Update: Portland, Oregon (First reported 04-12-13): The city will pay $2.3 million to settle a federal lawsuit filed after a police officer wounded a man when he mistakenly fired lethal rounds at him from a beanbag shotgun. The victim is now permanently disabled and narrowly escaped death only because there was a hospital nearby
The proposed settlement was reached after city attorneys and Monroe’s lawyer met Monday in a mediation session with U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken.
It must still go before the City Council for approval. If accepted, it would mark the city’s largest individual settlement in its history.
“Honestly, I think in the grand scheme of things, it’s not an unfair settlement,” Thane Tienson, Monroe’s lawyer, said Tuesday.
Tienson said the money will help pay for Monroe’s ongoing medical costs and lost wages.
Reister’s gunshots fractured Monroe’s pelvis and punctured his bladder, abdomen and colon. The fourth shot, fired from less than 15 feet away, left a “softball-size hole in his left leg” and severed the sciatic nerve, according to Monroe’s suit.
So it took 4 shots for the cop to realize he was shooting lethal rounds? Oh bullshit! That’s attempted murder.
Radley Balko's Raid(s) Of The Day: The CAMP Raids
Note: The “Raid of the Day” features accounts of police raids I’ve found, researched, and reported while writing my forthcoming book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. It’s due out in July, but you can pre-order it here.
In the mid-1980s, the federal government and the state of California stated the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP. The program combined federal law enforcement and military resources with state law enforcement in an effort to eradicate marijuana cultivation in the northern part of the state.
It effectively turned parts of California into a military zone. CAMP sent U-2 spy planes over the skies to search for pot, then sent — literally — black helicopters full of armed National Guard troops, drug cops, and sometimes even volunteers to cut down the plants. Anyone who happened to be nearby could be detained, often at gunpoint.
Journalist Dan Baum writes in his book Smoke and Mirrors, that CAMP roadblocks started hauling whole families out of cars and holding them at gunpoint while searching their vehicles without warrants. CAMP troops … went house to house kicking in doors and ransacking homes, again without warrants.” California Attorney General John Van de Kamp also recruited LAPD cops to raid suspected pot grows in the northern part of the state. Baum reported that the the feeling within the department was that spending a couple weeks of raiding hippies in a place like Humboldt County was like “summer camp.”
…
Within a year, the CAMP program had extended to other states, and by 1985 was operating in all 50. The program is still operational today.
Read the full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/raids-of-the-day-the-camp_n_3163932.html
FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam
A federal magistrate judge has denied a request from the FBI to install sophisticated surveillance software to track someone suspected of attempting to conduct a “sizeable wire transfer from [John Doe’s] local bank [in Texas] to a foreign bank account.”
Back in March 2013, the FBI asked the judge to grant a month-long “Rule 41 search and seizure warrant” of a suspect’s computer “at premises unknown” as a way to find out more about this possible violations of “federal bank fraud, identity theft and computer security laws.”
In an unusually-public order published this week, Judge Stephen Smith slapped down the FBI on the grounds that the warrant request was overbroad and too invasive. In it, he gives a unique insight as to the government’s capabilities for sophisticated digital surveillance on potential targets. According to the judge’s description of the spyware, it sounds very similar to the RAT software that many miscreants use to spy on other Internet users without their knowledge.
» via ars technica
(via beatyourselfup)
Excessive force is 30 police cars to catch one guy, arresting him, and then dragging him like a dog across the pavement and pinning his head down with your knee in an act of domination. To the police, it’s a war zone out there. It’s cops vs everyone else. This is what they’re taught. This is why their behavior sucks. And incidents like this are indicative of that cop mentality, even if this incident is not quite as tragic is some of the others.
Cops Tase & Arrest 8 Months Pregnant Woman
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - A woman 8 months pregnant was tased by Springfield police after she reported a car accident in the parking lot of Best Buy on Saturday.
[Classic]
Excessive force was necessary
Springfield, Illinois police spokesman said this after the incident where they tazered an 8 month pregnant woman and slammed her to the ground. In my opinion, this is a blatant admission of guilt.
I didn’t realize that EXCESSIVE force was ever justified.
(via beatyourselfup)Three Florida police officers in Collier county beat man who wasn’t resisting. You can hear his screams for pain and him saying he’s not resisting.
Notice they keep yelling “give me your hands”, even though he was compliant. It seems unlikely that he was refusing to give them his hands.
They know that if they dog pile you, they can beat the shit out of you while yelling at you to do something they’re physically forcing you not to do so they can continue to beat the shit out of you, claiming that you were resisting.
Yelling out “give me your hands” while three cops pin you down and prevent you from moving, is just stage performance for the camera.
[classic]
Police brutality compilation of the week (february 11 to february 25)
4 Police Officers Lose It and Brutally Beat Down Suspect Instead of Arresting Him
Raid Of The Day: The Fasching Family
“And the 12-year-old daughter of Jackie Fasching suffered severe burns after the SWAT team used a broomstick to drop a flash grenade through a window into a bedroom where the girl and her sister were sleeping.”
Billings Montana,
…
“A simple knock on the door and I would’ve let them in,” she said. “They said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If they would’ve checked, they would’ve known there’s not.” Fasching’s husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver failure, was in fact attempting to open the door to let the cops in just as they knocked it down.
As for the flash grenade, Fasching said it “blew the nails out of the drywall.” There’s also the matter of why, if they were looking for a meth lab, the police would have set off flash grenades in the first place. Meth labs are known to explode.
According to the Gazette, Chief St. John said investigators did “plenty of homework on the residence,” yet somehow weren’t aware that there were children inside. “The information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did not have any juveniles in the room,” St. John said. “We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when they’re present. Every bit of information and intelligence that we have comes together and we determine what kind of risk is there. The warrant was based on some hard evidence and everything we knew at the time.”
It sounds like a pretty professional plan. Except that they were looking for a meth lab, and didn’t find it. And they weren’t aware of the children permanently living in the home they claim to have thoroughly investigated. Clearly something went wrong.
St. John added, “If we’re wrong or made a mistake, then we’re going to take care of it … When we do this, we want to ensure the safety of not only the officers, but the residents inside.”
It seems clear that ensuring the safety of the officers was a high priority for the Billings SWAT team. But it’s difficult to see how blindly dropping flash grenades into a bedroom shows much concern for the safety of “the residents inside.”
Walnut Creek, California: The family of a hairdresser killed by police is seeking $15 million in a wrongful-death suit filed against four members of the police department, alleging the 22-year-old man was shot after officers tripped and fell over one another
Anthony Banta Jr. was killed Dec. 27 when officers say he charged them with a knife after a fight with his roommate in their Creekside Drive apartment. A lawsuit filed Jan. 24 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco maintains the altercation had ended by the time police arrived and that Banta was not armed. The lawsuit says that one officer fired in a panic after reacting to the other officers tripping and falling behind him, and that other officers also opened fire.
