Fresno's deputy police chief was among four people arrested on federal drug charges, including conspiracy to distribute oxycodone and heroin, authorities said Thursday.

Deputy Police Chief Keith Foster, 51, was arrested for conspiracy to distribute and/or possess with the intent to distribute oxycodone, heroin and marijuana, the Federal Bureau of Investigations said in a statement.

Foster and Fresno residents Rafael Guzman, Jennifer Donebedian and Randy Flowers were arrested as result of a yearlong joint investigation by the FBI and ATF that involved wiretaps and surveillance, the FBI said.

Foster, a 29-year-veteran of the Fresno Police Department, oversaw patrol operations for the department's four police districts. He has been a deputy chief since January 2007.
Foster has been put on paid administrative leave while the Fresno police conduct an internal investigation into alleged criminal and policy violations, the Fresno Police Department said in a statement.

"This is a very sad day for the Fresno Police Department, the citizens of Fresno, the law enforcement profession, and for me personally," Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said.
An affidavit by U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent Sherri L. Reynolds shows Foster told Flowers in a Dec. 23, 2014, phone call that he had "100 of those things" for Flowers.

Foster picked up a prescription for 100 oxycodone tablets at a Rite Aid pharmacy drive-thru and then drove his black BMW to Flowers' home on West Church Avenue in a pocket of southwest Fresno just outside city limits.

Foster picked up another prescription of oxycodone pills on Jan. 27, 2015, and then drove to Flowers' home.

Flowers has a criminal history in Fresno County that includes a 1988 conviction for possession of cocaine base for sale; a 1994 conviction for being a felon and addict in possession of a firearm; and a 2010 conviction for delivery of a schedule II controlled substance from Marion County, Oregon, the affidavit says.

Neither the FBI nor the Fresno Police Department could provide the name of a defense attorney to comment on the charges.

45-8-213. Privacy in communications.

(1) Except as provided in 69-6-104, a person commits the offense of violating privacy in communications if the person knowingly or purposely:

(a) with the purpose to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy, or offend, communicates with a person by electronic communication and uses obscene, lewd, or profane language, suggests a lewd or lascivious act, or threatens to inflict injury or physical harm to the person or property of the person. The use of obscene, lewd, or profane language or the making of a threat or lewd or lascivious suggestions is prima facie evidence of an intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy, or offend.

(b) uses an electronic communication to attempt to extort money or any other thing of value from a person or to disturb by repeated communications the peace, quiet, or right of privacy of a person at the place where the communications are received;

(c) records or causes to be recorded a conversation by use of a hidden electronic or mechanical device that reproduces a human conversation without the knowledge of all parties to the conversation. This subsection (1)(c) does not apply to:
(i) elected or appointed public officials or to public employees when the transcription or recording is done in the performance of official duty;
(ii) persons speaking at public meetings;
(iii) persons given warning of the transcription or recording, and if one person provides the warning, either party may record; or
(iv) a health care facility, as defined in 50-5-101, or a government agency that deals with health care if the recording is of a health care emergency telephone communication made to the facility or agency.

...

(4) "Electronic communication" means any transfer between persons of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic, or photo-optical system.

When it was all said and done, I received a ticket interference/resisting a peace officer. My brother received a ticket for having a cracked windshield.

Police originally reported that the blood on his brain, broken orbital bone, and four broken ribs inflicted upon Dent came about as they acted in self-defense. They even went so far as to charge the retired grandfather with resisting arrest, assault on an officer, and fleeing police. All of these charges would ultimately be dropped after the judge watched the video.

However, a possession charge from the evening remained as the officers claimed they found crack cocaine under the passenger seat of the vehicle.

Dent was offered a plea deal that would include probation and expunging his record in six months, but Dent has refused to admit guilt for a crime he did not commit.

After being choked, punched 16 times, and repeatedly tasered- the beaten and bloodied man insisted that the drugs were planted in his car; a claim many might roll their eyes at and call a likely story. Dent was so adamant, however, that he insisted the hospital blood test him. All tests came back as clean as his criminal record.

Dent, in 57 years, had never had a single run in with the law and absolutely no drugs or alcohol were found in his system.

Now, newly released footage appears to prove Dent’s innocence. It shows the officer who is seen choking Dent in the video, William “Robocop” Melendez, pull what appears to be a plastic bag filled with a white substance from his pocket before searching the battered man’s vehicle.

The video is a bit blurry, and it is difficult to make out for sure what is going on, but a quick glance at Robocop’s history certainly does not make the image less suspicious.

The former Detroit officer has an extremely long list of offenses, including having “been sued at least four times for excessive use of force. He has cost the city more than $1 million in legal settlements and received more citizen complaints than any other in the city,” the LA Times reported in 2003.

...

During a joint investigation by the FBI and Detroit Police Department, he was indicted for corruption, falsifying police reports, and planting drugs/guns on suspects who had been illegally arrested. The officer was somehow acquitted by a jury, despite other police testifying against him.

The car accidents city police officer Pedro Abad was involved in during the past 10 years include one in which he rear-ended a car at a stoplight, another in which he crashed into a highway guardrail, and a third in which he slammed through the front of a store, police records show.

Abad, the driver in a March 20 Staten Island crash that left two men dead, had eight prior accidents on his record, including two that led to drunken driving charges.

Police in Ohio seem to not be able to understand the job very well. Local news got a story of a Toledo cop punching a handcuffed suspect in the face. The female officer walks over and hauls off and hits the handcuffed man right in face as he bends down to allow the officer behind him to adjust the cuffs. “Police brutality captured at its finest,” says Brad Bollinger, the neighbor who shot the cell phone video. Even the Toledo Public Relations officer agrees it is police brutality just from looking at the video!

...

You can even see that when he is struck, the folks on the sidewalk start to react and the cops go rushing over as if they are going to do something to that officer. And they should expect that the family of the victim would want to retaliate against the attacker! Especially when eight cops stand around and do nothing when one of theirs assaults their brother or father, or whatever! These people then have to watch a gang of thugs that just allowed one of theirs to assault their family member, take that person to the police station, out of their sight, and trust that he will make it there alive? I call bullshit!!

To emphasize this point even further. As I write this, I am informed by a Toledo Cop Blocker that another person has died in TPD custody last night. So we are supposed to trust police with all this information we have about the bad ones? Especially when we are finding out daily how this is not a once in while occurrence.

Florida, in 2014, recorded an all-time high of 346 inmate deaths inside of their prisons. Although the prison population has remained relatively steady the past five years, the death toll of prisoners reached an all-time high for the state in 2014.