Woman calls police for help.  Ends up brutally stripped searched, naked on the floor of a jail cell.

Be sure to watch the video.  There’s a follow-up report, too.

I do sympathize with this fellow and his wife. Must’ve been a pretty harrowing situation. I don’t doubt that his wife was probably pretty traumatized, and certainly she’s in no way to blame for what happened.

But based only on his account, it seems to me that the Fresno police deserve some praise here. A car thief fled into an apartment building. And instead of calling out the SWAT team, kicking down doors, or deploying concussion grenades, they simply surrounded the place, used an amplified intercom, and tried to coerce the suspect out without confrontation. They didn’t throw his wife to the ground, rough her up, or humiliate her. Once they realized she wasn’t a threat, they were apparently quite kind and polite to her. I’m not sure how they could have handled it any better.

I highlight a lot of bad police behavior on this site. But I do think it’s important to note that there are times when innocent people are going to traumatized through no fault of their own, and through no fault of the cops. In this case, it seems hard to cast blame on anyone other than the fleeing suspected car thief.

• A Chicago cop caught on tape beating a man handcuffed to a wheelchair will apparently be back on the job come April.
• L.A. cops convicted of robbing people in burglaries disguised as drug raids. So not only can you not be sure the people banging down your door at night are the police, not only can you not be sure they’re the police even if they say they’re the police (lots of criminals have caught on, and now stage fake drug raids), you can’t even be sure it’s safe to let them in even if they are the police.
• A Philly cop who did narcotics work in majority black neighborhoods was caught with an interesting poster in his locker:
  

  A cartoon of a man, half as an officer in uniform and half as a Klansman with the words: “Blue By Day - White By Night. White Power,” according to police officials.

• A cop in Atlanta admits to taking “protection” money from local businesses. Yes, he’s being tried for his crimes. But he never would have been caught were it not for investigations resulting from the Kathryn Johnston case. Had Alex White done what his police handlers pressured him to do, all of this corruption at APD would still be going on.
• Good news from Seattle, where a new the mayor is proposing some sweeping changes to make the city’s police department more transparent and accountable. An officer caught lying while doing his job will now face a presumption of termination. The changes came after the police chief ignored the city’s civilian review board recommendation that two officers be fired for using excessive force, then lying about the incident.
• Missouri Illinois cop turns off his video monitor, then drives in excess of 120 mph to an accident scene that had already been secured. He then lost control of the car, and slammed into an SUV, killing two teenage sisters. It’s not clear what’s being done about it. He’s apparently still being paid. And this article says he is not facing any disciplinary charges. On the other hand, it also says the district attorney is looking into the possibility of charging him with reckless homicide.
• Police in Colorado are being investigated for going a bit too far in a prostitution sting. There are about a half-dozen of these stories per year. Always a problem when you have laws that cops have to break in order to enforce.
• A town in Connecticut will have to pay a $100,000 to a police officer who was fired for lying in a police report. He’ll also get his job back. It’s not that he didn’t lie. Rather, an arbitrator ruled that he was treated differently than other officers, triggering an “age discrimination” complaint.
  

An attorney who had aspiration to be become a prosecutor is himself being prosecuted in Massachusetts for videotaping a couple of police officers while they were arresting a teenager.

I defend videotaping the police here.

The Chesapeake city manager will apparently announce tomorrow that…

…the [police] department will undergo a top-to-bottom examination including looking into procedures, policies and equipment used by the force.

She did not want to get more specific because the City Manager is expected to announce the move Tuesday during a news conference at City Hall.

At that point, he may go into greater detail about it.

However, Willis does say the idea of reviewing the police department is not new, and has been lfloating out there for a while. However, the death of Detective Jarrod Shivers might have accelerated City leaders to make the idea a reality.

The timing of the announcement is certainly interesting. Makes me suspect we’ll soon be hearing more about the Shivers-Frederick raid.

One of Shivers’ colleagues recently told the Virginian-Pilot that if they were to conduct the raid again tomorrow, they’d do it “the exact same way.” I suppose he was driven to say that in part by feelings of defiance in the wake of his friend’s death. There’s also the matter of liability. Admitting police error could both hurt the criminal case against Frederick and could put the department and individual officers at risk should Det. Shivers’ family decide to sue.

But damn. You just conducted a raid that ended with a dead cop and a man with no prior record sitting in jail on murder-one charges. You’ve got a life ended, a life ruined, and two families in mourning. And you found what I think we can now safely say was no more than a user’s amount of marijuana. The vast marijuana grow operation described in the search warrant is nowhere to be found. And you wouldn’t do anything differently?

I see plenty to like in this bill.

It would force states that receive federal crime fighting money to keep better track of statistics regarding deaths in police custody.

A similar bill was signed into law by President Clinton in the 1990s that required states to keep track of police shootings, but lacked any enforcement mechanism. So most of the states just ignored it.

The problem, of course, is that while police departments and state governments are excellent at reporting the number of police officers killed on the job every year, they’re pretty lousy at keeping track of the number of people who die at the hands of the police, justified and otherwise.

Same goes for botched raids. In the past, pro-SWAT groups have criticized me for relying on newspaper accounts and federal lawsuit filings to try to document and count the number of mistaken raids over the years. Thing is, that’s really the only way to document them. I’d love to rely on police records for that data. But in most of the country, they don’t exist. One of my main recommendations in Overkill was that every search warrant be tracked in a searchable database, from the time it’s requested through its execution. Records should include what police thought they’d find, what they actually found, what happened to the suspect, and what tactics were used to serve the warrant. They should also probably include some sort of code identifying any informants used, though that could be redacted if the other information were to be made public (and I think the entire database should be subject to FOIA requests). And of course, if a warrant is served on the wrong house, that should be documented.

I don’t see any federalism problems with these requirements, either. If state and local governments are doing an inadequate job protecting the civil rights of their citizens, the federal government is obligated to intervene under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the 2006 Hudson v. Michigan case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a laughable opinion arguing that the Exclusionary Rule needn’t be applied in cases where police perform an illegal no-knock raid, because police departments across the country have embraced a new “professionalism,” whereby bad cops are punished or fired, and victims of police excesses can file and win civil rights lawsuits. In fact, Samuel, Walker, one of the scholars Scalia cited in his opinion took to the L.A. Times op-ed page to explain how Scalia had misinterpreted his research.

I’ve had some fun with Scalia’s “new professionalism” canard over the last couple of years, pointing to news story after news story showing that the fabled “blue wall of silence” is as sound and secure as it’s ever been.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard a case from Virginia in which police illegally arrested a man after a traffic stop revealed he was driving on a suspended license. Virginia law bars police from making arrests for misdemeanor traffic offenses. In this case, the cops illegally arrested the guy, then forced him to take them back to his hotel room. There they searched him, and found some crack in his pocket, for which he was arrested and convicted.

The Virginia Supreme court threw out the conviction, explaining that evidence obtained from a search following an illegal arrest can’t be used at trial. The state of Virginia appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. From the tone of the questioning this week, it looks as if the Roberts court is prepared to rule for the state—that evidence seized in searches resulting from illegal arrests should be admissible at trial. Which means the court is well on its way to either overturning the Exclusionary Rule, or limiting it to the point where it’s basically useless. Virginia’s attorney general was asked if, consistent with this case, someone could be (illegally arrested) for jaywalking, then have his home searched pursuant to that illegal arrest, then have the evidence found in the search used against him at trial. He said yes.

I’ve argued that while the Exclusionary Rule isn’t perfect, it’s necessary, because it’s really the only effective deterrent to Fourth Amendment abuses. History has shown us that bad cops in fact aren’t properly disciplined by their departments or by prosecutors. The doctrine of qualified immunity and the tendency of judges, jurors, and police administrators to show deference to police, victims of illegal searches and excessive police tactics rarely if ever recover any damages—if their case is fortunate enough to even get by summary judgement.

Which brings me back to the Virginia case argued before the Court this week. The state of Virginia and the U.S. government (siding with Virginia against the Fourth Amendment) once again brought up the argument that disciplining and firing police officers who perform unlawful searches is a better remedy than the Exclusionary Rule.

That raised the question: What happened to the police who performed the illegal search in this particular case? NPR found the answer (listen to the tail-end of the audio). Not only were they not disciplined, one of the officers was named his city’s “Cop of the Year”—the same year he took part in the illegal search.

• The ACLU is suing on behalf of a paraplegic man who had his licensed, legal, therapeutic marijuana seized during a drug raid.
• Man shot in a Wilmington, North Carolina gambling raid. Police aren’t saying if he was armed, or what happened that led to the shooting.
• Mark Draughn notes that some overly sensitive DEA agents are suing over the movie American Gangster, because of some text at the end of the movie referring to a state drug enforcement agency the agents say could be mistakenly construed as the federal agency. Draughn points out that the damages the agents are seeking (”turn over all of its profits to a fund for federal DEA agents”) sounds like the product of some guys who’ve spent their careers doing asset forfeiture cases.
• More fun with maps: The top religions in America, broken down by county.
• Looks like there will be no indictments in the Hoboken SWAT-Hooters scandal.
• John McCain, after 27 years of making and voting on federal legislation:
  

  “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” 

  That would explain campaign finance reform.

• No idea on the veracity of this report. But if it’s true, it’s pretty stunning. Two people were apparently kicked out of the National Archives while viewing the Constitution, for wearing pro-impeachment t-shirts.
• Snail crossing.
• “Do you have any niggers in the building?”
• Tyler Cowen points to another study on prostitution, and why it’s illegal in Las Vegas. It’s the old Baptists and bootleggers problem. In this case, Baptists, gamblers, hookers, and bootleggers.
• Drug raid in Jackson, Mississippi leads to a shootout. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Also, if you’re wondering, no, the crazy-ass mayor wasn’t involved. But there was a five-year-old girl in the home. You’ve got what police believe is a dangerous dude. He’s in a house with his girlfriend and a little girl. Yet you still decide to storm the place in the middle of the night, guns blazing. It’s also clear from the story that the police didn’t have a good grasp of the layout of the place. How in the world is this safer than apprehending the guy on the street?
• BET founder Robert Johnson slagged Barack Obama at a Hillary Clinton rally this weekend, then tossed out this not-so-subtle reference to Obama’s admitted past drug use:
  

  “And to me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood –­ and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book –­ when they have been involved.”   

  Johnson’s now claiming he was referring to Obama’s “community organizing.” Except that doesn’t fit the context of the quote. It’s pretty clear what he meant. And he ought to know better.

Acting Killian, Louisiana Police Chief Joseph Guy Crawford Jr., wanted them for his wife, who apparently couldn’t get medication in the quantities she needed to alleviate her pain.

The chief’s actions were obviously careless, reckless, and criminal. But they’re also very sad. The story’s an example of just how difficult it is for people in pain to find relief, a problem that has only worsened with all of the high-profile arrests and harassment of doctors by federal and state authorities. It’s also indicative of the level of desperation some of these people and those who care about them can reach as access to the drugs they need to lead normal lives gets increasingly difficult.

Meet Sam Costales, part of the Albuquerque, New Mexico Police Department.

In 2006, Costales was present at a roadblock set up by the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team, after a carjacking investigation turned into a gunfire-laden, high-speed chase.

The roadblock also happened to be set up in the neighborhood of race car driving legend Al Unser, Sr. Here’s the initial news report of what happened as Unser approached the roadblock:

While the incident was still unfolding, Bernalillo County sheriff’s investigators allege Al Unser started going through a roadblock in an attempt to get to his property. Despite six or seven warnings to leave the area, he still refused to leave, saying it was his property–he owned it.
When the deputy told him he would be arrested, Unser allegedly said, “You can’t take me to jail,” and began cussing at the officer.

Officers report he then jerked away and said, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Al Unser.”

A short time after he was arrested, Bobby Unser showed up. Deputies said he, too, refused to leave and resisted arrest.

Both were transported to holding cells at the Valley substation before being taken to jail.

“They simply told them numerous times to leave the area, and they simply refused to do so,” Erin Kinnard of the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department said. “Were not talking about a situation where we’re trying to catch a shoplifter.

“This was a serious and dangerous situation.”

KRQE News 13 was told Al Unser threatened the arresting officer, telling him he would get back at him some day.

Unser of course said that’s not the way it happened. He says the officers were rude to him, refused to tell him why he couldn’t drive home, then pulled him out of his car and tossed him into a thorn bush before arresting him for resisting arrest.

Costales is a cop with the Albuquerque Police Department, not the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department, so he initially remained silent, and wasn’t interviewed as part of the investigation. But he was later contacted by a private investigator for the Unser family. That’s when he explained what he saw. His version of events were a lot more like the Unsers’ than the sheriff’s deputies.

Costales said he heard “yelling and screaming” after deputies stopped Unser’s vehicle.

“They were running and screaming at the driver, ‘Get the hell out of here,”‘ Costales said. “It bothered me. People have a right to know what’s going on. An explanation would clear them out quickly.”

Three or four deputies were involved in the confrontation, he said.

At one point, Costales said, Unser turned his vehicle around as if to leave as deputies continued yelling at him. Unser stopped and stepped out of his vehicle with his hands outstretched, he said.

Costales said it appeared that one deputy then made a shoving motion toward Unser.

“I thought, ‘This is getting out of hand,”‘ he said.

Costales testified that Unser got back in his truck and started to leave, and that he heard a deputy say, “That’s it, you’re under arrest.”

“They swung open his door, they grabbed him and threw him face down on the ground into a sticker patch,” Costales said.

The Albuquerque officer said he heard Unser tell officers as he was lying on the ground that he had an injured shoulder.

Asked by defense attorney Charlie Daniels if Unser was resisting, Costales replied, “No, sir, there were three of them on top of him.”

Costales added, “There was a right way of doing things and a rude and hateful way of doing things. I think they chose the latter.”

After Costales’ testimony, Unser was acquitted on all charges.

But the story doesn’t end there. The officers at the roadblock were never even investigated, let alone disciplined. In fact, the only action the Benalillo County sheriff took was to call the APD chief to complain about Costales’ testimony. Costales soon found himself the subject of an internal affairs investigation, one instigated by his own police chief at the behest of the sheriff. The charge? Improperly wearing his uniform while testifying in court. A police spokesperson explained to the local paper that officers are only permitted to wear their uniforms when testifying for the prosecution. When they testify for the defense, they’re to wear street clothes. Make of that what you will.

After the trial, the head of the police union in Albuquerque sent a letter to the Bernalillo County Sheriff apologizing for Costales’ testimony. It read:

As Secretary of the APOA i feel it is my duty and responsibility to apologize to you and your officers. Ofc. Sam Costales does not represent APD/APOA. The majority of our officers look at the BCSO as our brother and sisters in blue. We are embarrassed and ashamed of Ofc. Costales’s testimony in the Unser trial. If there is anything we can do to rebuild the damage caused by Sam please let me know.

Remarkable. Costales wasn’t exactly jumping up and down to sell out his fellow cops. According to a report by one New Mexico non-profit, Costales had retired from the police force three years prior after witnessing to much brutality, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. When APD asked him back as part of an effort to step up street patrols, he agreed, but only after first promising himself and his wife that he’d speak up about any abuses he saw. Even still, Costales spoke up about the Unser incident only after contacted by Unser’s defense team, then testified to what he saw when asked to do so while under oath. Seems to me he’s a pretty credible witness. He had little to gain from selling out his fellow officers (I doubt he was gunning for my “Cop of the Year” award), and quite a bit to lose.

And so much for police unions sticking up for their members, eh? Tell the truth under oath about police abuse in order to prevent a wrongful arrest and conviction, and they’ll drop you like you’ve just been tasered.

The sheriff responded to the union rep:

“Like you, I was shocked and dismayed when I learned that Sam was on the stand sucker-punching our deputies. Make no mistake, while his testimony was a work of fiction, it was pretty much game over after he finished…Sam Costales is incapable of breaking the brotherhood that bonds these great agencies.”

The internal affairs investigation of Costales ended without any formal complaint against him. But it sent a pretty clear message. And the retribution has apparently continued. Last August, Costales filed a federal lawsuit against his department, the sheriff’s department, and the police union:

Officer Sam Costales, in a federal lawsuit filed last week, alleged there’s an unwritten “blue code of silence” in which officers are expected to lie or keep silent to avoid contradicting fellow officers or situations that would make another law enforcement agency look bad.

And he said officers who break that code are punished by “derogatory comments and smear campaigns,” ostracism within the department and retaliation and by other officers refusing to back them up on calls in the field.

[...]

The lawsuit said that despite requests for transfer, Costales remains on patrol in a dangerous neighborhood, under a cloud of hostility, and wonders every time he gets a call whether other officers will back him up.

Costales said criticism by White and Schultz created a hostile and potentially life-threatening work environment and that stress has forced him to seek mental health treatment and take medication for anxiety and sleeplessness.

Seems like the lesson in all of this is clear. There may indeed be only a “few bad apples” in the police force. But if you, as one of the good ones, report their abuses, it’s you who will be punished, not them. This is also why I’m skeptical of police accounts of botched raids, shootings, and other incidents. There’s way too much incentive to lie, way too much protection for liars, and, in those cases where the police actually are at fault, too little protection for cops who do dare to tell the truth.

In my book, Sam Costales is a hero. He’s your Agitator.com “Cop of the Year” for 2007.

Courtesy of the Idaho Police Officer Standards and Training Academy:

Each class at the Idaho Police Officer Standards and Training Academy is allowed to choose a slogan that is printed on its graduation programs, and the class of 43 graduates came up with “Don’t suffer from PTSD, go out and cause it.”

[...]

Black said the class president was ex-military, and that the slogan “slipped in.” He declined to identify the graduate. Black said future slogans would be vetted by academy leaders.

Where to begin?  You’ve got a graduating group of police officers who advocate police brutality as their class slogan.  Which to me means one of two things:  Either these guys didn’t learn anything in the academy—in which case they shouldn’t be graduated to become police officers—or this kind of attitude was accepted and encouraged in the academy.  Which is obviously a pretty huge problem, too.

I suppose some will say it’s a joke.  I don’t know.  Seems to me that joking about police brutality oughtn’t be acceptable either.  Especially for someone fresh out of the academy.

Note also that the academy’s director explains the dust-up by noting that the class president is “ex-military.”

Um.  Isn’t that all the more reason for concern?  This guy’s conflating military attitude (which is appropriate in the military) with police work (which is not at all appropriate in police work*)?  And he’s going to be a cop, now?  Worse, he’s the guy the other cadets looked to for leadership?  Isn’t that all just a little troubling?

This is a big problem—the kinds of people police departments are recruiting to become cops.  There seems to be less emphasis on keeping communities safe and public service and lots of emphasis on busting up bad guys and playing cowboy like the guys on Dallas SWAT.  Remember the recruiting video the police department in the Raleigh suburb of Garner was using at local high schools?  The whole thing was about busting down doors, car chases, tackling bad guys, and generally kicking ass.  What kind of person is going to watch a video like that and be attracted to that kind of career?  What kind of temperament is that person going to have?  And is that the kind of temperament you want in your police force?

Seems to me that a video like that attracts the kind of candidate who might later think it’s funny to go out and inflict post-traumatic stress on the public.

(*Actually, I’ve noted before that there’s some evidence that U.S. troops in Iraq treat the civilians of an enemy nation quite a bit better than police officers here at home treat American citizens.)

I’m quoted at length in this piece by St. Paul Pioneer-Press columnist Ruben Rosario on botched SWAT raids.

The piece itself is great, but the comments are pretty sad. Lots of stuff along the lines of, “if this guy had learned English, he’d have known they were cops.” Jesus. They wrongly invaded his home. Also, I’m pretty sure Kathryn Johnston spoke English. Pretty sure, in fact, that most people on the raid map later determined to have been innocent who mistook raiding cops for criminal home invaders also spoke English. Khang’s wife says she heard no announcement of any kind, foreign language or otherwise.

As for the Khang raid itself, the police are in prime CYA form:

Minneapolis police say they are not to blame for a mistake that sent a SWAT team into the wrong house over the weekend.

[...]

“It was bad information that came on the informants end, not on the police end,” said Jesse Garcia, a Minneapolis Police spokesman.

Garcia said after the informant gave police three addresses they did their homework.

“Like I said, this is a long-term investigation that involved surveillance, looking at background of this whole situation to find out exactly what’s going on,” said Garcia.

In addition, a judge reviewed the information from police. The judge OK’d the three search warrants.

“The first two addresses were very good, a lot of information, numerous guns were recovered,” said Garcia.

[...]

WCCO-TV asked police if they would make police changes to prevent a mistake.

“I don’t think it was a mistake on our part, you know, we did everything correctly. We did everything in good faith, we followed the search warrant, we did everything correctly. It turns out some of the information that was given on the front end from the informant, just wasn’t right,” said Garcia.

But the informant works for the police. Informants aren’t sworn public servants. They aren’t trained to become police officers. They aren’t accountable to the public. Most, in fact, are pretty shady characters. The police ought to be independently coroborrating every informant’s tip before they go kicking down doors. Even a reliable informant could inadvertently transpose numbers, or get a street name wrong.

So don’t blame this on the informant. It’s the job of the officers he’s working with to corroborate the information he gives them. If his information is wrong, and they act on it, it’s their fault, not his. The fact that they shot up the wrong house by itself indicates that the police made a mistake, here.

Here’s more from Minneapolis police:

“This house was part of a package of very credible information that resulted in other successful enforcement actions,” she said. “This was the end of a chain of things, and there was no reason to question the credibility of the information.”

Except that, quite obviously, the information wasn’t credible. Or they wouldn’t have nearly killed an innocent family.

The police apparently knocked out six windows in the Khang home, some of them before the shooting began. The fired 22 rounds, spraying the Khang home with shotgun blasts.

One local media outlet is reporting that the police were investigating a black street gang. Had they taken the two minutes to type the address into the local property records website, they’d have seen the name “Vang Khang” pop up, which should have at least hinted at the possibility that the address might bewrong, and that it would probably be worth the time to do a bit more investigation before heading out to play soldier.

The fact that the police didn’t even take this small, not particularly labor intensive step by itself puts the lie to the statement that they “did everything correctly.”

Join the Chicago Police Department.

An eight-month Chicago Tribune investigation of 200+ police shootings going back 10 years found that within hours of a police shooting, the police department convenes hastily-assembled, wagon-circling “roundtables” of law enforcement officials where police and witnesses are questioned but not sworn or recorded, where the officers involved are allowed to confer to get their stories straight before being questioned, and where the inevitable conclusion is always that the shooting was justified. From there, broader, show-investigations begin. Key witnesses go uninterviewed. Forensic evidence is ignored. And the shooting officer is inevitably exonerated.

The Tribune found that even when information is later made public that contradicts the findings of internal investigations, the police refuse to reopen a case.

Wrongful death lawsuits often prompt the only full accounting of shootings and the internal investigations that follow.

In a recent suit filed by Ware’s family, a veteran detective who has been the lead investigator in numerous police shootings testified that she handles too many cases to go back and re-interview officers and reconsider roundtable rulings when autopsies and other test results shed new light.

“Once a case is closed, it’s closed,” said Sylvia VanWitzenburg.

“Your testimony is, once you close out a [police shooting] case, no matter what new information comes in, you’re not going to go back and review it?” asked the attorney representing Ware’s family.

“Correct,” she replied.

The paper also found that even on those rare occasions when investigators find a shooting to be unjustified, the officer in question isn’t disciplined.

Officer David Rodriguez asserted that he shot Herbert McCarter in the abdomen in a struggle over the officer’s gun in December 1999. But Smith concluded Rodriguez lied and recommended his firing, according to Smith and a lawsuit filed by McCarter.

Key to that recommendation: medical records showing that McCarter actually had been shot in the back, and gunshot residue tests on his clothes indicating he had not been shot at close range.

Rodriguez, who declined to comment, remains a police officer. According to McCarter’s lawsuit, no disciplinary action was taken despite the OPS chief investigator’s conclusion.

McCarter, however, was charged with aggravated battery of a police officer. He was found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison.

In his 2006 lawsuit, McCarter alleged that city officials hid the OPS conclusions and recommendation from his lawyer in his criminal trial. The city settled McCarter’s lawsuit for $90,000 this year.

The same officer was later sued in another questionable shooting. That suit resulted in a $4 million settlement from the city.

Finally, the paper found that this incredible deference to police officers extends also to officers who shoot people while off-duty. Cops who’ve shot people after drinking at bars, in road rage incidents, and during domestic disputes are given the same administrative privileges (privileges not given to you or I) as cops who shoot someone while on duty.

Via Rogier van Bakel.

It’s probably worth reiterating from time to time that the point of these roundups is not to suggest all police officers are evil or corrupt or abusive. It is to suggest that the good ones tend to cover up for the bad ones, and the bad ones are rarely disciplined. The other point is of course to mock Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for his opinion in Hudson, where he argues that a “new professionalism” has taken root in police departments across America, negating the need for judicial remedies for police abuses. Your latest roundup:

• Police in Arkansas went out looking for a man who failed to show up for a reckless driving charge. They apparently saw a man jogging alongside the road with the same name, whom one of the officers recognized as a locally famous Special Olympics athlete. It wasn’t the man they were looking for. Nevertheless, when the learning disabled man pulled away from the cops—as most any of us might do if wrongfully arrested—they hit him with the Taser. The police chief says the entire incident was justified because the innocent guy “pulled away” from the officers.

• Atlanta PD: The gift that keeps on giving.

The husband of a city police sergeant was arrested on a child pornography charge on Thursday, and federal investigators said police officers had apparently withheld and destroyed evidence in the case.

• Local police were called to the home of suspected wife killer Illinois police Sgt. Drew Peterson 18 times in two years. Peterson’s third repeatedly told police Peterson had hit her and threatened to kill her. Peterson’s fellow officers never arrested him, though they did arrest and charge the wife on two occasions (she was acquitted). The third wife is dead now. And Peterson’s fourth wife is missing.

• By my count, 99 seconds from getting pulled over until the guy gets “a ride on the Taser,” as they say. More troubling to me is how many people watch these videos and find nothing wrong with them. I realize these people aren’t being as respectful with the police as they ought to be (if for their own safety, if not out of courtesy). But if we’ve gotten to the point where a paralyzing jolt of electricity is now an acceptable punishment for getting uppity with a police officer (or in this case, for not bowing to the officer’s uppity-ness), well, I find that a little troubling.

• Regular readers won’t be surprised by this:

Chicago police officers are the subject of more brutality complaints per officer than the national average, and the Police Department is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seriously than the national norm, a legal team at the University of Chicago reported Wednesday…

…According to the new report, rogue police officers abuse victims without fear of punishment, and the lack of accountability has tainted the entire department, resulting in a loss of public confidence. Patterns of abuse and disciplinary neglect were worst in low-income minority neighborhoods, said the authors, Craig B. Futterman, H. Melissa Mather and Melanie Miles.

• Wrong-door SWAT raid in Milwaukee. Looking for a suspected child pornographer, police turned an innocent woman’s house upside down, terrified her and her family, and roughed up a 74-year-old man. Had they bothered to check, they’d have discovered the suspect moved out five weeks earlier. When they realized their mistake, they told the innocent people they’d just raided that they’re “just another one of” the actual suspect’s “victims.”

• A Muncie, Indiana drug task force is facing some “accounting problems” with the money it has seized from drug suspects. Sure is a nice workout facility, though.

• The city of Seattle just had to pay a $185,000 settlement to an artist who was beaten bloody by several of the city’s police officers. The man’ s “crime” was to ask questions after a police officer confronted his friend for littering. He was arrested, charged with resisting arrest, and after arriving at the police station, had his hand slammed into a wall while still handcuffed. The criminal charges against the man were dropped when the city refused to turn over video of the arrest. A civilian review board investigation recommended the officers involved be disciplined. Not only did that not happen, the cop the police chief said was most responsible for the beating was…wait for it…promoted.

• Investigation finds Dallas cops lied on tickets, made false arrests, and belittled ticket recipients by writing made-up occupations on their citations. They might be disciplined, but won’t be criminally charged.

Wow. Just wow.

Yet another cop busted for arresting sober people to pad his DWI stats. It also appears he too was using pre-written arrest reports.

Here’s a charming little website where cops nominate one another for the “Dick of the Month” award.

Nominees are cops who dared breach police “professional courtesy,” and wrote a ticket to another cop whom he caught breaking the law.

Thanks to several Hit & Run regulars for the tip.