Hot Springs County, AR - Body cameras used by law enforcement have the potential to protect officers from false claims and to protect citizens from abusive cops.

We are giving you a look at some body camera video recorded in January.

64 year-old Venetta Bullock was traveling back to Arkadelphia when she was stopped on Highway 7 in Hot Spring county.

Everything that happened from that point on was recorded by the deputy's body camera, and all involved believe that video supports their actions.

A Hot Spring County Sheriff's department review found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers and resulted in no action.

And there has been no civil suit filed.

But there were criminal charges.

Ms. Bullock...arm in a sling...appeared in a Malvern courtroom last week to face a litany of charges including DUI, battery, resisting arrest, refusal to test and failing to dim her headlights.

The deputy prosecutor, after viewing the video, elected to drop all but one of the charges against Ms. Bullock. And the remaining charge, resisting arrest, was reduced to disorderly conduct...a misdemeanor.

Both the officers involved and the prosecutors involved were asked to comment afterward.

All declined.

One question left unanswered: why wasn't a blood or urine sample taken? Those tests would have settled the debate regarding Ms. Bullard's level of alcohol consumption.

Without a warrant, or even an arrest, NYS Court Officers under The Office of Court Administration stole my iPhone, held it for 9 months and unlawfully searched / hacked it at their I.T. Department. This was done in retaliation for a complaint, video, and statements that I made against them just the day before this incident.

This was in retaliation for my filing a formal complaint on this incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWY4b...

The United States Supreme Court has held that you can not search a smartphone incident of an arrest, this was not even incident of an arrest. There was no arrest, nor were any charges ever filed in relationship to my use of my iPhone.

What you witnessed here is a CRIME, a real CRIME, not just some violation of some code.

Four Dickson County deputies, including a sergeant, allegedly entered a home with their guns drawn, but their body cameras were turned off.

The officers struggled with the suspect, Bradley Woodard, and one of their guns went off, but there is no video proof.

Channel 4 obtained an audio recording of Woodard’s preliminary hearing.

“They could have killed me, that kid, another officer,” Woodard said in the recording.

Police had a warrant for Woodard’s arrest. He was accused of aggravated assault, although that charge has now been dropped.

Woodard was at home, unarmed, with a friend’s 11-year-old child when police entered with guns drawn. One of those guns accidentally discharged.

Deputies eventually charged Woodard with resisting arrest.

“I didn’t have time to resist arrest,” Woodard said. “And if you had your body cameras on, it would have shown that I never did nothing. All I did was this, and I heard a gunshot and had four of them on top of me.”

According to Dickson County Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe, deputies are required to have their cameras turned on during all interactions with the public.

“The procedure was not followed,” Bledsoe said. “The cameras were not on. We did go back and review that there was disciplinary action as a result of it.”

The supervising sergeant was suspended one day for not having his body camera turned on. The officer who discharged his weapon because he had his finger on the trigger was also suspended for one day and ordered to undergo additional education.

The other two officers inside the home had a disciplinary write-up in their personal file.

Bledsoe said the officers had their guns drawn because Woodard has a lengthy criminal history and they had information leading them to believe he had a gun, but it turned out he did not.

In September, a Dickson County deputy shot and killed a man during a welfare check. Channel 4 learned that deputy also did not have his body camera turned on.

The sheriff said one of the officers who came to assist did have his camera on. That video was provided to the TBI and the incident remains under investigation.

18-year-old Gabbi Lemos was brutally assaulted by a police officer after celebrating her graduation from high school at her home. Hours after the party, Deputy Marcus Holton and six other officers with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department arrived uninvited at the home and began aggressively interrogating people who were outside.

Before approaching the house, Holton noticed that Gabbi’s sister Karli was sitting in a parked vehicle outside with her boyfriend and he began to question them. At one point during the interrogation, Holton opened Karli’s door and attempted to physically rip her out of the vehicle. Gabbi witnessed what was occurring outside of her home and shouted at the officer to leave her sister alone, and demanded that a female officer be called to the scene.

“It was scary seeing all his anger toward her in that moment. That’s when I decided to say something,” Gabbi said.

According to a recent lawsuit filed by the Lemos family, Gabbi “complained to the deputy that he had no right to pull her sister out of the vehicle and he needed to ask her first.”

Holten then violently pushed Gabbi, and while backing away she yelled, “You can’t touch me! We have rights!”

“I told him what he was doing wasn’t OK, that he couldn’t touch us,” Gabbi later told reporters.

Gabbi’s mother Michelle Lemos then came out and told her to go in the house. Next, according to the lawsuit, Holten “bolted around the family and without a word caught Gabbi from behind the neck in a chokehold, lifting her small body off the ground several feet before throwing her face-first onto the driveway.”

“Deputy Holton put his knee in the back of Gabbi’s head and began grinding her face into the gravel, despite her screams and her family’s pleas to stop,” the lawsuit said.

“All of a sudden, I felt an arm and my neck and that’s when he lifted me up off the ground and threw me face first onto the ground just, like right here,” Gabby said.

Gabbi is roughly 5 feet tall and 115 pounds and her family says that the officer towered over her and was much bigger.

“He was just angry from the get go, from the second he got out of the car,” Michelle Lemos, told reporters.

To make matters worse, after Gabbi was taken to the hospital she was arrested for battery on an officer and resisting arrest.

When asked by ABC News if she resisted, Gabbi said, “There was no way I could have. He was on top of me with my hands behind my back.”

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department said that the officer’s body camera shows that he “behaved with restraint and professionalism during a highly volatile situation.”

However, that same body camera footage ended up proving that Gabbi was not resisting, nor did she attack Holten in any way, so the charges against her were quickly dropped.


...


The day after the Lemos family filed their lawsuit, the District Attorney responded by filing new charges against Gabbi Lemos, for “obstructing, restricting or delaying a police officer.”

The family’s lawyer, Izaak Schwaiger said that this is an obvious move to discredit Gabbi so she is unable to file her lawsuit against the department.

“It’s ridiculous, unethical and totally expected. It’s another example of flying to the aid of the sheriff’s office when it’s in trouble. The D.A. has their back. If you are convicted of resisting arrest you can’t sue. It’s an unethical and vindictive process,” Schwaiger said.

...

Holten shot and killed a man in 2011 and was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing because he claimed that the victim was reaching for his waistband.

Police reports in the arrest of an on-duty state state trooper accused of a DWI crash at a Garden State Parkway rest stop describe Sgt. Michael Roadside as a severely drunk, slurring, vomit-covered mess who mishandled his weapon and threatened to pay the other involved driver $1,000 if she agreed not to call 911.

According to a New Jersey State Police Drinking Driving Report obtained by New Jersey 101.5 Tuesday evening through a public records request, when responding officer Sgt. M. J. Durak told Roadside he’d registered a .16 percent blood alcohol content level — twice the legal limit — he responded “I’ve been way more drunk than that.”

The report also says throughout the police response, he blamed his intoxication an anesthetic from a prostate surgery two weeks earlier — even though he had alcohol on his breath, and two open 16-ounce Coors Light containers in his troop car. But he eventually acknowledged having 9 beers at his house, according to a questionnaire Roadside filled out.

According to the report by Durak, when he responded to the crash on Oct. 16 at the Monmouth Rest Area, he found Roadside in his troop car and Kimberly Wilson in her Audi. Wilson had told police dispatchers she’d been in an accident with a trooper whose uniformed shirt was turned inside out, and who appeared to be sitting in the driver’s seat sucking a lollipop, Durak wrote.

‘He was scaring me’

Roadside told Durak that Wilson had stopped short and he hit her, Durak wrote. The responding officer wrote that he’d immediately noticed a strong smell of alcohol coming from the vehicle.

“I also noticed that Mr. Roadside appeared to be very disheveled, specifically, his clothing was dirty, mussed, he was only partly dressed in uniform, and his shirt was unbuttoned and appeared to have vomit on it,” Durak wrote.

Roadside’s speech was slow and slurred, and his eyes were watery and bloodshot, Durak wrote.

Wilson told Durak she’d been at a stop sign when Roadside’s troop car hit her, according to the report.

In a written statement she provided to police, Wilson said that when she asked Roadside if he’d be calling the accident in or if she should call 911, “he said he would take care of it” — and when she pressed for what that meant, he said he’d give her his name and number. She insisted on calling police, she wrote.

“He said I’ll give you a check right now for $1,000. I said I don’t operate that way,” she wrote.

She continued: “I asked if he was a police officer because he was a mess. His shirt was inside-out and his hair was disheveled. His belly and back were exposed. He said yes, I said where’s your uniform and your weapons? He pulled his shirt open to expose his weapons and a Bud Light cap fell on the ground and his magazine that was loaded fell on the ground.”

“I yelled at him to get in his car right away because he was scaring me,” Wilson wrote. She then called her fiance, and 911, according to her statement.

‘What am I, about a one-eight?’

Druak wrote that when he returned to Roadside and told the trooper he’d be taking him to the Holdmel station, Roadside put his car in reverse. Ordered by Durak to put the car in park, Roadside said, “What’s going on here? I’m not drunk,” Durak wrote.

As Roadside walked to Durak’s car, his knees were sagging and he was swaying, Durak wrote. Durak asked Roadside to remove his belt holding his gun and magazines — which were over blue sweatpants that covered his uniform pants, and which weren’t properly secured, Durak wrote.

Once Roadside was secured in Durak’s troop car, Durak asked him for his licensee, and Roadside said “I have no idea where it is. I’m just getting out of the hospital. I had have bad prostate surgery,” Durak wrote.

According to Durak’s report, another trooper was already on the scene when Durak arrived, and Roadside told that trooper he wasn’t drunk, had prostate surgey, and “whatever’s wrong with the car I’ll pay for it.”

Durak’s report also states that when Roadside was administered a breath test at the Holmdel Station, he asked “What am I, about a one-eight?” before being told his BAC was .16, and answering “I’ve been way more drunk than that.”

Durak’s report describes both his own troop car and the Holmdel station filling with the smell of alcohol as Roadside spent time in each.

After the investigation, Roadside was charged with driving while intoxicated, careless driving, and having an open container of alcohol in a motor vehicle, according to State Police. He was processed and released.

State Police said in October Roadside had been working a supplemental detail at a construction site at the time of his arrest.

Fairly clean record

According to public records, Roadside had a salary of $105,743 last year. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been with the State Police State House Security Operations and Policing Unit since 2013.

...

A city police officer is facing criminal charges after authorities claim he attacked a Dunkin Donuts employee as well as a female who tried to stop him on Valentines Day earlier this year.

Philadelphia police said Officer Joseph Marion, 39, was outside of a Dunkin Donuts on Wadworth Avenue on Feb. 14 when an employee lost control of a shopping cart he using was to put down salt.

The cart hit Marion's vehicle, spurring Marion to get out and start attacking the employee. Marion also allegedly assaulted a woman who intervened in the initial attack.

Police said Marion, a 4-year veteran of the force who worked in the 25th District, was arrested Tuesday and charged with simple assault and recklessly endangering another person following an internal affairs investigation.

He has been suspended for 30-days with the intent to dismiss.

an NY man who spent 29 days in jail after police mistook the homemade soap in the trunk of his rental car for cocaine has worked himself into enough of a lather to file a federal civil rights lawsuit.

Alexander J. Bernstein, 32, alleges that troopers from the state police barracks at Fogelsville conspired to fabricate evidence that he was transporting drugs, and knew that the field test they used on the soap wasn't reliable.

He says in the suit that he was forced to pay thousands of dollars in court costs and legal fees, and missed Thanksgiving with his 17-month-old son before the charges were dropped. Bernstein, who is seeking a jury trial and damages in excess of $150,000, also complains in the suit that investigators have refused to admit that they were wrong.

"[Bernstein] did not so much as receive an apology from the defendants," his attorney, Joshua Karoly, wrote in the suit.

Bernstein was a passenger in a Mercedes-Benz that was pulled over on Interstate 78 in South Whitehall Township on Nov. 13, 2013.

According to a 2013 criminal complaint, a state trooper stopped the Mercedes' driver, 26-year-old Annadel Cruz of New York, on westbound I-78 near the Cedar Crest Boulevard exit because she was approaching 60 mph in a 55 mph zone and was riding a traffic line for about a half-mile.

When questioned, Cruz told the trooper the car was a rental and they were driving from New York to Florida. The trooper told her he smelled marijuana and she said she had smoked earlier in the day, but not in the car. She gave police permission to search the car.

According to the police report, Bernstein told police he had a bag in the trunk and gave police permission to search it. In the bag, the trooper found two brick-size packages, which were covered in clear plastic wrap and red tape.

Cruz told police the packages contained soap she had made for her sister in Florida, but a field test showed that the substance was cocaine. The packages weighed 5.2 pounds. Police said they also found a small amount of marijuana in Cruz's bra.

The couple were charged with possession with intent to deliver cocaine, possession of cocaine, conspiracy and possession of drug paraphernalia. Cruz also was charged with possession of a small amount of marijuana, disregarding traffic lanes and speeding.

In the lawsuit, Bernstein claims he pretended to be asleep at the barracks after he was arrested, and overhead troopers discussing the field test. One trooper said the package tested negative for cocaine, the suit states.

"Well … make it positive," another trooper replied, according to the suit.

Bernstein was sent to prison under $500,000 bail. He spent 29 days behind bars before his bail was reduced to $25,0000 and he was released after paying $32,523 in bail and court costs. Two days later, lab tests proved the suspected cocaine was soap, and the charges were dropped.

"All the laboratory tests performed on the substance which the operator claimed, from the beginning, constituted nothing more than soap, confirmed that the package contained no cocaine, and no other drugs or controlled substances, but merely soap," the suit states.

In conducting a field test, a sample of the suspected substance is mixed with a liquid, causing a reaction and change in color that will indicate if it is an illegal drug.

Suspected substances are then sent to a lab for more in-depth testing that can take weeks.

Field tests have come under fire in numerous states after the tests mistook male enhancement products for methamphetamine and motor oil for heroin. In Travis County, Texas in 2012, District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg stopped accepting plea bargains on low-level possession cases based on field tests after a string of 12 false-positive drug tests.

Named in the Bernstein's lawsuit are Capt. Brian S. Tobin; commander of Troop M in Fogelsville; troopers Nicholas Goldsmith and Justin Julius; former state police commissioner Colonel Francis J. Noonan; state police officials Lt. Colonel Timothy J. Mercer, Major Robert Evanchick and Major Joseph L. Reed; and Safariland, LLC, the Florida company that manufactured the field test.

Tobin, the local state police spokesman, declined to comment on the suit. Safariland officials did not return a phone message seeking comment.

Karoly declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday, but in 2013 he accused the troopers of profiling.

"I think it is a nice car with out-of-state plates and a Hispanic female behind the wheel" that prompted the traffic stop, Karoly said. "If it was me driving that car, this wouldn't have happened."

The charges against Cruz were also dropped. Her attorney, Robert Goldman, said Friday that she has not filed a lawsuit.

A 21-year-old man is suing Toronto police for what he alleges was a brutal beating during a mistaken arrest.

In his unproven statement of claim, Santokh Bola said Wednesday he suffered serious injuries.

The incident in a west-end parking lot on Nov. 1 was caught on video by a bystander.

According to the claim, Bola was getting out of his car when two officers, guns drawn, approached him.

He alleges they then punched and kicked him.

There was no immediate comment from police.

A police officer has resigned after two fellow officers reported he used excessive force during an August arrest and lied about it in a report on the encounter.

Top St. Petersburg police officials met Monday to discuss what occurred and determine what punishment might be appropriate. During that meeting Officer Andrew Cane resigned.

Cane on Aug. 20 placed a man in handcuffs near 211 Third St. N. after he was spotted urinating in public and exposing his genitals. Two other officers arrived as Cane held the suspect against a wall, and they reported seeing Cane slam the man to the ground.

Cane wrote in his incident report that the suspect, 43-year-old James Robert Blair of Pinellas Park, tried twisting the officer’s grip after he was placed in handcuffs, became aggressive and appeared to want to fight. After Cane told Blair to stop resisting, the report says, the suspect kept twisting about and was poised to attack.

Cane wrote that because of Blair’s aggressive behavior, taking him to the ground was the safest option.

But the two other officers who arrived on scene disagreed, and reported Cane’s actions to their supervisors. At a news conference Tuesday, Chief Anthony Holloway said even after “shocking” surveillance video of the encounter emerged, Cane stuck to his story.

“I didn’t see anything that he wrote in his report that I saw in this video,” Holloway said.

Cane’s use of force, by itself, was not cause for dismissal, St. Petersburg police officials said. But investigators determined Cane also falsified his report on the arrest.

“We will not tolerate that,” Holloway said.

The Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office considered charging Cane with battery, the chief said, but chose not to prosecute.

It was not the first time Cane, who joined the department in 2011, had come came under scrutiny. In August 2014 he reportedly was discovered masturbating while off-duty in his personal vehicle in a parking lot at 801 Central Ave. Department leaders suspended him for nine days, and told him any future rule-breaking would result in progressive discipline.

Blair was not injured in the take-down arrest and did not file a complaint for use of force, Holloway said. Police spoke with Blair after his arrest at the Pinellas County Jail, but Holloway said the suspect had little memory of the event. Blair was charged with exposure of sexual organs and resisting an officer without violence, and was released from jail Aug. 26, jail records show.

After viewing the video, department officials contacted the State Attorney’s Office to make sure Blair was released from jail. Holloway said Cane had probable cause to arrest him, but everything the officer said happened after that was untrue.

“We wanted to make sure we cleared that up right away,” Holloway said.

Blair was arrested again the next day for disorderly intoxication.

Holloway said he is proud of the two officers who came forward after seeing Cane take down the suspect.

The chief is considered equipping his officers with body cameras; but in this case, he said, body cameras wouldn’t have made any difference in the outcome.

This would have been an incident that, in my opinion, once you watch the video, it wouldn’t have captured anything except the victims head,” he said, because most cameras are attached to the chest.

Holloway serves as co-chairman of a national panel set to explore issues related to body cameras in police work.

Two other department employees also were disciplined this week.

♦ Officer Jason Irvin was arrested on a DUI charge in June 2014 after being pulled over while off duty in his personal car, police said. Though Irvin’s court case is pending, the police department suspended him for four weeks and forced him to abstain from alcohol for five years. He must submit to random alcohol and drug testing for 18 months.

♦ Sheila Cunningham, an officer systems assistant, was fired after an investigation found she used the department’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database to look up a friend. Cunningham was suspended for 200 hours in January for a similar violation.

On Sept. 6, I locked myself out of my apartment in Santa Monica, Calif. I was in a rush to get to my weekly soccer game, so I decided to go enjoy the game and deal with the lock afterward.

A few hours and a visit from a locksmith later, I was inside my apartment and slipping off my shoes when I heard a man’s voice and what sounded like a small dog whimpering outside, near my front window. I imagined a loiterer and opened the door to move him along. I was surprised to see a large dog halfway up the staircase to my door. I stepped back inside, closed the door and locked it.

I heard barking. I approached my front window and loudly asked what was going on. Peering through my blinds, I saw a gun. A man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointing it at me. I stepped back and heard: “Come outside with your hands up.” I thought: This man has a gun and will kill me if I don’t come outside. At the same time, I thought: I’ve heard this line from policemen in movies. Although he didn’t identify himself, perhaps he’s an officer.

I left my apartment in my socks, shorts and a light jacket, my hands in the air. “What’s going on?” I asked again. Two police officers had guns trained on me. They shouted: “Who’s in there with you? How many of you are there?”

I said it was only me and, hands still raised, slowly descended the stairs, focused on one officer’s eyes and on his pistol. I had never looked down the barrel of a gun or at the face of a man with a loaded weapon pointed at me. In his eyes, I saw fear and anger. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw how it would end: I would be dead in the stairwell outside my apartment, because something about me — a 5-foot-7, 125-pound black woman — frightened this man with a gun. I sat down, trying to look even less threatening, trying to de-escalate. I again asked what was going on. I confirmed there were no pets or people inside.

I told the officers I didn’t want them in my apartment. I said they had no right to be there. They entered anyway. One pulled me, hands behind my back, out to the street. The neighbors were watching. Only then did I notice the ocean of officers. I counted 16. They still hadn’t told me why they’d come.

[I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong.]

Later, I learned that the Santa Monica Police Department had dispatched 19 officers after one of my neighbors reported a burglary at my apartment. It didn’t matter that I told the cops I’d lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID. It didn’t matter that I went to Duke, that I have an MBA from Dartmouth, that I’m a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation. It didn’t matter that I’ve never had so much as a speeding ticket. It didn’t matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. It also didn’t matter that I didn’t match the description of the person they were looking for — my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911. What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city — and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he’d never seen me before.

...

I had so many questions. Why hadn’t they announced themselves? Why had they pointed guns at me? Why had they refused to answer when I asked repeatedly what was going on? Was it protocol to send more than a dozen cops to a suspected burglary? Why hadn’t anyone asked for my ID or accepted it, especially after I’d offered it? If I hadn’t heard the dog, would I have opened the door to a gun in my face? “Maybe,” they answered.

...

The trauma of that night lingers. I can’t un-see the guns, the dog, the officers forcing their way into my apartment, the small army waiting for me outside. Almost daily, I deal with sleeplessness, confusion, anger and fear. I’m frightened when I see large dogs now. I have nightmares of being beaten by white men as they call me the n-word. Every week, I see the man who called 911. He averts his eyes and ignores me.

I’m heartbroken that his careless assessment of me, based on skin color, could endanger my life. I’m heartbroken by the sense of terror I got from people whose job is supposedly to protect me. I’m heartbroken by a system that evades accountability and justifies dangerous behavior. I’m heartbroken that the place I called home no longer feels safe. I’m heartbroken that no matter how many times a story like this is told, it will happen again.

A federal jury on Wednesday found that D.C. police framed an innocent man for a 1981 rape and murder, making the District liable for damages after he was imprisoned for 27 years.

Jurors found that two D.C. homicide detectives fabricated all or part of a confession purportedly made by the wrongly accused Donald E. Gates to a police informant. The detectives also withheld other evidence from Gates before he was convicted in the fatal attack on a 21-year-old Georgetown University student in Rock Creek Park, jurors found.

Gates, now 64, was exonerated in the June 1981 killing and released from prison in 2009 after DNA testing.

Following Wednesday’s verdict, Gates’s attorneys said the detectives’ conduct warranted investigation into their handling of other cases. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District declined to comment on the verdict or whether the decision exposes the detectives to criminal investigation for perjury.

“It feels like the God of the King James Bible is real, and he answered my prayers,” Gates, who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., said as he left the courtroom. “Justice is on the way to being fulfilled. . . . It’s one of the happiest days of my life.”

The verdict opens a new round of accountability for Gates’s wrongful conviction, which earlier triggered reviews by the U.S. attorney’s office, the Justice Department and the FBI. The jury’s decision means the District could be ordered to pay millions of dollars for misconduct by homicide detectives Ronald S. Taylor and Norman Brooks, now retired.

A third defendant — now-retired- lieutenant John Harlow — was cleared by the jury.

Gates’s case was the first federal civil rights claim for damages involving a wrongful conviction in the District.

By law, jurors face no limit on how much money they can award Gates in compensatory damages. The dollar figure will be set as the civil trial continues before Chief Judge Richard W. Roberts of U.S. District Court.

The possibility of a sizable sum for Gates clearly weighed on District attorneys who addressed the jury.

A state attorney arguing against a wrongful termination case last month struggled with a San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s deputy before being forced onto the courtroom floor, surveillance footage of the incident shows.

Deputy Attorney General Jennie Mariah Kelly was arrested Oct. 20 by courtroom bailiffs after what the Sheriff’s Office described as “speaking loudly” and “acting in an unprofessional manner” toward the opposing attorney.

She was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor resisting a police officer, cited and released, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

...

A Missouri woman is suing St. Louis County and a police officer after a Taser prong lodged in her eye and left her at a risk for blindness.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch first reported that 22-year-old Melnique Logan filed the suit against the county and Officer Lewis Bouwman in U.S. District Court in St. Louis on Monday.

A police report written by Bouwman indicated that officers found Logan, who suffers both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, being beaten by two women on the evening of March 15 while another woman filmed the attack.

“To try to stop the others from leaving, Logan kicked, punched and pulled on their car’s door and ignored Bouwman’s request to stop,” according to the Post-Dispatch.

The officer said that he fired his Taser because he feared being assaulted if he tried to engage Logan by hand. One of the Taser prongs lodged in her left arm and another prong lodged in her eye, which Bouwman blamed on the woman’s erratic movements.

Logan and the other three women were all charged with assault. Logan also faced additional charges for destruction of property and interfering with an officer.

The suit alleges that Logan suffered “painful vision loss and increased risk of permanent blindness.” It said that she had undergone multiple surgeries following the incident.

Attorney Steven Waterkotte, who was representing Logan, asserted that the charges had been “trumped-up” so that Bouwman could justify his use of force.

The lawsuit accuses St. Louis County of deliberate indifference and accuses Bouwman of excessive force. It is seeking at least $75,000.

“In the city’s continued commitment to transparency and accountability in this investigation we are releasing the officer’s body camera video footage,” Lt. Teena Richardson said in a press release issued Tuesday.

...

Below are the two videos of the incident. The first one is the body cam footage released on Wednesday. At 3:57 into the video it goes black, at precisely the same time the scene turns violent. When the video picks back up, the cops are done beating the teens, and they begin their subsequent character assassinations.

Read more at Cops Release Body Cam Video to Be ‘Transparent’ – AFTER they Edited Out their Violence | The Free Thought Project

As more details come to light about the death of 17-year old Laquan McDonald, the more it seems that the Chicago police department is involved in a massive cover-up. On the night of October 20, 2014 McDonald was shot sixteen times by Chicago police officers.

McDonald was gunned down near a Burger King, where police responded to a call about a suspicious man with a knife, or so they say. Very few details are actually known about the events that transpired leading up to the young man’s death. However, police claim that the young boy posed a serious threat to their lives, so they had no choice but to draw their weapons and shoot him over a dozen times.

According to the Medical Examiners report, nine of sixteen the shots hit McDonald in the back.

Police had stalked the young man through the parking lot of the Burger King, claiming that they were looking for a suspect, but instead they approached McDonald and ended up shooting him.

While details are unclear as a result of the cover-up, it is likely that the young man was not entirely cooperative with officers because he was innocent and just minding his own business and did not want to be bothered. These natural and understandable objections to being stopped and hassled by police can many times escalate into a murder.

Not only do the police refuse to release the dash camera footage from their patrol car, but they have also confiscated and deleted over an hour of security camera footage that was taken by the Burger King.

Jay Darshane, the District Manager for Burger King said that after the murder, a number of police officers entered the store and demanded the passwords to his security system and access to the security footage. Three hours later the police left, but the crucial video evidence was missing.

“We had no idea they were going to sit there and delete files. I mean we were just trying to help the police officers,” Darshane said.

According to NBC news, the 86-minutes of missing video runs from 9:13 p.m. to 10:39 p.m., which would include the time of the shooting which occurred at 9:50 p.m.

“One witness, this witness told us this was an execution. That’s his word,” attorney Jeff Neslund told NBC News.

New Mexicans ended civil forfeiture this summer, or so they thought. Despite passing landmark legislation outlawing the use of civil forfeiture statewide, cities across the state are ignoring the law and continue to seize and keep individual's property without convicting them of a crime. Now, a lawsuit has been filed by a bipartisan pair of New Mexico State Senators that seeks to shut down the city’s illegal civil forfeiture program once and for all.

One of the most glaring of note was an undercover inspector general investigation conducted last year, which found that body-scanners and agents missed banned items, including explosives, 95 percent of the time.

...

In addition of employing suspected terrorists, the agency also excels at hiring pedophiles and violent criminals, and takes pride in the plethora of sexual assault complaints levied against agents – but it seems that another task has taken precedent within their ranks.

Apparently, that is to get dangerous Disney World souvenirs out of the hands of children like 5-year-old Levi Zilka.

The boy’s father, David, said that his son was very excited when his uncle bought him a Buzz Lightyear toy during his first trip to Disney World. That joy was promptly ended however, on the families way back to Pennsylvania at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport in Florida.

Deemed a “replica firearm” by the TSA, David says agents took the toy claw out of a carry-on bag and threw it in the trash right in front of his son.

“Once he realized what was happening, that they weren’t giving his toy back, he immediately starts balling, just tears streaming down his face, crying,” David Zilka said. “…Taking a toy from a five year old doesn’t enhance national security.”