Corrupt drug cops in Philadelphia

From the Philadelphia Daily News:

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.

Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.

The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.

“I so scared,” said Eunice Nam, 56. “We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants.”

The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail.

The Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco pouches.

When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.

The Nams’ story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in South Philadelphia.

Via The Agitator. Officer Cujdik has other issues.

What Does It Take for a Police Officer to Get Fired?

Radley Balko, guest-blogging at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, describes three police officers, asking whether each has engaged in egregious enough conduct to be fired:

One,

Shoving a 71-year-old Walmart greeter to the ground and, when another customer came to assist, shoving that customer through a glass door?

Two,

How about three DWI incidents within a one-year span, including one in which the officer ran a roadblock, then had to be tasered, pepper-sprayed, and wrestled to the ground; another in which he hit another car, then left the scene of the accident; and another in which he fell asleep in his cruiser in front of a school, while in drive, with his foot resting on the brake?

Three,

How about an officer with an otherwise stellar record, who has a reputation in the department for honesty, but who became an outspoken critic of the war on drugs, and on one occasion declined to arrest a man after finding a single marijuana plant growing outside the man's home?

Can you guess which of these officers lost their jobs for the described conduct? Read Balko's post to find out.

More police puppycide

The cases continue to mount--when police officers come to search property and they are confronted by dogs, they often shoot and kill them, even if they are puppies.

A Milwaukee resident whose Labrador-Springer Spaniel mix was killed by police in 2004 has filed a lawsuit against the city, and she requested a list of every dog killed by city policy for the last nine years. There were 434--a dead dog every seven and a half days, and that's just one city.

In Oklahoma, a police officer pulled into a driveway to ask a woman for directions, and when the woman's Wheaton Terrier came bounding toward him, he shot and killed it. The police refused to do anything about the woman's complaint, and tried to pay her off to shut her up when she let them know that her security cameras had captured the incident. She also sued.

Radley Balko at The Agitator has been doing a great job of collecting and reporting on cases of unwarranted police killings of dogs. His latest summary of cases, from which the above two cases were taken, is his 16th "puppycide" blog post.

Arpaio foes arrested for clapping

Four people associated with the anti-Arpaio group Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability, were arrested on Wednesday for standing and applauding a speaker at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting. The East Valley Tribune notes that:

A double standard clearly was in effect during the Board of Supervisors meeting Wednesday. At one point, public-transit advocate Blue Crowley used part of his public-comment time allotment to sing a birthday song to [MCBoS chairman Andy] Kunasek. Kunasek blushed and several people applauded, but none was ordered to leave or threatened with arrest.

However, Kunasek, deputies and security officers refused to tolerate applause after the anti-Arpaio speech minutes later.

The criminal clappers were charged with "suspicion of disorderly conduct and trespassing."

This brings the arrests of MCSA members to eight for the week and nine for the last four months.

Four other members of MCSA were arrested on Monday, after a group of 20 went to Andy Kunasek's office to talk with him and he refused to meet with them. Sheriff's deputies asked them to leave and arrested the four who refused.

The other arrest was MCSA co-founder Randy Parrez, who was arrested on September 29 outside a Board of Supervisors meeting on similar charges--suspicion of trespassing and disorderly conduct.

All but one of the members of the Board of Supervisors are Republicans. The Tribune article quotes Supervisor Max Wilson (R-District 4) as saying, "I don’t tell the police how to do their job. I don’t instruct them to do it or when to do it. They’re professionals at it and that’s the way they handle it." The lone Democrat, Mary Rose Wilcox (D-District 5), however, stated that she thought the arrests were excessive and that she would talk to security about it.

Drunk driver kills someone, yet gets only a speeding ticket

Mario Chavez was driving drunk when he hit another car, killing its driver, 20-year-old University of Maryland student Brian Gray. Gray's mother was traveling behind him in another vehicle, and watched her son die. When police arrived at the scene, they did not bother to give Chavez a test for his blood alcohol level. Chavez lied to investigators about what he was doing prior to the crash, claiming he was sleeping even though his cell phone records show that he was talking on the phone. He didn't lose his job and he has only received a speeding ticket. Brian Gray, however, had blood taken from his dead body to see if he had been drinking, but he had not.

It seems the rules are different when the guilty party is a police officer. Mario Chavez is a Prince George's County, Maryland police officer who was driving his patrol car at the time of the accident. For some reason the black box recording device for his police cruiser has not been checked for evidence due to "software problems." A page of nurse's notes about Chavez after his admission to Prince George's Hospital after the crash has also disappeared.

(Via The Agitator.)

Criminal activity by air marshals

Looks like the air marshals have a problem similar to the TSA and the Border Patrol:

Shawn Nguyen bragged that he could sneak anything past airport security using his top-secret clearance as a federal air marshal. And for months, he smuggled cocaine and drug money onto flights across the country, boasting to an FBI informant that he was "the man with the golden badge."

Michael McGowan used his position as an air marshal to lure a young boy to his hotel room, where he showed him child porn, took pictures of him naked and sexually abused him.

And when Brian "Cooter" Phelps wanted his ex-wife to disappear, he called a fellow air marshal and tried to hire a hit man nicknamed "the Crucifixer."

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism organization, has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.

More details at USA Today.

UPDATE (8 March 2015): Another air marshals scandal:

What began as an internal investigation into allegations of harassment and threats stemming from a spat between ex-lovers has expanded into a criminal inquiry focused on the Federal Air Marshal Service’s dispatch hub in Herndon, Virginia. More than 60 federal employees are under scrutiny as investigators look into whether flights considered at risk of hijacking or a terrorist attack were left without marshals on board, sources with knowledge of the investigation told Reveal.

RNC protesters getting similar treatment as DNC protesters

P.Z. Myers reports on the behavior of police in Minneapolis, which looks similar to Denver.

ABC News producer arrested in Denver

Police told ABC News producer Asa Eslocker to move off a public sidewalk, pushed him into the street, and then arrested him after telling him he was trespassing and "impeding the flow of traffic." ABC has video at their site, which shows another police officer who needs to be fired.

Police violating rights at the Democratic National Convention?

P.Z. Myers has a post at Pharyngula about how the Democratic National Convention itself is prioritizing religious speakers who disagree with planks of the party platform over non-religious speakers who do not, which goes on to report allegations from an attorney that police from the Aurora, Colorado Police Department have been arresting peaceful protesters on bogus charges, apparently confiscating a compact flash card documenting police behavior, shooting pepper spray into the face of a protester who was obeying police instructions, and illegally not wearing badges or using means to obstruct their names and badge numbers.

Cops who act illegally should be fired and prosecuted, every time. They hold a position of public trust and need to be held to a higher standard than civilians, not a lower one.

UPDATE: Police claim protesters were carrying rocks. They arrested about 100 protesters. The group Recreate '68 says it was denied its use of a legal permit for the use of Civic Center Park, while police helped to protect and bring in Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. About a dozen abortion protesters were arrested on Tuesday, so they weren't being given special treatment.

In the Denver Post's photos, I don't see any cops without visible badges, though in only a few photos of cops with riot gear are the pictures close enough to see the numbers in white on the front of their uniforms.

Lying NYPD cops

Via The Agitator, here's video from a Critical Mass event in New York City which compares what actually happened on the scene from multiple angles to what police officers wrote in their reports. I have no sympathy for people who violate traffic laws like running red lights (which happens near the beginning of the video) or behaving like five-year-olds (which happens near the end), but this video also shows people who are supposed to be public servants violating people's rights and lying to make arrests on false pretenses. Officers like Sgt. Timothy Horohoe need to be not just fired, but criminally prosecuted.

The video asserts that Joyce Lin (the aforementioned person acting like a five-year-old) was within her rights to not produce identification and walk away, but this may not be true depending on New York law. Nevada has a law that requires suspects to identify themselves in certain conditions, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada (542 U.S. 177, 2004). If New York has a similar law, Lin was required to identify herself.

UPDATE (December 17, 2008): A Critical Mass bicyclist knocked from his bike by an NYPD cop in a similar incident in July, caught on video and viewed over 1.8 million times on YouTube has been cleared, and the cop indicted, stripped of his badge and gun, and assigned to desk duty. The NYPD officer in that case was Patrick Pogan. Sometimes flagrant police abuses do get punished, but it's a pity they often have to be caught on video and seen widely for that to happen.

SWAT team kills mayor's dogs

In yet another absurd drug raid, a Prince George's County special operations team busted down the doors of the home of Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, and shot his two dogs dead. This case was part of a scheme where drugs were being sent to homes of innocent people and then intercepted. Maryland does not allow no-knock warrants, but the authorities who entered Calvo's home did not knock and refused to show a warrant when asked for one. The police expressed regret, but no apologies, for killing the mayor's dogs.

The militarization of U.S. police, their completely inappropriate tactics in drug raids, and their repeated killing of dogs all need to stop.

Radley Balko at The Agitator has documented countless cases of such abusive actions, yet police are almost never held accountable for their actions. Perhaps in this case, since it involves a city mayor, someone will be held accountable. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

UPDATE (August 10, 2008): The police in this case claimed that they don't have a standard practice of shooting dogs, but Balko shows that this case is far from unique in that respect.

Calvo has spoken publicly about this raid and the fact that it is far from unique, except that in this case it was against the home of a mayor.

Man arrested for photographing cop

Scott Conover was arrested by a Johnson County, TN sheriff's deputy for taking his picture during a traffic stop--not his own, someone else's. He drove up to a stop in progress, slowed down, took a picture with his iPhone, and kept going. Officer Kenneth Lane went after him, pulled him over, falsely claimed that taking a picture of him was illegal and that he had to turn it over, and then arrested the guy, using two sets of handcuffs. The charge: "disorderly conduct, unlawful photographing, and pointing a laser at law enforcement officers"--all three of which were bogus.

More information, including a link to the officer's barely literate report, written four days after the fact, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

UPDATE (August 9, 2008): Turns out there's more to the story, and it makes the cops look even worse. Conover was taking a picture of what was part of an ongoing campaign of harassment against him, by going after the patrons of his bar. In this particular case, Conover knew that the driver of the car was a woman who was acting as designated driver for her husband, and only the husband had been drinking, and so he followed to take pictures to document what was going on. And this harassment of his patrons began after Conover was a witness to deputies beating up a man outside of his establishment, and he made a statement supporting that man. Conover had also previously sued the sheriff's department and settled for an undisclosed sum.

Cops and DUI

If you're the wife of a criminal defense attorney, you can get arrested for DUI even if you've not had a single drink. (This one was right here in Mesa, Arizona.)

If you're a cop, the expectation is that you won't get arrested for DUI even if you crash your car because you're so drunk you can't remember what year it is. Because if a cop arrests a cop for DUI, things get ugly.

Venezuela moves closer to a police state

The June 7, 2008 issue of The Economist reports that Hugo Chavez issued a decree late last month which:

authorises police raids without warrant, the use of anonymous witnesses and secret evidence. Judges are obliged to collaborate with the intelligence services. Anyone caught investigating sensitive matters faces jail. The law contains no provision for any kind of oversight. It blurs the distinction between external threats and internal political dissent. It requires all citizens, foreigners and organisations to act in support of the intelligence system whenever required--or face jail terms of up to six years.

Though my employer operates in Venezuela, I think that's one South American country I'd rather not visit at the moment... I hope November's elections reduce Chavez's power and he steps down from power in 2013 as he's previously said that he would.

And Daniel Ortega has suspended elections in Nicaragua... another country to avoid.

CIA operatives on trial in Italy

26 Americans, mostly CIA operatives, are currently on trial in absentia in Italy for the kidnapping and "extraordinary rendition" of a radical Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, who was taken to Egypt to be tortured. On Thursday, Italy's top counterterrorism official, Bruno Megale, explained in court how they identified the CIA operatives responsible for Omar's kidnapping:

Megale obtained records of all cellphone traffic from the transmission tower nearest the spot where Abu Omar was abducted, for a 2 1/2 -hour period around the time he disappeared. There were 2,000 calls.

Then, using a computer program, Megale was able to narrow down the pool by tracing the phones that had called each other, in other words, an indication of a group of people working together. Seventeen phone numbers, which showed intensifying use around the time of the abduction, were pinpointed. By following all other calls made from those phones, the investigators ultimately identified 60 numbers, including that of a CIA officer working undercover at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

In his testimony, Megale revealed that one telephone number he recognized was that of Robert Seldon Lady, then-CIA station chief in Milan. Lady and Megale had worked together in counter-terrorism investigations. It was a number, Megale said somberly, that he and his team knew.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Drug war led to Chicago PD corruption

Former Chicago police officer and FBI informant Keith Herrera told "60 Minutes" that pressure to get results in the war on drugs led to police officers lying about the facts in order to get arrests, and ultimately to a corrupt ring of officers engaging in thefts from drug dealers and a plot to kill two of fellow officers who weren't with the program and were prepared to testify against them. Herrera is one of seven officers in the Special Operations Section who have been charged with robbery, kidnapping, and other crimes.

(As reported by Reuters on Yahoo.)

FBI faked delay in terror investigation to justify unneeded new powers

Declassified documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that while investigating a possible conspirator in the 2005 London bombings, the FBI forced an agent to return documents obtained from North Carolina State University under normal lawful process so that they could be requested again under the USA PATRIOT Act, using a power the FBI did not have but wanted. When the second request was rejected, the FBI used another subpoena--just like the first one that had already been successful--to again obtain the documents.

The purpose for this sham? So that FBI Director Robert Mueller could testify before Congress that the lack of the desired power caused a delay in obtaining these records.

Sorry, Director Mueller, but this "delay" was a fraud, which means your testimony was still false (though apparently unknowingly so on his part).

Goldwater Institute takes on Sheriff Joe

Clint Bolick, formerly the primary litigator for the Institute for Justice, is taking on some good causes as a litigator for the Goldwater Institute's new Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. He's currently fighting against the City of Phoenix's unconscionable and unconstitutional multimillion-dollar subsidy to the developers of the CityNorth project, and now he's taking on popular Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

In an article posted today called "Who's in Charge?", Bolick points out two cases of apparent misuse of funds by Arpaio--using RICO funds to send staff to Honduras, and sending out nearly 200 deputies and "posse" members on "saturation patrols" that appear to be trespassing the jurisdiction of the Phoenix Police Department. Meanwhile, Bolick notes:

Whatever the rationale the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had for those actions, both diverted scarce resources away from vital law enforcement duties that fall within the Sheriff’s Office’s core duties:

• Unserved warrants, including those for violent offenders, number an estimated 70,000.
• Dozens of criminal defendants have missed court appearances because deputies in charge of moving inmates were told to skip shifts due to excessive overtime.
• The Sheriff’s Office closed three regional booking facilities in Surprise, Avondale, and Mesa, forcing police officers in all 26 Maricopa County jurisdictions to book criminal suspects at the Fourth Avenue jail in downtown Phoenix. The greatly increased transportation time removes officers from the streets and induces them to simply cite and release criminals.

Arpaio has a long history of showy but useless or even counterproductive law enforcement activities, as well as costing the taxpayers millions by getting the MCSO sued repeatedly for wrongful death and injury cases as a result of abuse of inmates. But Maricopa County residents keep voting him back in, because he claims to be tough on crime and is often a good self-promoter. I hope that events like last October's arrests of the owners of New Times and now Clint Bolick going after him will finally lead to his non-reelection for County Sheriff this year.

Dan Saban, who's running against Arpaio, is saying all the right things about integrity, civil rights, and combating waste, though he also seems to take a hard line on illegal immigration (which is another area where Arpaio has taken a hard line and engaged in some theatrical activities). He looks like a marked improvement to Arpaio.

UPDATE (April 2, 2008): Looks like Goldwater lost round one today on CityNorth, a project where the city is giving $97.4 million in taxpayer subsidies to the developers of a shopping mall over the next 11 years, and claiming that it is for the 3,180 parking spaces in the parking garage the project is building, 200 of which are reserved for carpoolers using park and ride city bus services for the next 45 years. If the subsidy is considered to be for those 200 spaces, that comes out to $487,000 per space over the 45-year period, or $10,822.22 per space per year. The average parking space annual lease price in Phoenix is $684, and ASU recently estimated that a parking garage would cost $14,000 per space to build. In other words, if instead of paying nearly $100 million to CityNorth, the city instead had purchased land and built its own parking garage, the construction would have cost less than what the city is paying for the first two years worth of the 45-year lease on the 200 spaces. And that doesn't count the additional $10,000/week of taxpayer funds that has been spent on lawyers fighting for this subsidy.

The Goldwater Institute has announced that it will appeal.

UPDATE (April 9, 2008): The New York Times has editorialized that Arpaio should be subpoenaed about his anti-illegal-immigrant sweeps:

For months now, Sheriff Joe has been sending squads of officers through Latino neighborhoods, pulling cars over for broken taillights or turn-signal violations, checking drivers' and passengers' papers and arresting illegal immigrants by the dozen.

Because he sends out press releases beforehand, the sweeps are accompanied by TV crews and protesters — deport-'em-all hard-liners facing off against immigrant advocates. Being Arizona, many of those shouting and jeering are also packing guns. Sheriff Joe, seemingly addicted to the buzz, has been filmed marching down the street shaking hands with adoring Minutemen.

If this doesn't look to you like a carefully regulated, federally supervised effort to catch dangerous criminals, that's because it isn't. It is a series of stunts focused mostly on day laborers, as Sheriff Joe bulldozes his way toward re-election.

The sheriff says he is keeping the peace, but it seems as if he is doing just the opposite — a useless, reckless churning of fear and unrest.

RateMyCop

RateMyCop.com is a new website that allows you to rate individual police officers on the basis of your interactions with them, on the attributes of authority, fairness, and satisfaction, for which you can rate them poor, average, or good, and leave specific comments about your interactions. The site describes itself like this:

Welcome to RATEMYCOP.com, the online watchdog organization serving communities nationwide. RATEMYCOP.com is not affiliated with any government agency; we are an independent, privately managed organization.

Our mission is to compile information on cops’ performance and to provide a forum where users can freely share individual accounts. Good, bad or indifferent. Most of all, we would like to hear your stories. Your appreciation and your disapproval. Did you witness a cop doing a good deed, or were you involved in an unfortunate altercation? Tell us about it. Tell others about it. Let it out. Don’t feel intimidated by the badge to remain quiet.

While we respect their authority we are also free to question it. You have the right to remain informed.

The site has lists of 120,000 individual police officers from 450 departments around the country, which the site obtained directly from police departments, asking only for the names of patrol officers who work with the general public, not undercover officers. There are no photos, addresses, or telephone numbers, only names.

The city of Tempe has expressed disapproval and its intention to try to remove this information from the site, according to an ABC 15 News story which claims the site is a danger to officers. Tempe Police Department Officer Tony Miller is quoted in the story raising issues about undercover officers, and the article says that he "feels as though officers like him are scrutinized enough." The article also states that "Tempe officer Brandon Banks says the department's chief, human resources and even the city's prosecutor are looking into the website and fighting it." I don't see that they have a case, this information should all be a matter of public record.

It seems to me that there is potential for abuse (especially in the form of inaccurate ratings and comments, just as on teacher rating websites), but less so than there is from other kinds of public records about all of us that are published on the web. I disagree with Officer Miller's opinion that there is already sufficient accountability for police officers; this blog's previous posts in the "police abuse and corruption" category and the far more numerous and detailed posts from Radley Balko's The Agitator blog and his article "Overkill" are overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It's worth noting that the courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no duty of police officers to protect individual members of the public, and many states have statutes which prevent individual officers and departments from being held civilly liable for a failure to provide adequate protection, a fact often used by gun advocates to argue for widespread gun ownership for individual protection (e.g., here, here, and here). The U.S. Supreme Court also eliminated a major protection against police abuse in 2006, when it ruled in Hudson v. Michigan (PDF) that evidence from an illegal no-knock raid need not be excluded from trial, because police officers have entered a new realm of "professionalism" in which they recognize civil liberties and can be trusted to investigate and deter their own abuses. In the wake of such decisions and continuing abuses, a website such as RateMyCop.com seems to me like a good idea.

What the site seems to be missing, though, is a way to quickly find officers who have received ratings (very few seem to have any yet), and to sort those in order to find those with favorable or unfavorable ratings.

UPDATE (March 12, 2008): Apparently GoDaddy has pulled the plug on RateMyCop.com's website without notice to the owner, allegedly first for "suspicious activity" and then for exceeding bandwidth limits, and the site is up with a new web hosting provider.

It looks like the ratings are now on a single category, and you can see a list of the most-rated and most-recently-rated on the front page. Another feature that would be nice would be a way to allow registered users to rate the raters for reliability, similar to the way Amazon.com book reviews can be rated as helpful or not helpful. That way, ratings could be weighted based on judgments of the reliability of the raters from the user base, and ratings from those with a personal axe to grind could have their weight minimized.

Looks like Rackspace has also refused to host ratemycop.com.

Interestingly, apparently Gino Sesto of RateMyCop.com was a Bush voter.

Chasing ghosts with joint terrorism task forces

The latest issue of Rolling Stone has an excellent article by Guy Lawson, "The Fear Factory," about how joint terrorism task forces across the U.S. are engaging in wild goose chases and exaggerating the terrorist threat to justify their existence.

A companion article, Tim Dickinson's "Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts," reports on the real stories behind repeated terror scares that have been used to elevate the DHS advisory system over the last five years.