Portland cop was playing video games and posting and chat rooms while on the job. But get a load of what he was posting:

According to the Portland Tribune article in Friday’s newspaper, the deputy, using the screen name Trafalgar, said, “Seeing someone get Tasered is second only to pulling the trigger. That is money – puts a smile on your face.”

In another chat, the Tribune article claimed the deputy said, “I crushed a dude’s eye socket from repeatedly punching him in it and then I charged him with menacing and harassment (of me). He took a plea to get away from me. He shoulda picked somebody else to try and fight.”

This is unreal:

An undercover cop’s use of a stolen gift card was caught on a security camera and recorded in store receipts, and he admitted it in statements to investigators.

But after more than two full days of deliberation, an Oakland Circuit Court jury returned a not guilty verdict in the case of Richard Craze in Judge Colleen O’Brien’s courtroom. He had faced up to five years in prison if convicted.

The 12-year Madison Heights Police veteran was charged with larceny in a building in the theft of a $125 Home Depot gift card he picked up during a Pontiac drug raid in March. He was assigned to the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team (NET) task force at the time.

“We hoped the jury would weigh all of the evidence,” assistant Oakland County Prosecuting Attorney Paul Walton said outside the courtroom. “But you can never predict an outcome

“You might have one person who, for whatever reason, just has trouble with convicting a police officer with a crime, regardless of your evidence. Here we apparently had two.”

The quote from his attorney is great:

“The card didn’t have someone’s name on it or an amount on it,” said Rickel. “He wasn’t trying to deprive anyone of anything. He picked it up, and when he went to the store he used it. The jury agreed that intent to steal from the homeowner was never established.”

He will now sue to get his job back.

Singletary, you’ll remember, is the elderly man in Florida who, upon seeing drug dealers on his lawn, came out with a gun to scare them off.

Unfortunately, they weren’t drug dealers, but undercover cops posing as drug dealers. They shot Singletary dead. Even the police and town officials concede that Singletary was involved in no criminal activity, and was merely attempting to protect his property from what he thought were criminals.

I’ve explained in the past that I think Singletary’s death is drug war collateral damage. His death is the entirely predictable consequence of having crimes on the books that the police have to break in order to enforce, and of ratcheting up the stakes for those crimes by declaring a “war” on them.

It now looks like the cops who killed Singletary won’t face criminal charges. I’m a bit conflicted on this one. But if there are no criminal charges, there should at least be some disciplinary action, at least if that “new professionalism” Justice Scalia was telling us about means anything at all.

The disturbing parts of this case:

Annapolis police are now refusing to release an internal report about what went wrong in a botched raid on an innocent family. Police broke down the door, deployed a concussion grenade, and kicked a man in the groin before realizing they had the wrong house.

They’re now saying the public–for whom they work, remember–won’t get to see the report because the family is pursuing a lawsuit.

After initially telling the media that wrong door raids happen “almost never” in Annapolis, they’re now conceding at least 15 incidents in the last 30 years, or once every two years. The most they’ll say is that this particular botched raid was the result of “misinformation and miscommunication.”

I don’t care if the report might reveal details that will make it harder for the city to fight a lawsuit. If that’s the case, then the family deserves compensation. But more importantly, the people this department serves deserve to know what went wrong, and what the department is doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again in two years.

The hits keep on comin’.

An officer the Chicago Police Department tried to fire for punching an elderly man in the face after a fender-bender is now accused of doing nothing while fellow cops beat up bar patrons in January.

On Thursday, the four patrons filed a lawsuit in federal court saying they were beaten by at least five cops early Jan. 7 outside Carol’s Pub at Clark and Leland on the North Side.

The defendants include Detective John Sebeck, who was suspended for nine months in 2000 after the Police Board rejected then-Supt. Terry Hillard’s request to fire him for beating a 72-year-old man who rear-ended his car while Sebeck was off-duty.

The four men (none of whom had a prior record, three of whom have college degrees) were arrested, and charged with crimes that included felonies. Police claim they were fighting each other, then resisted when the police attempted to break them up. They plead to misdemeanor disorderly conduct. Believe whom you will.

TFA includes bonus gory cell phone photo goodness.

This is getting a little ridiculous.

Three days after her name appeared in a Chicago Sun Times report about police harassment of residents in her public housing facility, a narcotics team raided the home of 63-year-old grandmother Carol Wallace.

Carol Wallace, a 63-year-old grandmother, has no criminal record and said she has never had any run-ins with the police in her 10 years at the Dearborn Homes public housing complex. She accused the police of trying to silence her.

"They did this just to harass me," Wallace said. "My nerves are shot, and I’m afraid. I feel like I’ve been violated."

[...]

Wallace said about six of the officers dumped clothes from a dresser and closet on her bed and floor and rifled through her medications. Police also told a friend at the apartment that visitors weren’t allowed, she said.

It may have been another case of a wrong-door raid, rather than retaliation. The description of the suspect in the warrant seems to fit one of Wallace’s neighbors.

A whopping one out of every twenty cops (or 662 of 13,200) in Chicago has had at least ten official written complaints filed against them in the last five years. This information comes by way of a lawsuit against the police department. Naturally, Chicago PD has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the list from going public. Note, the list doesn’t point out which of the officers had more than ten complaints. Nor does it include officers who’ve had one or five or nine complaints over the same period. The city had to be forced by a court to finally release the list, and even then, it redacted the names of the officers.

You know, regular citizens accused of wrongdoing often get their names published in the newspaper. Why not police officers? And why in particular not police officers who’ve garnered ten complaints over five years?

This, remember, is the same department where this happened. And this. And this. And this.

I’m sympathetic to the “it’s just a few bad apples” line about bad cops (though the good apples have a troubling tendency to cover for the bad ones). But in Chicago at least, 662 is a heck of a lot more than a “few.”

Man tasered for riding a bicycle. And a cop with a history of disciplinary problems in a police department with a history of stealing cash from motorists during traffic stops…gets caught stealing cash from a motorist during a traffic stop.

A MADD gold-star winner gets caught cheating:

In one year, Brock arrested 58 people whose blood-alcohol content was below 0.08, the level at which state law presumes a driver is impaired, an internal affairs audit showed.

"I don't prescribe to the theory that somehow you have to be 0.08 to be drunk or impaired, " Brock, 38, told investigators.

A driver may be charged with DUI if the blood-alcohol level is between 0.05 and 0.08 percent, but there must be other evidence of impairment, such as a swerving vehicle.

In 43 of those 58 cases, motorists demonstrated no visible impairment behind the wheel, according to an internal affairs report made public Thursday. In 41 arrests, Brock also failed to make a case with urine samples, the report states.

Repeatedly, investigators found Brock reported failures in field sobriety tests when his patrol car video camera documented the opposite. He wrote, for instance, that a driver on Oct. 25, 2005, lost balance while turning. The video of the encounter showed that wasn't the case. The driver blew a 0.01 in the breath test but was arrested anyway.

He said drivers incorrectly recited the alphabet, used arms for balance and slurred speech - when the video showed correct alphabets, perfect balance and clear speech.

He's also not the sharpest tool in the shed:

He failed to activate his cruiser's audio and video equipment in 40 percent of his stops, instead relying on his "wrought memory" to recall important arrest details, the audit showed.

So what's MADD's reaction?

"We always felt he was a good officer, " said Becky Gage, 55, the victim advocate for Hillsborough's MADD chapter. "As long as officers are within the scope of the law, then we support their efforts to remove impaired drivers."

Not a hint of regret, eh? This is a little odd, too:

He told investigators that given the chance, he would conduct his DUI stops the same way.

Said Brock: "I mean, perfect world, we need more deputies and fewer people."

So what happens to all of those people who now have a record, paid thousands of dollars, sat through tedious alcoholism group sessions, and suffered the personal and professional repercussions of a false DUI arrest? And how many other cops are fudging the numbers due to incentive systems that reward cops who make lots of arrests?

Thanks to Mark Hemingway for the tip.

Remember Steven Blackman? He’s the man whose home Ft. Worth police raided last summer. His house was destroyed. They broke down his door, and fired four rounds of tear gas into the house. They also weirdly slashed the tires on his truck. Fortunately, he wasn’t home at the time, or he could well be dead. The cops had the wrong address, of course. They commenced the raid due to a mistaken, uncorroborated tip from an informant (but don’t worry, this almost never happens).

Well, the reviews and reports have been written. So what about all that professionalism, all those checks and balances, all that new police accountability Justice Scalia assured us was taking place all over the country in his opinion in the Hudson case?

One officer was suspended for five days. And last week, that suspension was reduced to one day.

Note also that the man police were actually looking for was wanted for possession of an illicit drug. Not distribution. They used tear gas bombs, a SWAT team, broke down the back door, and slashed the wrong guy’s tires trying to arrest someone for possession.

Keep that in mind too next time defenders of these tactics say they’re only used to go after the big-time dealers.

An off-duty cop got drunk, got into an argument with another off-duty cop about whether he was too drunk to drive, then shot the other man in the hip.

He was put on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation. After pleading guilty he received–wait for it–probation.

Eight city police officers in St. Louis were busted last year after using World Series tickets seized from scalpers for themselves and family and friends.

They’ll each get a two-week suspension. And their names won’t be released to the public.

[Police Chief] said what they did was “intolerable” but added that they are “not thieves” and “can be redeemed.”

Really? If taking and using tickets that don’t belong to you doesn’t make one a “thief,” what does?

Holy crap.

Note that until the incident hit the news, the schmuck had only been charged with misdemeanors. I’d also like to know more about the threats and intimidation the reporter vaguely alluded to.

Hey, this sounds like a great idea:

Four months into his job, a police officer in Mississippi holds a gun to the head of an unarmed teenager and puts him in a chokehold. A rookie officer in Illinois gets into a car chase that kills a driver. And a new campus policeman in Indiana shoots an unarmed student to death. Some are blaming these harrowing episodes on what an Associated Press survey found is a common practice across the country: At least 30 states let some newly hired local law enforcement officers hit the streets with a gun, a badge and little or no training.

These states allow a certain grace period _ six months or a year in most cases, two years in Mississippi and Wisconsin _ before rookies must be sent to a police academy. In many cases, these recruits are supposed to be supervised by a full-fledged officer, but that does not always happen.

Hat tip: Rogier.

Hypothetically, if I were to engage in some of that “new professionalism” we’re always hearing about…

Two on-duty police officers in New Hampshire break into the local fire department and vandalize it. No criminal charges.

Terrific editorial in the Star News, a newspaper in northeastern North Carolina.

New Hanover County Sheriff Sid Causey doesn’t plan to change a thing about the way his SWAT team is trained and operated.

That seemed to surprise editors at other North Carolina newspapers, which quickly put the Star-News story on their Web sites Monday morning. But it was no surprise to people who’ve watched the way this sheriff operates.

Causey and his staff never make mistakes. Not serious ones, anyway.

Four years ago, the sheriff said he would make no changes whatsoever when another of his deputies seriously injured a jail inmate, who died after he was not given appropriate medical care. That deputy was transferred to another job, but the official line was that the shift had nothing to do with Gary Rummer’s death.

[...]

Similarly, Causey says he will make no changes whatsoever after heavily armed deputies were sent at night to the home of an 18-year-old student suspected of assaulting and robbing another student of a video game. The deputies used a battering ram when the student didn’t open up, and one deputy shot him to death through the closed door. The shooter said he thought the sound of the battering ram was a shot.

In this case, Causey did act quickly. He fired the deputy who fired the shot. Apparently that’s all he intends to do.

The message is that the death of Peyton Strickland was entirely the fault of one deputy. The message is that no fault attaches to Causey or his top subordinates, who oversee the training, deployment and procedures of a team of deputies armed as if for war.

It’s nice to see at least one media outlet hold him accountable. Now, if only the voters would.