The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[derspiess]

This is not an uncommon fate for cop killers.

I know I'm being very pedantic by pointing it out, but technically the guy shot a far-right militia person, not a cop.

I can't read the article, paywalled, so everything I said might be completely wrong.

Not that that ever stopped me from posting about something

fucking cheapskate. Support your hometown paper you ass.

I support mine.  Does that make me not an ass? 

[PDH]

I support mine.  Does that make me not an ass? 

Hmmmm, let me get back to you on that one.

[katmai]

fucking cheapskate. Support your hometown paper you ass.

I support mine.  Does that make me not an ass? 

It makes you not a cheapskate.

[derspiess]

[Razgovory]

This is not an uncommon fate for cop killers.

I know I'm being very pedantic by pointing it out, but technically the guy shot a far-right militia person, not a cop.

At this point, what's the difference?

[viper37]

The article said it was US Marshals effecting the arrest, not local PD.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/10/reinoehl-portland-antifa-killing-police/ What are languish's thoughts on this?

2 witnesses say they saw the suspect shoot at the police.1 witness says he saw the police fire first without summons while the guy was unarmed and talking on his cellphone.
Someone is obviously lying there.  An independant investigation sounds right.  But by whom?  Another police corps from another city, maybe.  I'm not sure I would trust the FBI's neutrality currently.

[DGuller]

Witnesses can be wrong without lying.  In fact, they often are.

[grumbler]

Witnesses can be wrong without lying.  In fact, they often are.

Agreed.  Further, the witnesses may not have said exactly what the paper claims they said.  Reporters get it wrong, as well.

So there's a lot of room here for misunderstandings.  Not all that's wrong is a lie.

[The Larch]

Not shooting violence this time, but more news of police departments behaving badly.

Pasco's sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens.
It monitors and harasses families across the county.


Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.

What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

First the Sheriff's Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.

They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

One former deputy described the directive like this: "Make their lives miserable until they move or sue."

In just five years, Nocco's signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.

At least 1 in 10 were younger than 18, the Times found.

Some of the young people were labeled targets despite having only one or two arrests.

Rio Wojtecki, 15, became a target in September 2019, almost a year after he was arrested for sneaking into carports with a friend and stealing motorized bicycles.

Those were the only charges against Rio, and he already had a state-issued juvenile probation officer checking on him. Yet from September 2019 to January 2020, Pasco Sheriff's deputies went to his home at least 21 times, dispatch logs show.

They showed up at the car dealership where his mom worked, looked for him at a friend's house and checked his gym to see if he had signed in.

More than once, the deputies acknowledged that Rio wasn't getting into trouble. They mostly grilled him about his friends, according to body-camera video of the interactions. But he had been identified as a target, they said, so they had to keep checking on him.

Since September 2015, the Sheriff's Office has sent deputies on checks like those more than 12,500 times, dispatch logs show.

Deputies gave the mother of one teenage target a $2,500 fine because she had five chickens in her backyard. They arrested another target's father after peering through a window in his house and noticing a 17-year-old friend of his son smoking a cigarette.

As they make checks, deputies feed information back into the system, not just on the people they target, but on family members, friends and anyone else in the target's orbit.

In the past two years alone, two of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies have scrapped similar programs following public outcries and reports documenting serious flaws.

In Pasco, however, the initiative has expanded. Last summer, the Sheriff's Office announced plans to begin keeping tabs on people who have been repeatedly committed to psychiatric hospitals.

The Times shared its findings with the Sheriff's Office six weeks before this story published. Nocco declined multiple interview requests.

In statements that spanned more than 30 pages, the agency said it stands behind its program — part of a larger initiative it calls intelligence-led policing. It said other local departments use similar techniques and accused the Times of cherry-picking examples and painting "basic law enforcement functions" as harassment.

The Sheriff's Office said its program was designed to reduce bias in policing by using objective data. And it provided statistics showing a decline in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts since the program began in 2011.

"This reduction in property crime has a direct, positive impact on the lives of the citizens of Pasco County and, for that, we will not apologize," one of the statements said. "Our first and primary mission is to serve and protect our community and the Intelligence Led Policing philosophy assists us in achieving that mission."

But Pasco's drop in property crimes was similar to the decline in the seven-largest nearby police jurisdictions. Over the same time period, violent crime increased only in Pasco.

Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency's practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.

"Morally repugnant," said Matthew Barge, an expert in police practices and civil rights who oversaw court-ordered agreements to address police misconduct in Cleveland and Baltimore.

"One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing — and an absolute absence of common sense and humanity — that I have seen in my career," said David Kennedy, a renowned criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, whose research on crime prevention is referenced in Pasco's policies.

The Times' examination of Pasco's intelligence program comes amid a national debate over the role of police in society and calls to reduce funding for law enforcement or replace entire departments.

For years, the program's inner workings have remained largely out of public view, even as Nocco has touted its merits during debates and community forums. Times reporters combed through thousands of pages of documents, watched hours of body-camera footage and spent months obtaining and analyzing the target list, which had not been previously released.

Pasco is an overwhelmingly white county, and the program did not appear to disproportionately target people based on race.

But juvenile offenders, regardless of race, were an outsized priority for the intelligence program, according to former deputies and a Times data analysis.

Of the 20 addresses visited most by its dedicated enforcement teams, more than half were home to middle- or high-schoolers who were identified as targets.

Longer article here: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/

[Syt]

[The Brain]

Why does the sheriff's department keep a record of that?

[HVC]

Not shooting violence this time, but more news of police departments behaving badly.


Longer article here: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/

BB would like to subscribe to their news letter.

[Barrister]

Not shooting violence this time, but more news of police departments behaving badly.


Longer article here: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/

BB would like to subscribe to their news letter.

Nothing wrong with identifying certain suspects and targets for enhanced attention.  I've seen cases where someone is IDed as a high risk offender is being surveilled by police and then go out and commits a new crime.

But this sure sounds like it is going well beyond anything useful and just becomes harassment.

[grumbler]

Except that the kid doesn't "have a record with the sheriff's department," there were two kids involved, and the disruption of the class involved a lot more than the toy gun.

News media fail.  It's possible that the school over-reacted, for sure, but the thrust of this "news story" is false.

[grumbler]

Why does the sheriff's department keep a record of that?

Because it is better clickbait for Vice News.