A Beaufort police officer pleaded guilty to simple assault against his 10-year-old stepdaughter, then resigned from the police department.

Robert Dunn, 46, pleaded guilty to simple assault on Monday. According to warrants, he slapped his 10-year-old stepdaughter on the right side of her head.

The judge gave Dunn a 45-day suspended sentence and a year of unsupervised probation, a court official said.

Dunn turned in his resignation from the Beaufort Police Department later Monday, which became effective on Tuesday, said Town Manager Charlie Burgess. Dunn was a police captain.

The Carteret County Sheriff's Office arrested Dunn on April 20 and charged him with one count of misdemeanor assault on a child under 12. He was placed on paid administrative leave from the Beaufort Police Department.

Dunn's wife, Tara Keys Dunn, called 911 after the alleged incident occurred. She alleged that Dunn was "stoned drunk."

"My husband just assaulted my daughter. He's drunk, he's stoned drunk. He just came into the room and slapped her across the face while she was sleeping," Tara said to the 911 operator.

But Tara Dunn later requested that the charge against her husband be dropped, saying it was a big misunderstanding.

Tara Dunn said her husband was playing with her daughter when he went to give her a high five. However, the child moved in the midst of the high five, causing Dunn to accidentally touch the child's face, Tara said.

WINSTON COUNTY, Alabama -- A Winston County sheriff's investigator faces a charge of manufacturing methamphetamine, Sheriff Rick Harris said Wednesday.

Sgt. Grady Keith Concord, 41, of Nauvoo, is charged with second-degree manufacturing methamphetamine and has been transferred to the Lauderdale County Jail, where he's being held on a $500,000 bond, Harris said.

A mother had taken her seven-year-old son to a doctor’s appointment in Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri; one of many visits her son must go through because he is going deaf.

Mandi Kay Wilson takes photos of her son during these visits to post online, part of a Go Fund Me campaign to help raise money for her son’s medical expenses.

But last week, the audiologist berated her for taking photos, insisting that it was against policy to photograph her son in her office. The doctor then admitted she was upset because a framed picture of the her daughter had come out in the background of one of Wilson’s previous photos posted online.

...

The doctor called a security guard, who told her she had no right to photograph her son because of the federal HIPAA law, which is a huge misconception we’ve seen played out many times over the years by cops, paramedics and hospital staff.

HIPAA laws pertain to the privacy of medical records and has nothing to do with photography or videography in hospitals, especially of your own relative (patients with an expectation of privacy should not be photographed against their will but that wouldn’t fall under the HIPAA law).

The city of Estelline is reviewing its police procedures after Hall County authorities reached a $77,500 legal settlement with an Azle woman who alleged officers illegally seized more than $29,000 from her pickup and kept $1,400 of her cash.

The federal suit, filed last year by Laura Dutton, 64, alleged that the cities of Estelline and Memphis, former Officer Jayson Fry and Memphis Police Chief Chris Jolly violated her Fourth Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure when she was arrested Nov. 28, 2012, in Estelline on a felony money laundering charge.

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Fry told Jolly he thought he smelled raw marijuana in the pickup and that he thought Dutton was acting nervously. The drug dog “hit” on the vehicle and the officers found more than $29,000 inside Dutton’s purse, still bundled in bank currency wrapping. Dutton told officers she didn’t do drugs and denied having any marijuana in her truck. She told officers the cash came from a recent property sale, and no drugs were found during the search.

During the stop, the Memphis police chief reportedly contacted Dutton’s two sisters, who confirmed her account that the money was received from a recent real estate transaction. Jolly, according to court records, then called an experienced local criminal investigator, who advised that officers did not have enough evidence to justify Dutton’s arrest. After consulting with Jolly, Fry arrested Dutton, who was held overnight and bonded out the next day.

In January 2013, District Attorney Luke Inman’s office refused the case for prosecution, citing the fact that Dutton provided records of the land sale. Dutton later returned to claim her seized cash, but said the city didn’t return all the money that was seized during the arrest, a claim she noted on her signed receipt. The city returned $29,640 to Dutton on Jan. 10, 2013, and her speeding ticket was dismissed.

The city of Estelline, according to court records and depositions, did not properly investigate Dutton’s complaint that officers seized $1,400 more than was returned to her and could not produce video recordings of Dutton’s roadside interrogation by Jolly and
Fry in Jolly’s police vehicle.

“The city of Memphis claims they destroyed their copy of that recorded interrogation. The city of Estelline says they didn’t make any such video or audio recording of Dutton’s roadside interrogations; only Memphis did,” court records show.

BLOOMFIELD, N.J. (AP) - Authorities say a northern New Jersey police officer accidentally shot himself when a dog apparently attacked him.

Anthony Ambrose, chief of detectives for the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, tells NJ.com (Clifton officer accidentally shoots himself after Bloomfield dog attack | NJ.com) that the officer was treated at a hospital for injuries that were not considered life-threatening.

But his name and further details on his condition were not disclosed.

Ambrose said the Clifton officer was on duty when he was apparently attacked by a dog in Bloomfield. The officer drew his service weapon, which somehow fired accidentally.

A Clifton police spokesman declined comment on the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation.

Atlantic City must turn over a "representative sampling" of all police officer Internal Affairs reports from 2003 to 2011, a federal judge ruled in a case that is attempting to prove the department has been indifferent to its officers’ misconduct.

The civil lawsuit filed by Matthew Groark claims Sgt. Frank Timek and Officer Sterling Wheaten beat him during a 2010 incident at Dusk in Caesars Atlantic City. Groark alleged he was thrown down stairs, punched and repeatedly kneed by the officers in an unprovoked attack.
But now the files of other officers must be turned over to see whether alleged failures in internal investigations went beyond the two officers.

After reviewing 70 of those reports, Richard Rivera — the plaintiff’s expert — found a “catastrophic failure of (the department’s) Internal Affairs to impartially and thoroughly investigate” the two officers in those complaints. None of them was substantiated by investigators.

A Press special report in May found that Atlantic City dismisses most police brutality and civil rights complaints against its police officer. During a five-year span, the city has disciplined officers in only one of 473 excessive force complaints.

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Police claimed that they knocked, received no answer, then barged in when they discovered the door was unlocked. The individual sleeping on the couch was quickly detained and the intruders made their way to Mr. Westcott’s bedroom.

Jason Westcott Jason Westcott
In the split-second confusion of being jarred awake by strange noises, Westcott picked up his pistol in a futile effort to defend himself. It would be the last decision he ever made. Police skillfully entered his sleeping quarters and opened fire on the man that supposedly “threatened the officers.”

Mr. Westcott did not fire a shot. He was mortally wounded when struck with multiple shotgun slugs and pistol rounds.

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft.

We’re operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you’ve got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.

What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights. You’re nothing more than a serf or a slave.

In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray guns, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—is little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of corporations.

The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There’s the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic collapse, etc. However, these rationalizations are merely excuses for the growth of a government behemoth, one which works hand in hand with corporations to profit from a society kept under lockdown and in fear at all times.

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A three-year federal investigation into the conduct of the Newark Police Department found that the vast majority of pedestrian stops conducted by police were unconstitutional, that many officers used unreasonable force and that some officers even stole from prisoners, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

DOJ's Civil Rights Division, working with federal prosecutors in New Jersey, found that about 75 percent of pedestrian stops had an insufficient constitutional basis, that 20 percent of reported use-of-force incidents were unreasonable and unconstitutional, and that the Newark Police Department was plagued by inadequate supervision, training and investigations.