Hypocrisy in Blue

The Flawed Case of Heather Bogle

A nonprofit legal aid group has filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department for information about arrests and attorney visits to people being held by police, according to a copy of the suit provided to the Tribune.

The group, First Defense Legal Aid, said that three mayoral administrations provided data that Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is now refusing to provide.

“Never had this kind of trouble. CPD was a partner in this data reporting. Look, it’s always been bad news, but the information helped us make it better together year over year," the group’s director, Eliza Solowiej, said. “Why can’t anyone see the stats now? Are things really getting worse under the consent decree?”

Deja Stallings was nine months pregnant two weeks ago when police manhandled her during a demonstration in Kansas City.

Deja Stallings says she was just trying to protect a friend when she was arrested during a demonstration in Kansas City, Missouri two weeks ago. During the arrest, Stallings was thrown to the ground and kneed in the back by a police officer who remains on the job. As it turns out, the same police officer was also returned to the street after fatally shooting an unarmed Black man in March.

A Chicago police officer has filed a lawsuit alleging sexual assault by former police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who was out drinking with her the night he was found asleep behind the wheel of his SUV.

In her lawsuit filed Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court, Cynthia Donald also says Johnson destroyed cellphone evidence of their relationship amid an investigation into Johnson's movements that night.

Donald's lawsuit alleges Johnson sexually harassed her, pressured her to engage in sexual acts and even texted nude photos of himself to her between 2016 and 2019 after he assigned her to his detail and then as his driver. In one incident, she alleges that Johnson forced her onto a couch, pulled her pants down without her consent and engaged in a sex act, telling her, “Now you know you belong to me.”

The number of incidents that involved a D.C. police officer using force last year increased again, but at a much slower clip than in previous years.

The 64-page 2019 Use of Force report states that the total number of use of force incidents was up by less than 1% from the previous year. But the Metropolitan Police Department says incidents are up 84% since 2015, with more than half of them happening in the city’s 5th, 6th and 7th Police Districts. The Metropolitan Police Department is the D.C. police department.

The department defines force as “any physical coercion used to effect, influence, or persuade an individual to comply with an order from an officer.”

In a city that’s 46% black, more than 90% of the incidents that saw a police officer use force involved someone who was black and 85% of the time it was someone who was male.

A North Carolina boy with autism was handcuffed by a school resource officer and held on the floor for nearly 40 minutes, according to a federal lawsuit filed by the boy's mother.

The suit was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina and accuses former Statesville Police Department officer Michael Fattaleh of an "unreasonable use of force" and inflicting "unnecessary and wanton pain" on the child during a 2018 incident at the Pressly Alternative School in Statesville, about 50 miles north of Charlotte.

The child, who was identified in the court documents by the initials L.G., has suffered emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the incident, according to the lawsuit.

NBC News

Two police officers in Rockland, Maine who were fired last week now face charges of aggravated cruelty to animals for allegedly beating several porcupines to death during their shifts, the Bangor Daily News reported on Tuesday. The animal cruelty charges against the former Rockland Police Department (RPD) officers Addison Cox, 27 and Michael Rolerson, 30, were reported last week, but details of the horrifying underlying conduct were not immediately clear.

According to the report, the officers didn’t just pummel the animals, they also shared the deed via social media.

“One apparent beating was posted to Snapchat groups — RPD Underground and the Night Crew — used by Rockland police primarily to share family photos to boost morale. In the video, Rolerson beat something on the ground with his baton, saying ‘I got it’ as he returned to his cruiser. A photo of a dead porcupine was then posted,” the report stated.

Rolerson also reportedly told colleagues that the beatings weren’t a one-time thing, saying he would often use pepper-spray on the porcupines before and after striking them.

Law & Crime

A White police officer who shot and killed an unarmed Black man at a convenience store in a small East Texas town Saturday was arrested Monday and charged with murder, authorities said. Within hours, Shaun Lucas posted his $1 million bond, reports CBS Dallas.

The family of the man who was shot, Jonathan Price, 31, is demanding to know why it happened.

Price's family and friends said Monday that the one-time college football player was intervening in a domestic disturbance at the store when he was shot.

"When police arrived, I'm told, he raised his hands and attempted to explain what was going on," civil rights attorney Lee Merritt said in a Facebook posting. "Police fired Tasers at him and when his body convulsed from the electrical current, they 'perceived a threat' and shot him to death."

CBS Dallas cited witnesses as saying things escalated between Price and the alleged abuser in the domestic dispute but had calmed down by the time police arrived.

It wasn't clear why Lucas used deadly force, the station said.

CBS News

A bill to charge law enforcement officers with a Class 6 felony if they engage in sexual relations with a detainee has unanimously passed both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly.

Del. Karrie Delaney said she proposed the bill to close a loophole.

Virginia law currently states that employees of correctional facilities or jails cannot have sexual relations with someone in their custody. But Delaney said current law does not make it illegal for police officers to have sexual relations with someone who has been detained but not yet arrested.

WTOP

Mayor de Blasio said Friday that the NYPD was wrong to arrest “legal observers” at a June 4th Bronx protest and that, contrary to what the police department’s top lawyer has said, such protest observers are exempt from arrest in such situations.

“The NYPD is wrong on this one,” de Blasio said in response to a question on the Brian Lehrer show.

"You had documentation proving you were legal observers,” he continued, addressing the caller directly. “If someone didn’t have documentation, if their status was unclear, I could understand there could be some confusion. But a legal observer doing what a legal observer is supposed to identify themselves and clarify their role, of course, they’re not supposed to be arrested.”

A fired police officer in Aurora, Colorado, said he was "very remorseful" for dismissing the pleas of a Black woman who was upside down with her hands and feet tied together on the floorboard of his patrol car for roughly 21 minutes.

Officer Levi Huffine was fired in February over the August 2019 incident but earlier this week, police made public video of the incident and Huffine testified at an appeal hearing.

Body camera footage shows the woman being handcuffed, taken to a police car and later her hands and feet were hog-tied using a soft restraint hobble.

For 21 minutes, she repeatedly asked for help and said that "she did not want to die like that".

These dogs, whose jaws and teeth are strong enough to punch through sheet metal, often produce severe injuries. Police employ them not only in emergencies, but also for low-level, non-violent incidents. The dogs bite thousands of Americans each year, including innocent bystanders, police officers, even their own handlers. And there is little oversight, nationally or in the states, of how police departments use them.

Police dogs are often portrayed as harmless, loveable members of the local police. But many departments across the country use dogs as weapons, training the animals to bite thousands of people every year, causing serious and even fatal injuries.

A new investigation from The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar, the USA TODAY Network and the Invisible Institute exposes the widespread use — and abuse — of dogs in police departments across the U.S.

USA Today

Three Los Angeles police officers are facing charges for allegedly falsifying records and misidentifying people they had stopped as gang members.

In July, charges were filed against three other LAPD officers for the same action.

Officer Rene Braga is charged with filing a false police report and preparing false documentary evidence, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said in a Friday news release. Officers Raul Uribe and Julio Garcia each face one count of preparing false documentary evidence, the release said.

"In all three cases, the defendants are accused of writing on the card that a person admitted to being a gang member even though body-worn camera video showed the defendants either never asked the individuals about their gang membership or the individuals denied gang membership if they were asked," the news release said.

Information from the interview cards was used to wrongly enter individuals into a gang database, the release said.

Black and Latino adults in California are disproportionately cited for minor, non-traffic infractions like loitering or sleeping in public compared to their White counterparts, according to a new study.

In Los Angeles, 30% of citations for non-traffic infractions between 2017 and 2019 were issued to Black residents, though they make up just 7% of the city's population, according the study, which was released Wednesday by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Black adults in L.A. were issued 63% of all citations for loitering while standing, the report says. And they were 3.8 times likelier to be issued citations for non-traffic infractions than White adults.

A police officer who died in a car crash just hours after being told he was to be fired over his role in the death of a Black man has been buried in a secret ceremony.

Officials had moved to keep the funeral of Louisiana state trooper Chris Hollingsworth under wraps amid concerns it would attract protesters angry at the in-death custody of Ronald Greene.

The Associated Press (AP) reported that Hollingsworth was buried with with honors on Friday amid tight security.