Bad Cops & Prosecutors

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-19-08

Posted on December 19, 2008
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Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-19-08

Posted on December 19, 2008
Stills from a video taken in December 2007 of a Knoxville Jail guard beating a mentally ill jail detainee while he was restrained in a device nicknamed "The Devil's Chair".Reuters Reports Replicated Milgram Experiment Shows Most Would Torture Others If Ordered ToFirst performed in the 1960's the Milgram Experiment showed that most people would willingly torture others if told to...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-18-08

Posted on December 18, 2008
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12 Year Old African American Girl Beaten And Arrested By Galveston Texas Police Who Mistook Her For A White Prostitute

Posted on December 18, 2008
I know, I normally don't do this for stories outside of the Seattle area... But... Offered in it's entirety from the a href="http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2008/12/galveston_false_arrest.php"Houston Press blog/a via Radley Balko's a href="http://www...

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12 Year Old African American Girl Beaten And Arrested By Galveston Texas Police Who Mistook Her For A White Prostitute

Posted on December 18, 2008
I know, I normally don't do this for stories outside of the Seattle area... But... Offered in it's entirety from the Houston Press blog via Radley Balko's The Agitator with the only comment being some tidbits about the lawyers involved... and that I think I'm going to be ill...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-18-08

Posted on December 18, 2008
Watching the snow from a jail windowBeen in a real funk lately, so I'm a little late with this one... Let's start local as usual, then fan out from there.Urban Golfer Falsely Accused Of "Assault" By Man Hit By Foam BallJonah at The Stranger posted about an "urban golfer" who's been charged with assault for allegedly accidentally hitting a bystander in the head with a foam ball...

More Raising Cain In Bainbridge Island

Posted on December 16, 2008
It started with a 911 call made by Seth Chipman's wife, a registered nurse named Rickie Chipman, and ended with Seth in jail instead of a hospital. Seth was in a state of mental distress and had hurt himself so Rickie Chipman called 911 to have Seth transported to the hospital...

Excessive Force Complaint Sustained In Mark Hays Case

Posted on December 16, 2008
The Seattle Police Department's Office of Professional Accountability's Civilian Auditor released her biannual report recently and in it was a revelation that I wasn't aware of. It appears as though the OPA, the SPD's internal investigations division, found that officers used excessive force when they arrested Mark Hays and Michael Lujan earlier this year...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-12-08

Posted on December 12, 2008
In Local News: 9th Circuit Court Rules Seattle's Parade Permit Law Unconstitutional The court of appeals ruled that Seattle's permit laws violate the constitution's first ammendment since it vests the Seattle Police chief with full authority to decide whether people may use public property to broadcast their message...

Vindictive Vancouver - Punishing Good Cops For Telling The Truth

Posted on December 10, 2008
In 2006, the city of Vancouver Washington fired an officer that they described as the dirtiest cop in Clark County?s history for allegedly falsifying reports and they sent out Brady notifications which effectively ended his career in law enforcement...

Construction Zone

Posted on December 09, 2008
Yes... I'm in the process of changing the site design, so don't be alarmed if you're a frequent visitor and things look different.Thanks for visiting, and hopefully the changes are for the better... and, as always, constructive suggestions are welcome!

All Around The Blogs... And Some News Too

Posted on December 08, 2008
I'm mixing things up a bit for this edition of NewsWatch. There's been a lot going on that I wanted to cover, much of it already being covered in other blogs, so here we go. ...First we'll start out locally as always: Is King County Executive Ron Sims' Head In The Clouds? The Seattle Weekly asks if King County Executive Ron Sims already has his head somewhere other than in his own troubled county as rumors abound about him being offered a position in Obama's administration...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch For 12-06-08

Posted on December 06, 2008
Picture taken outside of the US Federal Courthouse in Seattle Washington In Local News: Seattle Officer Remained In SPD With Outstanding Warrant For Two Years In October of 2005 Seattle officer Francis Estrada became so inebriated that he drove the wrong way on the I-5 freeway and crashed into a number of different vehicles on is way home...

Are Cops Gathering Info On Misconduct Victims?

Posted on December 04, 2008
Screenshot of the fraudulent Injustice In Seattle site presumably created by Seattle police officers to gather information on victims of police misconduct. Some of our readers may remember when, early this year, some Seattle police officers created a fake Injustice In Seattle site to fool people searching for this site into revealing their personal information to Seattle police officers instead...

Winter Cleaning

Posted on December 03, 2008
I'm getting ready to update my blogroll and our blog feed due to the large number of police misconduct blogs that disappeared this year. So, if you know of a blog we've missed, or a related police misconduct or civil rights site, or even a civil rights lawyer that we neglected to add to our list that you think we should include in our lists, please let me know! Might as well clean up all those links while I'm at it, huh? Thanks for reading!

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 12-02-08

Posted on December 03, 2008
In Local News:Remember This The Next Time An Officer Tries To Blame The VictimA Bellingham Washington police officer's police cruiser was apparently stolen when he left it running in an alleyway while responding to a call. The police car was later recovered...

Strangers In Strange Lands

Posted on December 02, 2008
A friend of ours had just come back into town yesterday from his tour of duty in Iraq so I took him out for some dinner in a quiet little restaurant so we could catch up for a bit. Of course, there were a lot of stories about what he had seen and experienced there, but there was also talk of how it was difficult to adjust to being away from all of that...

From The Mailbag - WTO 9th Anniversary

Posted on December 01, 2008
Clips from a video by Paul Richmond of the WTO protest showing an officer pull a protester's head up by the hair and then pepper-spraying him at point-blank range in the face. Received an email yesterday from attorney Paul Richmond reminding me that it, yesterday, was the ninth anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 11-28-08

Posted on November 29, 2008
Judge Clears Way For Wrongful Death Suit Against Sandy Oregon PoliceYou may have read recently about a Sandy Oregon police officer who was indicted for giving drivers licenses he confiscated to his teen-aged female friends? Well, a judge gave a go-ahead for a lawsuit against that department for a shooting death of an unarmed man, Fouad Kaady, who had been in a car accident which involved that very same officer back in 2005...

Sharing Thankfulness

Posted on November 27, 2008
Despite all that I?ve been through I have a lot to be thankful for and perhaps because of all I?ve been through I tend to be more mindful of those things I am thankful for than I would otherwise be. I am thankful for the simple things, the seemingly small things that most take for granted maybe, simply because many of those things were taken from me or nearly lost...

Adding Insult To Injury

Posted on November 25, 2008
As some of you might remember, back in February of this year I broke down and finally went to a doctor after the problems I had ever since I was badly beaten and then denied medical care in November of 2006 just wouldn?t go away and was really affecting my work...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 11-23-08

Posted on November 24, 2008
Recruiting Video Stirs Controversy For Misconduct-Plagued Police DepartmentThe San Jose Police Department is being taken to task over it's recruiting video that highlights militaristic police tactics due to recent concerns over that department's record of aggressive tactics, brutality, and racial profiling...

Detainee Abuses Continue A Year After DOJ Investigation

Posted on November 24, 2008
This month marked two anniversaries that, unfortunately, remind me of things that I would rather forget and that happen to be oddly coincidental. First, in November of last year the US Department of Justice released the findings of an investigation they performed into the treatment of detainees at the King County Jail (KCCF) that found, what they termed as, egregious and potentially deadly civil rights violations occurring at that facility which included the denial of medical care, physical abuse, and sexual abuse against detainees...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 11-21-08 - Updated

Posted on November 21, 2008
Seattle's Infamous Aurora Bridge, home to the Fremont Troll and the most suicide attempts in the city UPDATED: 17:50- 11/21/08 SPD Officer Investigated For Handling Of Aurora Bridge Suicide A Seattle Police Department officer is under investigation over a suicide death...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 11-19-08

Posted on November 19, 2008
Picture taken outside of the US Federal Courthouse in Seattle Washington Border Patrol Chief Insists They Have More Authority Than God More news about those US Border Patrol roadblocks I posted about the other day that appear to be violating 4th amendment rights against illegal search and seizure in Washington State...

Technical Difficulties

Posted on November 17, 2008
It appears as though the www.injusticeinseattle.org placeholder site is having some issues. While the blog itself is viewable, some links will not work, such as the HOME link to the right and the media contacts list since they are hosted at the .org domain instead of the blogger domain...

Remaining Charges Dropped in Sturgis Shooting Case

Posted on November 17, 2008
As predicted, the remaining weapons charges against two Seattle Police Department officers involved in a shooting during the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota have been dropped. Per The Seattle Times, the judge in the case determined that the federal law allowing officers to carry weapons anywhere while off-duty took precedence over state law outlawing weapons in establishments that serve alcohol...

Police Misconduct NewsWatch for 11-17-08

Posted on November 17, 2008
Is the King County NAACP Still Relevant? Here in Seattle, the Seattle Post Intelligencer questioned the relevancy of the King County chapter of the NAACP in Seattle the other day... They seem to have come to the same conclusion I did, that they could be if they would just learn to communicate with the community better and actually work more with other groups to address common problems...

US Border Patrol- More Authority Than God On Earth?

Posted on November 16, 2008
A couple days ago I commented on the US Border Patrol's "internal checkpoints" that have been set up all over Washington state to not only catch suspected illegal immigrants but also allow agents to search US citizens as well. Since the end of February the US Border Patrol has operated 53 roadblocks in distances up to 100 miles AWAY from the border...

On The Web And In Seattle

Posted on November 14, 2008
California Blogger Stalked Over Article About Officer's Sexual Assault ChargesFive Before Midnight, a blogger in Riverside California who covers the inner-workings of the local government and police conduct issues, seems to be the target of a creepy stalker because of the in-depth coverage written about the Riverside officer who is facing trial over multiple charges of sexual abuse...

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