple investigations are still ongoing. Nearly 14,000 cases linked to the now-disbanded Squad 15 (of the Narcotics Division) are under review by the District Attorney's office and dozens of pending cases have already been dismissed.

The charges brought against Goines late last year are now officially backed by an indictment, as Jacob Sullum reports for Reason.

"Because officers lied, people died," Harris County, Texas, District Attorney Kim Ogg said today at a press conference where she announced a grand jury indictment of two former Houston narcotics officers who were involved in a January 2019 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple in their home. The indictment confirms the state charges filed last August against Gerald Goines, who is accused of lying to obtain the warrant for the raid, and Steven Bryant, who is accused of subsequently backing up Goines' false portrayal of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas as dangerous heroin dealers.

Yes, it's incredibly easy to obtain a grand jury indictment. But the success rate drops precipitously when it's a cop being charged. This isn't a testament to the trustworthiness of grand jury proceedings, but rather an indication of just how irredeemable Officer Goines' actions were.

It's impossible to know how many people's rights were violated by Officer Goines and the PD's Narcotic Division, but we can say definitively Goines caused the death of two people who had nothing in their house but a small amount of drugs for personal use. They were never dealers and did not use heroin. But Goines used a bunch of lies to turn a couple who had been married for 21 years into dangerous drug dealers, and instigated a no-knock raid that resulted in multiple injured cops and two dead Houston residents.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo took over a troubled police department and promised greater officer accountability. He has failed to turn things around since his arrival in 2007. A narcotics unit doesn't become a flagrant abuser of rights overnight. It's something that steadily gets worse in the absence of accountability. Because no one felt compelled to engage in meaningful oversight, 14,000 cases linked to a single squad are now being reviewed for further evidence of illegality and misconduct.

Acevedo failed this test as well. He initially offered his support for an officer now charged with murder. Police officials complain all the time about people drawing assumptions before all the facts are in, but they are the first to offer their support of officers' actions before all the facts are in. The facts are in. And the facts make the entire department look awful. Goines isn't an aberration. He's just the one who got caught.

Filed Under: art acevedo, dennis tuttle, gerald goines, houston, murder, qualified immunity, rhogena nicholas

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

In Leaked Recording, Austin Police Chief Tears Into Commanders For Fatal Shootings, Use Of Excessive Force

from the burning-his-own-system-to-the-ground dept

If police culture is truly going to change, it needs to start at the bottom. Years of DOJ investigations and consent agreements have done almost nothing to root out the deep-seated problems found in many law enforcement agencies. The change has to come from within each department -- a much longer, slower process that requires those leading the reforms to put their careers on the line. They will be opposed by many of their fellow officers and villainized by police unions for any attempts to bring more accountability to policework.

There are probably more law enforcement officials out there with the same mindset as Austin (TX) police chief Art Acevedo. Unfortunately, very little of what they've done or said makes its way into the public eye without being strained through several filters. Acevedo's private comments to Austin PD commanders, however, arrive in the form of a leaked recording.

Acevedo was addressing the criticism he took for firing Geoffrey Freeman after the officer shot and killed a naked, unarmed, mentally-ill 19-year-old as he ran down a residential street. Acevedo addressed many issues during this talk and made it clear the APD isn't going to keep heading down the same limited-accountability road and end up just another law enforcement agency more known for its misdeeds than its law enforcement efforts. (h/t PINAC)

“I have given nine years of my life to the Austin Police Department,” Acevedo told his commanders. “Nine years aren’t going to go down the drain because we have people in this room that don’t want to do the hard lifting, that don’t want to be the bad guys. Sorry, we have to be the bad guys sometimes.

And the problem ain't the cops. It's the leadership.”

Directly addressing the shooting, Acevedo had this to say:

“If you can’t handle a kid in broad daylight, naked, and your first instinct is to come out with your gun, and your next instinct is to shoot the kid dead, you don’t need to be a cop. I don’t give a shit how nice you are,” Chief Acevedo told the group.

“The union got all pissed off because I fired Freeman. Some of you might have gotten pissed off. I’m going to tell you right now. If we have another Freeman tomorrow, that is what’s going to happen.”

He also addressed another controversial arrest -- one Acevedo only heard about after he started being questioned by media reps about it. "Contempt of cop" arrests will apparently no longer be tolerated.

“I am sickened that somehow people are still trying to justify Richter,” Acevedo said on the recording. “Nobody wearing stripes, or bars or stars should even think about justifying a woman — that the reason that woman got pulled out of that car is because she had the audacity to tell him to hurry up."

"She wasn’t going with the program,” he said. “You know what? Millennials ask questions, so get over it. If you are going to order somebody to do something, you better have a damn good reason if you are going to take them to jail.

“That was such an easy stop to de-escalate.”

Acevedo followed this up with something his commanders (and officers below them) can't have been happy to hear: massaging the paperwork to generate an exculpatory narrative is bullshit.

“Who cares what [Officer Richter] wrote?” Acevedo said. “Because I think we have this attitude, of I’ll just cover it in the report and I’ll be good to go … Anybody can do creative writing. Does that make sense to you guys?”

While these comments may have been spurred by recent events, Chief Acevedo is actually in the middle of an ongoing effort to reform his police department. The Austin Statesman points out that eleven internal affairs investigations have been opened on APD commanders in the last two years, leading to six reprimands and "several" resignations.

While resignations are hardly the ideal outcome, they're a better solution than allowing a poisonous influence to remain in the department. True, this move sidesteps accountability, but the intended outcome is still reached: the removal of a "bad apple," or at least a "bad apple" enabler.

Chief Acevedo will probably find himself out of a job, though. Complaints against him are already bubbling up from the lower ranks, with some commanders accusing him of refusing to consider their input. This may actually be a feature rather than a bug. Those complaining about his refusal to listen aren't providing much detail about the content of their input. If much of it was just more of the usual -- attempts to lower accountability for themselves and the officers they command -- it's hardly surprising Acevedo isn't implementing their ideas.

This is the sort of leadership America's law enforcement agencies need: commanders who are willing to start gathering up the slack given to officers over the years. Unfortunately, this can often lead to damaged or destroyed careers, which is why we see so few officials willing to do what Acevedo is doing. There's almost nothing to be gained personally from doing so, and an almost infinite amount to lose.

Filed Under: accountability, art acevedo, austin, excessive force, police, police violence

Police Chief To Critics Of Controversial Arrest: Hey, At Least My Officers Aren't Sexually Assaulting Arrestees

from the nicely-played,-Chief dept

When it takes four officers to apprehend a jaywalker -- a very tiny jaywalker at that -- how do you defend your department's actions? Well, if you're the Austin police department, you try several diversionary tactics ranging from bad to horrendous.

Here's the setup. A Texas woman out jogging boldly crossed the street far from the lawful corners. This attracted the attention of two Austin PD officers who yelled at her to stop. When she failed to submit to their authority (most likely because she would have assumed that [if she even heard it over her earbuds] -- like any other person crossing the street -- shouts of "Austin police! Stop!" were intended for someone doing something much more dangerous/criminal), they stepped up their pursuit, ultimately grabbing her arm and demanding she provide some identification.

She further enraged the jaywalking patrol by a.) pulling her arm out of the cop's grasp and b.) refusing to provide an ID card or drivers license. This turned jaywalking into an arrest for (if you guessed "jaywalking," you're wrong)... "failure to identify."

Is that even a thing? Well, yes it is, but no, not in this case. Here's the part of the statute that applies to the events in question.

(a) A person commits an offense if he intentionally refuses to give his name, residence address, or date of birth to a peace officer who has lawfully arrested the person and requested the information.

According to the report, the cops grabbed her arm and demanded ID. She refused. At that point, she wasn't under "lawful arrest." She was being (informally) detained, but not arrested. Police in Texas can't just demand you show them ID. Ex-Cop Law Student breaks it down further.

OK, it is fairly simple. If you are under arrest [and] refuse to provide your name, date of birth, or residence address, you commit a Class C misdemeanor unless you have warrants outstanding, when it is a Class B misdemeanor. If you are either under arrest or lawfully detained, it is an offense to provide a false name, date of birth or address. The later is a Class B or A misdemeanor, dependent on whether you have outstanding warrants.

What is not an offense is refusing to provide your name, date of birth, or residence address when you are lawfully detained.

So, now that we know the Austin PD doesn't really know the law its using to charge the jaywalker, let's get to the defensive tactics.

First, from the Austin PD's PR department:

The Daily Texan reached out to the Austin Police Department, where police spokeswoman Lisa Cortinas said police were working on “pedestrian enforcement.” Cortinas maintained that police weren’t targeting jaywalkers specifically, but instead focusing on pedestrian and bike safety overall.

Police Chief Art Acevedo backed this up:

Police Chief Art Acevedo says there is a lot more to the story. The officers were working on an initiative to cut down on pedestrian and bicycle violations. This week, they are focusing on jaywalkers.

Oh, OK. Officers are now busting jaywalkers because it's the sort of thing the PD has generally overlooked in the past. Now, it's apparently overcorrecting.

Here's a second department spokesperson with more on the APD's "pedestrian enforcement" initiative.

“I don’t think there’s any [jaywalking] initiative going on out there,” a second spokeswoman said.

OK. Um... The APD, contrary to statements made by another spokesperson and the Chief himself, is no longer pursuing the jaywalking initiative, if indeed, it ever was. But don't worry, citizens. These courageous cops have managed to capture the head of the city's worst jaywalking gang. No one needs to cross at the corner in fear any more.

But contradictory claims aren't the only trick up the APD's sleeve. Here's Austin PD chief Art Acevedo attempting to tell the outraged public just how ridiculous it is to be making noise about this arrest.

First, he notes how he would have played the hardass card right out of the gate.

"This person absolutely took something that was as simple as "Austin Police – Stop!' and decided to do everything you see on that video," Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo at a press conference this afternoon. "And quite frankly she wasn't charged with resisting. She's lucky I wasn't the arresting officer, because I wouldn't have been as generous."

Well, I guess Austin citizens are fortunate you're only running the department rather than slapping additional bogus charges on jaywalkers. But Chief Acevedo has more, because the spoiled citizens of Austin truly have no idea how lucky they are that Austin's finest are patrolling the streets.

"In other cities there's cops who are actually committing sexual assaults on duty, so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin, Texas."

Hear that, Austinites? YOU COULD BE BEING RAPED BY AUSTIN POLICE OFFICERS BUT YOU'RE NOT, ARE YOU? SHUT. UP.

To be fair (certainly not because he's earned it), Acevedo did apologize for the "you could be being sexually assaulted" comment. But he did so in the most self-serving way possible.

Yesterday's press conference related to the arrest of a jogger by members of the Austin Police Department (APD) was the culmination of an emotional week for the APD, our extended APD family and me personally.

During the press conference I attempted to place the arrest into context by bringing attention to the fact that law enforcement deals with many acts of serious misconduct. This includes recent instances in the news of sexual assault by police officers in other cities.

In hindsight I believe the comparison was a poor analogy, and for this I apologize. I stand committed to transparent leadership and will continue to engage the community we serve in an open, honest, and timely manner.

Sorry about the rough week there, pal. That's big city policing for you. If you're going to focus on penny ante jaywalking (that somehow requires a 4:1 cops-jaywalker ratio to enforce), then you can't be too surprised at the public's reaction. Citizens like proportionate responses. This wasn't one of them. And when it all gets too "emotional" to deal with rationally and your gut instinct is to tell the public they're lucky the Austin PD isn't sexually assaulting them, then it's going to take much, much more than a small "I had a bad week" apology to dig yourself out of that hole.

Filed Under: abuse, art acevedo, austin pd, police, texis