TAMPA, Fla. - It is a police takedown, caught on a cell phone camera, and it could cost the City of Tampa, or taxpayers, $165,000.

The video which is posted on YouTube shows three plain-clothed Tampa police officers and a uniformed officer detaining two individuals outside Gaspar's Grotto in Ybor. The incident happened back in 2010 after one of the men was thrown out of Gaspar's and then the two men got into a scuffle with bouncers.

At issue is that one of the men, Jacob Cowie, is hearing impaired, and according to a lawsuit filed against the officers and the City of Tampa, he did not know that the men trying to detain him were police officers because he could not hear them and because of the way they were dressed.

Even though the lawsuit isn't officially settled, the case has already led to an official policy change for Tampa Police. "The Chief has made the decision that when we have large scale events like Gasparilla," Tampa Police Spokesperson Laura McElroy explained, "officers who are going to be patrolling in heavily populated areas, they will all be in full uniform."

The other issue may be more critical, and may be the one putting the pressure on the city to the settle the lawsuit with Cowie for $165,000. In the cell phone video, you can see the uniformed officer kick at Cowie twice while he is on the ground.

According to the lawsuit, Cowie sustained serious injuries to his shoulder and his face. Those kicks have led to another police policy change according to McElroy. "In the past, our policy allowed officers to use this as a pain control technique, but it was only really suppose to be used in a situation where there is overwhelming great risk to the safety of a police officer or the public. Not in a situation where there are multiple officers trying to make an arrest. So instead of having confusion about when to use it, we just eliminated it as an accepted technique," said McElroy.

It is now up to Tampa City Council to decide if an agreement reached by its city attorney with Cowie and his attorney for $165,000 is fair. Council will decide on that this Thursday. If they do not agree to the terms, the video and the case could end up going to trial.

MARYLAND WAS disgraced last year by a scandal at the Baltimore jail in which violent prison gang members colluded (and in some cases had sex) with corrupt correctional officers to engineer a virtual takeover of the facility. A contributing factor in the breakdown of order was that jail management found it all but impossible to discipline guards suspected of misconduct, thanks to a state law that guarantees them elaborate procedural safeguards.

That law, known as the Correctional Officers’ Bill of Rights, should have been a cautionary tale for lawmakers in Annapolis. Unfortunately, under union pressure, they are flirting with repeating the mistake — this time for police officers.

Md. lawmakers would make it even tougher to discipline police officers suspected of misconduct.

A bill drafted by the Fraternal Order of Police would force investigators to throw out any evidence of police brutality, corruption, racial profiling or other serious abuses if they made even a technical mistake while looking into suspected wrongdoing. Police chiefs and sheriffs around the state, most of whom oppose the measure, say the bill would undercut their efforts to weed out bad cops and promote public trust in their departments.

The measure, sponsored by Sen. Brian E. Frosh and Del. Kathleen M. Dumais, a pair of Montgomery County Democrats, would provide police officers facing internal disciplinary action or firing with protections usually reserved for accused criminals looking at prison time. Even in Maryland, where public employees have extensive rights thanks to their political clout, no other group of state or local workers is covered by such safeguards.

The bill would expand the existing “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights,” from which Maryland police officers and sheriff’s deputies have benefited for the past 40 years. That measure, one of the most extensive in the nation, tips the scales heavily in favor of uniformed officers suspected of misconduct by providing stringent procedures in the course of internal investigations.

In general, the current rules have worked well, although they have added fuel to a process that is so highly litigious that it often takes a couple of years or more to discipline an officer once he is suspected of wrongdoing. But it is going too far to add an “exclusionary rule” that would ban any evidence collected if investigators committed even a garden-variety technical violation of the rules.

For instance, what if an officer were informed of the names of possible witnesses nine days ahead of an administrative hearing instead of the 10 specified ? S hould that be reason to toss out all evidence of serious misconduct gathered by investigators? What if the officer is not officially informed of the name, rank and job title of a fellow officer present during his interrogation, perhaps because the two have known each other for years — should that also be sufficient to quash evidence? Lawmakers seem prepared to consider watering down the bill, and they should. By automatically excluding such evidence, they would make an unwieldy system positively sclerotic and give bad cops a free pass.

A woman pulled over a traffic stop, who ended up getting physically injured after admitting she was recording the incident, spends the night in jail.

I was peacefully video recording the NYPD in public making an arrest (which isn’t clear in this video). However, a superior officer saw me and ordered an attack. Corruption from the top down, par for the course in the NYPD.

He took my camera then threatened to shoot me if I pointed at them again. He said that he would claim that he thought my camera was a gun, and he would have gotten away with the murder.

I got the camera back and felt lucky to have escaped with my life. I got to what I thought was a safe distance away and began to record again, and they came at me again.

The C.C.R.B. found that the cops attacked me and committed a physical assault. What did the NYPD say to me in referencer to this incident? Nothing. They promoted the officer who assaulted me to Sergent, so now he can order others cops to commit crimes against citizens.

Cops are above the law. Bad Cops are the law.

This video was recorded in 2010. The summons that they issued were baseless, and they knew it so they never submitted them to the courts so there was no charges for me to defend against.

However, it wasn't until 2013 that I received a final disposition. So I filed a formal complaint against them. This video wasn't post until 2013 as well.

So what they did was to retaliate against me for posting this video and filing the complaint. You would think that they would have just left it alone. But these guys really aren't that bright so they ended up digging a really deep hole for themselves.

Now I'm going to sue them. Had they just left the matter alone, I would not have had any grounds to sue. They made the matter far worst than it already was.

I'm also seeking criminal prosecutions of some of these guys.

check out www.themarginalzone.wordpress.com

The video returns with both rangers on top of Berghardt in the roadway, the trooper off to the side. But Berghardt somehow escapes from the rangers’ grasp, pushes away the trooper, and bolts for the trooper’s patrol vehicle.

“Why don’t they just cuff him and be done with it?” one of the men in the video asks.

“You’d think,” the other replies. “They keep letting him get up and run away.”

The trooper points either his firearm or a Taser at Berghardt but then backs away as Berghardt briefly stomps toward him. Berghardt hurries to the driver’s side of the trooper’s SUV and climbs inside as the trooper slams the door on him.

“Dude, this guy’s going to end up getting shot,” one says.

The camera jerks to the left as the rangers, who had apparently deferred to the trooper, reach the driver’s side of the car. As the camera stabilizes, a ranger wearing dark pants fires eight or nine shots from his handgun into the trooper’s car.

Authorities haven’t officially commented on the case, but the Review-Journal has learned that the officers say Berghardt grabbed for the trooper’s AR-15, which was locked in a gun rack in the car.

The witnesses in the video express shock as the shooting occurs.

“These cops are not taking the prerogative to …”

“Dude, they just shot him. They just killed the dude. Holy (expletive). They just killed him.

“You know what’s ridiculous about this is, they never grabbed him. They could have grabbed him. They kept letting him get up.”

The video also shows the trooper take a few steps back, lowering his head and putting his hands on his knees.

One of the men in the video acknowledges the threat if Berghardt had gained access to the car.

“Well, there’s a gun in that Highway Patrol car,” one of the men in the car is heard saying, “and they probably thought he was gonna get it.”

“They had him on the ground,” the other says. “I don’t know why they didn’t just jump on him and pin him!”

“You know, unless they thought he had something on him, but it didn’t look like it to me.”

“It’s redneck justice.”

Berghardt died at the scene. His name was released by the Clark County coroner’s office on Sunday, but little has been forthcoming from the police agencies involved. The Highway Patrol has said nothing since the day of the shooting.

EUHARLEE, GA — A 17-year-old young man set to graduate high school in a few months and join the Marines, is now dead because a cop felt a Nintendo Wii controller was threatening.

This horrific murder took place around 7:35 p.m. this past Friday night in Euharlee – a small town of about 4,000 residents in Northwest Georgia. A press release by Euharlee cops says two of their employees showed up at 937 Euharlee Road, Lot 5 to “serve probation violation warrants.” Cops said Mr. Christopher “Bubba” Roupe, 17, and who was not the subject of the warrants, “opened the door with a hand gun pointed at” them.

The female cop at the scene fired a single bullet into Mr. Roupe’s chest. The Daily Tribune News reported that the young man survived the initial shot, but bled to death waiting for paramedics to arrive. Both the killer cop and the one accompanying her were rewarded for the kill with paid vacations, aka “paid administrative leave.”

She says she woke up to a Kentucky State Police trooper and a Johnson County Sheriff’s deputy knocking on her door at 1:30 in the morning to serve a warrant for someone that no longer lives at her house.

Two other KSP troopers pulled up just as her 4 year old Great Dane named Boss got out.

“He ran past a sheriff’s deputy and a state trooper that was on the porch. He went down the steps on my sidewalk and he was out maybe five seconds, and then I heard gunfire,” Pelfrey said, “I looked out and Boss was lying in the road. And I said, ‘Did you shoot my dog?’ and [the trooper] said, ‘Yes ma’am I did, he was charging at me.’”

But Pelfrey questions the troopers’ claim, asking why he felt the need to shoot five times, if he was standing in the road and when Boss walked right by the deputy and trooper standing at her front door.

“They could have tazed him, they could have pepper sprayed him, I know they carry batons. They could have taken other precautions instead of drawing your weapon and firing,” Pelfrey added.

Boss returned home from the vet Wednesday after being treated for four gunshot wounds. The vet says Boss could lose one of his legs.

We reached out to Kentucky State Police for their side of the story, they declined to comment.