Whistleblower: Police Officers Celebrated Shooting People With Badge-Bending, BBQs

from the jesus-fucking-christ-can-you-try-not-being-awful-just-for-a-moment dept

There's a lot of competition for Worst Police Force in America. The NYPD is known for its casual approach to human life and its antagonistic approach to public records requesters. The Chicago PD operated its own black site to separate residents from their rights while interrogating them. The Pasco County Sheriff's Department thinks it should be in the business of turning students into criminals. The list goes on and fucking on.

Enter the Vallejo (California) Police Department -- one that has apparently gamified the shooting of residents.

For a generation, a secretive clique within the Vallejo Police Department has commemorated fatal shootings with beers, backyard barbecues, and by bending the points of their badges each time they kill in the line of duty, an investigation by Open Vallejo has found. The custom was so exclusive, some officers involved in fatal shootings were never told of its existence.

First you have to shoot someone. Then the others who are in on this have to determine whether you can be trusted.

Sources say not every officer who kills is invited to participate in the Badge of Honor ritual. The vetting process is stringent, if straightforward. Those who kill meet its first requirement. Those who can be trusted not to talk fulfill the second.

Open Vallejo cites the controversial shooting of Willie McCoy as the impetus for this anonymous whistleblowing. McCoy was shot by Vallejo police officers in a Taco Bell drive-thru, where he had apparently passed out. Restaurant employees called the PD, which sent officers to perform a wellness check. Instead of seeing whether anything was wrong with McCoy, officers surrounded the car and killed McCoy when he awoke and moved one arm towards his shoulder. Vallejo officers fired 55 rounds in less than 3.5 seconds, killing McCoy.

It wasn't the first time Vallejo cops emptied their magazines into someone they were supposed to be arresting or helping. At the tail end of a chase involving an alleged robbery suspect, Vallejo officers shot the suspect -- who was carrying a knife and slowly moving towards them -- 41 times.

According to Open Vallejo's source, one of McCoy's killers -- Officer Ryan McMahon -- got a bend on his "star" for this shooting. This would be his second "bend" in less than a year.

Vallejo police officers love using their guns to solve problems. Even if you doubt the anonymous whistleblower's claims of in-house celebrations for shooting citizens, this statistic is chilling:

At the time of [Captain John] Whitney’s firing, nearly 40% of officers on the force had been in at least one shooting, Open Vallejo research shows. More than a third of those had participated in two or more. The department employs about 100 sworn personnel.

That's well above the 27% of officers who have self-reported firing their weapons in the line of duty. This disparity begs the "chicken or egg" question. Are Vallejo cops violent because there are informal rewards for being violent? Or did this streak of violence lead to the unofficial rewarding of shooting people?

The captain namechecked in this quote was forced out of the department after opening an investigation into the shooting of Willie McCoy. Vallejo's police culture doesn't welcome internal or external scrutiny -- like pretty much every other law enforcement agency in the nation.

Captain Whitney's whistleblowing didn't start there. It wasn't just the Willie McCoy shooting. It was also the blowback from another Vallejo PD failure -- one ignored off by officers and supervisors, including the then-head of the PD.

[Current police union president Mat] Mustard was the lead detective on the 2015 Denise Huskins kidnapping case Vallejo police mistakenly called a hoax.

Whitney says he was in the room when Chief Bidou allegedly instructed Lt. Kenny Park before a now infamous press conference.

"The fact that we've essentially wasted all of these resources for really nothing is upsetting," said Lt. Park during the 2015 presser.

"Chief Bidou told Lt. Park to burn that b****," said Whitney.

Huskins recorded this exclusive statement for ABC7 News: "In their eyes, if you're a woman - you're another "bit**" to burn; if you're a person of color - you're another 'criminal' to kill. It's horrific, and the community of Vallejo deserves better."

That's the mindset of this PD, which has terrorized residents for years under the guise of preserving law and order. This is the way it has always been.

The failure to hold police officers accountable has been an issue in Vallejo for as long as anyone can remember. According to confidential city documents, twenty-five years ago one officer shot another while drinking in a bar, and wasn’t fired. A cop with a drug problem kept his job even after he was caught stealing from evidence lockers and was arrested for prescription fraud. Twenty years ago, a lieutenant told a new officer named Joseph Iacono that, when a suspect runs away, the officer should use enough force to put the man in the emergency room. To see if Iacono could fight, he was placed in a holding cell with an uncoöperative suspect. Iacono is now the department’s Lead Force Options Instructor and, according to the documents, likes to say, “It can’t be awful if it’s lawful.”

The Vallejo PD has cost city residents $16 million in the last ten years. This may not seem like much when compared to the amounts racked up by law enforcement agencies in large cities like Chicago and New York City. But when broken down to a per officer cost, Vallejo takes the lead in costing those paying their salaries the most. And -- despite actions taken by the city's insurer -- police officers continue to make things worse for those that manage to survive their violence.

Police violence has cost the city so much money that, in 2018, the statewide insurance pool that helped pay its legal fees took the unprecedented step of raising Vallejo’s annual deductible, from five hundred thousand dollars to $2.5 million, prompting the city to find another insurer. Vallejo is currently facing at least twenty-four use-of-force cases, which it estimates could cost some fifty million dollars.

Even if Vallejo officers aren't bending their badges in celebration of shooting citizens, they're still shooting citizens far more often than cops in other departments. A lot of whistleblowing has occurred over the years in relation to this department. And so far, it hasn't changed the culture.

The Vallejo PD is out of control. Swapping parts out isn't going to change it. There's a new deputy chief helping preside over Vallejo's squad of uniformed killers but no one should be holding their breath waiting for internal reform. The "new" sub-boss is the same as the old boss: a department rehire. Joseph Kreins presided over the department as chief from 2012-2014. Dusting off someone who failed to control a department for two years doesn't change anything. The city's cops will continue to kill and maim until someone dares to rein them in.

And it appears no one will -- at least not immediately. Between retrofitting a deputy chief and pretending state AG Xavier Becerra -- the same AG who fought a new police accountability law in court -- will get to the bottom of the PD's endemic violence problem, city residents haven't been given anything to hope for. The shootings will continue until law enforcement morale improves.

Filed Under: california, police, police brutality, shootings, vallejo, violence

Cops: People In Their Own Homes Are In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time Whenever A Cop Enters Unlawfully

from the dear-sirs-or-madams:-get-fucked dept

It's not a trend. It's disturbing, trend or no trend. It just is. You're the enemy, even when you're in your own home. That's the arguments cops are making for killing or maiming people who had no idea law enforcement officers had entered their residence.

Part of the problem is "no-knock" raids. Saying they need the element of surprise to ensure officer safety and prevent the destruction of evidence, cops are engaging in a hyper-aggressive form of warrant service that sacrifices officer safety on the altar of evidence preservation. There's no evidence no-knock raids are safer. In fact, many high-profile stories show the opposite: performing an armed home invasion can often result in an armed response. The residents don't know cops are entering their house violently. All they know is people with guns are suddenly in their home shouting threats. They respond appropriately.

This is a direct result of the militarization of police, aided greatly by the Defense Department's 1033 program, which encourages cops to partake of the military's surplus. The addition of military gear, tech, and vehicles has allowed cops to view themselves as combatants in a war zone, with everyone who isn't a cop a potential enemy.

Even when they don't have the explicit permission to enter a residence without knocking and announcing their presence, cops do it anyway. What are the odds anyone would find out? Whose testimony is going to stack up against that of sworn officers of the law?

"Wrong place, wrong time" is living in your own house when cops show up unexpectedly. And that's almost always how cops show up: unexpectedly. In Julian Betton's case, cops served a warrant by crashing through his front door unannounced and shooting at him 29 times (hitting him nine times) when he confronted the home invasion with a gun in his hands. The gun was at his side but it made no difference to officers who kept firing until they felt he no longer "posed a threat." Betton was paralyzed from the waist down and suffered numerous injuries to his internal organs.

What the task force failed to notice during its "dynamic entry" was Betton's security camera. The recorded footage flatly contradicted multiple officers' sworn testimony. They claimed they knocked and announced their presence before entering. The tape shows no knock, no hesitation, and not a single officer moving their lips to announce their presence. A total of nine seconds elapse between the officers' arrival and their entry into Betton's home.

Betton sued and won, but Officer David Belue of the Myrtle Beach PD appealed the stripping of his immunity, arguing that he had every right to shoot Betton, even if the officers' entry was illegal.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals seems skeptical, to say the least. Belue's lawyer argued that the illegal entry was not an issue for this appeal, so the court didn't need to waste its time relitigating that aspect of the case. The Court disagreed, pointing out Betton likely had every reason to protect himself from armed intruders that did not identify themselves as cops and were wearing gear that made it much more difficult for Betton to clearly identify them as officers of the law.

To paraphrase the oral arguments concisely, this is what was said:

OFFICER BELUE'S LAWYER: Citizens have no right to defend themselves from armed intruders in their home.

COURT: What the actual fuck

The oral arguments should be listened to in their entirety to enjoy the thorough reaming of Belue's representation, who attempted to argue the particulars of the shooting do not matter. According to Officer Belue's lawyer, the only thing that matters is a cop's view of the situation. If a cop increases the chances of an armed response by performing an illegal entry, it's on the resident if they get shot at 29 times by officers for choosing to grab a weapon before confronting the intruders.

This argument upends the Castle Doctrine. The Fourth Amendment holds the home above all else when it comes to Fourth Amendment protections. Citizens are given wide latitude to defend their home from invaders -- and that includes those who might be carrying badges. Officers like Belue are arguing that law enforcement's invasion of a home tips the scale in favor of law enforcement, allowing them to do whatever they want without repercussion simply because of their profession.

This is wrong. But it's not the only time this perverse argument has been made.

On September 6, 2018, Dallas police officer Amber Guyger entered the wrong apartment and killed Botham Jean, the actual resident of the apartment Guyger thought was hers. Guyger may have made an honest mistake but it ended in the death of a person who responded like anyone would to an unexpected intruder: he got up off his couch and moved towards the front door. Guyger handled her own illegal entry by killing Jean within a few seconds of entering his apartment.

She claimed Jean ignored orders to show his hands. (This is disputed by neighbors' account of the shooting.) But why would he? He was in his own apartment and Guyger was the intruder. The threat was posed by Guyger. She walked into the wrong apartment and drew her gun when she spotted someone she didn't expect to be there. Jean responded to Guyger by trying to get her out of his apartment. For that completely explicable reaction, he was killed.

So, who has the right to defend themselves in a situation like this? Well, a witness for Officer Guyger claimed it's the person who entered the wrong apartment.

A Texas judge barred explosive testimony Wednesday by a lead investigator who said he believes fired Dallas police officer Amber Guyger did not commit a crime when she entered the wrong apartment and killed the unarmed black man inside.

The "lead investigator" was former Texas Ranger David Armstrong. His take on the Botham Jean shooting? Guyger had the right to defend herself against an intruder even as she intruded into someone else's residence.

On the witness stand, Armstrong disputed prosecutors’ argument that Jean was seated on his couch in front of the TV eating vanilla ice cream when Guyger shot him. Instead, Armstrong said Jean was 13 feet from the door and posed a “deadly threat” to Guyger.

Outside the presence of the jury, Armstrong said Guyger acted “reasonably” and that he does not believe she committed any crime.

Living in your own home turns you into a "deadly threat" the moment an officer enters a residence unannounced. That's what cops want the legal standard to be.

Fortunately, it isn't, at least for the most part. There's a lot of immunity being spread around carelessly (the Fourth's oral arguments include one judge saying with some irritation "we grant immunity to everyone") but it's still police officers who are the interlopers when it comes to situations like these. The Appeals Court doesn't sound like it will give Belue a pass on his decision to use bullets to handle a situation he made more dangerous by refusing to follow the specifications (knock and announce) of his search warrant. And Amber Guyger was found guilty of murder, albeit the variety that results in a 10-year sentence rather than life.

Make no mistake: law enforcement officers are just as willing as any of us to do whatever it takes to preserve their livelihoods. The problem is that -- unlike most of us -- they occasionally engage in unjustified killings. And yet, they still want people to believe these deaths are a response to threats posed by citizens minding their own business in their own homes, even when all evidence points to the officers being in the wrong. When we screw up at work, we inconvenience people. When cops screw up at work, people end up dead. The arguments are not just weak, they're inexcusable. We deserve better. But it seems unlikely we'll ever get what we deserve.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, castle doctrine, police, police shootings, shootings

New Mass Shooting Prevention Bill Will Use 'Anti-Terrorism' Methods To Ramp Up Surveillance Of Students

from the not-quite-the-civics-lesson-schools-had-in-mind dept

The federal government still doesn't have any great ideas on how to head off future school shootings. But it does have some ideas. Some ideas are better than none when calls to "do something" abound. Something is indeed in the works. Unfortunately, the solution being offered just opens up students to increased surveillance, on and off campus.

You already know we're headed to a darker place when the head of the DOJ is touting anti-terrorism tactics as a solution.

As America grapples with the crisis, [Attorney General William] Barr wrote in a letter to federal and local law enforcement officials that it was “critically important ... that we learn from our experiences over the last two decades fighting terrorism and violent crime and that we apply those lessons to hone an efficient, effective and programmatic strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all lawful means.”

Barr was speaking more broadly of mass shooters, but school shooters are also mass shooters, which means the "individuals" being "disrupted" will sometimes be school students.

Expanded surveillance of school students would be the result of Sen. John Cornyn's RESPONSE Act. (Expanded surveillance of everyone would also be the result of the proposed bill.) There are some helpful aspects to the proposed law, like increasing access to mental health treatment and the hiring of additional mental health professionals to handle the uptick in access.

But the law would also authorize less helpful things, like expedited death penalties and nudging ISPs towards monitoring their customers' internet use.

Encouraging Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to Better Collaborate with Law Enforcement to Prevent Mass Shootings —Clarifies that internet service providers and online platforms have the authority to share information with law enforcement concerning acts of mass violence, hate crimes, or domestic terrorism.

The bill doesn't demand increased monitoring. It just suggests law enforcement will be expected a bit more proactivity from service providers.

The bill also suggests doing more of what hasn't been proven to be useful, like the periodic traumatization of staff and students with active shooter drills.

But it's really about the surveillance. As The Guardian reports, schools are already engaged in plenty of student surveillance. Adding students to the "possible mass shooter" pool would just put existing systems on PEDs.

There is still no research evidence that demonstrates whether or not online monitoring of schoolchildren actually works to prevent violence.

Despite this, new legislation introduced Wednesday by Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and longtime ally of the National Rifle Association (NRA), would update the Children’s Internet Protection Act to mandate that public schools adopt “a technology protection measure that detects online activities of minors who are at risk of committing self-harm or extreme violence against others”.

That mandate isn't going to improve the faulty AI and algorithms already in place. It will increase their use, but it won't make systems prone to false positives any more reliable. Children will become haystacks sifted and sorted by companies like Gaggle. Students will spend more time talking to law enforcement about innocuous posts flagged as suspicious because they contain certain words.

Cornyn's mass shooting plan piggybacks on a vague law that demands schools monitor students online activities. What that covers has never been clearly defined. A do-almost-nothing law that demands increased surveillance will only make existing problems worse. No price is too high to pay for school safety, especially when the price is going to be paid by students.

Filed Under: gun control, john conryn, school shootings, shootings, students, surveillance, surveillance state, terrorism, william barr

You're Not Helping: ESPN Delays 'Apex Legends' Broadcast After 2 Mass Shootings

from the not-helping dept

Of all the battles we wage here, my personal frustration probably peaks on the topic of video games and real world violence. The amount of calories spent even having this discussion should go down as some kind of complete human failure. Study after study, never mind the input from actual law enforcement professionals, has demonstrated that the political talking points on violent games are complete bunk. I used to be fond of saying that the science on this topic was unsettled. At this point, the science is quite clear.

Which means what we really need for that science to take hold with the public and end this stupid debate is to stop signaling that the debate isn't over. But when ESPN, with all of its popularity, decides to suspend a broadcast for an Apex Legends tournament because of the recent mass shootings, it's doing the opposite.

This weekend’s planned airing of the EXP Apex Legends Invitational at X Games tournament on ESPN2 has been postponed by the network, “out of respect for the victims and all those impacted in the immediate aftermath of the shootings.”

The broadcast is meant to show highlights from the Apex Legends tournament that was held at X Games in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on August 2. Originally scheduled to air on ESPN2 this weekend, the show has been postponed for two months.

On the one hand, look, sure this sounds fine. And it's almost certain that somebody somewhere would have raised hell at ESPN about putting on a video game tournament that includes violent gaming shortly after a tragedy. But the job of society is to tell those people that they're crazy, not bend the knee to them. One single movie announced it was pulling its release following the shootings and this too is absolutely not helping. Plenty other upcoming releases that feature violent imagery are going off as planned. No word of TV networks delaying the release of any episodes over concerns that they contain violence. Not a single book release has been rescheduled, music video delayed, nor comic book axed over any of this. So why is this different?

Because video games. The scapegoating has gone on for so long that it's become etched into our psyches and only a conscious uncoupling is going to change that.

Filed Under: apex legends, delays, shootings, video games
Companies: espn

FBI's Internal Investigations Of Shootings By Agents Clears Agents 98% Of The Time

from the BONUSES-ALL-AROUND! dept

An agency that investigates itself will almost always clear itself. The FBI, which still allows interviews of suspects to be "memorialized" with pen-and-paper recollections by the interviewer, is allowed to handle its own internal investigations of deadly force deployment. Unsurprisingly, FBI agents are rarely found to have acted inappropriately.

New FBI data obtained exclusively by NBC News shows the bureau found fault with the actions of agents five times in 228 shooting incidents from 2011 to the present. Eighty-one were intentional shootings involving people or objects, 34 were intentional shootings of animals, and 113 were accidental discharges.

The large number of cleared incidents quite possibly includes this list of questionable shootings:

• In August, an FBI agent was acquitted of federal criminal charges that he lied about firing his weapon in a 2016 standoff with right-wing extremists in Oregon. The FBI declined to comment on any disciplinary investigation.

• In June, an FBI agent — off-duty but armed with a handgun — accidentally shot someone in a Denver nightclub after he did a backflip that dislodged his weapon. He pleaded guilty to third degree assault and was sentenced to two years probation. The FBI would not discuss his status at the bureau.

• In 2016, an FBI agent shot a 31-year-old man during a military-style raid to serve a warrant on a different person. The FBI says the man was armed; his family, which has filed a wrongful death lawsuit, disputes that and adds that he was blind in one eye and disabled. The FBI declined to comment on the case.

• In 2015, the FBI terminated an agent who fired his weapon from a second-story apartment in Queens, shooting an unarmed man as he tried to burglarize the agent's car on the street below.

It's impossible to say if any of these might be one of the five incidents the FBI found problematic. The agency refused to comment on any of these shootings when questioned by NBC.

Very little information can be obtained by those seeking to hold the FBI responsible for wounding them or killing their loved ones. Even as the FBI has tentatively encouraged other law enforcement agencies to be more proactive in releasing information about officer-involved shootings, it hasn't applied the same level of transparency to its internal investigations. What has been released is heavily-redacted, giving readers little to work with but a few raw numbers.

This is especially of concern to Junior Valladares, whose father was shot by an FBI agent during a hostage situation in Houston, Texas. His father was the hostage. According to the FBI, an agent poked a gun through a window to try to shoot the man holding Junior's father hostage. The gun was grabbed by someone in the room, resulting in the agent firing two shots into the room. One of those two bullets struck and killed Ulises Valladares, who was tied up on the couch.

The hostage was the only person in the room, and the FBI went on record as stating it was the hostage who grabbed the rifle. It seems like an unlikely thing for a bound hostage to do, but the FBI has stuck to this story. Houston police chief Art Acevedo -- who is dealing with the fallout from a botched raid himself -- stated at a news conference last fall he no longer believes the FBI's narrative. It's unclear what Acevedo has seen that has changed his mind, but at this same news conference he called out the FBI for allowing the investigation to drag on for months, denying Valladares' son any closure.

Law enforcement agencies have proven time and time again they can't be trusted to police themselves. The FBI is no exception.

Filed Under: fbi, internal investigations, shootings

DOJ Finally Going To Force Law Enforcement Agencies To Hand Over Info On People Killed By Police Officers

from the better-late-than-never dept

At long last, the federal government is getting serious about tracking the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers.

For most of the last two decades, the DOJ has been collecting this information from local law enforcement agencies, but only on a voluntary basis. As a result, the federal numbers have nearly no relation to the real numbers -- which have been compiled by a handful of private actors, including The Guardian, a UK-based journalistic entity.

Last June, legislators introduced a bill (that promptly went nowhere) which would replace voluntary reporting with mandatory reporting. The FBI expressed its concern about the government's inability to collect accurate information on citizens killed by police officers, offering on multiple occasions to replace its voluntary system with a better voluntary system.

The Guardian is reporting that the voluntary system is finally being replaced with something that will create actual accountability.

Police departments will be required to give the US justice department full details of deadly incidents involving their officers each quarter, under a new government system for counting killings by police that was influenced by the Guardian.

Announcing a new program for documenting all “arrest-related deaths”, federal officials said they would actively work to confirm fatal cases seen in media reports and other open sources rather than wait for departments to report them voluntarily.

This still lets local PDs off the hook in terms of immediate self-reporting. But that's probably ok, as there's nothing in the reporting of deaths at the hands of police officers that encourages urgency or transparency from law enforcement agencies. With the feds independently verifying reported deaths -- i.e., those reported by journalists -- delays between reports and their addition to the federal numbers will be decreased dramatically.

Law enforcement agencies aren't completely off the hook, however. They'll still be required to report in custody deaths to the Justice Department. The difference is that the DOJ will no longer wait around for agencies to self-report. Local agencies heavily reliant on federal funding will probably be the agencies filling out these reports the fastest.

In their Federal Register article, officials cited their authority under the death in custody reporting act – a law that states local departments must report all deaths in custody to the justice department or lose 10% of their federal funding. The law has been largely ignored since being reauthorized in December 2014.

The other change of note is that this will no longer be a year-end tabulation after all the self-reporting is completed. Agencies can fill out one form for 2016's total deaths, but going forward will be required to hand these in quarterly.

Agencies will also be responsible for collecting a lot of data they've never had to previously. Details about the deadly incident will need to be provided, along with demographic data on the deceased. Coroners and medical examiners serving law enforcement agencies will also need to turn over information to the government and will be asked to confirm local news reports on officer-involved deaths.

This is a huge step forward for a federal agency that has long relied on voluntary reporting from compliant law enforcement agencies to tabulate the use of deadly force by officers. It's a sign that the federal government finally realizes the good people in law enforcement can't be relied on to hand over data on incidents that make them look less that perfect on a voluntary basis. Targeting federal funding is a smart move because that's the sort of money that gets spent on surveillance tools and 1033 acquisitions that agencies normally couldn't afford without it.

The real test will come when it's implemented, as it often takes more than federal mandates to alter entrenched cultures where accountability and transparency are considered weaknesses.

Filed Under: data, doj, information, police, shootings

Police Step Up Arrests For 'Threatening' Social Media Posts In The Wake Of The Dallas Shooting

from the civil-liberties-v.-kneejerking dept

In a move that's sure to only increase the nation's respect for law enforcement, police departments have been arresting people for "threatening" social media posts. This activity follows the tragedy in Dallas, where five police officers were killed by a man armed with a rifle. Naomi LaChance of The Intercept has more details.

Four men in Detroit were arrested over the past week for posts on social media that the police chief called threatening. One tweet that led to an arrest said that Micah Johnson, the man who shot police officers in Dallas last week, was a hero. None of the men have been named, nor have they been charged.

Four more arrests have occurred elsewhere:

Last weekend in Connecticut, police arrested Kurt Vanzuuk after a tip for posts on Facebook that identified Johnson as a hero and called for police to be killed. He was charged with inciting injury to persons or property.

An Illinois woman, Jenesis Reynolds, was arrested for writing in a Facebook post that she would shoot an officer who would pull her over. “I have no problem shooting a cop for simple traffic stop cuz they’d have no problem doing it to me,” she wrote, according to the police investigation. She was charged with disorderly conduct.

In New Jersey, Rolando Medina was arrested and charged with cyber harassment. He allegedly posted on an unidentified form of social media that he would destroy local police headquarters. In Louisiana, Kemonte Gilmore was arrested for an online video where he allegedly threatened a police officer. He was charged with public intimidation.

Arresting people for speech is problematic, especially when the content of the communications doesn't rise to the level of a "true threat." The Supreme Court's Elonis decision says this distinction is important. It's not enough for a person or persons to subjectively view the communication as threatening. It needs to be viewed through the "reasonable person" lens.

In these cases, perception appears to be everything. In the wake of the Dallas shooting, it's entirely normal for police officers to view the world a little differently. But this altered view -- one that's likely to be less skewed as time goes on -- can't be allowed to override the First Amendment and deprive individuals of their freedom to speak, not to mention their actual freedom.

And just as certainly as law enforcement officers and officials are likely to view certain acts of blowhardiness as threatening in the immediate aftermath of a shooting targeting police officers, certain citizens are likely to vent their frustration and anger in particularly stupid ways, but without the intention or ability to carry out the perceived threat. Caution should be exercised on both sides of the interaction. However, those with the power to arrest, detain, and charge citizens for stupidity should be the more cautious of the two parties -- simply because they still hold the power, despite recent events.

Those in power should also take care to carry this out with some sort of consistency, if that's the route they're choosing to take. It can't just be deployed against a bunch of nobodies who mouthed off about their contempt for law enforcement. If this is how it's going to be handled, those who speak with the same rhetoric in defense of law enforcement need to be held accountable. Former congressional rep Joe Walsh tweeted out that this was now "war on Obama" after the Dallas shootings and yet no one showed up at his door to arrest him for threatening the President. It's bad enough that power is being misused to silence criticism of law enforcement violence. It's even worse when this power is deployed in a hypocritical fashion.

Filed Under: arrests, dallas, free speech, law enforcement, police, shootings, social media

Two Days, Two Shootings, Two Sets Of Cops Making Recordings Disappear

from the command-control dept

There are cameras everywhere. But when cops start shooting, it's usually bullets and never footage. The first recordings that ever make their way to the public are those shot by bystanders. Anything else captured during a shooting remains under strict control of law enforcement… even when the recordings don't belong to law enforcement.

Minutes after two cops killed Alton Sterling outside of a convenience store, police confiscated all surveillance video of the incident without a warrant and allegedly without permission.

An attorney for the owner of the Triple S Mart, Abdullah Muflahi, told The Daily Beast a hard drive containing the complete recording of the Sterling’s death at the hands of Baton Rouge Police Department Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake was unlawfully taken by police. Muflahi showed The Daily Beast the barren cabinet where the hard drive had been.

All that’s left of the storage unit is a sole barren wire.

If this tactic sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it on multiple occasions. After Laquan McDonald was shot by Chicago police officers, several cops went to a nearby restaurant and seized its surveillance recordings. It took the city of Chicago over a year to release dashcam footage of the incident -- footage that was oddly missing the audio that normally would have been captured when the camera was turned on.

In California, cops raided a marijuana dispensary. Before helping themselves to edibles and playing a game of darts, officers attempted to disable the store's surveillance cameras and seized recording devices.

In Baton Rouge, officers were wearing body cameras. Chances of seeing this footage is nil. According to reports, the cameras "came loose" during the shooting and apparently did not record "quality" footage of the incident. And, as of now, city attorneys, the police department, and the FBI (which is conducting its own investigation of the shooting) are refusing to discuss the missing surveillance equipment.

When The Daily Beast requested both the surveillance video and the supposed warrant from the Baton Rouge Police Department, a lawyer from the department first denied the request by saying they could not turn over any documents from a “criminal investigation.” When told that a warrant is a public court document and could not be withheld, the lawyer then outright refused to confirm or deny if a warrant for the surveillance video even existed.

After backtracking on the existence of the warrant, the attorney backtracked on the possession of the surveillance video, saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the hard drive.

“My client has not been informed of that,” said Porter, the attorney for the store owner.

The FBI refused to confirm or deny the police department’s claim.

What has been confirmed is that it was a warrantless seizure. Both the Baton Rouge District Attorney and the clerk of courts have admitted there is no record of a warrant being issued or even an affidavit submitted.

Another controversial shooting, following one day after the Baton Rouge incident, has also resulted in missing footage -- albeit only temporarily.

The driver of the car in which passenger Philandro Castile was shot by police officers posted a horrifying video of the aftermath to Facebook using its live-streaming option. Not too long after it was posted, the video vanished. Facebook blamed it on a "technical glitch" and restored the recording an hour later. The details behind the video's disappearance now suggest this wasn't a glitch, nor was it Facebook inappropriately flexing its content policies.

Castile, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter were pulled over by police in the Falcon Heights suburb of Minneapolis for a broken tail light. Using her cellphone and Facebook Live, Reynolds web-streamed footage of her dying boyfriend after he was shot by a police officer as he reached for his ID in his wallet. The video was mysteriously removed from her Facebook profile as it went viral across the internet.

On Thursday, Facebook said a “technical glitch" caused the recording to be pulled from its social network. However, Reynolds claimed officers seized her phone and took over her Facebook account to delete the evidence.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the event have tonight confirmed to The Register that someone – highly suspected to be the city's police – used her phone to remove her recording from public view shortly after the shooting.

This, too, is a common occurrence. While the Supreme Court's Riley decision may provide an easy way to determine whether someone's Fourth Amendment rights have been violated by a search/seizure of their cell phone, it doesn't prevent an officer from simply taking a cell phone and deleting incriminating footage. The path for redress is clearer, but it's powerless against those whose first reaction is to vanish away evidence of their misconduct. [Update: For what it's worth, Facebook is standing by its "technical glitch" story and says the cops did not delete the video]. To quote law professor Butler Shaffer [h/t Faultline's Matt Brown]:

The Constitution is that sacred document which prevents the government from doing all the terrible things it does.

Fortunately, a number of streaming options and cloud services will keep some recordings from disappearing just because a phone is illegally seized and accessed. But both of these shootings -- and their responses to "uncontrolled" recordings -- show law enforcement has a long way to go before it can be considered trustworthy.

Filed Under: alton sterling, evidence, philandro castile, police, shootings, videos
Companies: facebook

FBI Director Says Agency Will Track Police-Involved Killings Better By Not Changing Any Of Its Current Methods

from the mistaking-stasis-for-progress dept

After years of not giving a damn and letting the public do its job for it, the FBI is apparently ready to get serious about collecting stats on "police-involved shootings." In a statement released along with the FBI's 2014 Crime Report (tl;dr: most crime down again), FBI director James Comey says the agency will be doing… something… to ensure more comprehensive reporting of citizens killed by police.

[T]o address the ongoing debate about the appropriate use of force by law enforcement, we plan to collect more data about shootings (fatal and nonfatal) between law enforcement and civilians, and to increase reporting overall. Currently, the UCR program collects the number of justifiable homicides reported by police as well as information about the felonious killing and assault of law enforcement officers. These data are available in Crime in the United States and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. As helpful as this information is, however, we need more law enforcement agencies to submit their justifiable homicide data so that we can better understand what is happening across the country. Once we receive this data, we will add a special publication that focuses on law enforcement’s use of force in shooting incidents that will outline facts about what happened, who was involved, the nature of injuries or deaths, and the circumstances behind these incidents. We hope this information will become part of a balanced dialogue in communities and in the media—a dialogue that will help to dispel misperceptions, foster accountability, and promote transparency in how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve.

There's a lot not to like about this statement.

First off, the FBI is only now getting around to "addressing the debate," after doing the bare minimum for the past several years. Currently, the data is "collected" via voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies and is limited to justifiable homicides, and then only those where someone was shot during the commission of a felony. This is why the FBI's yearly totals are, at best, half of what's tallied by private efforts.

Comey's statement basically says nothing's going to change. The collection will still be limited to "justifiable" homicides and will still be voluntary. Comey says he wants more law enforcement agencies to submit data, but there's no directive being issued to force the issue.

If anything's going to mobilize a more complete collection of shooting data, it will likely be new legislation. But the only recent effort towards a more comprehensive database of police-involved killings is languishing in Washington, having gone no further than being assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If any expanded reporting does result from Comey's announcement, it will still be heavily-skewed in favor of law enforcement agencies and their use of force. Because it will only contain information on homicides deemed to be justified, the report will not provide any further information on unjustified uses of deadly force. This will do nothing to further the conversation on law enforcement use of force, much less increase the level of trust in the communities they serve.

Comey is correct that continuing to serve up incomplete statistics won't result in positive change. But his statement contains nothing that indicates substantive changes in reporting is on the way. The only difference here is that the FBI is finally acknowledging the public's growing disgruntlement with the nation's law enforcement agencies. But Comey's light touch -- designed not to offend his agency's brothers-in-arms -- suggests the only thing he's willing to throw at the problem is a few extra words.

Filed Under: data, fbi, police, police shootings, shootings, tracking