A Florida cop once named "Officer of the Year" was arrested by federal agents for distributing child **** -- and uploading the **** on the job, court documents show.

Port St. Lucie Officer Michael Harding was charged Wednesday with sending and receiving child **** after undercover Homeland Security investigators discovered his filth-ridden account on the app Kik messenger, authorities said.

The 27-year-old married father of three posted explicit material to the Kik chatroom #toddlerf**k while stationed in his police vehicle on patrol on the overnight shift beginning on July 23, according to an affidavit.

A Homeland Security Investigator stumbled onto posts Harding made under the name destheabovee showing young girls in sex acts with men, the affidavit said. The account was later linked to Harding's IP address and cell phone number, investigators said.

A search of Harding's home found hundreds of child **** photos and videos on a thumb drive, which had been hidden in a gun case in the bedroom, the affidavit said. Another thumb drive showed 23 sexually explicit pictures had been deleted, investigators said.

The thumb drives had images of boys and girls between about pre-school age and prepubescence, investigators said.

Harding was taken into custody Tuesday evening and appointed a public defender Wednesday after telling a judge he had $3,000 in his bank account, WPTV reported. A judge did not set bond because Harding is considered a danger to the community.

Harding was named Officer of the Year while working for the Fort Pierce Police Department in 2011. He quit Fort Pierce to work for Port St. Lucie in August 2012, the department said. He did not provide proper notice of his resignation, leaving him not in good standing with Fort Pierce.

Harding was placed on administrative leave without pay pending an investigation after his arrest, Port St. Lucie Police Chief John Bolduc told reporters Wednesday. When the department first learned of the investigation Tuesday morning, he was placed on paid leave.

A Fairview police officer has been charged with five felony counts of possession of child pornography and one felony count for violating the Computer Crimes Act for storing child pornography on a computer.

William Nathaniel “Nate” Meyer was placed on administrative leave Friday after Charles Gadd, Fairview's acting police chief, received allegations from a juvenile male that Meyer was communicating with the boy's girlfriend in a sexually explicit manner via text message, according to an affidavit.

Major County Attorney General Chris Boring filed the charges against Meyer on Wednesday.

According to the affidavit, a search warrant was served Monday for Meyer’s residence. At the time of the warrant, Meyer and his wife declined to be interviewed.

While searching the home, Dewey County Sheriff L. Clay Sander found more than 50 child sexual abuse images on a custom-built computer tower that contained seven individual hard drives, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit detailed five images and videos found on the computer, including a video of two prepubescent children touching each other while nude and engaging in intercourse.

After conducting the search, the Meyers were advised of their rights and were placed under arrest. At that time, according to the affidavit, Nate Meyer voluntarily stated he took responsibility and it was “all my fault.”

Bond was set at $50,000 for Nate Meyer. He bonded out shortly after, according to Major County Sheriff’s Department.

Gadd said as soon as his office became aware of the allegation, he immediately turned the investigation over to the District Attorney’s Office.

“We felt it was going to be better handled by an outside agency,” Gadd said. “I can say that there was an allegation of misconduct and it was turned over to the DA.”

Boring said no charges have been filed against Meyer's wife at this time. She has filed for a divorce, according to court documents. The two married in 2012.

Nate Meyer is a Cimarron High School graduate and was a member of Oklahoma National Guard's 45th Infantry Combat Brigade, according to his marriage announcement from 2012.

An arraignment hearing is set for 2:30 p.m. Friday in Major County.

The State Personnel Board on Tuesday upheld the firing of a prison shift commander who failed to report an incident in which a kneeling, handcuffed inmate was struck in the head several times by another officer.

The beating was captured on video.

The officer who struck the inmate, Sgt. Juanice Cole, was also fired.

Lt. Edmond Cooper, who had worked for the Department of Corrections for about 13 years, admitted he was wrong not to report the incident but claimed that termination was too harsh, his lawyer told the Personnel Board.

"We're not saying that Mr. Cooper shouldn't be punished," lawyer Adam Morel said.

Morel said suspension or demotion would have been more appropriate.

The incident happened Dec. 11, 2014, in the shift commander's office at Elmore Correctional Facility.

DOC spokesman Bob Horton said the department launched an investigation as soon as it learned of the situation and placed the officers on administrative leave.

Horton said Cole was fired for inappropriate use of force and other violations of DOC rules. Cooper was fired for failing to report what happened.

A third prison officer who saw the incident resigned to avoid dismissal, according to the DOC.

The DOC said the inmate was not injured. The DOC would not release his name for security reasons, Horton said.

The video shows Cole escorting an inmate, hands cuffed behind him, into the shift commander's office.

After the inmate kneels, Cole strikes him in the face or head three times.

Cooper, working at a desktop computer a few feet away, does not visibly react. There is no audio.

Cole walks briefly out of view, then returns and speaks to Cooper, still at his desk. She again approaches the inmate, who is lying on his side, and appears to hit him again.

Cooper rises from his desk and walks out of the office while another employee, who also watched the incident, coaxes the inmate back to his feet.

Cooper returns to his desk, and the video ends.

Bennett was shot Oct. 14, 2013, by then-Officer Cardan Spencer. Bennett’s mother had called police that day to help her deal with her son, who had a knife and was acting erratically. When Spencer and fellow Officer Christopher Watson got to Bennett’s home in Rylie, they found Bennett sitting in an office chair in a cul-de-sac.

The cops approached Bennett, who stood up but did not advance. They drew their guns and told him to drop the knife. After a pause, Spencer opened fire and hit Bennett, who collapsed.

At first, police charged Bennett with aggravated assault against a public servant. Watson, who did not fire his gun, said in an arrest warrant affidavit that Bennett had his “knife raised in an aggressive manner” and had stepped toward the officers.

The account was false. A neighbor’s surveillance video showed that Bennett stood still and never moved his feet forward.

Police had the video for several days, but kept Bennett in custody. After the neighbor’s surveillance video went public through the media, Chief David Brown announced the charges were dropped.

The video prompted Brown and a former Dallas police trainer to criticize Spencer’s tactics, particularly how he and Watson advanced on Bennett as soon as they got out of their squad car. Brown later fired Spencer and suspended Watson for 15 days. Spencer has been charged with aggravated assault by a public servant.

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But Bennett, 54, said he isn’t fully satisfied with the $1.6 million settlement that the Dallas City Council approved Tuesday.

“The whole message never got out,” Bennett said. “I was hoping we could send a message that this type of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated.”

Bennett said he will bank more than half of the settlement after significant bills, medical expenses and fees for Don Tittle, his lawyer. Tittle said the record settlement was too good to pass up.

After the shooting, the driver fled in the Escalade and officers from the West Covina Police Department pursued the SUV for nearly an hour before to a dirt field in Fontana, where it appparently became bogged down, according to investigators.

Video shows a man standing outside the SUV before a police K9 jumped on him and took him to the ground and officers handcuffed him. He incurred bite wounds in addition to the earlier shooting wound and was hospitalized.

A police officer who was charged with raping a woman while on duty was fired this week by the San Jose Police Department, authorities said.

The department Thursday confirmed 40-year-old Geoffrey Evatt Graves, who joined SJPD in 2008, was fired Wednesday. Officials offered no additional comment, citing personnel privacy laws.

Graves has been locked up in the Santa Clara County Main Jail since mid-March when a judge held him over for trial on charges he sexually assaulted a woman two years ago in a motel room after she requested to be taken there following a disturbance call at her house.

Graves also faces domestic violence charges in connection with his ex-girlfriend, a San Jose police dispatcher who testified in March that he blew up at her more than a dozen times, sometimes violently.

Graves' attorney Thursday described the termination as a rushed decision, noting that Graves is innocent until proven guilty. "I think it's premature to fire him,'' said Kristin Carter, the alternate public defender who represents Graves. "I'm feeling very confident about this case.''

It was not immediately clear if Graves would appeal his termination.

Santa Clara County prosecutor Carlos Vega declined to comment on the department's decision.

"We continue to be focused on the prosecution of the case,'' Vega said.

The police department's decision to dismiss Graves comes after Vega presented evidence that convinced Judge JoAnne

McCracken in March to declare him a flight risk and threat to public safety.

It was a death sentence.

David Stojcevski, a 32-year-old resident of Roseville, Michigan, was arrested for failing to pay a $772 fine stemming from careless driving. A court ordered him to spend a month in the Macomb County jail.

Over the next 17 days of his incarceration in a brightly lit cell—where he was denied clothing—he lost 50 pounds, suffered convulsions, and eventually began to hallucinate. He died in agony, from a combination of obvious, untreated drug withdrawal and galling neglect.

Making matters worse (if anything could be worse than that), the entirety of his demise was captured on jail surveillance footage. Indeed, Stojcevski was under self-harm watch—stemming for a profound misdiagnosis of his condition, which was drug addiction, not mental instability—and jail officials were supposed to be watching him constantly. Either their vigilance was inadequate, or they watched and simply didn’t care.

WDIV's report on the story is a must-see, though it’s highly disturbing: the video shows clips from the jail footage while a medical expert offers commentary on the inhumanity of Stojcevski’s treatment.

Stojcevski was a drug addict, and was taking Methadone, Xanax, and Klonopin to treat his addiction. But without access to these prescriptions, he quickly went into withdrawal while in jail, according to WDIV's expert. Withdrawal caused him to behave irrationally, but jail officials ignored these obvious symptoms and instead placed him in a cell for the mentally unstable. He was stripped naked—so that he couldn’t hurt himself—and forced to languish under the unceasing bright lights (the jail doesn’t turn them off, even at night).

At one point, Stojcevski began fighting with another (naked) inmate, who was then moved out of the cell. Sometime later, completely alone, Stojcevski could be seen reenacting the fight—a clear sign of hallucination.

On his last day of life, the man refused to touch his food and was too weak to get up from the floor.

At the first, obvious sign of drug withdrawal, Stojcevski should have been given adequate medical treatment. He was not a violent criminal, or a danger to the public. He was a man who hadn’t paid a traffic ticket.

Stojcevski’s family is suing Macomb County. A lawyer for the county told WDIV that the suit “lacks legal merit,” and expects the family to lose when the case goes to trial. Macomb County has no plans to settle, according to the lawyer.

Two NYPD officers were under investigation late Wednesday, after a warrant search in Westchester County that residents said felt like a home invasion.

As CBS2’s Lou Young reported, Geneva Smith of Mount Vernon said she heard rapping at her door last Tuesday morning.

“I heard a bang on the door,” Smith said. “It wasn’t a knock. It was a bang on the door.”

Smith said the men at her door Tuesday morning said they were NYPD officers with a search warrant. The problem is that she lives outside their jurisdiction in Westchester County.

Smith called her husband at work, opened the door a crack, and passed the phone through.

“I asked the officer for his full name and his shield number, and he refused to give it to me,” said Richard Smith. “He told me, he said, ‘All you need to know is that I’m a New York City police officer, and I’ve got an arrest warrant and a search warrant.”

Richard Smith said he called Mount Vernon police on another line as the men forced their way in, breaking the security chain on the door.

“They did knock me down after I wouldn’t open the door for them — after husband got off the phone with them and told them: ‘Mount Vernon police is on the way. Do not enter the house,’” Geneva Smith said.

But the men entered anyway, and never showed the warrant they said they had, she said.

By the time Mount Vernon police arrived, the men had searched the house and left. They did not find the person they were looking for.

Late Wednesday afternoon, local officials in Westchester County were demanding answers.

“I don’t care who, what the other police department it is,” said Mount Vernon City Council President Marcus Griffith. “They must confer – I’m demanding they confer with our police department before they invade our residents.”

“This is an incident we cannot tolerate and that we will not tolerate, and we will be talking to the Police Department of New York City,” said Mount Vernon Corporate Counsel Lauren Raysor.

This is now the second out-of-jurisdiction mishap for the NYPD in a matter of weeks. Last month, a Mount Vernon man died when an undercover city officer fired shots at a fleeing suspect in a gun buy gone bad.

It has taken a week for Mount Vernon to get any answers on the latest incident.
“If we were not people of color, corrective action would’ve already been taken,” Richard Smith said.

An NYPD spokesman confirmed that it was two Warrant Squad officers in Mount Vernon last week, and an internal investigation has been launched.

The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination would be breached if two insider trading suspects were forced to turn over the passcodes of their locked mobile phones to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

"We find, as the SEC is not seeking business records but Defendants' personal thought processes, Defendants may properly invoke their Fifth Amendment right," US District Judge Mark Kearney of Pennsylvania wrote.

The decision comes amid a growing global debate about encryption and whether the tech sector should build backdoors into their wares to grant the authorities access to locked devices. Ars reported today that an Obama administration working group "considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow government investigators to decipher encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals."

Without this capability, the authorities are trying to get suspects to cough up their passwords instead. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of the issue. There's been a smattering of varying court rulings nationwide on the topic. In 2012, a federal appeals court said that forcing a child-**** suspect to decrypt password-protected hard drives would amount to a Fifth Amendment violation.

In the latest case, the SEC is investigating two former Capital One data analysts who allegedly used insider information associated with their jobs to trade stocks—in this case, a $150,000 investment allegedly turned into $2.8 million. Regulators suspect the mobile devices are holding evidence of insider trading and demanded that the two turn over their passcodes.

The defendants balked at supplying their passcodes, saying the Fifth Amendment protected them. The judge agreed and said that the government was going on a fishing expedition:

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A man who was “whipping his hand around” as though it were a gun was shot and killed by Baltimore County Police, authorities said Thursday. The man, whose name has not yet been released, was shot three times by police after trying to use a fake prescription to buy cough syrup at a pharmacy, the Guardian reports.

A statement released by the Baltimore County Government reports that the incident was caught on video by a nearby surveillance camera:

The footage shows the suspect aggressively advancing on a single officer, who retreats with his gun drawn. The footage shows the suspect reaching around to the small of his back and abruptly whipping his hand around and pointing it toward the officer, as if with a weapon. The officer fires his weapon as the suspect swiftly brings his hand forward from his waistband. On the ground, the suspect refuses to comply and keeps reaching into his waistband, as if for a weapon.

Officers confirmed that no weapon was found at the scene. The officer involved has been placed on administrative leave while the Baltimore County State’s Attorney investigates.

The incident occurred in Reistertown, a suburb of Baltimore close to where riots broke out earlier this year after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died of a spinal injury in the city. Gray, who was arrested for carrying what police say was a switchblade, died of his injuries while in police custody.

PERTH AMBOY The city’s police chief, suspended without pay after being accused of stealing from taxpayers, has lost a bid to have his indictment dismissed.

Benjamin Ruiz was arrested in December after officials accused him of using public funds to buy parts for his motorcycle and using the municipal garage to repair his classic car and a car belonging to a friend.

Ruiz later was hit with further official misconduct and witness tampering charges after he allegedly tried to get a police sergeant to lie on his behalf.

Ruiz will face trial unless he reaches a plea deal with the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office.

New details into the witness-tampering allegation — as well as the claim by authorities that Ruiz tried to cover his tracks after he was caught by cutting a personal check for the motorcycle parts — are being reported for the first time by MyCentralJersey.com.

In a motion to dismiss the grand jury indictment from February, Ruiz’s attorney, Brian Neary, argued that there was no evidence of witness tampering.

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In October, a Los Angeles police officer was caught on video kicking and hitting a man as he lay face-down on a South L.A. sidewalk.

Officer Richard Garcia's actions immediately drew concerns from police officials — one called the footage "horrific" — and prompted prosecutors to take the rare step of charging the officer with assault.

But a report made public Tuesday shows LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has also faulted the actions of other officers involved in Clinton Alford's arrest, including a second officer who the chief said used unreasonable force when he kicked Alford and stood on his feet.

The civilian commission that oversees the LAPD sided with Beck on Tuesday and found that Garcia and the second officer violated the department's force policies during the Oct. 16 arrest. Beck said he had viewed the video of the incident and concluded "that the force used was not reasonable, given Alford's limited and unapparent resistance," according to the report.

The names of the four officers who arrested Alford were redacted from the document, which was made public as a result of a request by The Times. Garcia, 35, was publicly identified in April when the district attorney's office charged him with assault under the color of authority. He has pleaded not guilty.

An LAPD spokesman declined to comment on the Police Commission's decision, saying it may trigger disciplinary proceedings that are kept private under state law.


Caree Harper, Alford's attorney, said actions should have been taken against the officers sooner, given what was seen on the video. She said her client wants the officers fired.

"What takes the chief almost a year to come up with a conclusion that could have been made instantaneously is beyond me," she said.

Robert Rico, who is representing Garcia in his criminal case, said he wasn't surprised by the Police Commission's ruling. He said he believed the board lost its credibility this year after its controversial decision to fault a police officer who fatally shot Ezell Ford, a mentally ill black man, during a struggle over the officer's gun.

"I do not give that Police Commission any credence," Rico said. "In order for them to have come to that decision, they had to have ignored all the facts and all the other officer statements that said Mr. Alford was continuing to resist."

Beck's report outlines a narrative from the officers, who said Alford resisted their efforts to detain him and struggled even after he was handcuffed. Sources who saw the video have told The Times that Alford was not resisting the officers.

One source said Tuesday that the officers' comments were being further investigated as a result of the discrepancy. The recording, which was captured by a security camera on a nearby building, has not been made public.

It is now up to Beck to decide whether to discipline the officers, who could receive more training, face suspensions or lose their jobs. None have returned to work since the arrest, an LAPD spokesman said Tuesday.

Alford, now 23, previously told The Times that he was riding his bicycle along Avalon Boulevard near 55th Street when a car pulled up and a man yelled at him to stop — but did not identify himself as a police officer. Someone grabbed the back of the bike, Alford said, so he jumped off and ran.

Beck said in his report that the officers approached Alford at the request of a detective who was looking for potential robbery suspects in the neighborhoods covered by LAPD's Newton Division. The report said Alford matched the description of the suspect but did not include that description.

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A Kansas law criminalizing the refusal by motorists to submit to testing for alcohol or drugs is unconstitutional, Shawnee County District Judge Bill Ossmann ruled Wednesday.

Ossmann concluded the constitutional rights of former Topeka City Councilman Andrew Gray were consequently violated last year when he was arrested in connection with breaking that law.

Ossmann issued a memorandum decision dismissing a charge alleging Gray refused to submit to a test for alcohol or drugs as required by Kansas statute 8-1025.

KSA 8-1025 violates the defendant’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, Ossmann wrote, adding that the Doctrine of Unconstitutional Conditions also provides another basis upon which to find that law unconstitutional. That doctrine prohibits a government from imposing a condition on the granting of a benefit requiring the waiver of a constitutional right.

Ossmann indicated that in granting the request for dismissal filed by Gray’s attorney, Kevin Shepherd, he adopted reasoning put forth last year by Shawnee County District Judge Marc Braun.

Braun issued a 24-page ruling May 27, 2014, dismissing a charge that motorist Derick A. Wilson violated KSA 8-1025 when he refused to submit to a breath test. Braun concluded that Kansas law, which was enacted in 2012 and criminalized the refusal to submit to testing, was unconstitutional.