On a quiet weeknight among the stately manors of Great Falls, ten men sat around a table in the basement of a private home last November playing high stakes poker. Suddenly, masked and heavily armed SWAT team officers from the Fairfax County Police Department burst through the door, pointed their assault rifles at the players and ordered them to put their hands on the table. The players complied. Their cash was seized, including a reported $150,000 from the game’s host, and eight of the ten players were charged with the Class 3 misdemeanor of illegal gambling, punishable by a maximum fine of $500. The minimum buy-in for the game was $20,000, with re-buys allowed if you lost your first twenty grand.

This was not your everyday cash game with the neighbors. The buy-in was twice what it costs to enter the World Series of Poker’s main event in Las Vegas (though the Great Falls players did not have to pay the whole $20,000 up front). Two established poker pros were at the Great Falls table and another was hosting the game, taking a roughly 1.5 percent cut from the buy-ins to pay for two dealers and two assistants to make coffee runs or give massages to the players. “Taking a cut” is what elevates a poker game, in the minds of the Fairfax police, into a criminal enterprise. But the host has not been charged and the search warrant used to raid the house remains sealed. The host declined to comment.

...

[56yo] Martha says that the cashier made a mistake on her purchase, and the two got into a dispute when she did not pay.

Martha believed that the cashier was actually scamming her, and possibly other customers, by charging them for things they weren’t purchasing.

Due to this concern, she called the police to report the cashier.

When Officer Gillespie arrived, he was already angry, according to reports.

Officer Gillespie went into the store for about two minutes, then came back outside and suddenly grabbed Martha, the report states.

He “twisted her body around and jerked her arms behind her back. She thought her forearms were going to snap. Martha felt herself being pushed forward,” her lawsuit notice states.

“It was totally unprovoked,” said Martha.

The next thing she knew, she woke up in the hospital with a blackened eye, two nasal fractures, and a fractured skull.

Her attorneys noted that the location of the fractures suggest that she was punched two different times in the face.

But Officer Gillespie basically says that she did it to herself.

His report accuses her of “trespassing,” even though, according to Martha’s report, she was never asked to leave the store.

Officer Gillespie claims that he grabbed Martha’s wrist to arrest her, but she pulled away and forced him to adjust as she twisted her own body.

Then, he claims, Martha “lost her balance” and “fell in the parking lot” which caused her face to be struck by the asphalt.

terling Heights — A Detroit police officer, who, according to two police sources, was being investigated by the FBI and Detroit Internal Affairs for narcotics corruption, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday morning.

Detective James Napier, 35, of the 12th Precinct, shot himself at about 8:45 a.m., the sources said, while sitting in a car outside his parents’ home in the 34000 block of Maple Lane near 15 Mile in Sterling Heights. Two sources familiar with an investigation into corruption in the former Narcotics Section said he was one of the officers being investigated.

Sterling Heights Police Lt. David Smith said Thursday the incident is “still under investigation, but it appears to be a suicide.”

Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday he could not comment about the probe but said the death was “tragic.”

In a video uploaded to YouTube, Rialto police are seen repeatedly tasering a man on the ground, and viciously beating him with an asp, as the woman filming the attack pleads with them to stop. The man does not appear to be violent or threatening in any way as the officer’s bark orders at him- while pumping his body full of electricity.

The woman behind the camera explained to the Free Thought Project that the man being assaulted had honked his horn at the officers because they were blocking a driveway. This allegedly angered the officers to the point we see here.

Baltimore City officials have denied a claim by a woman whose dog had its throat cut, arguing city police officers aren't city employees.

While the courts sort out the criminal animal cruelty case, the WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team has learned the dog's owner has run into a surprising argument from the city.

Nala, a 7-year-old shar-pei, died last summer when police responded to a call of a dog who had bitten a woman on her hand. Police used a pole to control the dog while Officer Jeffery Bolger allegedly cut its throat.

In December, the dog's owner, Sarah Gossard, filed a claim for damages against the city, naming the police officers allegedly involved and the police commissioner. Her lawyer, Tony Depastina, said it's not about the money.

"The point of the claim is to effectuate changes in policy in the Baltimore City Police Department when dealing with these potential type of situations," Depastina said.

Depastina expected he might get a fight from the city, but he didn't expect the argument being used.

In a letter, a city lawyer writes: "The conduct alleged does not involve an employee of the mayor and City Council. For that reason, we do not believe the city has and legal responsibility."

Chesapeake, Va. – The City of Chesapeake is dishing out $50,000 dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against police by 70-year-old Ruth Davenport.
“I’m as happy as a lark,” Davenport said Tuesday.

She says she’s happy today, but that comes after nine long months of fighting for justice. The lawsuit filed by Davenport back in November claims two police officers Joel Ayala-Acevedo and Anthony Echevarria were at her house to serve a search warrant for her son when one officer grabbed her by the arm, pushed her into a wall and threw her to the ground.

“I was screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me,'” Davenport told NewsChannel 3 back in April.

In court documents, the officer claims Davenport was cursing and kicked him while resisting, but her charges were dropped. Davenport believes her saving grace was a video of what happened recorded on a body camera of one of the officers.

“I said the same story and I’m sticking to it. The same story over and over and I think the camera corroborated that,” she added.

The city has refused to release the video, but Davenport’s attorney, S.W. Dawson saw it himself.

“I think I can safely say that the video would have corroborated Ruth’s version of events in whole or in part,” Dawson said.

Dawson is confident he and Davenport would have won the $500,000 dollar lawsuit if it went to trial, but both Davenport and the city agreed to settle for $50,000. However, Chesapeake’s City Attorney, Jan Proctor released this statement about the settlement Tuesday:

“The settlement is not an admission or a concession that Ms. Davenport’s rights were violated,” Proctor wrote.

For Davenport, whether or not the city admits responsibility is a moot point.

This is likely going to be a long read. If I'm violating the rules my apologies.

I always thought I got in law enforcement to help others. That was my true intention. I wasn't bullied in school. I had a normal healthy upbringing. My family is on the upper-middle class so money was never an issue. I remember a cop coming in for career day one day. He didn't wear any of the big tactical stuff, no showing off weapons. He explained what he did, why he did it, and then let us play with his patrol car. I was hooked. Some of it might have been the blue lights too, but I thought this was a noble profession where you could help others.

Currently I'm entering my 12th year of law enforcement. I started when I was 18 as a state prison guard. While I didn't stay in the prison long, before changing careers into a local agency, the best thing about working there was talking to the inmates. Hearing their stories, their struggles, their life style, was simply amazing to me. I'll never forget a few of the encounters I had there.

Through the police department I rose rather quickly. I saw many cops come and go. I arrested two of them myself. One thing I never did see is an abuse of power physically. It might have been because I was already labeled as "that cop" since I arrested former law enforcement already. However, I did witness abuse of mental power.

I remember working with an officer that had found some marijuana on a kid, probably 20-22 years old, during a traffic stop. He did the whole "work with me, I'll work with you" spill and the kid gave up the location of the dope and told the officer where he got it from. That ended up leading to another arrest, as it often does, and he still went back and charged the kid because "we didn't get enough drugs" from the second bust. Was it illegal? No. Cops can lie. And they will. Was it immoral. Absolutely. I made it clear to him, and my supervisors that we were not to work together anymore. He did end up going to work with the narcotic division a few months later. I'm sure there were more, but this one stuck out the most.

Once I made it to Captain I was put in charge of hiring new officers. As with any agency, the turn over rate for police is pretty high. It does take a special type of person to work in law enforcement and be able to handle it. I remember having to get in the mind set that we didn't want to hire over qualified people. Those with higher education, higher skill set, were often hired then would leave within a matter of months or years because they would be offered something better. So you would expect to hire a lower tiered person. Someone that could do the job, often as seen as physically, and would stay around. That probably says a lot about me for sticking around as long as I did. I don't know.

While the police themselves are often the issue, the system overall is a failure. Once you reach the rank as I have, especially in a political office like the office of a Sheriff as example, you no longer see how things work, rather you see WHY they work the way they do. Money, political alignment, social power; all shined a new light on law enforcement that I had never seen. It's one thing to work the streets, answer calls, make arrest. Often times you make arrests and forget about the case. You never make it to court, you never know the outcome, and unless you take the initiative to seek it out you never really know the end result of the cases you make or the impact of the person you arrested. With the Captain rank though, it was part of my job to follow through with each arrest, each case, each charge our officers were making.

I remember sitting through court and this group of teenagers came in, 4 of them. They were caught with a little bit of weed, personal use amount, in a vehicle together. Thing is, they were from out of state. They showed up with no lawyer and wanted to plead guilty to the charges. I'm assuming to throw their mercy on the court. The court fined them $2,000 each and put each of them on 1 year probation. This would mean at least three more trips to our county from whatever state they were from before the probation could possibly be transferred to their state. Not long after that we had a kid die from a drug overdose. There was a large party, and they were skittling as they called it (placing a large quantity of mixed pills in a bowl and just taking them by the handfulls). The kid ended up passing out after convulsing. While I wont go into details much about the case 3 of the teens hid his body and it was found days later by the kids mom after one of them finally felt bad enough to tell her. Their punishment? 6 months probation, suspended if they went through drug rehab. No fees, no fines, and the charge was reduced to disorderly conduct. The difference? Social pressure. They were high class kids, with predominant parents, and expensive lawyers. I could probably go on for days about those type of examples I saw. Like the kiddy dibbler who was able to avoid any punishment vs. the convenience store robber who broke in after they were close to steal a beer and currently on serving his 2nd of 5 years in prison. What's worse is those cops that themselves have broken the law and absolutely nothing happens to them.

I know there are a lot of good cops out there. They had the same ambitions or goals I did. Those cops though will not be cops long. Your truly good cops will make their way on to other things eventually. What you're left with is the ones that don't care. They don't see the broken system, or they themselves are the broken ones. Being in command staff I also know how incredibly hard it is to fire a bad cop. Another sign of a broken system. I don't know anymore how to fix the system. I just know it's time for me to leave it. Friday I'll turn in my resignation. I'll hope to turn to some career line where I can speak for those changes that need to be made. I'm also a strong component of drug legalization and have been a silent partner of LEAP for many years. I hope that I'll be able to use what I've learned to somehow fix the problems that are very much real and very much still prevalent today.

tl;dr: Never talk to the police. Ever.

As the Public Defender's Office spokesperson explains, "[Tillotson] told the interrogating officer that she was the attorney and he said, 'I just need two minutes with him.’ When she asked why, he just said it was a police investigation. Then he started basically bullying her, telling her she’s interfering."

The Public Defender's Office also points out that the arresting officer, Police Inspector Brian Stansbury, was the subject of a 2013 federal civil rights lawsuit filed by a black SFPD officer alleging racial profiling.

Tillotson was held at Southern Station for an hour, during which time her client was apparently photographed and questioned by police.

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said he was outraged and disappointed with how police treated Tillotson.

"She advised her client that he did not have to answer any questions, as is his right," Adachi said.

He said Tillotson refused to let her client be questioned without the presence of his attorney and she was subsequently detained. She is now facing charges of misdemeanor resisting arrest, a charge Adachi said has a maximum penalty of one year in prison.

Adachi said he hopes the case against her is thrown out immediately.

Tillotson said she was in Department 17 on Tuesday afternoon representing her clients facing misdemeanor charges, as she routinely does, when she was informed that police in the hallway outside of the courtroom were attempting to detain and question one of her clients and another person.

She exited the courtroom and saw her client, a black male, accompanied by another black male. Both were being questioned by police officers.

The two videos showing Tillotson's detainment were shot by other attorneys, according to the public defender's office.

The videos show San Francisco police Inspector Brian Stansbury, who is among the officers facing a lawsuit filed by a black San Francisco police officer in federal court that claims he was racially profiled during a traffic stop and then allegedly choked and tackled to the ground by officers in May 2013.

In the video, Tillotson repeatedly tells Stansbury and other officers, "I am representing my client here."

Stansbury tells the two males being detained that he needs to take their photographs and tells Tillotson that if she doesn't step aside she will be arrested.

Stansbury then handcuffs Tillotson and places her under arrest and she is then led away from her client.

Tillotson said she was taken to the Southern Police Station and handcuffed to a wall in a holding room for about an hour before she was let go.

Adachi said he felt Tillotson's constitutional rights were not respected by the San Francisco Police Department.

"This is not Guantanamo Bay, you have an absolute right to have a lawyer with you when you are questioned," Adachi said.

He said he "can only imagine what might be happening out there on the streets," if police are acting "outside the law" inside the courthouse.

Adachi said the client that Tillotson was trying to represent was in court that day for a misdemeanor petty theft-related charge.

Tillotson said Stansbury wanted to take photos of her client and that after she was taken away, her client was released without a citation or arrest.

"We are very concerned about racial profiling in the Police Department," Adachi said.

San Francisco police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said Tillotson was detained by Stansbury for allegedly resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer trying to perform an investigation.

Esparza said Stansbury noticed two individuals in court that day who he thought might be related to a burglary that is still under investigation and called them aside to question them.

Esparza said anyone interfering with a police investigation can be detained by officers.

Esparza said it appears Stansbury "acted appropriately," but said that San Francisco police Deputy Chief Lyn Tomioka will be reviewing the cellphone footage handed over by the San Francisco Public Defender's Office.

The civil rights lawsuit still pending against Stansbury, the city of San Francisco, police Chief Greg Suhr and Officers Daniel Dudley and Christopher O'Brien was filed by San Francisco police Officer Lorenzo Adamson.

Garfield High School teacher Jesse Hagopian will file a tort claim this afternoon against the City of Seattle and the Seattle Police Department, according to his lawyer, former Seattle NAACP President James Bible, over the way he was pepper sprayed during demonstrations on Martin Luther King Day this year.

It might be several months before the autopsy results of Khamis Shatara, the 21-year-old shot and killed by his off-duty PBSO deputy father on Christmas Eve, are released to the public. That's because the death is being investigated as an "officer-involved shooting" even though the elder Shatara was at home and off-duty when he pulled the trigger.
The Palm Beach County Medical Examiner's office told New Times the status of the case when we attempted to get a copy of the autopsy results, which are considered public records.

"It's an officer-involved shooting, and the case is still under investigation," the records clerk said, adding that it might be before April the records are releasable, after having gone through the District Attorney's Office, which is the norm for all shootings involving on-duty police officers.

However, this shooting was a domestic dispute, according to the Delray Beach Police Department, which is investigating the killing because it happened in their jurisdiction.

William Wingate, a retired bus driver and Air Force veteran who was 69 at the time, said he’s been using that golf club as a cane for 20 years and refused to set it down.

So Whitlatch escalated the lying.

“You just swang that golf club at me …. It was on audio and videotape, put it down,” she said.

The incident took place last July, but Whitlach’s dash cam video was just released after a public records request by The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly.

The video, posted below, shows Wingate remained professional but defiant, insisting she call another officer.

But when she did, the second officer took her side, arresting him on harassment and obstruction charges when it was clear from the video she was the only one harassing and obstructing his freedom to move freely in the city.

After spending a night in jail, King County prosecutors switch the charge against him to unlawful use of a weapon, obviously not bothering to watch the video.

Wingate, represented by a public defender who also didn’t watch the video, was told to sign an agreement stating the case would be dropped in two years if he complied with certain stipulations.

Fortunately, a former politician learned of the case and got involved, and eventually persuade the judge to dismiss the case. But police never admitted wrongdoing, even after watching the video.

And Whitlach is still on the force, a protected liar who should be behind bars.