A South Daytona police officer, accused of punching a handcuffed suspect who was in the back of a patrol car in January, has been fired following an internal investigation. Officials said Detective Zach Pickett stood outside the patrol car, reaching in and hitting suspect Parker Beasley in the face.

Investigators said Beasley was ranting when Pickett allegedly punched him. Pickett was charged with misdemeanor battery last month following a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation and was terminated Tuesday from his job, effective immediately.

OF DOGS AND MEN explores a disturbing trend in American law enforcement: the shooting of pet dogs. From SWAT raids to simple calls and even visits to wrong addresses, we are seeing more and more incidents of officers using lethal force against a family pet they deem a threat. Are these rash reactions by officers in a system with little regard for our four-legged family members, or are they true peace officers doing their best in a dangerous job? OF DOGS AND MEN investigates the issue from all angles, interviewing law enforcement officers and experts, and taking a journey with pet owners through the tragedy of loss and pursuit of change in a legal system in which the very officers they challenge are an integral part.

An investigation is underway after two police dogs were found dead inside an unmarked SUV parked outside a Hialeah police officer's home.

Hialeah police say K-9 Officer Nelson Enriquez arrived at his home in Davie early Wednesday after completing his midnight shift and apparently left the dogs inside his vehicle. Investigators say the officer found the dogs around 7 p.m.

Davie police Sgt. Pablo Castaneda says his agency responded to a call from the home and found the two dogs.


The SUV was towed from the home late Wednesday. Davie police are handling the investigation.

The dogs were Jimmy, a 7-year-old bloodhound, and Hector, a 4-year-old Belgian Malinois.

Hialeah police say Enriquez is a 13-year veteran of the department and has been a K-9 handler for seven years.

...As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.

My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, "That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to "get the **** up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him...

What is the most obscure law you have used to cite/arrest someone? (self.ProtectAndServe)

I read something on reddit recently regarding officers with strong knowledge of their local laws using it to their advantage when they would be unable to prove a large crime was being committed but knew something was going on. What is the most obscure law you've used to protect and serve?

One of my good friends hit somebody with the heinous Virginia code of 18.2-102.2. Unauthorized use of a milk crate, mother ******.
There's plenty of moped drivers around here that have them strapped to their rides but no one has been enough of an ******* for me to actually put pen to paper for it. Yet. I will not retire before I write that one.

We have a statute against fortune telling. I will get someone for that one day. Also, people get pissed if I write them for Keys in Unattended Vehicle

The head of the Cleveland police department's patrol union said aspects of the agreement that mandates sweeping reforms to the city's police department could put officers in danger.

Officers could be hesitant to draw their guns because doing so would result in more paperwork under the terms of the agreement, Cleveland Police Patrolman's Association president Steve Loomis said Wednesday. The agreement requires an officer to complete a report each time he or she points a gun at a suspect.

"It's going to get somebody killed," Loomis said. "There's going to be a time when someone isn't going to want to do that paperwork, so he's going to keep that gun in its holster."

Cleveland and the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled the agreement, known as a consent decree, Tuesday. It is meant to transform a police department that too often used excessive force and failed to conduct thorough internal investigations, according to an investigation by the Justice Department. The agreement will become legally binding once approved by a federal judge.

Loomis said he believes the 105 pages of reforms are a response to high-profile incidents that have happened nationwide, rather than to incidents that have happened in Cleveland, including the 2012 police chase that saw 13 officers fire at two unarmed people 137 times, the police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the death of a mentally ill woman after officers forced her to the ground.

Part of the problem with making it a common practice to NOT hire people who do well on an IQ test is that you end up with a nearly endless list of stupid people on the police roster. Take these 3 testaments to the existence of Neanderthals, Sgt. Andy Mercado, Officer Dave Garza and Officer Tweena Dum of the Fresno police department. All three just graduated with honors in how not to behave toward the public and acing Assholery in public.

How this ignoramus passed a sergeant’s exam would raise the eyebrows of most domesticated cats. This non-Rhodes Scholar first approaches citizen activists Brian Sumner with his taser drawn for the imaginary offense of “vulgar gesturing.” Clearly on this day, Sgt. Mercado was determined to win the Fresno Police department’s scumbag prize on this day by detaining a man for an imaginary crime of gesturing, then illegally detaining him based on that imaginary crime and then arresting him for “resisting a lawful order.”

The solution to the hubris of the dastardly reprobate with a badge is to bust him down to a janitor. He has no business with a badge and a gun. For far too long police have behaved like a gang rather than the servants that they are. If they are going to be given the trust of the public, when they break that trust by arresting innocent people for imaginary crimes, they must be fired.

The specious case against Brian Sumner was dismissed but that didn’t bother Sgt. Mercado at all. He got overtime for going to court. Shame on you Fresno police.

Herold now sees how little she understood about policing, transparency, and the community back then. She’s now a District Commander in the Cincinnati Police Department, where more than a decade of negotiations have led to significant reforms. Herold believes that the changes made in the department are the best way to guarantee a good relationship between a city and its police force.

...

Looking back, the results of Cincinnati’s reform efforts are startling. Between 1999 and 2014, Cincinnati saw a 69 percent reduction in police use-of-force incidents, a 42 percent reduction in citizen complaints and a 56 percent reduction in citizen injuries during encounters with police, according to a report by Robin S. Engel and M. Murat Ozer of the Institute of Crime Science at the University of Cincinnati. Violent crimes dropped from a high of 4,137 in the year after the riots, to 2,352 last year. Misdemeanor arrests dropped from 41,708 in 2000 to 17,913 last year.

Yet it might not be so simple to adopt Cincinnati’s changes in other cities. It took a long time—five to ten years, by some counts—to get police to actually buy into the reforms. Nobody likes it when somebody comes into their workplace and tells them how to do their job. The changes Cincinnati adopted were nothing short of a complete turnaround in how the city approached incarceration, crime and its relationship with its residents. And to make sure they were adopted, the federal government had to apply constant pressure, reminding all parties involved about the need to stay vigilant about reform.

“In the early 2000s and late 90s, Cincinnati was just a hotbed of problems, and we got the city and the police department to agree to certain reforms,” said Mike Brickner, senior policy director with the ACLU of Ohio, which sued the city shortly before the riots over discriminatory policing practices. “It’s gratifying for me to see that people are coming back several years later and recognizing how successful it was.”

Some of the changes were small: The police department vowed to hold a press conference within 12 hours of any officer-involved shooting and to provide information as well as camera footage from the event. It agreed to track officers who received an inordinate number of complaints or who violated policies, and take disciplinary action if needed. It established a Citizen Complaint Authority with investigative and subpoena powers over police. It adopted new use-of-force policies, changed guidelines on when to use chemical spray, and established a mental-health response team to deal with incidents in which a suspect may have mental-health problems.

But those changes were tiny in contrast to what Herold and others say completely altered the department over the course of a decade: the adoption of a new strategy for how to police. The settlement agreement for the ACLU lawsuit, dubbed the Collaborative, required Cincinnati police to adopt community problem-oriented policing, or CPOP. The strategy required them to do fewer out-and-out arrests, and instead focus on solving the problems that cause people to commit crimes in the first place.

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