The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[CountDeMoney]

Ok surely those guys will be sent to prison right?

Why would you think that?

[Valmy]

Ok surely those guys will be sent to prison right?

Why would you think that?

Because of them conspiring to murder the guy is right there on tape?

But what do I know? That NFL player told all his friends he was going to rape a woman, he did, they testified that he told them this and he STILL was found innocent so it is very possible I just do not understand criminal law.

[Martinus]

Wow, Marty sure got quiet all of a sudden...

Sorry, I am busy and do not check obsessively on all the threads.

This is clearly outrageous. It does not mean that every single case thought so by the SJW mob is.

[Admiral Yi]

I find this one a lot less outrageous than the ones involved obviously unarmed suspects.

[Valmy]

Wow, Marty sure got quiet all of a sudden...

Sorry, I am busy and do not check obsessively on all the threads.

This is clearly outrageous. It does not mean that every single case thought so by the SJW mob is.

Well that is not really the point. The SJW mob, or at least some flavors of them, have a certain world view this crisis is feeding.

The truth of the matter is that way too many civilians are being killed by police. This is a result of bad training and bad priorities, the later largely a result of the wars on terror and drugs. Reforms and priorities need to be shifted to help protect the citizens. Even convicted felons and criminals should not be shot unless it is absolutely necessary. The fact that certain demographics are being shot more than perhaps they should be is also something that should be addressed by reform.

One would think that would be rather uncontroversial but instead all this feeds into the culture war where fighting the fight is far more important than actually doing anything. So instead we get big debates about semantics and which side is the more wicked. Frustrating.

Though that is not to say that positive things are not happening. I am sure that in some communities good work is being done. Just not nationally, which is regrettable since federal policies play a role in how this has happened IMO.

[viper37]

Because of them conspiring to murder the guy is right there on tape?

so it is very possible I just do not understand criminal law.

this.  Not many cops have been charged and convicted of murder in cases similar to this.

[CountDeMoney]

As any filthy piece of shit lawyer and Ideologue will tell you, there's a difference between the objective truth and the legal truth.

[viper37]

As any filthy piece of shit lawyer and Ideologue will tell you, there's a difference between the objective truth and the legal truth.

Yes.

[Berkut]

Wow, Marty sure got quiet all of a sudden...

Sorry, I am busy and do not check obsessively on all the threads.

This is clearly outrageous. It does not mean that every single case thought so by the SJW mob is.

But that wasn't your argument. Your argument was that in all cases, it turns out the "victim" was not that innocent.

So you know, you are wrong. Again.

[jimmy olsen]

At least this guy didn't get shot.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dejuan-yource-arrested-on-porch_us_57eec39ee4b024a52d2ef329?section=&

Video Shows Carolina Cop Violently Arrest Black Man For Sitting On His Porch
Greensboro Officer Travis Cole was stripped of his law enforcement credentials, but he escaped criminal charges.

09/30/2016 11:28 pm ET | Updated 1 day ago


Carla Herreria Senior Writer, HuffPost Hawaii

City council members in Greensboro, North Carolina voted this week to strip the law enforcement credentials of a police officer who is accused of violently arresting a man sitting on his porch after body camera footage of the arrest was made public.

The council voted unanimously Monday to permanently sanction Officer Travis Cole for using excessive force during the June arrest. The body camera footage shows Cole roughly throwing Dejuan Yourse to the floor of the porch and punching him as Yourse waited for his mom to come home and let him into the house, according to local news WREG.

The council pushed for criminal charges against Cole, but the district attorney refused, saying he wouldn't "rehash the same evidence," the Greensboro News & Record reported.

Cole and another officer approached Yourse's house after they were dispatched to investigate a possible break-in on June 17.

As seen in body camera footage from both officers, combined below, Yourse explains that he's waiting for his mom, who has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, and visits her house every day.

Yourse is seen on the video attempting to phone his mom so she can speak to the officers. He gives the officers his ID, which lists the address as his residence, and he suggests the officers ask a neighbor to verify that he lives there.

The exchange escalates when Cole places his hands on Yourse's chest to stop him from walking away. After Yourse sits back down, Cole snatches Yourse's phone from his hand while Yourse is talking to someone, asking the person to come to his house because "the police is over here and they harassing me."

Cole then throws Yourse to the floor and struggles to handcuff him. Amid the scuffle, Yourse repeatedly asks Cole why he's punching him. When Cole yells, "I'm going to hit you again," Yourse yells back, "Why?"

The cops charged Yourse with resisting arrest and assault on government officials. The charges were dropped when Cole resigned from his position in August. The second officer involved in Yourse's arrest, C.N. Jackson, quit her job on Wednesday. Both ex-officers are white.

Warning: The video below is violent and contains explicit language.
https://youtu.be/VGTZBNoLayM

[grumbler]

The real disadvantage of elected judicial authorities can be seen in the Greensboro case.  No way those thug cops avoid trial for their assault unless the DA is confident that the voters will endorse a travesty of justice.

This is why pressure from groups like BLM matters - not everyone in city hall gives a shit about justice.

[Syt]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/body-cameras-are-just-making-police-departments-more-powerful/502421/

Body Cameras Are Betraying Their Promise

They're not transparent. They're not independent. They're not even turned on when they should be.

When they were introduced to the American public two years ago, police body-cameras seemed like they might help everyone. Police departments liked that body cams reduced the number of public complaints about officer behavior. Communities and protesters liked that they would introduce some transparency and accountability to an officer's actions.

Today, research suggests that body cameras significantly reduce the number of public complaints about police. But recent events subvert the idea that the devices help or increase the power of regular people—that is, the policed. Instead of making officers more accountable and transparent to the public, body cameras may be making officers and departments more powerful than they were before.

This is happening across the country. And there are three trends that are repeating themselves over and over.

First, many officers are (either earnestly or conveniently) forgetting to activate their cameras when they're supposed to. Take the case of Terrence Sterling, an unarmed 31-year-old black man who was fatally shot this month by local police officers in Washington, D.C., after his motorcycle crashed into their car. Contrary to District of Columbia policy, no officer at the scene activated their body camera until after the shooting. The city released footage of Sterling's final moments this week—but that video begins more than a minute after shots were fired.

Also this week, The Washington Post revealed that an officer present at the shooting of Keith Scott, in Charlotte, North Carolina, did not activate his body camera when he should have. The officer only turned it on immediately after another officer at the scene shot Scott. Due to a feature of the camera that saves the 30 seconds of video prior to its activation, this meant that while the shots were captured on camera, the footage had no sound. (Dashboard-camera video released over the weekend seemed to show that Scott, a 43-year-old black man, had his hands by his side when another officer shot him four times and killed him.)

Or consult the case of Paul O'Neal, an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager who was shot and killed by a Chicago Police Department officer in late July. The officer's body camera was also turned off during the shooting.

In case after case, police departments say officers did not have their body cameras activated when it counted. It can seem as though incidents where body-cam footage helped secure an indictment—such as in Marksville, Louisiana, last November, or as in Cincinnati last July—are more rare than the cases where they don't.

These are breaches of protocol—incidents where events didn't happen as the law would require. Often, these violations are never significantly punished. This is the second major threat to body-camera accountability: If there's not significant discipline for officers who fail to follow local policies—as the officers failed in D.C., Chicago, and Charlotte—then it doesn't matter what's in the policy.

"Even if a department like Chicago has a great, green-check-mark policy, there are still lapses by officers," said Harlan Yu, a technologist at Upturn, a civil-rights consulting firm. "In the Paul O'Neal shooting, cameras were on before, they appear to be on after, but then—oh well!—something happened" during the shooting itself.

"We see this in Chicago over and over in other areas—there are all sorts of stories about Chicago cops purposefully deactivating their dash cams, even though they're required to use them and the city pays for them. But who is disciplining officers when they fail to follow the policies? If taxpayers are spending money on these cameras, they sure as hell better be working when a shooting happens," he added.

The third threat is that many states have introduced or passed new laws that restrict public access to footage while preserving police access.

In October, North Carolina will enforce a new law that only allows courts, and not politicians, to release any body-camera footage. The law asks state judges to weigh various factors before releasing a video, including whether it is "necessary to advance a compelling public interest" and whether it would "create a serious threat to the fair, impartial, and orderly administration of justice."

North Carolina is not the only state to restrict access to body-camera footage. The Urban Institute says that Illinois, Texas, South Carolina, and other states have all blocked the public's access to it.

To be sure, some of this restriction may make sense. Body cameras present a somewhat counterintuitive method for keeping the police accountable. Though the devices are meant to preserve the actions of individual officers, they do so by filming members of the community: Cops may be the target of body cams, but they're not the subject of its footage. And most people filmed by a body camera are just going about their day, unaware they're being filmed at all. This means that some states do need to adjust their freedom-of-information policies to protect people's privacy.

Yet that requirement alone does not explain all the restrictions, including those recently enacted by North Carolina. And what makes many of these policies even worse is that, in the vast majority of cases, officers can view body-camera footage before filing a report about an incident even when other witnesses cannot. This even holds for use-of-force incidents.

"In most jurisdictions, because unions have fought really hard for this, officers get to view footage before writing their report," Yu said.

When Upturn and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights conducted an audit of local body-camera policies last month, they found that no major urban police department required officers to file a report before they got to see footage of it. Only a few cities—including Atlanta and Oakland—introduced a special two-step process for use-of-force incidents, where officers have to file a preliminary report that they can then augment after watching footage.

This kind of policy completely subverts the egalitarianism that body cameras are supposed to ensure. Instead of providing an independent documentation of an event, body cameras seem to be one more way that police officers can shore up their version of events on the ground.

Body cameras represent a significant investment. In the last two years, the U.S. government has spent more than $23 million buying body cameras for local and state police departments. This week, the Department of Justice put up another $20 million in grants.

When used as they're intended, body cameras do sometimes capture the most flagrant and dangerous officer behavior. But if the laws around them do not change, they will become an effective replacement for dashboard cameras: another fancy technology, initially embraced by the police and the policed, that often doesn't seem to work at the most crucial moments.

[jimmy olsen]

An old, but..unusual incident of police violence that I just had to share.

http://fox13now.com/2013/08/03/new-details-emerge-regarding-grand-co-deputy-charged-with-assaulting-his-father/

New details emerge regarding Grand Co. deputy charged with assaulting his father

Posted 9:58 pm, August 3, 2013, by Gene Kennedy

GRAND COUNTY, Utah -- A father and son, both in positions of authority, are at the center of a scandal that's growing in Moab.

Now, police reports have been released detailing how a deputy allegedly tried to kill his dad over a shocking discovery. The reports can be viewed here, but some of the contents may be considered graphic by some readers.

The website "Talking Points Memo" posted the 13-page report where numerous officers offer accounts of the July 11 crime.  One by one, they say the discovery of an affair fueled a drunken attack, then a suicide attempt.

The Brewer family is known for their high-profile positions in Moab-area emergency services.

On July 11 they gathered at Grand County Deputy T.J. Brewer's home.

The family dinner ended with a massive domestic violence attack after the deputy discovered his wife allegedly having sex with the deputy's father, Corky Brewer, according to reports, which say the sexual encounter happened in one of the children's bedrooms.

Police reports say Deputy Brewer lost it and started to "beat the f--- out of his dad.  He stated several times that he wanted to kill his dad, that he wanted his gun to finish the job."

Brewer allegedly pistol whipped his father and wife.  According to the police reports, "TJ hit her, backhanded her, and pointed a handgun at her face."

After the alleged assault, everyone went home but the father and fire chief, Corky Brewer, who was about to continue where his son left off.

The police reports say, "Corky was apparently looking for a firearm and his wife, Cindy Brewer, denied him access to the firearm.  Corky then grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed himself two times puncturing a lung and slicing his liver."

The narrative confirms what neighbors suspected for weeks.

One neighbor who didn't want to be identified described the July 12 crime scene.

"A lot of police cars here early this morning, they've been here all morning going in and out of the house, don't get any information but I know something was going on," the neighbor said.

The reports say officers removed bloody clothes from Corky Brewer's trash cans, plus guns from the home.  And police say the violence spilled over to the local hospital, where T.J. Brewer allegedly hit a cop, according to the documents.

"After T.J. heard his father was alive, he left to go to Moab Regional Hospital to finish him off."
Police arrested Deputy Brewer and later transported his father to a Grand Junction, Colorado hospital.

He's been released and Deputy Brewer has resigned.

"It does surprise me," said Corky Brewer's neighbor Stephanie Cluff.

On July 12 Cluff said, "The family is always very close. To hear that, we never seen anything like that, just a close family all together."

Initially T.J. Brewer was booked into the San Juan County Jail on suspicion of attempted murder, amongst other allegations.  The charges actually filed were assault and assault of a police officer.

The Utah Attorney General's Office is prosecuting the case to avoid conflicts of interest since the Brewer family has extensive ties to law enforcement, emergency services and local government. Deputy T.J. Brewer has a hearing scheduled Tuesday in Moab.

[CountDeMoney]

 

Just start Googling pictures of everybody, they're out there. 

[viper37]

Hunter shot by cop, prosecuted for negligent use of firearm
2004 text
(yeah, use Google translate.)

That's silly.  The man goes hunting on his land, the cops see him they hide, with camo equipment and facepaint.  They were hoping to catch wannabe drug kingpins in the act.  The hunter starts shooting at birds, then the cops, seeing the armed man (duh) getting closer to them starts shooting.  They fired a dozen shot at him and hit his shoulder.

No accusation against the cops, but the hunter gets charged for negligent use of his firearm.  At no point did the officers identified themselves as cops.  During hunting season.  Wearing camouflage.  And they wonder why somebody would shoot in their general direction??