Sigh…
Category: American Injustice System,
Surveillance video shows Chicago police dragging female student down stairs, using stun gun
In the new video, they can be seen pinning her to the ground, throwing several punches and eventually using a stun gun on her three times.
…[The student] was initially charged with two felony counts for aggravated battery against a peace officer. Those charges were later dropped by the State’s Attorney’s Office.
“The Board of Education and the Chicago Police Department continue to fail our children,” Howard’s lawyer, Andrew M. Stroth, said. “An unarmed, 16-year-old girl was beaten, kicked, punched and Tasered by Officers Johnnie Pierre and Sherry Tripp at Marshall High School.
The school hung on to this surveillance video for months. School oficials might as well have ordered the officers to assault and abuse the youth themselves.
Video shows CPD officers dragging, punching, using stun gun on Marshall HS student | abc7chicago.com
Video shows Chicago police officers dragging a 16-year-old Marshall High School student down a flight of stairs, punching her, and using a stun gun on her.
What the video shows does not [show is] the story the officers …told when the incident happened in January.
…Police said they were told to escort Howard out of the school after she was removed from class for having her phone out.
…As the person in the yellow shirt walks away, video shows one of the officers immediately grab Howard and throw her to the ground.
…Video from another angle shows the officers dragging Howard down the stairs, and at the bottom one officer is holding her arm while the other is holding her leg.
“In the video you can see they pull her by the leg down the stairs, the whole flight of stairs.”
…One officer …kick[s] and punch[es] Howard as he’s holding her on the ground. Video shows her thrashing on the floor …before the officer ultimately deploys his stun gun.
Video shows CPD officers dragging, punching, using stun gun on Marshall HS student | abc7chicago.com
the fact that the officers involved still have their badges shows the contempt the Chicago Police Department has for the citizens they are charged to protect. If the police and court were at all interested in law and order or justice the officers would be in jail.
This thuggish abuse of power and unrepentant bullying and violence is what people are inviting into the lives of children and young people when police officers are in schools.
State Police troopers had quota system for tickets, officials allege
Federal prosecutors say troopers from a troubled State Police unit had a quota system for issuing tickets to motorists, a practice that state courts have deemed unconstitutional and agency officials have repeatedly denied exists.
Members of the now-disbanded Troop E were expected to issue at least eight citations during their shifts under a specialized overtime program, which dozens of troopers allegedly abused to collect fraudulent overtime, according to prosecutors.
…“Repeated failures to meet this quota often resulted in a trooper being blocked from receiving such overtime opportunities.”
…Criminal justice and legal experts told the Globe that quotas are unconstitutional in Massachusetts, citing a landmark 2005 state appellate court decision regarding Newton police.
“The Appeals Court was very, very clear that nobody should be making the decision to issue a ticket but the cop out there on a case-by-case basis,” said Boston-based attorney Peter Elikann. “Any kind of quota would interfere with the police officer’s judgment.”
Officials at the US Attorney’s and Massachusetts Attorney General’s offices declined to comment. Each cited their ongoing probes into overtime abuse.
State Police officials have repeatedly denied that any quota system exists.
…Those troopers — roughly one-third of Troop E’s members — are accused of bilking taxpayers out of tens of thousands of dollars in 2016 alone, submitting bogus traffic citations, filing for no-show shifts, and taking steps to hide their allegedly illegal activity.
State Police troopers had quota system for tickets, officials allege – The Boston Globe
“In his 32 years in policing, Kyes said he has never come across a department with [a ticket quota].” <—– Ahem, Cough. Liar. Bold-faced lies like this is why officers of the law have zero credibility. Someone who point out to this gentleman that outside of the court system a lie told by an officer in uniform is not magically converted into and treated as truth.
Maine GOP rep. says access to menstrual products would make jails like ‘country clubs’
During debate, Pickett, who currently serves as Dixfield Police Chief and who voted against the bill, argued that detainees already had access to menstrual products such as pads and tampons.
“Quite frankly, and I don’t mean this in any disrespect, the jail system and the correctional system was never meant to be a country club,” he said, according to Bangor Daily News reporter Alex Acquisto.
Maine GOP rep. says access to menstrual products would make jails like ‘country clubs’ | Beacon
Jeezus…
Philly’s SEPTA quietly decriminalizes jumping turnstiles, lowers fines
Tacked onto the [$300] fine Josh received were court costs that typically run around $150.
…“People generally who are jumping turnstiles are doing so because they don’t have the fare to get to their destination, period,” said Hancock.
…“That does not include the opportunity cost for that individual — who has to come to court one, two, three, maybe four times depending on how long the case goes — to take off from their job or take care of child care or elder care,” Hancock said.
…People who attempt to beat their fare and get caught today receive a $25 ticket, down from $300, and do not face criminal charges. Repeat offenders are granted four strikes before they are banned from SEPTA’s trains, buses and trolleys. Violating that ban constitutes a misdemeanor under the policy put into effect on Jan. 14, but the city district attorney’s office has agreed to consider these cases for diversion, offering social services in lieu of jail time.
…Policing small quality-of-life crimes harshly to prevent more serious crime down the road is known as broken-windows policing. Increasingly, though, criminologists have discredited the strategy for having a disparate impact on low-income people of color while failing to reduce crime rates.
…“It’s a smart approach that will hold people accountable for bad behavior while freeing up other resources in the criminal justice system for more series crimes,” said Ben Waxman, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office.
SEPTA quietly decriminalizes jumping turnstiles, lowers fines | News | phillytrib.com
hmmm
Police release body-cam video of Willie McCoy killing, showing him asleep in car
Vallejo police have released footage of the killing of Willie McCoy at a Taco Bell, showing six officers shooting the 20-year-old who was sleeping in his car.
…The officers did not try to wake McCoy up or talk to him after they spotted a gun in his lap, and instead pointed their firearms at his head directly outside the car as he slept for several minutes.
…The officers then realized the firearm did not have a magazine in it, noting to each other that if it was loaded, it would have a single bullet in it: “He’s only got one shot if he shoots.”
…The young rapper had moved his hand to scratch his shoulder before [all six] officers opened fire.
…Police hit Willie with an estimated 25 shots, including in his face, throat, chest, ear and arms.
…After the officers stopped shooting, they all kept their guns pointed at the car, shouting: “Let me see your hands! Put your hands up!” One said: “Officers are OK.”
…Marc McCoy, Willie’s older brother, told the Guardian on Friday that he was glad the public would finally see the video, but was not confident it would lead to justice.
…His family has said police should have treated this like a medical emergency.
…“They were never trying to be peaceful or de-escalate the situation. It’s about being rough and tough,” said Marc, adding that the police’s plan seemed to be “‘If he moves, I’m gonna kill him’”.
…“We all have to come together in some way and put pressure on the politicians to hold police accountable,” added Marc. “It’s crazy that police still have these jobs. It’s crazy that as a country we are not outraged by this conduct.”
WTF?!
DA Larry Krasner pitched judges on ending Philly’s probation addiction. Will they go for it?
…More than 40,000 people, or one out of 22 adults, are monitored by the county probation and parole department. That supervision can last for years or decades because state laws allow for some of the longest probation terms in the nation.
…Under his proposal, interested judges might set out criteria for terminations that could be conducted en masse without hearings. For example, some judges might allow terminations for those with three years on probation or parole without a violation; others might approve termination after two years for good candidates convicted of nonviolent offenses only.
…In Krasner’s letter, he emphasized each judge’s discretion in any early termination decision: “We respect your independence — as should be clear from our demonstrated commitment after 15 months not to abuse the judiciary via the press and via other means, as was done at times in some prior [District Attorney’s Office] administrations.”
…“In a functional system, the chief prosecutor does — and should — reach out to judges to discuss whether and how existing court processes and procedures might be altered, and why such changes might be a good idea,” she said. “That sort of reaching out to the bench is normally not considered a violation of the rule against ex partecommunications, especially where the other main institutional player, the chief defender, is included in the conversation.”
…The First Judicial District declined to respond to questions about the proposal; instead, a spokesperson provided a statement:
“Court leadership remains committed to working with our partners to effectuate criminal justice reform. And our individual judges will continue to make their decisions objectively in a thoughtful, judicially responsible manner, consistent with the rules and procedures to which the judiciary are bound.”
DA Larry Krasner pitched judges on ending Philly’s probation addiction. Will they go for it?
hmmm
America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral
Margaret Hennessey’s experience was far from unusual. She had been detained under a program she likely had never heard of: the “American Plan.” From the 1910s through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of American women were detained and forcibly examined for STIs.
…If the women tested positive, U.S. officials locked them away in penal institutions with no due process. While many records of the program have since been lost or destroyed, women’s forced internment could range from a few days to many months. Inside these institutions, records show, the women were often injected with mercury and forced to ingest arsenic-based drugs, the most common treatments for syphilis in the early part of the century. If they misbehaved, or if they failed to show “proper” ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement—or even sterilized.
…Beginning in 1918, federal officials began pushing every state in the nation to pass a “model law,” which enabled officials to forcibly examine any person “reasonably suspected” of having an STI. Under this statute, those who tested positive for an STI could be held in detention for as long as it took to render him or her noninfectious. (On paper, the law was gender-neutral; in practice, it almost exclusively focused on regulating women and their bodies.)
…Records exist in archives that document women being detained and examined for sitting at a restaurant alone; for changing jobs; for being with a man; for walking down a street in a way a male official found suspicious.
…Contemporaneous exposés reveal [, that] in the late 1940s, San Francisco police officers sometimes threatened to have women “vagged”—vaginally examined—if they didn’t accede to sexual demands. Women of color and immigrant women, in particular, were targeted—and subjected to a higher degree of abuse once they were locked up.
…“In other words,” the [Sacramento] Bee reported, “out of twenty-two suspects subjected to an examination [in the single day sweep in 1919,] the police were justified in arresting but one woman.”
…Enforcement of the American Plan ended by the 1970s, amid the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s lib movement and the sex-workers-rights movement.
America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral – HISTORY
Jeezus Krrrreyst
DOJ says Alabama prisons likely in violation of Constitution – al.com
U.S. Attorney Richard Moore of the Southern District of Alabama said in a statement the findings indicate a “flagrant disregard” for the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments.
…For years, Alabama prisons have housed far more inmates than they were built for and employed too few correctional officers. Alabama Department of Corrections officials said the crowding and understaffing contribute to rising violence in prisons.
A spike in inmate suicides is one of the issues that has surfaced in a federal lawsuit over health care for inmates. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in 2017 that mental health care for inmates was “horrendously inadequate.” The ADOC is under court orders to increase mental health staff and security staff.
…Over about the last five years, sentencing guidelines and criminal justice reforms enacted by the Legislature have reduced the prison population but it is still about 160 percent of the number prisons were built to hold.
…In 2014, the Justice Department found conditions at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women were unconstitutional because of a failure to protect inmates from sexual abuse and harassment by male staff.
…Today’s notification concerned two of three areas covered by the investigation, whether prisoners were protected from violence and sexual abuse by other inmates and whether conditions were safe. A third remains pending, the DOJ said — whether prisoners are adequately protected from excessive use of force by prison staff and sexual abuse by prison staff.
DOJ says Alabama prisons likely in violation of Constitution – al.com
hmmm
Supreme Court: Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor are feuding with Neil Gorsuch over the death penalty.
What can we glean from this war of words, which lays bare a great deal of sniping that usually stays behind the scenes? First, it’s obvious that the liberal justices remain incensed that the conservative majority barely bothered to justify its decision in Ray. (Its one-paragraph decision provided virtually no analysis.) Second, the conservatives believe the liberals misrepresented their actions in Ray, and now—nearly two months later—seek to set the record straight. By doubling down, though, Gorsuch only divulged the deeply flawed logic that led the conservative majority to do what it did in Ray. At the time, its single-paragraph order seemed callous. But perhaps its sophistic victim-blaming was better left unsaid.
hmmmm
Mom recants story about pulling gun to stop abduction at West Virginia mall
Mom recants story about pulling gun to stop abduction at West Virginia mall | WTVR.com
Racist bitch. Clearly she’s the one who should have been arrested.
…And the officer’s involved should be on desk duty while their not-at-all due diligence response to the call they received is investigated for malfeasance and ineptitude.
Darryl Bynes: Atlanta teen Omarian Banks fatally shot after knocking on the wrong door in Atlanta apartment complex
Omarian Banks, 19, was dropped off by a Lyft near the wrong breezeway in the complex, police said, according to WSB-TV. Banks and his girlfriend had just moved to the complex and Banks wasn’t familiar with the area, police said. Banks was using FaceTime to talk with his girlfriend when he knocked on the door he thought was his. Shortly after, he walked away.
…”I just hear faint voices and a gunshot, and then I hear him yell,” Mathis told WSB-TV. “And I heard all the fear in his voice and he was just, ‘I’m sorry! I’m at the wrong door!’ The man was like, ‘No, you’re not at the wrong door!’ And he shot two more times and then it was silent.”
If the shooter in this incident does not end up in jail for his violent and unproved murder the city of Atlanta cannot claim to be interested in law, order or justice.
As for the cousin of the shooter’s comments? No, unfair is being shot in cold blood because you knocked on the wrong door. Sit down and STFU.
New York Budget: Congestion Fee, Plastic Bag Ban, Mansion Tax
New York lawmakers approved a budget that allows for tolls on cars entering midtown Manhattan, increases sales taxes on multimillion-dollar city homes and ushers in a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags.
They also capped local property tax increases outside New York City at 2 percent a year, ordered sweeping changes to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and scrapped cash bail requirements that jails thousands a year before trial.
…Some issues the governor and legislature left undone. Lawmakers remain divided about marijuana legalization, which Cuomo failed to push through after raising expectations of $1 billion in tax revenue for mass transit. They also punted on public financing of political campaigns, instead creating a commission to make rules on how and to whom the government should disburse tax dollars to candidates, saying their findings would be binding unless lawmakers vote to reject them.
New York Budget: Congestion Fee, Plastic Bag Ban, Mansion Tax – Bloomberg
hmmm
ICE Spokesman Quits, Citing Trump Administration’s Use Of ‘Misleading Facts’ To Discuss California Arrests
James Schwab has resigned from his job as a Department of Homeland Security spokesman, saying he didn’t agree with Trump administration officials’ use of “misleading facts” to attack Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf after the mayor issued a warning about an immigration sweep in late February.
“I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts,” Schwab told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time and I quit.”
hmmm
Romanian immigrant who drove Trump family has been in ICE custody for eight months
Zoltan Tamas, a Romanian immigrant who came to the United States legally in 2011 and worked for Trump’s golf club in Jupiter, Florida, was arrested in June 2018 by ICE after the agency called him to their office “to discuss his ‘inadmissibility'” to the United States following a 2013 trip he took to Romania, according to the Times.
According to the paper, Tamas, a green-card holder, was arrested by the agency after a background check connected to his 2016 application for citizenship “revealed that he had been convicted in absentia of committing insurance fraud in Romania.”
…”Usually, these types of convictions aren’t given full faith in the United States. So that was essentially the argument I wanted — that should’ve been brought up and tackled there. You hardly see these kinds of cases, they’re very rare,” he said.
“I think this is probably something that ICE took a little too far. Tamas was here for many years. He was here legally, paying taxes — he has no criminal record in the United States,” Urizar added.
hmmm
Tyler Bariss, who made ‘swatting’ call that led to death, to spend 20 years in prison – CNN
“Today’s sentencing is only the first step in obtaining justice for the Finch family,” said family attorney Andrew Stroth. “The leadership of Wichita and the (police department) are also responsible for the tragic, unjustified and unconstitutional death of Andy Finch. The family will continue to pursue justice and accountability with the federal lawsuit pending against the city of Wichita and (the officers).”
….Authorities said one of them enlisted Barriss to “swat” the other co-defendant because of an argument that began while they were online playing a video game. Barriss was given an address — where the second co-defendant once lived but was then Finch’s residence.
He made 911 calls from Los Angeles by acquiring a local Wichita number through a cell phone app, authorities say.
Tyler Bariss, who made ‘swatting’ call that led to death, to spend 20 years in prison – CNN
hmmm
Arizona cops release bodycam footage of lead-up to storming home over child with high fever
Sarah Beck brought her 2-year-old son to Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine on Feb. 25 and was told he had a temperature of more than 105.
…Police were contacted after a doctor reported to the Department of Child Services that the child never made it to the hospital, as she had recommended.
When police arrived, Beck and her husband, Brooks Bryce, wouldn’t let them into the house because they said the fever had broken and the child was no longer in danger.
…”He’s doing fine. His fever broke, he’s under 100 degrees, and he’s doing just fine,” Bryce said.
When the officer told Bryce that officers need to see the boy for themselves, Bryce responds, “no you don’t.”
…Bryce once again refused over the phone to let officers into the home and said, “you’re not going to make me go to the hospital and spend three grand on an emergency room visit right now.”
…Almost three hours after the first knock on the door, officers forced their way in with guns out and ready to fire.
Arizona cops release bodycam footage of lead-up to storming home over child with high fever
Jeezus…
What a shit-show.
ACLU Files Challenge To “Riot Boosting” Act
SB 189 creates a mechanism to collect triple damages from any person convicted of riot boosting. SB 190 establishes a fund to reimburse state and local governments for their costs on pipeline projects, with each project paying a $1 million bond for every 10 miles, up to $20 million. “
The lawsuit asserts that the laws violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution by limiting protected speech and failing to adequately describe what speech or conduct could subject protesters and organizations to criminal and civil penalties.
“No one should have to fear the government coming after them for exercising their First Amendment rights,” Courtney Bowie, legal director of the ACLU of South Dakota, said in a news release. “That is exactly what the Constitution protects against, and why we’re taking these laws to court. Whatever one’s views on the pipeline, the laws threaten the First Amendment rights of South Dakotans on every side of the issue.”
ACLU Files Challenge To “Riot Boosting” Act
hmmmm
‘Abortion Reversal’ With Progesterone Is Being Tested In Study
Legislators in Arkansas, Idaho, South Dakota and Utah have made it a legal requirement in recent years that doctors who provide medical abortions must tell their patients that “reversal” is an option, although they are not prevented from also telling patients if they think the treatment doesn’t work.
Medical researchers such as Creinin and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecology are concerned by that trend.
“[This is] a law based on no science — absolutely zero science,” Creinin says.
…Already in 2019, legislators in several states — Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota and Nebraska — have been considering bills that would require abortion providers to tell their patients about abortion reversal. Back in 2017, Delgado testified in support of similar legislation in Colorado, although the proposal never made it into law.
Grossman says he’s furious that states are forcing abortion providers to give their patients inaccurate information related to abortion care.
What’s more, Grossman says, “these laws take an extra step … and essentially are encouraging patients to be a part of clinical research that isn’t really being appropriately monitored. … This is really an experimental treatment.”
‘Abortion Reversal’ With Progesterone Is Being Tested In Study : Shots – Health News : NPR
sigh…
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