This is a good article but this isn't about neoliberal, this is about a police department that plays politics to keep its budget.
What Everybody Is Missing About The Police
Chief Who Favors Illegal Aliens Over Americans
Marina Medvin
|
A leftist police Chief for one of DC’s
wealthiest suburbs, Fairfax County, Virginia, announced in a press release that
an illegal immigrant was initially investigated by one of his officers for
causing a traffic collision, and after the officer was notified that the
individual was wanted by ICE, the Fairfax officer surrendered him to ICE
custody instead of setting him free. The Chief declared that this officer
violated his internal police directive that orders Fairfax County officers to
set illegal immigrants free, even if the officers are put on notice that these
individuals are wanted by ICE and even if they can lawfully detain the
individuals under Virginia law. The neoliberal Chief ordered an internal
investigation and accused his officer of misconduct, stating that this officer
“deprived a person of their freedom, which is unacceptable.”
Conservatives became outraged at a Chief
punishing his officer for following Virginia law. “Based on the information
currently known, this officer did NOT violate any law. He simply violated the
liberal Chief’s sanctuary city policy and was punished for not following the
Chief’s political agenda. This Chief destroyed a young officer’s career in
order to pursue his selfish liberal ideations,” I advised Townhall for their
report on this issue. Always on the wrong end of immigration issues, Liberals
were unsurprisingly elated to applaud a Sanctuary City Utopia that does not
enforce the law with respect to illegals.
What most media commentary has missed is
the striking problem that the neoliberal Chief presented for Americans: he
suspended an officer for briefly depriving an illegal of his freedom by
detaining him until ICE arrived, but yet has never announced suspending or
investigating an officer who has deprived an American of his or her freedom
during an illegal detention or arrest. And, as a practicing Fairfax County
attorney, I can personally vouch for the fact that unconstitutional
deprivations of freedom have certainly taken place in Fairfax County, and these
violations were remedied by the Court, but not by the police department.
“When was the last time that Fairfax County
disciplined an officer for violating the rights of an American? Every time a
lawyer wins a Motion to Suppress, it means that a defendant’s rights were
violated. Yet, the responsible officers do not get publicly disciplined, if at
all,” I advised the senior editor of Townhall for his article on this issue.
This is a very important point to digest.
When an accused prevails on a Motion to Suppress, it indicates that his Fourth
Amendment rights have been violated by the arresting or detaining officer. But
does this neoliberal Chief care about his officers violating constitutional
rights, true freedom violations? That question can only be answered by asking
another question: has this Chief ever suspended and investigated an officer for
violating the constitutional rights of an American? Does this Chief even have a
directive on how to re-educate a police officer on constitutional rights when
an officer’s arrest or detention was deemed unlawful in court? According to
trusted sources, the answer is no, to both of these questions.
Moreover, the deprivation of freedom under
the Constitution is a violation of freedom that has been recognized by American
courts for centuries, the issue that defines our criminal justice system. The
deprivation of “freedom” that the neoliberal Chief found unacceptable, however,
is a freedom that this Chief personally bestowed upon a group of people that he
personally and politically favors, a made-up anti-law-enforcement sanctuary
city “freedom.”
By not redressing the constitutional
violations of American defendants and only enforcing the politically-motivated
“rights” of illegal immigrants, this Chief, undeniably, creates favoritism in
his department for illegal immigrants over Americans. This is discriminatory,
disgraceful, and wrong.
Fairfax County Police Body Camera Program To Begin In Phases
NOBODY trusts these hoods .If
you’re a young person considering working with the Fairfax County Police
Department, stop and think about that. EVEN THEIR EMPLOYER DOESN’T TRUST THEM.
Do you really want to spend twenty years of your life around people like this?
You can do better.
The Fairfax County Board of
Supervisors approved a body camera program for police officers.
By Emily Leayman, Patch Staff
MOUNT VERNON, VA — The Fairfax
County Board of Supervisors approved a permanent body camera program for police
officers on Tuesday. The program is set to begin in May 2020 and will be
implemented in phases over three years.
The approval follows a 2018 pilot
program involving the Reston, Mason and Mount Vernon police district stations.
These will be the first three stations implementing the permanent program. All
district stations and other key operational staff will receive body cameras.
According to the implementation
plan, 416 body cameras will be issued in fiscal year 2020, followed by 338 in
2021 and 456 in 2022. Positions will be added to the Fairfax County Police
Department, Office of the Commonwealth's Attorney and Department of Information
Technology.
Once the program is fully phased
in, it will give officers 1,210 body cameras and require $6.65 million in
baseline funding. One-time funding was included in the fiscal year 2020 budget,
and baseline funding will come in the 2021 budget and future years as needed.
The $4.3 million in funding for this year was available from the Reserve for
Ad-Hoc Police Practices Review Commission.
Fairfax County Police
Feedback on body cameras came
from an American University research team's survey during the pilot program,
which ran from March 3, 2018 to Sept. 1, 2018. The researchers surveyed 603
residents who had an interaction with an officer during the pilot program as
well as two squads of officers before and after the program. Results saw
overwhelming support for body cameras from residents. Opinions among officers
were mixed; one squad's perception of body cameras became more negative after
the program, while the other's became slightly more positive.
A loon is a loon is loon
There was an article, produced by NBC News entitled “How this
police department is fighting for its officers’ mental health after suicides” which
focused on the Fairfax County Police department and police suicides in general.
That’s peachy
keen but the article completely failed to mention other research that showed
that police isn’t so much the cause of suicide as is the fact that our society
doesn’t vet the people we hire to do police work. In other words, these guys are
disturbed human being and would consider suicide if they were cops or plumbers
or lawyers.
Don’t think its
true?
Spend some time
with a Fairfax County Cop and then let me know what you think.
You're damn right they should be on camera
McLean group supports countywide police-body-cam effort
by BRIAN TROMPETER, Sun Gazette Newspapers
Fairfax County officials should move ahead with implementing a
body-worn-camera program for the county’s police force, according to a
resolution passed Sept. 4 by the McLean Citizens Association’s board of
directors.
“Body-worn cameras are a
win for all of us, members of our community, the police and the
criminal-justice system,” said MCA president Dale Stein. “What they record can be reliable evidence
for investigations and prosecutions, a deterrent against unjustified
complaints, and pluses for transparency
and accountability.”
As of last year, more than 80 percent of large U.S. police
forces were using such cameras or planning to do so, the resolution noted.
If implemented countywide, the Fairfax County Police
Department’s camera program would cost an estimated $30 million over five
years.
County police conducted a pilot program at the department’s
Mason, Mount Vernon and Reston district stations between March and August 2018,
with half of the officers at each station being assigned cameras and half not.
A report on the pilot program, released in July this year, found
county residents overwhelmingly supported widespread adoption of the camera
program. Police agreed the program would improve evidence-gathering efforts,
increase departmental transparency and help settle complaints against officers.
MCA’s resolution asks the county to begin implementing the
body-worn-camera program as soon as possible this fiscal year. MCA board
members noted they would not have supported the program if it would have
competed budgetarily with officers’ salaries.
Why is this not a surprise?
Fairfax County Juvenile Detention
Officer Accused of Sexually Assaulting Minor: Police
A
juvenile detention officer in Fairfax County, Virginia, was charged with raping
and having sexual contact with a minor, authorities say.
Clifton
Townsend Jr., 60, was arrested Monday on four felony sex offenses, the Loudoun
County Sheriff's Office said.
The
victim was not someone Townsend knew through his job as a detention officer,
the sheriff's office said.
Investigators
were told about the alleged crimes on Saturday.
Townsend,
of Leesburg, was charged with rape, carnal knowledge of a child and two counts
of sodomy.
He is
being held at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center on no bond.
And another one bites the dust
Daniel Pantaleo—the police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, who was killed five years ago on Staten Island during an interaction with police—was fired from the New York City Police Department by Commissioner James O’Neill on Monday.
A magistrate said police could force a man to unlock his phone. Is that legal?
It isn’t completely a question of
the legality it is a question of the integrity of the Fairfax County Police who
record is appalling. In the past decade, the department has murdered unarmed
citizens and lied about and ruined the lives of several innocent people they
have investigated.
Bear in mind, a magistrate is not
necessarily an attorney at law and the cop knew that when she asked permission
to break into the man’s phone.
Think she did the right thing?
Well then, how about if I SUSPECT you of a crime and break into your locked
home to prove it?
A magistrate said police could
force a man to unlock his phone. Is that legal?
By Justin Jouvenal
When Fairfax County police
arrested a man last month in connection with the brutal sexual assault in May
of a 15-year-old with developmental delays, they seized a piece of evidence
that might hold crucial evidence of the crime: his iPhone.
The phone’s GPS might have placed
Kevin Caldwell at the scene, contained texts between him and his alleged
accomplice or even video of an incident, but authorities quickly realized they
could not access any of it.
The phone required Caldwell’s
fingerprint to unlock it.
A detective resorted to a novel
and controversial approach: She went to a magistrate and got an order to have
Caldwell provide his fingerprints to gain access, but police said they
ultimately decided not to follow through with the thumbprint.
In an age of increasing
encryption, law enforcement officials say compelling a person to cooperate is
sometimes the only way to retrieve make-or-break evidence. They have asked
magistrates and judges to order suspects to give up their fingerprints to
unlock phones, as well as face scans and passwords.
The trend has touched off heated
legal battles in some state and federal courts over the constitutionality of
such searches, resulting in a welter of legal opinions. Defendants often argue
that such searches violate their Fifth Amendment rights against
self-incrimination.
“These are newer technologies for
securing devices, but they’ve been around for several years now,” said Andrew
Crocker, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“You’ve started to see police trying to force people to unlock their phones
with their fingerprints or faces and courts having to deal with that.”
Fairfax police said the incident
involving the teenage girl occurred May 16. The girl told detectives that she
went to a family event at the Mount Vernon Country Club, where she got into a
disagreement with her brother, according to a search warrant filed in Fairfax
County.
The teen went out to get some air
and ended up walking into the Wingstop restaurant on Cooper Road, according to
the search warrant, where she asked Caldwell for a ride, saying she was lost.
He declined, the search warrant states.
Caldwell and a second man, Andrew
Collins, who was an employee at the restaurant, followed the teen into the
bathroom and blocked the door, she told detectives, according to allegations in
the warrant. The girl was taken to another location she described as “sticky,”
where both men allegedly assaulted her, according to the search warrant.
After an investigation, Caldwell,
21, and Collins, 22, were arrested in July. Caldwell was charged with forcible
sodomy, and Collins was charged with animate object penetration. Neither has a
fixed address, and they have yet to enter pleas. Caldwell’s attorney declined
to comment, and it could not be determined whether Collins had an attorney.
Fairfax police Detective Alyson
Russo applied for a search warrant for Caldwell’s fingerprints to unlock the
phone in late July, citing a 2014 Virginia Beach Circuit Court ruling that
touches on many of the crucial legal arguments surrounding such searches.
In that case, police wanted the
state to force a man charged with assault to give up his passcode or a
fingerprint to unlock a phone they suspected contained video evidence of the
assault. The defendant objected, saying it would violate his Fifth Amendment
protections against providing incriminating testimony against himself.
Crocker said the courts generally
have held that the Fifth Amendment bars law enforcement from forcing people to
provide testimony that would reveal the contents of their minds.
The judge ruled that the state
could compel the man to produce a fingerprint but not a passcode.
“The fingerprint, like a key . . . does
not require the witness to divulge anything through his mental processes,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “Unlike the production of physical
characteristic evidence, such as a fingerprint, the production of a password
forces a ‘defendant’ to disclose the ‘contents of his own mind.’ ”
Other courts have decided
differently. Some have compelled defendants to reveal passcodes, even jailing
people who have refused. Courts in California, Illinois and Idaho have found
that compelling the production of fingerprints is unconstitutional under the
Fifth Amendment, although most of those decisions have been reversed.
The Fairfax public defender’s
office, which is representing Caldwell, objected to the police’s quest for his
fingerprints. “It is a violation of the 5th Amendment to compel someone’s
fingerprint,” Dawn Butorac, a public defender, said in an email.
But Fairfax police Capt. Eli Cory
said the searches were lawful. He said that such searches are rare and that the
department did not maintain statistics on how often they happen. Because the
case is pending, he declined to say whether police ever gained access to
Caldwell’s phone through means other than the fingerprint.
“We face encryption all the time
in some shape or form,” Cory said. “It’s something we have to overcome in the
context of law.”
In major rulings in recent years,
the U.S. Supreme Court has strengthened privacy protections around police
searches of cellphones, citing the wealth of information they contain. Last
year, the high court ruled that police generally need to obtain a warrant to
get cellphone location data; and in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that
authorities must obtain a search warrant to look through the contents of a
cellphone.
Riana Pfefferkorn, associate
director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet
and Society, said the issue of compelling defendants to give up access to their
phones may be an issue the Supreme Court ultimately takes up, too.
“The constitutional
questions are still developing,” PfefferFor those of you who argue that ALL cops are not mentally challenged, read these two cases.....
Charges Dropped for 119 People
After Cop Caught on Video Planting Meth on Innocent Grandma
Jackson County, FL — Dozens of
innocent people who were rotting in jail have been freed and their charges
erased after the corrupt cop who put them there was caught on his own body
camera planting meth on an innocent mother. Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy
Zachary Wester has since been fired and a slew of lawsuits are now rolling in.
Wester’s fall from law
enforcement grace and the 119 people who were exonerated are due largely in
part to the diligence of a single person, assistant state attorney at the 14th
Judicial Circuit, Christina Pumphrey.
Pumphrey’s job as assistant state
attorney included reviewing evidence before moving forward with charges against
individuals. When she began reviewing cases, she found something very peculiar.
“This is an exaggeration, but it
felt like his (Wester’s) name was on half the cases,” Pumphrey told The
Appeal.“It was seriously disproportionate.”
When Pumphrey began watching the
body camera footage from Wester’s arrests, she found something even more
disturbing. Many times, Wester was seen conducting illegal searches. Also, his
written affidavits did not match what she watched in the videos. But that
wasn’t the most telling aspect of all these videos.
While it is no question that
folks will claim that drugs found on them or in their possession “aren’t
their’s” and “they don’t know how that got there,” nearly all of Wester’s cases
had this. The videos showed that people were utterly shocked when Wester
claimed to have found drugs in their vehicles. While a single person may have
been lying, when everyone reacts the exact same way, something is up.
Although she reviewed multiple
videos, Pumphrey never saw the actual act of Wester planting drugs or otherwise
hiding them. However, all that changed when Wester pulled over Teresa Odom in
February of 2018.
In that video, Wester pulls Odom
over, claiming her tail lights aren’t working. However, it would later be
revealed that her tail lights were, in fact, working fine and Wester had
targeted her to frame her.
In the video, Wester is extremely
nice to the woman, complimenting her, joking around, and making small talk. But
in the back of his mind, he knew the entire time that he was going to plant
meth on her and have her thrown in a cage—an insidious move indeed.
After threatening to have a K-9
come search her car, Wester tells Odom that she can avoid the K-9 if she just
lets him search her truck himself—a huge mistake.
An LAPD officer accidentally
filmed himself putting cocaine in a suspect’s wallet
It’s reportedly the first LAPD
body camera video that the media and public have seen.
By German Lopez
Police officers can’t seem to
stop filming themselves potentially planting evidence.
The latest incident comes from
Los Angeles, where an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
accidentally filmed himself placing cocaine in a suspect’s wallet, according to
a new report by CBS Los Angeles.
The body camera video shows
police picking up Ronald Shields, who was charged with felony hit-and-run,
having a gun in the trunk of his car, and cocaine possession in April. The
police report claimed cops had found the cocaine in Shields’s left pocket.
The footage tells a different
story. LAPD officer Gaxiola, as CBS Los Angeles identified him, picks up
Shields’s wallet from the street and shows it to another officer who then
points to Shields. Gaxiola then puts the wallet back down, picks up a small bag
of white powder from the street (which later tested positive for cocaine),
picks up the wallet, and puts the bag in the wallet.
The audio turns on, signaling
that the officer had manually activated his camera to record. Then, the officer
shows himself supposedly finding the wallet and the drugs inside of it, and
repeatedly telling other officers about it. “Just to let you know, sir, inside
his wallet, he has a little bag of narco,” Gaxiola said.
So what happened? The simple
explanation is that the officer apparently did not know that when he switches
on his body camera, it automatically records and saves the past 30 seconds,
although without audio.
Shields’s lawyer claims that the
officers outright planted the drugs to frame his client.
It’s possible, though, that the
cops tried to reenact the act of finding the cocaine for the cameras. But that
is still very deceptive — and when so clearly caught on video, it makes it hard
to trust the police officers with just about everything else they’re doing. It
makes a potentially credible case lose all credibility.
The LAPD is investigating the
incident. “The LAPD takes all allegations of misconduct seriously and, as in
all cases, will conduct a thorough investigation,” it said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time
something like this has happened. Previously, Baltimore police officers were
caught doing this — twice. That led the local prosecutor to drop dozens of
cases involving the officers.
According to CBS Los Angeles,
this is the first time that the media has seen LAPD body camera footage since
the force launched its program two years ago. It’s one hell of a debut.
A string of shootings in the area that left six injured were gang-related....you made that up
“The dust-up followed a contentious meeting in the Gum Springs
neighborhood on July 9, during which Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C.
Roessler Jr. said a string of shootings in the area that left six injured were
gang-related. Roessler declined to name the gang involved, citing a police
department policy of not giving gangs publicity. Police have said the men
involved in one shooting are black.
At the meeting, Annan and other African Americans sharply
questioned the idea that gangs were involved in the shootings, saying police
across the country had mislabeled violence in minority communities as related
to gangs. Annan also said racial profiling by police was a problem in the
county and criticized police for connecting the violence to a local recording
studio that caters to hip-hop artists. “We don’t need a surge of police,” Annan
said. “We need a surge of resources.”
Cops Can Kill Non-Threatening People As Long As They Say They Were Scared
The Supreme Court has now reversed the 9th Circuit court’s decision, and in its opinion on the case, the court argued that there should not be a debate over whether Hughes’ Fourth Amendment rights were violated, because Kisela should automatically be afforded “qualified immunity” as a police officer.“The Court need not, and does not, decide whether Kisela violated the Fourth Amendment when he used deadly force against Hughes. For even assuming a Fourth Amendment violation occurred—a proposition that is not at all evident—on these facts Kisela was at least entitled to qualified immunity. ‘Qualified immunity attaches when an official’s conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known … Because the focus is on whether the officer had fair notice that her conduct was unlawful, reasonableness is judged against the backdrop of the law at the time of the conduct.’”As SCOTUS Blog noted, even if the Supreme Court judges believed that Kisela was guilty of violating Hughes’ Fourth Amendment rights, “Kisela still could not be sued because any rights that he might have violated were not clearly established—a key factor in whether government officials enjoy immunity from lawsuits.”Even though Chadwick testified that she did not feel threatened by Hughes or the knife in her hand at the time of the shooting, the Supreme Court has chosen to side with the police officer who chose to open fire within seconds, before taking the time to accurately assess the situation.By supporting Kisela’s actions, the Supreme Court has essentially given all police officers a blank check, which says that if they see a person standing in the distance on her property, and she appears to be holding a weapon in her hand, the officer has the right to open fire and shoot her multiple times—as long as the officer maintains that he feared for his safety, even if he cannot prove that the person he targeted was threatening him.
This is why those low lifes need to have body cameras on them and required to be turned on with ANY interaction.
Ex-Deputy Arrested On 52 Counts
After Allegedly Planting Meth On Innocent People
Former Jackson
County Sheriff's Deputy Zachary Wester faces up to 30 years in prison if
convicted.
Crawfordville,
FL – A former Jackson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) deputy has been arrested
on multiple counts for allegedly planting methamphetamine on random, innocent
motorists while he was working as a law enforcement officer.
The
Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) began investigating 26-year-old
Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Zachary Wester in August of 2018 at the request
of his department, the DFLE said in a press release.
The
JCSO requested the probe after a prosecutor noticed that the deputy’s reports
were often inconsistent with what appeared on his bodycam – if he turned the
recording device on at all, according to The Washington Post.
If
his bodycam was activated, it was generally only turned on after he “found”
methamphetamine inside of a suspect’s vehicle.
Wester,
who comes from a prominent law enforcement family, began working as a deputy in
May of 2016, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Over
the course of the next two years, the rookie deputy “routinely pulled over
citizens for alleged minor traffic infractions, planted drugs inside their
vehicles and arrested them on fabricated drug charges,” the FDLE said.
“Wester
circumvented JCSO’s body camera policy and tailored his recordings to conceal
his criminal activity,” investigators noted.
He
generally told the unsuspecting vehicle occupants that he smelled marijuana,
which then led to a search of the vehicle, The Washington Post reported.
But
instead of “finding” marijuana, he would come out of the vehicles with meth.
“A
patrol officer just does not get lucky time and time again under the same
circumstances without engaging in a pattern and practice of violating persons’
constitutional rights and/or framing people,” one federal lawsuit filed against
the now-former deputy declared, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Some
of the people Wester targeted were guilty of other offenses, such as
outstanding warrants or traffic infractions, but many had done nothing wrong,
The Washington Post reported.
One
man was sentenced to a year in a residential rehabilitation center due to the
deputy planting drugs in his car, and another man lost custody of his daughter.
“He’s
ruined lives,” a family member of one of the people Wester arrested told
the Tallahassee Democrat.
“People are losing their lives, their freedom, their children, their marriages —
all because of this one man. It’s not just innocent men. It’s innocent children.
It goes a lot deeper than everyone realizes.”
At
least 119 criminal cases that Wester either initiated or was heavily tied to
have been dropped since the probe began, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Sentences
for at least eight inmates were vacated, resulting in at least five of the
inmates being immediately released from prison, WFAA reported.
Over
a dozen people have filed notices of their intent to file lawsuits against the
JCSO for their various arrests, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
“There
is no question that Wester’s crimes were deliberate and that his actions put
innocent people in jail,” said FDLE Pensacola Assistant Special Agent in Charge
Chris Williams said in the FDLE press release.
Wester
was fired by the JCSO on Sep. 10, 2018, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
On
July 10, he was arrested on 52 counts of false imprisonment, racketeering,
fabricating evidence, official misconduct, possession of controlled substances,
possession of drug paraphernalia, and perjury, according to The Washington
Post.
Wester
is being held without bond at the Wakulla County Jail, the FDLE said.
“I
would like to thank the citizens of Jackson County for their patience during
the investigation and my staff for continuing to serve our citizens during this
difficult time,” Jackson County Sheriff Lou Roberts said in the press release.
“I also appreciate FDLE and the State Attorney’s Office for their commitment to
this investigation.”
State
Attorney William “Bill” Eddins said that investigators have been unable to
determine why Wester carried out the crimes he’s been accused of, The
Washington Post reported.
“You’re
never certain of what lies in the heart of man,” Eddins said.
The
prosecutor noted that Wester faces up to 30 years in prison, and said he has no
intention of offering him a plea bargain.
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