Law and Order 2 - Page 206 - Politics and Economics

I was pulled over by an AHP officer who'd been tailing me for a couple of miles. I hadn't been speeding, so I wondered if perhaps the car had a broken taillight or something. I rolled down my window and waited.

Suddenly, the officer rapped on the rear passenger side window with his pistol. My daughter, who was sitting inches from the barrel of his gun, jumped with fear as the officer yelled at me to roll down the front passenger window, his service weapon pointed directly at me. I knew something was terribly awry and I tried to remain calm, keeping my hands visible as I slowly fumbled for the window controls in an unfamiliar car. My daughter rolled down her window and I explained that we were in a rental car, that we had no weapons, and I was having trouble figuring out how to roll down the front passenger window from my driver's side door. The officer didn't listen, and kept yelling louder and more insistently, ordering me to comply with his request as he leered at me down the barrel of his pistol. My daughter panicked and tried to get out of her booster seat to reach forward to roll down the front window, and the officer screamed her at her not to move as he pointed his pistol at her.

Some more yelling and screaming the guy gets arrested

Quote:

Why was I arrested? The car I was had rented had previously had its front license plate lost or stolen, so the car rental company reported this to the Nevada DMV. The Arizona highway patrol officer, who looked up my plate number while he was tailing me, misinterpreted this Nevada DMV report as meaning that I was driving a car with a stolen license plate, and somehow this prompted him to approach me at gunpoint and threaten to kill me in front of my little girl.

After a few minutes he released me from the handcuffs, and since I knew the truth,I called him out for over-reacting, and told him he had no reason to threaten to shoot me. He stood by his story that I had made a threatening movement toward my waist, and I said it wasn't true, and he said this wasn't the place to discuss it. He let me go attend to my daughter but continued to "detain" us for another 20 minutes as he talked to his supervisors, presumably plotting damage control.

Moral of the story

Quote:

As we drove the final hour to our Grand Canyon hotel, she told me she was confused, because she thought the police were the good guys, and she didn't know why the officer said he would kill me when my hands were in the air. I tried to come up with an explanation but I struggled for words.

I'm not sure why I'm writing all this down. Maybe it's because, as I sat in that back of that police car and heard the AHP officer learn the truth from his dispatcher - that the man he'd just captured at gunpoint and threatened to murder was totally innocent - I realized it was very possible that the only reason I was alive was because I am a scrawny 48-year-old white man wearing a Micky Mouse t-shirt and cargo shorts and hiking boots. The officer that arrested me was so pumped up on adrenaline and eager to get a "bad guy" that he could barely control himself, and if I'd looked just a little bit more threatening to him - because I was black, or young, or long-haired, or tattooed, or didn't speak English - I believe he might have pulled the trigger.

If you are a person who has ever looked skeptically at the claims of Black Lives Matter, or others who talk about police violence, I urge you to consider what happened to me and put yourselves in the shoes of others. I just survived a bizarre gunpoint situation in which I was as innocent as Philando Castile, who was not as lucky as I was.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=3&theater

08-15-2016 , 08:54 AM

#5127

Hopey

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Reading the comments that follow his FB post is infuriating. About 20% of the comments are trolls accusing him of making up the story and/or people defending the police.

You'd think that this story would be something that everyone could get behind and say "that's ****ed up", but nope.

08-15-2016 , 02:37 PM

#5128

Trolly McTrollson

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Holy ****, Texas is the nut ****ing low:

Quote:

Wood was convicted and sentenced to death under what’s called the law of parties, which has been in effect in Texas since the 1970s. It states that a person who “solicits, encourages, directs, aids, or attempts to aid the othe
Under the law, prosecutors are not required to prove that a defendant had any part in committing a crime, or even intended to commit it. Jurors only need to find that there was a plan to commit a crime and that the defendant should have anticipated that the crime would occur.

In Wood’s case, he was sitting in a pickup outside a Texaco convenience store in Kerrville, Tex., in January 1996, when Daniel Reneau went inside and shot and killed the store clerk with a .22-caliber handgun.

[...]

These “debilitating emotional and intellectual impairments” made Wood vulnerable to Reneau’s manipulation and rendered him unable to comprehend what Reneau was capable of doing, court records say. Because of those impairments, his attorney argued, Wood should have been declared incompetent to stand trial.

And of course, the psychologist who determined Wood was competent to stand trail has been expelled from the APA for being incompetent, but his testimony is still in play because Texas:

Quote:

Grigson didn’t personally examine Wood. But during the sentencing phase of the trial, the forensic psychiatrist told jurors that Wood would “most certainly” commit violent crimes in the future, according to court records.

The prosecuting attorney elicited that response by describing a hypothetical situation that laid out the facts of the case.

What jurors didn’t know was that Grigson, so beloved by prosecutors, was reviled in his own field.

In 1995, three years before Wood’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association and its Texas branch at that time, the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, for predicting a defendant’s potential threat to society based solely on a hypothetical. The expulsions followed an investigation by the Texas association’s ethics committee, which cited Grigson’s “willfully narrow rendition of psychiatric knowledge.”

In a profile published after Grigson’s death in 2004, the Houston Chronicle cited his unusual willingness to testify against capital murder defendants. A former prosecutor who used Grigson in several trials told the newspaper that he was an “outstanding communicator who really connected with a jury.”

But the psychiatric association saw Grigson as a threat to the profession.

In the writ of habeas corpus, Tyler asked the Texas court to find that Grigson’s testimony about Wood was false and misleading.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.72e9330642d0

08-18-2016 , 06:45 PM

#5129

vhawk01

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Today in Minneapolis area police were called about a baby left in a hot car. Cop shows up, breaks into car abd starts performing cpr on lifeless baby. Baby is a "very realistic" doll.

Gotta feel for the cop though. Tough situation. You get a call that a baby was left in the car, you gotta make a split second decision. Do I start performing cpr or do I open fire? Presumably it was a white baby doll which made things easier for him

08-18-2016 , 09:43 PM

#5130

smacc25

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Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 2,969

Quote:

Originally Posted by vhawk01

abd=anybodydoes?

08-19-2016 , 05:38 AM

#5131

vhawk01

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ha actually its shorthand for "abdomen" but I meant and, phone autocorrects it to abd sometimes.

09-13-2016 , 10:49 AM

#5132

Huehuecoyotl

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Cop gets fired for not shooting a guy

Quote:

After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.

Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.

“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.

Mr. Mader, who was standing behind Mr. Williams’ car parked on the street, said he then “began to use my calm voice.”

“I told him, ‘Put down the gun,’ and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me.’ And I told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you brother.’ Then he starts flicking his wrist to get me to react to it.

“I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop” situation.

Mader was responding to a 911 call from Williams’s girlfriend. In that call, she told police that Williams was threatening to kill himself, not anyone else.

Quote:

Mader should have been given a medal. Unfortunately, two more cops then showed up, and quickly shot Williams dead.

Quote:

In a meeting with the chief and City Manager Travis Blosser, Mr. Mader said Chief Alexander told him: “We’re putting you on administrative leave and we’re going to do an investigation to see if you are going to be an officer here. You put two other officers in danger.”

Mr. Mader said that “right then I said to him: ‘Look, I didn’t shoot him because he said, ‘Just shoot me.’ ”

On June 7, a Weirton officer delivered him a notice of termination letter dated June 6, which said by not shooting Mr. Williams he “failed to eliminate a threat.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.66850e68baa3

09-13-2016 , 11:15 AM

#5133

EfromPegTown

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Amazing

09-13-2016 , 11:16 AM

#5134

Louis Cyphre

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I vote Onion.

09-13-2016 , 06:03 PM

#5135

drugsarebad

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Join Date: Apr 2011 Posts: 3,692

"There are good cops and bad cops out there" really loses steam when a good one gets fired for using more advanced training to ~correctly~ determine that he should be trying to save a member of the community instead of shooting him.

09-14-2016 , 11:01 AM

#5136

einbert

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Officer Eric Parker back on the job, takedown of Indian man did not violate policy
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/in...r_eric_pa.html

Quote:

Madison Police Officer Eric Parker is back from leave and headed for active duty today after Madison's acting police chief decided he did not violate policy in the sidewalk stop and takedown of an Indian pedestrian that led to federal civil rights charges and international publicity.

Major Jim Cooke, acting chief, said in a memo published today by AL.Com news partner WHNT News 19 that Parker is back from administrative leave until he completes re-certification requirements. "After his training is complete," Cooke wrote, "he will receive his duty assignment."

Parker and a trainee stopped Sureshbhai Patel on Feb. 6, 2015, walking near his son's house days after Patel's arrival from India. The stop ended with Patel on the ground needing spinal surgery, and Madison police moving to fire Parker and have him arrested for assault.

09-14-2016 , 02:43 PM

#5137

goofyballer

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Journalist rides along with San Diego PD on curfew sweeps (it's illegal for people under 18 to be out after 10pm, full stop)

Quote:

Just then, a trolley arrived – and a person exited and ran down a flight of stairs toward the street. He seemed to be wearing headphones and didn’t respond when officers called out to him. The officers ran across the parking lot after him – shouting and waving their flashlights – leaving the already arrested youth in police vehicles. A few moments later, the officers walked back and said the person they chased was an adult.

Just keeping the community safe

09-14-2016 , 03:32 PM

#5138

Louis Cyphre

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Quote:

Originally Posted by goofyballer

Journalist rides along with San Diego PD on curfew sweeps

Quote:

After we returned to the police station, officers replaced the metal handcuffs with plastic flex cuffs on three male teens: the two pals who pretended to be 18 and another male teenager. The three sat side by side and faced officers who asked them a series of questions for paperwork purposes. When one of the boys said he was thirsty, an officer brought him a bottle of water and poured the water into the handcuffed teen’s mouth.

A quick recap:

-teenagers
-arrested for a curfew violation
-patted down and searched
-answering questions for the paperwork
-inside a police station

are in HANDCUFFS!

09-14-2016 , 05:14 PM

#5139

EricLindros

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https://twitter.com/samswey/status/776152539905437696

Quote:

The President of Minneapolis police union's perspective on police violence. n.pr/28WIxkJ pic.twitter.com/nEeVrrHTL2

09-14-2016 , 07:43 PM

#5140

microbet

Solar Powered

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 56,665

Quote:

Originally Posted by Huehuecoyotl

Cop gets fired for not shooting a guy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.66850e68baa3

Sadly it's totally unsurprising that his military training is what made him less likely to shoot than a typical cop. Maybe martial law would be better than what we have.

09-24-2016 , 10:34 AM

#5141

Huehuecoyotl

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Quote:

Three Connecticut police officers are accused of fabricating charges against a man who was protesting DUI checkpoints police action after their conversation was unknowingly captured on video.

...

“Michael’s permit comes back as valid, they say ‘oh crap,’ and one of the troopers says we gotta punch a number on this guy,’ which means open an investigation in the police database. And he says ‘we really gotta cover our asses,’” said Dan Barrett, legal director for ACLU-CT. “And then they have a very long discussion about what to charge Michael with—none of which appear to have any basis in fact. This plays out over eight minutes. They talk about ‘we could do this, we could do this, we could do this.’”

The police decide to charge Picard with reckless use of a highway by a pedestrian and creating a public disturbance. One of the officers tells the others, “What we say is that multiple motorists stopped to complain about a guy waving a gun around, but none of them wanted to stop and make a statement.”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nati...#storylink=cpy

09-24-2016 , 01:23 PM

#5142

vaya

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Just a few bad apples

09-24-2016 , 02:17 PM

#5143

mmbt0ne

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Rural Georgia police officer admits she made up a story about being shot by a black man. Currently charged with 4 felonies that she'll be arrested for as soon as she checks out of "rehab."

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breakin...bi-says/nsdct/

All kinds of crazy stuff in that article, but the local government is going hard at her.

“Cops are humans and they make mistakes, but this is not a mistake,” Butts County Sheriff Gary Long said at a news conference. “This is criminal.”

Likewise, Jackson Mayor Kay Pippin said she is “disappointed on so many levels” because of the lost manpower hours — and lost trust.

“For two weeks this incident has cast an image of the city of Jackson that does not reflect who we are,” Pippin said, calling Jackson a safe city where violent crime is a rarity.

“The truth is the officer did something wrong,” Milam (the DA) said. “She will be prosecuted and brought to justice.”

09-27-2016 , 04:50 PM

#5144

einbert

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http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/in...ions_conf.html

Quote:

The Department of Corrections said Monday that a number of guards at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore failed to report to work on Saturday.

Bob Horton, a spokesman for the department, emailed a statement to AL.com that seemingly confirmed reports by inmate advocacy groups that a strike took place at the prison over the weekend.

But it stopped short of giving credence to the groups' claims that guards were still on strike Monday.

"Some correctional officers assigned to William C. Holman Correctional Facility did not report for the third shift on Saturday," Horton said. "As a result, officers from other correctional facilities augmented Holman's security staff. Prison officials have not reported further incidents."

Horton sent out a new statement Tuesday afternoon stating that the reports of a strike by Holman corrections officers were "erroneous" and that the DOC only confirmed that they missed work.

"Prison officials are acknowledging that nine officers did not report for the facility's third shift on Saturday. In response, and as standing operating procedure, officers from other ADOC facilities were assigned to the shift to augment the security staff," the statement said.

"Authorities say most officers assigned to the facility's third shift reported to work the following day. At no time did the officers state that they were participating in a strike, nor did they express any demands or grievances."

Horton went on to explain that the "unofficial reports" of a strike by corrections officers "came from inmate advocate groups and not from department officials."

The failure by the correctional officers to report to work Saturday comes on the heels of two weeks of strikes by inmate laborers across the country. The striking prisoners are protesting what they describe as inhumane living conditions and unfair employment practices in prisons.

The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) issued a statement Saturday about the strike.

Full statement: https://freealabamamovement.wordpres...nd-now-guards/

09-27-2016 , 06:22 PM

#5145

heehaww

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Join Date: Aug 2011 Posts: 5,081

Quote:

Originally Posted by EricLindros

https://twitter.com/samswey/status/776152539905437696

Haha amazing.

"If cops aren't breaking the law while on duty, they aren't working hard enough!"

09-28-2016 , 04:31 PM

#5146

pvn

Guest

Posts: n/a

Shocking news!

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/69923...tial-databases

"Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases"

09-29-2016 , 06:50 AM

#5147

chezlaw

Limey Bastard

Join Date: Jan 2004 Posts: 46,890

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37502136

Quote:

Police body cameras can dramatically reduce the number of complaints against officers, research suggests.

The Cambridge University study showed complaints by members of the public against officers fell by 93% over 12 months compared with the year before.

Almost 2,000 officers across four UK forces and two US police departments were monitored for the project.

Quote:

Dr Ariel, who is based at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, said: "I cannot think of any [other] single intervention in the history of policing that dramatically changed the way that officers behave, the way that suspects behave, and the way they interact with each other."

He said the results indicated both police and the public were adjusting their behaviour.

"Once [the public] are aware they are being recorded, once they know that everything they do is caught on tape, they will undoubtedly change their behaviour because they don't want to get into trouble.

"Individual officers become more accountable, and modify their behaviour accordingly, while the more disingenuous complaints from the public fall by the wayside once footage is likely to reveal them as frivolous."

09-29-2016 , 10:48 AM

#5148

mmbt0ne

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This is just an awful thread of tweets about what happens with a 17 yo black kid reports his car stolen.

https://twitter.com/TheInsaneRobin/s...09354116284416

Also, guess what happens when cops treat people like ****!