A Bastrop County Sheriff's Office Deputy is facing charges after he was arrested Friday morning for driving while intoxicated while on duty.

The Bastrop County Sheriff's Office confirms the deputy is Fred Ensinger.

Investigators say at around 8:30 a.m. Sheriff's Office dispatchers alerted the on duty patrol supervisor because they were concerned about the welfare of Ensinger, who was on duty at the time.

Dispatchers reported Deputy Ensinger's speech was slurred and he was not making sense in his conversation.

Deputy Ensinger was found near 143 Navasota Street in Bastrop County. He was sitting in the driver seat of his assigned marked patrol vehicle, and his supervisor and another deputy detected an odor of alcohol emitting from Ensinger's breath as he spoke, the Sheriff's Office says.

A search of the vehicle turned up an open quart sized bottle of vodka in an open backpack, belonging to Ensinger, in the front passenger seat. Also found with the alcohol was an empty bottle of prescription medication, county officials say.

Deputy Ensinger was relieved of duty and transported to the Sheriff's Office where a search warrant for a blood specimen was obtained and executed. Deputy Ensinger was subsequently booked into Bastrop County Jail for the charge of driving while intoxicated with an open container. Bail was set at $10,000 and he was released on his own recognizance, the Sheriff's Office says.

A police officer is under arrest, charged with public intoxication and carrying a weapon under the influence of alcohol.

When Officer Bryan Crumb showed up for his shift Friday night, a co-worker noticed something was off.

“I believe the officer said he had an odor of alcohol, glassy eyes, and an unsteady gait,” said Sgt. Jeremy Thorne. “He was unsteady on his feet.”

According to a police report, an officer “asked if [Crumb] had been drinking and he told [the officer] he had not slept well for days, was under a lot of stress from his divorce. He stated he had a drink before he went to sleep and then slept for four hours before coming to work.

“[Officer] Crumb was very upset but calm at the time,” the officer stated in his report.

A supervisor was called and brought to Crumb’s personal vehicle, where he was sitting on the passenger side in full uniform. The officer removed Crumb’s firearm from his holster and removed the magazine and a live round from the chamber.

Crumb was asked to step from the vehicle, at which point the officer “smelled what I believed to be an alcoholic beverage mixed with a strong cologne,” and observed some unsteadiness in movement.

Crumb refused to take a breathalyzer test at the station and was arrested.

“Very serious [charges] for a police officer,” said Thorne. “Most definitely anytime we have a report of something like that, we treat it with the utmost care to make sure the public is served and well protected. We care about everybody’s safety.”

Officer Crumb has been suspended from the force until an investigation is complete.

A cleaning woman in a middle school was arrested earlier this month after police said officers mistook her for a burglar and shot her with a stun gun.

Juana Raymundo, 36, was cleaning inside Ooltewah Middle School in Collegedale, Tenn. on Jan. 11 when two police officers entered the building and saw that she was the only one inside, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports. The arrest report states the officers announced their presence, but Raymundo, who did not speak very good English, responded with “no.”

According to police, the officers began walking toward her and asked for her “identificacion” and “licencia,” but she continued to reply with “no” and walked quickly down the hallway. The officers yelled for her to “alto,” (stop in Spanish), and began to sprint after her, chasing her outside of the building, the arrest report stated. Once outside, the officers warned her to stop and shot her with a stun gun when she did not comply.

Raymundo was identified as an employee of a cleaning company that regularly works for the school, the Times Free Press reports. Nashville, Tenn., attorney Andrew Free told the Times Free Press that he found a lot of details missing in the officer’s report.

Raymundo was charged with evading arrest, booked in jail, and released on $750 bond.

A lawyer for a Westlake detective accused of beating a man during an interrogation said Monday that some of the man's injuries were not caused by the officer, but were the result of unrelated sexual activity.

Attorney Kevin Spellacy made the remark during opening statements in the case of officer Robert Toth, whose trial on charges of using excessive force and obstructing justice began Monday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Brennan described in her opening statement a prolonged and brutal April 2014 beating that Teddie Abadie suffered at the hands of the enraged detective.

Spellacy countered during his opening remarks that sores found inside Abadie's mouth — photos of which were later shown to the jury — were not caused by his client but rather "some type of sex stuff we'll get into later."

...

Abadie was arrested but was released the next day without charges. Toth falsified his police report and later, when he found out the FBI was investigating him, lied to an FBI agent, Brennan said

Bullins was not charged, though he admitted that he punched Abadie in the chest. Bullins is expected to testify, although he doesn't want to, Brennan said.

A company that makes license-plate readers is offering free use of its equipment to Texas law enforcement agencies in exchange for a 25 percent surcharge on outstanding court fines collected through its database.

The deal turns Texas police in to “mobile debt collectors,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation says at its DeepLinks blog.

The blog says Vigilant Solutions is leveraging a new Teas law that allows officers to install credit card readers in their cars to take payment on the spot for court fines. In exchange for the license plate readers, Vigilant will get data on outstanding court fines. Vigilant will add the information to its database of license plate images and give it to police, who could use the data to find license plates associated with fees, the blog says.

When police pull a driver over, they can offer the driver the choice of arrest or immediate payment—plus a 25 percent processing fee for Vigilant. Already, Guadalupe County and the cities of Orange and Kyle are participating in the Vigilant program.

Fox7Austin covered the Kyle program and spoke with Wayne Krause Yang, legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. The law says that debt collection “is supposed to be direct and reasonable in its fees,” Krause Yang said. A 25 percent surcharge is “not reasonable and it’s not direct,” he said.

Vigilant spokesperson Josh Zecher tells the ABA Journal that the company isn’t performing debt collection services. “Vigilant is providing law enforcement with tools to collect fees and fines on their own,” he tells the ABA Journal in an email. “Vigilant’s fee is authorized by statute and is lower than the 30 percent fee that is statutorily mandated for those who perform debt collection in Texas—something again we do not do.”

Zecher says people apprehended under the “warrant redemption program” already have warrants out for their arrest, mostly for failure to appear. He says it’s cheaper to pay the processing fee than to go to jail and pay the costs of towing and impounding a vehicle.

His calculation: Those who don’t pay on the spot have to pay a $175 towing fee and a $20 daily impound fee, and they lose a day of work while in jail, giving up $96 in wages if pay is $12 an hour. The processing fee for paying a typical warrant fine of $500, on the hand, is $125.

The city of Brandon denied allegations that one of its police investigators violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act by accessing a man’s prescription history through a state database, according to court records filed Monday.

A lawsuit filed in federal court last month alleges Brandon Police Department Investigator Chris Bunch accessed Brandon Maddox’s prescription history without probable cause or a court order. Brandon’s response to the lawsuit, which names the city, Chief William Thompson and Bunch as defendants, maintains the department obtained the information lawfully — with probable cause and without violating HIPAA.

However, the lawsuit argues the Board of Pharmacy’s Mississippi Prescription Monitoring Program, which monitors controlled substance prescriptions, violates the Constitution and individuals’ right to privacy by allowing law enforcement officials and licensing boards access without a court order.

“My opinion is Mississippi law … does not comply with United States constitutional requirements as far as them being able to access privileged medical information,” said Donald Boykin, who is representing Maddox in the lawsuit. “In other words, I think the Constitution protects people from unreasonable search and seizure, and in this case, just to go online and not have a court order based on probable cause doesn’t satisfy constitutional requirements.”

Newhart is demanding justice over the shooting of his 6-year-old pet cat, Sugar, in a neighbor’s yard.

He said the cat was reported missing the evening of Dec. 6, and the family found out the following afternoon the cat had been shot and killed by Pursell.

“It’s absurd this could happen in this day and age,” Newhart told The Press Tuesday.

A neighbor on American Street, Mike Leinert, had called police when he saw Sugar near his back door that night.

Leinert said the cat had hissed at him when he tried to pick her up and then hid under a barbecue grill cover.

Leinert later told New- hart that Pursell attempted to pick the cat up with the same result.

When Pursell told Leinert he was going to put the cat down by shooting her, Leinert went inside his home because he did not agree with the action and did not want to witness the event.

Off Duty cop argues with patron, pulls pistol and threatens him

The police seized “17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants … native grasses and sunflowers,” after holding the residents inside at gunpoint, farm owner Shellie Smith said in a statement.

The commune in Arlington, Texas, was subject to a raid all because police had convinced themselves that the community “must” be growing marijuana.

A federal lawsuit filed by five victims of the SWAT raid, noted that the justification for this armed assault on their farm all boiled down to the police mistaking what were ultimately tomato plants for marijuana.

In the search warrant affidavit, Exhibit A in the lawsuit, Arlington Detective Magdalena Perez stated that commune leader Quinn Eaker possessed “a usable quantity of marijuana of two ounces or less” in Arlington “on or about July 30, 2013.”

The Houston Chronicle reported that “a search of Arlington court records turned up no marijuana or other drug charges in Eaker’s name.”

A 61-year-old Tennessee woman is suing local authorities for refusing to help her after she was Tased while being booked, WTVC-TV reported.

Body camera footage shows Nancy Mason arguing with Hamilton County Sheriff’s Sgt. Rodney Terrell during the incident last March before being stunned and falling to the floor. As she grabs at her wrist, she can be heard saying, “You broke my arm.”

“I didn’t break your arm, you broke it,” Terrell responds.

Mason’s $1.75 million lawsuit accuses Terrell and five sheriff’s deputies of failing to help her after she fell. Footage from an interior camera shows a group of officers standing near Terrell after he Tased her while not moving toward Mason.

“She was deprived of due process in that she was in a helpless position, or was in the care and the control of the government actors, and that they failed to protect her.” said Mason’s attorney Robin Flores.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that none of the other deputies targeted by the suit have faced disciplinary action.

While Mason was cooperative during her arrest on theft charges, the situation escalated when Mason refused to remove her earrings while being booked.

“I will report you,” she told Terrell, who replied, “Step over there and you can report all you want.”

After Tasing her, Terrell asked Mason, “Now will you be able to get up and place your earrings on this?”

Mason pleaded guilty to the charges against her and received a suspended sentence. Flores said the fall caused her to suffer an arm fracture that has not healed.

But if NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton gets his way, resisting arrest will offer near-perfect impunity to his force's most violent and sleazy officers, who will be able to threaten anyone who complains about gratuitous violence during arrests with long prison sentences and felony records.

The Commission has suggested that he will be able to curb abuses of the new powers by having the police investigate fellow officers who lay higher-than-average resisting arrest charges in the course of their duties.

In theory, a resisting arrest charge allows the state to further punish suspects who endanger the safety of police officers as they're being apprehended; in practice, it gives tautological justification to cops who enjoy roughing people up. Why did you use force against that suspect, officer? Because she was resisting arrest. How do I know you're telling the truth? Because I charged her with it, sir.

Consider a few recent would-be felons:

* Chaumtoli Huq, former general counsel to NYC Public Advocate Letitia James, who was charged with resisting arrest for waiting for her family outside the Times Square Ruby Tuesday's.

*Jahmil-El Cuffee, who was charged with resisting arrest after he found himself on the receiving end of a head-stomp from a barbarous cop because he was allegedly rolling a joint. ("Stop resisting!" cops screamed at him as he lay helpless, pinned under a pile of officers.)

*Denise Stewart, who was charged with resisting arrest after a gang of New York's Finest threw her half-naked from her own apartment into the lobby of her building. (They had the wrong apartment, it turned out.)

*Santiago Hernandez, who was charged with resisting arrest after a group of cops beat the **** out of him following a stop-and-frisk. "One kicks me, he steps back. Another one comes to punch me and he steps back...They were taking turns on me like a gang," Hernandez told reporters.

*Eric Garner, who no doubt would have been charged with resisting had the chokehold from Daniel Pantaleo not ended his life first.

In February 2014, Steven S. Kahn, 60, was peacefully sitting in his car, had not harmed anyone and was not suspected of committing any crime. However, these facts would prove to be no defense against Burlington City police officers and their tendency that night to escalate a peaceful situation into a violent one.+

The entire interaction was captured on police dashcam.
According to the Courier-Post, Michael J. McKenna, a Cherry Hill attorney representing Kahn, said the video “demonstrates a use of force by police against a 60-year-old man so excessive that it can only be called sickening.”

According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of Kahn, police went to the Wawa gas station where he was parked in response to Kahn’s passenger being involved in a dispute over a clerk’s refusal to sell her tobacco products without an ID.

As shown on the dashcam, the situation looks peaceful enough as three officers surround the car. However, the scene quickly turns violent as the female passenger, the alleged subject of the police investigation, becomes the target of cops.

In the video, the officers are seen shouting at the woman, who is then yanked from the car and slammed on the hood of the patrol car as she is placed in handcuffs.

While this was going on, Kahn sat peacefully and calmly in his car, until he became the subject of the officers’ “swift, severe and unprovoked violence,” according to the suit
After the officers had slammed the 60-year-old man face down on the concrete, they knelt on him while placing him in an arm lock. Wanting to join in on the assault, officer William Lancenese, jumped in and also “applied weight and force on top of Mr. Kahn,” the suit says.

As multiple cops applied their weight and force to the 60-year-old, Kahn noted that he couldn’t comply with giving the officers his right arm because it was pinned underneath him by the officers’ weight.

According to the lawsuit, it was at this point that Bright “suddenly and with great force” bent Kahn’s left arm until it snapped.

The brutalized and tormented Kahn was then placed in handcuffs which “caused further agony and suffering,” according to the suit. Then, instead of bringing him to a hospital, the injured man was brought to jail.

The ‘charges’ against Kahn, which apparently required such brutal force to arrest him, were all dropped as a part of a conditional plea. The entire violent interaction in the video below was carried out by these officers for no reason at all.