Local KHOU 11 News reports the following:

She says it was just after 1 a.m. when she was leaving a bar to say hello to some friends across the street.

She walked between Corporal James Palermo’s squad car and a vehicle he had just pulled over.

I wasn’t the only one who walked between the cars, Alpha said… “Several people walked between them. I was just the one he called out…

“I could kind of tell like he wanted to start an argument, and at that point, I was polite from the beginning, and the meanest thing I said was ‘you re in a bad mood, and you re taking it out on me. You re just being a d***k.'”

That’s when the officer grabbed her and threw her “face down into the concrete.”

DeVillena, 22, was shot six times while attempting to flee from officers Mike Heron and Chad Nordman in the public parking garage in downtown Palm Springs. DeVillena, a drunk driver, ignored officers’ commands to stop, and allegedly struck Heron with the front bumper of his car.
The two officers were cleared by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office last year. However, the D.A.’s review only examined whether the officers committed a crime during the shooting and did not measure the quality of their police work.
The newly released documents show that the confrontation with DeVillena became dangerously escalated when Nordman attempted to stop the Marine’s car by jumping through the passenger-side window. According to the new documents, Heron did not see his partner jump through the window, so he assumed Nordman had been pulled into the car against his will and was under the mistaken impression that Nordman was being attacked. As a result, Heron opened fire.
“The way he was in the car, I thought for sure that they were going to kill him,” Heron said, according to a police interview transcript. “You know, I had no choice.”
The discovery that Nordman’s jump into the car prompted the shooting comes from a Desert Sun analysis of more than 1,000 pages of law enforcement documents, obtained exclusively by the newspaper through the cooperation of the D.A.’s office. After reviewing these documents, the newspaper asked three national law enforcement experts for their opinions on the officers’ actions.

Rather than degenerate into a lawless land where criminals rule the streets, a Texas town that fired its entire police department has seen a 61% decrease is crime.
In 2012, Sharpstown, a community of 66,000 located just southwest of Houston, declined to renew its contract with the constable’s office, essentially dismissing its cops.

Instead, the Sharpstown Civic Association hired SEAL Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets.

“Since we’ve been in there, an independent crime study that they’ve had done [indicates] we’ve reduced the crime by 61% in just 20 months," James Alexander, Director of Operations for SEAL, told guns.com

The private security firm places its officers on continuous patrol in their assigned neighborhoods, as opposed to the strategy of intermittent presence that the constable embraced.

“On a constable patrol contract, it’s either a 70/30 or an 80/20,” Alexander said. “Meaning they say they patrol your community 70 percent of the time, [while] 30 percent of the time they use for running calls out of your area or writing reports.”

Denver City Council has approved another significant payout to settle a civil lawsuit over excessive force by Denver Police.

On Monday night, city council approved a $50,000 settlement for Patricia Lucero. She filed a civil lawsuit in 2014 for a December 2012 incident involving Denver Police Officers Marika Putnam and Kenneth Starbuck.

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Video from the elevator hallway showed Putnam slam Lucero into the wall near the elevator door. When the elevator gets to the first floor, the surveillance video from the main area showed a bloodied Lucero being walked out in handcuffs, leaving behind a pool of blood in the elevator.

Putnam's conduct was reviewed by police and she was exonerated for her use of force.

"What does it say that they're not receiving punishment, but city council continues to pay out for their behavior?" 7NEWS reporter Marshall Zelinger asked city councilwoman Mary Beth Susman.

"I'm not sure that they don't receive punishment. We have executive sessions about these sorts of things where we can ask the questions that we want, and we always ask, 'So, what happened to the officer?' said Susman. "I think people should be punished if they do something wrong. If they break the rules, they should be punished."

A school police officer faces assault charges after prosecutors say she assaulted three female students at a school in East Baltimore and the incident is caught on camera. At the request of the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office, a grand jury indicted Lakisha Pulley Monday for an incident that happened at Vanguard Collegiate Middle School on October 28, 2014. School surveillance video show Pulley and three middle school girls involved in a violent tussle. But it's officer Pulley, who's now charged for allegedly assaulting the three girls. Jared Jaskot, the girls' attorney, calls the city state's attorney's request for an indictment, a step in the right direction. "Well it says that the state's attorney's office watched the video and they saw that what the police wrote in the charging documents was a lie," says Jaskot. The grand jury also indicted Pulley for a felony theft charge Monday related to a separate incident that happened at the school in November. Prosecutors say Pulley stole donated food that had been delivered to the school. Meanwhile, school officials are not commenting on the officer's indictment, calling it now a personnel matter.

A 12-year-old boy with a pellet gun whom police shot in November died because of his own actions, lawyers for the city said in newly filed court papers.

Tamir Rice's injuries resulted from a failure "to exercise due care to avoid injury," one of 20 defenses filed Friday in Cleveland's response to a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Tamir's family.

Lansing, Michigan – A federal judge recently decided that a $10 million dollar lawsuit against the Lansing Police Department can proceed.

The judge’s decision comes after officers were cleared for killing a young girl as she was hiding from them, resting on her knees repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

In 2011, 17-year-old Derrinesha Clay broke into a local Bank of America branch and ended up hiding in one of the offices inside the building. It has been said that the teenager was going through some [issues].

Family members said that the teenager was going through some trouble and was possibly dealing with issues relating to bipolar disorder.

It is assumed by police that she was attempting to rob the bank, but no one will ever know why she actually entered the building because she was shot and killed as soon as she was found.

Baltimore police are fighting the release of a secret audit that found a number of officers misrepresented their educational credentials in order to wrongly receive pay raises and bonuses, court documents show.

The audit, performed in April 2014, was conducted after an anonymous tipster told Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts that a high-ranking commander had used a bogus degree from a diploma mill to earn a bonus.

The commander, Lt. Col. Clifton McWhite, resigned and was later criminally charged with theft.

In new court papers filed in McWhite’s case, officials acknowledge the audit and say it “identifies named BPD employees that have had their educational pay benefits discontinued for not having the required credentials to receive said pay benefits, and who have now been referred to internal affairs.”

The acknowledgement comes from an attorney for the Police Department who wants the audit kept confidential, but City Councilman Brandon Scott, vice chair of the public safety committee, says the audit should be “absolutely” released.

“If there’s been an audit done on the use of city taxpayer funds to see how people are earning city taxpayer dollars, people should have the right to see it,” Scott said.

Police Department attorney Brent Schubert said in court documents that records of which officers receive educational incentives are personnel records and should not be disclosed. He is asking the court to require the document be kept confidential if it is turned over to Bates.

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A Las Cruces man was hospitalized with a skull fracture after two officers used force on him while he was handcuffed in a jail cell. Now, his attorney says the department should be on the hook for what happened.

Russ Flynn was arrested back in December for allegedly pointing a rifle at his neighbor over a parking space and then ignoring the officer’s commands at the scene. It’s what happened after he was handcuffed, in a jail cell at the Las Cruces Police Department, that has him ready to sue.

His attorneys say he kicked the cell door out of frustration and talked back to the officers.

What happened next, was captured on surveillance video. It shows Officers Richard Garcia and Danny Salcido using force on Flynn – so much that he ended up in the ICU.

“It’s absolutely shocking. It was a vicious attack on Mr. Flynn,” said attorney Christopher Cardenas with the Lahann Law Firm, which is representing Flynn. “Mr. Flynn was handcuffed. He was already in police custody. So he was posing no threat to the officers.”

ormer San Diego police officer was released from jail Monday after serving five months of a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting women while on duty.

Christopher Hays, 30, left the downtown jail at 6:51 a.m., according to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. No explanation for his release was offered.

Hays, an officer for four years, resigned after his arrest last year. In September, he pleaded guilty to one count of felony false imprisonment and two counts of misdemeanor assault and battery under color of authority.

The charges involved touching women inappropriately and for sexual gratification during pat-downs.

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Hays entered jail on Oct. 3. He was also sentenced to three years' probation but will not have to register as a sex offender, under the judge's sentencing.

A tweet by the NYPD's Twitter guru created a brief social media revolt on Monday.

The tweet — "People off their meds r losing it &wlking into police bullets" — by Zachary Tumin, deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives, referred to a report that said a lack of mental health services has led to more mentally ill people being killed by police across the country.

"As a consequence of the failed mental illness treatment system, an increasing number of individuals with untreated serious mental illness are encountering law enforcement officers, sometimes with tragic results," said the executive summary of the joint report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and National Sheriffs' Association.

The report concluded, based on "multiple informal studies and accounts," that more than half the people shot and killed by police in the United States have mental health issues. It also found one-third of fatal police shootings were so-called "suicide by cop."

St. Louis Police Sgt. Darren Wilson, who has the same name as the ex-Ferguson cop who killed Michael Brown, has been suspended from the force.
The former president of a St. Louis black police officers’ association was suspended from the force Tuesday as part of a probe into the disappearance of $200,000 in group dues.

St. Louis Police Sgt. Darren Wilson’s suspension without pay came amid an internal and criminal investigation of “financial irregularities” reported in December by members of the Ethical Society of Police.

The veteran cop is no relation to the former Ferguson, Mo., police officer with the same name, who shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown in August.

According to a Justice Department report set to be released soon, police officers in Ferguson, Mo., consistently and systematically violated the constitutional rights of the city’s residents by engaging in racially discriminatory policing. In addition, police officers reportedly made racist jokes about black people on their official email accounts.

The report is not limited, though, to the police department, and apparently extended to the city’s municipal courts as well. According to the DoJ, African-Americans were targeted for traffic tickets and fines at a disproportional rate in the majority-black city. 85 percent of traffic stops from 2012 to 2014 were of black citizens, who also made up 93 percent of all arrests during that same period. In addition, 90 percent of all citations 93 percent of jaywalking tickets were against black people.

Perez read a series of racist jokes uncovered from officials’ emails, including one aimed at President Barack Obama.