The dash cam also shows the moments leading up to the crash. Supposedly, Robertson saw a “speeding” SUV traveling in the opposite direction and he made a U-turn to follow the vehicle. However, after completing the U-turn, Robertson came to a complete stop in the road. He stated that he did so to “check the speed of the driver on a radar unit” and “then tried to reach the speeding driver ahead of him.” However, there is no need for a police vehicle to be at a complete stop to use the radar.

During this ‘chase’, Robertson did not follow proper protocol, or any protocol for that matter. He chose not to turn his emergency lights on, nor did he activate his siren. In fact, he didn’t even call into dispatch about the supposedly speeding vehicle. It’s extremely hard to believe that a veteran officer would not turn on his lights or siren, or even call into dispatch if he was actually ‘chasing’ a suspect. One of the theories being passed around is Robertson was simply performing a 0-60 test, or given the accident report, a 0-100 mph test.

Regardless of what actually occurred, an innocent man is dead and family is left grieving from the grossly incompetent actions of another cop. Robertson’s only punishment was nothing more than a paid vacation, in the form of ‘administrative leave’ for two months before he was allowed to return to work at the police department.

Morales’ family has sued the village of Wheeling and Robertson as an individual defendant. The suit claims negligence on Robertson’s part and the intentional infliction of emotional distress by the village for failing to ensure that all of Morales’ body parts were removed from the scene following the initial investigation. The suit seeks damages in excess of $50,000. As it turns out, the police left body parts of 20-year-old Fredi Morales at the scene of his death for up to 36 hours.

“The allegations contained in the lawsuit filed two days after the accident were without merit and we believe the amended complaint is no different,” Sfondilis said. “The claims asserted in this lawsuit will be answered fully in court at the appropriate time.”

The Department of Justice announced last week it would no longer enforce federal marijuana laws on Native lands, which theoretically opened the door for tribes to pass the same sort of progressive pot legislation that some states have. But some are asking why the DOJ took that step when it's not clear that the tribes themselves want to legalize the stuff.

Thirteen people were arrested and more than 11,000 marijuana plants were seized during raids on two properties on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department reported Friday.

It was just past 9 a.m., and I was still under the covers. The only visible target was my head.

In the shouting and commotion, I felt an instant familiarity. I’d been here before. This was a raid.

I had done this a few dozen times myself, 6,000 miles away from my Alexandria, Va., apartment. As an Army infantryman in Iraq, I’d always been on the trigger side of the weapon. Now that I was on the barrel side, I recalled basic training’s most important firearm rule: Aim only at something you intend to kill.

I had conducted the same kind of raid on suspected bombmakers and high-value insurgents. But the Fairfax County officers in my apartment were aiming their weapons at a target whose rap sheet consisted only of parking tickets and an overdue library book.

My situation was terrifying. Lying facedown in bed, I knew that any move I made could be viewed as a threat. Instinct told me to get up and protect myself. Training told me that if I did, these officers would shoot me dead.

In a panic, I asked the officers what was going on but got no immediate answer. Their tactics were similar to the ones I used to clear rooms during the height of guerilla warfare in Iraq. I could almost admire it — their fluid sweep from the bedroom doorway to the distant corner. They stayed clear of one another’s lines of fire in case they needed to empty their Sig Sauer .40-caliber pistols into me.

They were well-trained, their supervisor later told me. But I knew that means little when adrenaline governs an imminent-danger scenario, real or imagined. Triggers are pulled. Mistakes are made.

...

Earlier in the week, the managers of my apartment complex moved me to a model unit while a crew repaired a leak in my dishwasher. But they hadn’t informed my temporary neighbors. So when one resident noticed the door slightly cracked open to what he presumed was an unoccupied apartment, he looked in, saw me sleeping and called the police to report a squatter.

Sitting on the edge of the bed dressed only in underwear, I laughed. The situation was ludicrous and embarrassing. My only mistake had been failing to make sure the apartment door was completely closed before I threw myself into bed the night before.

I told the officers to check my driver’s license, nodding toward my khaki pants on the floor. It showed my address at a unit in the same complex. As the fog of their chaotic entry lifted, the officers realized it had been an unfortunate error. They walked me into the living room and removed the cuffs, though two continued to stand over me as the third contacted management to confirm my story. Once they were satisfied, they left.

When I later visited the Fairfax County police station to gather details about what went wrong, I met the shift commander, Lt. Erik Rhoads. I asked why his officers hadn’t contacted management before they raided the apartment. Why did they classify the incident as a forced entry, when the information they had suggested something innocuous? Why not evaluate the situation before escalating it?

Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers’ actions “on point.” It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.

...

This is where Rhoads is wrong. We’ve seen this troubling approach to law enforcement nationwide, in militarized police responses to nonviolent protesters and in fatal police shootings of unarmed citizens. The culture that encourages police officers to engage their weapons before gathering information promotes the mind-set that nothing, including citizen safety, is more important than officers’ personal security. That approach has caused public trust in law enforcement to deteriorate.


...

Rhoads, the Fairfax County police lieutenant, was upfront about this mind-set. He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. According to reporting by The Washington Post, those rules are established in police training, which often emphasizes a violent response over deescalation. Recruits spend an average of eight hours learning how to neutralize tense situations; they spend more than seven times as many hours at the weapons range.

Of course, officer's’ safety is vital, and they’re entitled to defend themselves and the communities they serve. But they’re failing to see the connection between their aggressive postures and the hostility they’ve encountered in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and other communities. When you level assault rifles at protesters, you create animosity. When you kill an unarmed man on his own property while his hands are raised — as Fairfax County police did in 2013 — you sow distrust. And when you threaten to Taser a woman during a routine traffic stop (as happened to 28-year-old Sandra Bland, who died in a Texas jail this month), you cultivate a fear of police. This makes policing more dangerous for everyone.

I understood the risks of war when I enlisted as an infantryman. Police officers should understand the risks in their jobs when they enroll in the academy, as well. That means knowing that personal safety can’t always come first. That is why it’s service. That’s why it’s sacrifice.

Police were called to the scene around 7:00 pm last Friday after a man reported that he'd been in an altercation with Zareck.

Ten officers were deployed to stop the disabled man.

Three shots were heard as Zareck screamed in agony and began flailing about in his wheelchair before officers swarmed him and fired a taser at him.

The LAPD told CBS Los Angeles the man swung a pole at officers when they tried to take him into custody.

Zareck was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon and brought to a nearby hospital to be treated for his injuries.

'We are shocked. We are disappointed,' said Eric Ares of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a Skid Row advocacy group that released the video.

There is an interesting story out of Massachusetts where an official at the Massachusetts Civil Service Commission found that the Methuen Police Department admitted that job applicants were given higher scores if they indicated that they would never arrest a fellow officer for drunk driving and other applicants were downgraded for saying that they would apply the law equally to all citizens — officers and non-officers alike.

Christopher C. Bowman, chairman of the Civil Service Commission wrote in a July 9 decision that “the City turned the interview process upside down. There is simply no valid basis to award the highest points to candidates who express a willingness to apply one set of rules to strangers and another set of rules to friends and family members.”

Methuen asked candidates how they would handle a situation in which where they found a driver in a crash who appeared to be intoxicated. The candidate was then asked if the response would change if it involved a relative or a police officer they knew from a neighboring town. The questions are obviously designed to elevate honest officers but was instead used to select dishonest ones. When candidates said they wouldn’t arrest family or fellow officers, the hiring panel noted the person “knows discretion.” Indeed, Bowman said that “Some of the interview panelists actually heaped high praise on those candidates who stated that they would arrest a stranger but not arrest a friend or family member based on the same facts, citing their understanding of ‘discretion.’”

While Methuen Mayor Stephen N. Zanni (right) said he plans to review the police hiring process and procedures, there was notably no assurance that officials rewarding such pledges to turn a blind eye to crime would be fired. It would seem that this is a fairly good measure of an officer’s inability to serve. The grading officer or officers not only selected candidates based on their professed bias but actively sought officers who would ignore crimes.

Driving home today I got lost and made a wrong turn. In an unfamiliar area I drove slowly but made the mistake of not seeing a poorly marked rotary. I stopped midway through it when I realized I screwed up and fortunately there were no close calls or potential accidents. Only a single oncoming car (not the medford cop/detective in the video, he was on the other side) that had fully stopped before the rotary seeing my stupid mistake. After I stopped and realized it was too late I just continued out of the way and back onto the correct road in front of me. This man starts tailgating me and puts his high beams on in his Red Chevy Silverado pick up truck. He then yells how I'm an ******* and that he is going to hurt me, and well the rest is in the video.

The date is incorrect as my dashcam apparently was set wrong. I very rarely ever need to pull videos off of it over the period of time I've owned it and just didn't notice the date mistake. The time however is right.

I also never gave my address to him, he found it by running my plates/license so him saying I'm not registered is false. I have had that info updated since I moved.

A Medford police detective was placed on administrative leave Monday morning after a driver's dash camera captured him threatening and yelling at the driver after a traffic stop late Sunday night, 5 Investigates reported.

The officer was identified by Medford police as Detective Stephen Lebert, who was off-duty when he stopped the driver who had made a wrong turn going through a rotary.

You might think that legislation should be freely accessible as a matter of course, but the state of Georgia begs to differ. It's suing Public.Resource.Org owner Carl Malamud for allegedly violating copyright by publishing the annotated versions of Georgia's laws (that is, the ones that truly reflect the legislative process) online. While it's fine to publish the basic, note-free laws, the state argues that you should pay Lexis Nexis up to $378 to read the context-laden versions. The state claims that it would have to dip into tax dollars if it wanted to make this information free, and citizens would supposedly be deprived of "valuable analysis and guidance" if it wasn't published at all.

Malamud isn't likely to back down. He has long argued that the US discourages copyright on laws, since you have the right to know what your legislature is doing. He also fended off earlier pressure from Oregon to remove documents from his site. However, there's no certainty that Malamud will succeed this time around. He's undoubtedly publishing unauthorized scans -- his only chance might be to convince the court that Georgia is abusing copyright when it puts some of its public record behind a paywall.

...at the center of the issue is not Georgia's basic legal code – that is made readily available online and off – but the annotated version of it. That annotated version is frequently used by the courts to make decisions of law, and as such Malamud decided it should also be made easily accessible online.

Georgia says that information is copyrighted, however, and it wants him to stop publishing it. Currently you can access the information through legal publisher Lexis Nexis, either by paying $378 for a printed copy or by going through an unusual series of online steps from Georgia's General Assembly website through to Lexis Nexis' relevant webpages (going direct to the relevant Lexis Nexis webpages will give you a blank page).

Malamud argues that the law should not be subject to any form of copyright provisions and has previously put forward a legal argument that presumably he will offer in response to the lawsuit.

It is a long-held tenet of American law that there is no copyright in the law. This is because the law belongs to the people and in our system of democracy we have the right to read, know, and speak the laws by which we choose to govern ourselves. Requiring a license before allowing citizens to read or speak the law would be a violation of deeply-held principles in our system that the laws apply equally to all.

He then quotes some supreme court decisions in support of his view.

Rutherford can be heard swearing and telling officers he didn't do anything as he was pressed onto the hood of the squad car. Westfall kept his elbow and arm on Rutherford's face for several minutes before switching to his hand to keep the suspect's head on the hood of the car.

Westfall is facing a misdemeanor criminal charge of unnecessary assault by a police officer and administrative review by the police department following the July 10 incident. A veteran of the police force since 2006, Westfall has been placed on paid administrative leave.

In addition to the police video, the Journal obtained full reports of the criminal investigation into the incident conducted by the Idaho State Police.

“Are we going to prosecute officers when they make a mistake? Are we going to terminate a career and prosecute over one event?”

The Safety Employee Benefits Association, which represents 3,400 sworn officers in San Bernardino County including the deputies and command staff whose names were released, is providing financial assistance for legal representation for the deputies.

“Our job as a union is to support each and every member,” said Laren Leichliter, SEBA president in a news release. “The financial assistance for legal representation is something these deputies have paid into as part of their membership of SEBA and their service as law enforcement professionals. It is our duty to ensure our members have the same right to legal representation — and the notion of being innocent until proven guilty — as any private citizen would.”

The 10 officials involved in the beating were identified in a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department news release as Sgt. James Evans, deputies Nicholas Downey, Scott Hamilton, David Moore, Dominic Moody, Michael Phelps, Raymond Perez, Tyler McGee, Charles Foster, and Detective William Doemner.

Following the beating, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pay Pusok $650,000.

“The sole purpose of this agreement for both parties is to avoid the costs involved in litigation,” board Chairman James Ramos said in a statement at the time of the vote. “This agreement is a fair outcome for everyone involved, including the taxpayers.”

All of the personnel named by the Sheriff’s Department remain on paid administrative as criminal and administrative investigations continued, according to Monday’s news release.

Rambo, a one-and-a-half-year-old pit bull, is going through more pain than most humans will ever feel. He was struck by two bullets.

"Both front paws, at least three toes have to be amputated and his hind leg- he's got to have surgery or they have to amputate it," described his owner Brittany House.

Gunshots fired from a Tampa police officer's firearm caused the injuries.

According to a report, officers showed up to Rambo's house Friday evening regarding a child custody dispute. At the time, the dog was said to be on a leash attached to a post out front.

The report says the dog "aggressively lunged from the porch towards the officers." It says the officer was "forced to fire two rounds."

Owner, Brittany House isn't buying that.

"I think it's wrong. My dog wouldn't hurt anybody. He's so lovable and sweet," she said.

Tampa police officials say a neighbor gave a sworn statement saying the officer had no choice but to shoot, but one we spoke with painted a much different picture.

"When we told them it was a dog, that's when the dog came from under the house. When the dog came from under the house, both officers looked. When they went back, the dog was just looking, so he went with his first instinct. Bang-bang," recalled Monte Bowens.

The city of Tampa is working with Rambo's owner on treatment. She says the city has already paid $2,000 in emergency vet bills. She would also like an apology from the police department.

"I feel they do have a choice. They don't have to be so quick to pull out a gun," she added.

TPD isn’t commenting on the shooting, citing an on-going internal affairs investigation.