"CASEY MCDONALD IS WANTED BY THE U.S. MARSHALS WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA FUGITIVE TASK FORCE
(WPAFTF)FOR VIOLATING THE CONDITIONS OF HIS PAROLE ON ORIGINAL CHARGES OF POSSESSION WITH
INTENT TO DELIVER."

"Original Charge: Homicide, Attempted Homicide, and Aggravated Assault

Robert Lee KING is wanted by the Shelby County (TN) Sheriff’s Department for the brutal murder of his
girlfriend and the attempted first degree murder of his girlfriend’s daughter. "

There is little in the 400 pages of evidence a judge released last week to indicate why 42-year-old Gregory Rachel died during an encounter with the Mobile Police Department nearly three years ago. But the material, part of a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and individual defendants pending in U.S. District Court, does present an argument suggesting how it happened.

The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences concluded Rachel succumbed on May 1, 2012 to “excited delirium,” a spontaneous, medically dubious condition increasingly cited in the deaths of subjects in police custody. While his autopsy documented dozens of contusions and abrasions received at the hands of police officers and also found tertiary evidence of “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” Rachel’s manner of death was ruled a homicide.

...

The account continues to explain how the officers approached the residence and located Mr. Rachel in the front yard: “After receiving several commands from the officers, Mr. Rachel began to actively resist the officers’ efforts to place him in custody for domestic violence. During the physical confrontation, Mr. Rachel was tased with little or no effect and had to be physically restrained. Soon after the physical confrontation, Mr. Rachel began to show signs of medical distress. Mobile Fire-Rescue responded and transported Mr. Rachel to Providence Hospital where he died.”

But the complaint, which was amended in last month to remove former Police Chief Micheal Williams as a defendant, claims “at no time did Gregory Rachel offer resistance to the police officers.” Instead, it suggests Rachel fell to the ground after being tased, and when he began to pull off the electrified probes, the two responding officers, Christopher McCann and John Jackson, “began to kick and stomp” Rachel, while also using their batons “to physically beat” him.

Two other officers arrived on scene and the complaint claims that after Rachel was both handcuffed and shackled — “hogtied” as Officer McCann described it in deposition — “one or two of the officers were observed sitting on his back.”

It wasn’t until several minutes later, as the officers prepared to lift Rachel and place him in the back of a patrol car, did they notice he was nonresponsive.

A former San Francisco undercover police officer who stole money and property seized during drug searches in 2009 was sentenced in federal court Wednesday to three years and three months in prison.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said he found the violation of public trust by Edmond Robles, 47, of Danville, and two other former officers to be "very disturbing."

The sentence must "serve the purpose of giving notice to people who are given the trust of the community that the trust can't be violated without serious sanctions," Breyer said.

Robles, a 22-year member of the police force, was convicted by a jury in Breyer's court in San Francisco in December of five felonies related to the theft scheme.

The five counts were conspiracy to violate civil rights, two counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit theft from a federally funded program (namely, the Police Department) and theft.

Former Sgt. Ian Furminger, 47, of Pleasant Hill, was convicted of the first four of those charges. Breyer sentenced him last month to a slightly longer term of three years and five months.

...

Prosecutors presented evidence during the trial that Robles, Furminger and a third former officer, Reynaldo Vargas, stole thousands of dollars and Apple gift cards from drug suspects during four searches in San Francisco and one on Newark in 2009.

The officers were working as undercover detectives out of the Police Department's Mission Station at the time.

Vargas, 46, of Palm Desert, pleaded guilty to four counts two weeks before the trial and testified against his former colleagues.

He is due to be sentenced by Breyer on May 6 on the four charges of conspiracy to distribute drugs, distribution of marijuana, conspiracy to commit theft, and theft.

Both Furminger and Robles resigned after being convicted. Vargas was fired in 2012 for falsifying time cards.

Robles's defense attorney, Anthony Brass, referred briefly during the sentencing to the public furor that arose following the revelation last week that Furminger exchanged racist and homophobic text messages with four other officers in 2011 and 2012.

The formation of public policy or

the conduct of business by vote shall not be

conducted in closed meetings. All meetings

of any public body except the legislature

and the courts shall be public meetings, and

all persons desiring shall be permitted to

attend and listen to the deliberations and

proceedings. Reasonable efforts shall be

made to accommodate the use of audio and

video recording devices.

Almost a year after a Nevada deputy was exposed on video stealing $50,000 from a man under threat of the state’s forfeiture laws, accusing the man of crimes he could not prove, the deputy was arrested on a felony assault with a weapon charge.

Humboldt County sheriff’s deputy Lee Dove was arrested Tuesday by the Winnemucca Police Department, which so far has released little details other than Dove apparently pointed a weapon at somebody else at a convenience store.

Dove was not on-duty as he has been on administrative leave since January for an unspecified reason.

Former New Mexico State Police officer Elias Montoya, dismissed last year after firing three shots at a fleeing van occupied by a mother and her five children, has been hired as a deputy sheriff in Taos County, Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe confirmed Tuesday.

Montoya has said he was unaware the van was full of children and that he was aiming at a rear tire when he shot at the van as it sped away on NM 518 south of Taos in October 2013.

The gunfire followed a chaotic encounter that started when another officer pulled the van driver over for speeding. The incident was recorded in a State Police dash-cam video that went viral and attracted international news attention and commentary.

“I witnessed my son-in-law killed by the SWAT team I founded,” he said.

In 1974, Lawrence was elected sheriff of Davis County – in the northern suburbs of Salt Lake City. A year later, he launched the department’s first SWAT team, a specialized unit he envisioned for deescalating high-risk situations.

His preference was to resolve conflict without force, and his reputation for integrity became local lore. (He once wrote himself a parking ticket.)

...

In 2008, Lawrence’s son-in-law, Brian Wood, 36, had a mental breakdown after a fight with his wife, barricaded himself in his truck when police arrived and threatened suicide. What followed was a 12-hour standoff, covered wall-to-wall by local media.

Lawrence arrived quickly, responding in seven minutes, he says. He offered help, but was told to stand back.

The former sheriff assured his family they could trust the two officers on the scene. But that confidence evaporated as the police presence quickly grew to dozens. More than 100 police officers showed up including 46 from the SWAT team Lawrence founded.

Sharpshooters perched on nearby roofs and military hardware rolled in.

Far from defusing the situation, the SWAT team’s actions were actually escalating it, Lawrence said, counter to everything he had preached decades earlier.

“I was cursing, saying, ‘What the hell are you doing? What the hell are you doing?’” he said.

Police tried using tear gas and flash-bang grenades to get Wood to surrender.

Lawrence said that his son-in-law was both badly wounded and unarmed as the standoff continued.

By 10 p.m., Wood was dead, killed by police gunfire. Lawrence says the final shot was fired by a sniper on the ground.

In local media coverage, police officials said they didn't intend to make the scene resemble a war zone.

...

He knew he was in jail, but he didn’t know why.

Eventually, Abreham Zemedagegehu learned that he had been accused of stealing an iPad – an iPad whose owner later found it. He spent the next six weeks in jail, unable to communicate with his jailers because he is deaf. He described a frightening, isolated experience in which medical procedures were performed without his consent and he feared for his safety.

Zemedagegehu sued the Arlington County sheriff last month in federal court, saying his treatment failed to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I felt like I was losing my mind,” Zemedagegehu said through an interpreter in an interview at his lawyer’s office. “I thought Virginia would give me an interpreter and they said no. That’s why I felt lost.”

What happens when municipalities have no financial incentive to write tickets?

They don’t write many.

Consider Madison County. In the Land of Lincoln, speeding and other traffic infractions are state violations. Municipalities get very little revenue from the tickets.

In 2013, police in Madison County wrote just 17 tickets per 100 residents, about half the rate of Missouri and about one-quarter of the rate of St. Louis County.

Consider Ferguson, population 21,111, which wrote 11,822 tickets last year. Or Creve Coeur, population 17,865, which wrote 14,382 tickets.

Compare that to cities of similar size in Madison County: Alton, population 27,690, where officers wrote 6,653 traffic tickets in 2013, the last full year reported.

Or Edwardsville, population 24,663, where officers wrote 3,128 tickets in 2013.

Edwardsville Police Chief Jay Keevan likes it that way.

“None of us want an officer to have a financial incentive to write citations,” he said.

According to a lawsuit filed this week, a police officer put a child in a chokehold and pepper sprayed a woman during a preschool graduation.

Last summer, Amanda Scott and her young sister Donnesha Bennett were attending the preschool graduation ceremony at the Inner Harbor East Academy. The event was for Scott’s two twin girls. when the school principal and an on-duty officer asked Bennett to leave the property.

Scott explains that she saw her younger sister having a heated discussion with the school principal and an on-duty officer. Despite complying with requests to leave the property, Cpl. Timothy Kelly grabbed Scott by the arm.

Upon being grabbed by the officer, Scott told him that she was pregnant, according to the lawsuit. At that point, instead of releasing her, Kelly “escalated the physical encounter without provocation,” the complaint states. The officer then reportedly punched her in the face and shot her with pepper spray.

According to the lawsuit “Kelly struck plaintiff Scott about the head and face with closed fists, deployed pepper spray aimed at her face, and subsequently struck her with the pepper spray can.”

Bennett attempted to intervene and prevent the officer from hurting her sister, so he put the young girl in a chokehold.

After both girls were thrown around and manhandled by the officer, they were both placed under arrest. Scott was charged with second-degree assault, assault on a police officer, resisting arrest and trespassing. Bennett is a minor and was not formally charged, but was arrested.

Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, (1, 2) in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.(3) A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24% (4), indicating that domestic violence is 2-4 times more common among police families than American families in general. A police department that has domestic violence offenders among its ranks will not effectively serve and protect victims in the community.5, 6, 7, 8 Moreover, when officers know of domestic violence committed by their colleagues and seek to protect them by covering it up, they expose the department to civil liability.7

D.C. police investigators are looking into how the department botched the rape case of an 11-year-old almost seven years ago, arresting her instead for filing a false report, reports The Washington Post.

According to her parents, even though their daughter, Danielle Hicks-Best [who allowed her name to be used in the story], showed signs of sexual assault, she was charged with filing a false report and they agreed to a poorly worded and confusing plea bargain on her behalf making her a ward of the state.

...

In 2008, Danielle was repeatedly raped by two men in a basement apartment which was reported to the police after she had gone missing overnight. A rape kit taken at Children’s National Medical Center proved conclusively that she had been sexually assaulted, yet detectives failed to follow up, even after she took them to the scene of the crime.

Less than one month later, Danielle was abducted once again and raped by a different man and then later by the same men from before. After being released, she was driven home by a passerby, and then taken to the hospital again by her parents where a detective came to speak with her.

Detective William Weeks of the Youth Investigations Division tracked down one of the men accused of raping her. But the 22-year-old man said the 11-year-old girl had claimed she was sixteen and was willing to have sex with any men in the house. Weeks confronted her about the assault and he said her story became confused and muddled.

“Over the next three-hour period, the Complainant proceeded to tell Detective Weeks a myriad of stories. . . . In the presence of her parents the Complainant continuously changed her stories whenever confronted with inconsistencies from the previous tale. It became apparent that the Complainant was determined to get any story across that she could, regardless of how incredible it might be,” Weeks’s report said

In a recent interview, Hicks-Best said, “I don’t remember giving lots of different accounts. What I remember was being confused, and I was exhausted, and I was still wearing the same clothes and I felt horrible.”

Although a rape kit once again showed that she had been sexually assaulted, Weeks went to the Office of the Attorney General and requested a custody order so he could charge her with making a false police report, which was granted. Weeks then marked the child sexual abuse case as “closed.”

A federal lawsuit filed by the former head of Atlanta’s crime lab accused the Fulton County district attorney and the Atlanta chief of police of being lawbreakers who acted to secure convictions at the expense of justice.

Donald Mikko pulls no punches in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court. In it he accused District Attorney Paul Howard and Chief George Turner and one of Howard’s top prosecutors of obstruction of justice and racketeering.

The lawsuit contends Howard lobbied Turner to fire Mikko because the crime lab chief agreed to testify for the defense in a Florida trial and provided an evidentiary report contradicting the prosecution.

Mikko also contends Turner and Howard also conspired to violate his First Amendment rights by punishing him and interfered with a valid contract he had as an expert witness in the Florida case.

“Prosecutors have a duty is to seek justice, not merely to convict,” said attorney Matthew Billips, who is representing Mikko. “What Paul Howard was doing to that defendant in Florida was trying to help another prosecutor convict irrespective of whether it was justice.”

The case became a racketeering case, the lawsuit contends, because Howard and Assistant District Attorney Sheila Ross conspired with the Florida prosecutor to obstruct justice by interfering with Mikko assisting the defense.

...

Sheriff Mike Scott says one of his deputies should be fired after he did not show up at a 911 call.

Officials say a woman is now dead. Neighbors say they found her lying on the ground with ants crawling over her body, her phone in one hand, and medication in the other.

“If what I know is in fact validated and proven through this investigation, my estimation is that it leaves him unfit to wear this uniform and as long as I’m the sheriff, he’ll not ever wear it again,” said Scott.

Sources tell WINK News that Friday afternoon, just after 1 p.m., someone called 911 from a house near Ortiz Avenue. Nobody spoke on the other end of the line.

“We know that we dispatched a 911 call, we know that it was a valid call,” said Scott.

Operators stayed on the line, and a deputy named Yvan Fernandez was dispatched.

Fernandez said he was on his way. But Scott says that a preliminary investigation shows Deputy Fernandez did not go, and it appears that instead, he may have gone to lunch.

Police said Thursday that bullets and a stun gun were taken from an unmarked police vehicle in Sanford.

The officer who was assigned the car had parked it outside his home overnight.

The Sanford Police Department said a Taser X26, a cartridge for that stun gun and two loaded magazines to fit a handgun were taken from the vehicle. While the magazines were fully loaded with bullets, the gun was not in the car.

"Officers are required to take a reasonable amount of effort to make sure that the equipment issued to them is secured as securely as possible," Sanford police spokeswoman Shannon Cordingly said.

The veteran investigator parked the unmarked car at his home in Sanford's historic district Wednesday after his day shift. By morning, somebody had been inside and stolen the items.

"It was not obvious that the vehicle was broken into, so one thing we will look at is if the vehicle was secured properly," Cordingly said. "If the vehicle was not locked then the officer will definitely face disciplinary action."