A white former police chief will have to spend a year under home detention but won't have to serve any prison time in the 2011 shooting death of an unarmed black man.

Prosecutors agreed Tuesday to drop a murder charge against 38-year-old Richard Combs, the former police chief of the small town of Eutawville, in exchange for his guilty plea to misconduct in office. The murder charge carried a penalty of 30 years to life.

Circuit Judge Edgar Dickson suspended a 10-year prison sentence for Combs as long as he completes his home detention and five years of probation.

Combs stood trial twice on the murder charge, but both cases ended with hung juries. Defense attorney Wally Fayssoux said Combs was ready to end a four-year ordeal.

"My client is financially and emotionally exhausted," Fayssoux said.

Bernard Bailey's family told the judge he was a good man who stayed out of trouble and was targeted for arrest by an officer who was on a power trip, which set the tragedy in motion.

"We have been on a mission of justice. We know the outcome of this trial will not help Walter. But perhaps it will help some other family, some other young man," said Bailey's sister, JoAnn Bailey-Lawton.

Eutawville suspended Combs after the shooting and dismissed him several months later. The town reached a $400,000 wrongful death settlement with Bailey's family.

Combs shot Bailey in May 2011 as he tried to arrest him on an obstruction of justice charge weeks after he argued about his daughter's traffic ticket on the side of a highway. Eutawville is a town of 300 people about 50 miles southeast of Columbia.

Bailey came to Town Hall to discuss the ticket and Combs told him he was under arrest. Bailey stormed out and got in his pickup truck and Combs followed, authorities said.

Bailey was shot three times as he backed his truck out. Prosecutors said Combs was trying to arrest Bailey on a trumped up charge, was not threatened and could have stepped out of the way.

Combs testified he was leaning into Bailey's pickup and had just seconds to react. They said he had no pepper spray or stun gun, which left him no option but his gun. He was the only officer in the town.

Combs had been a police officer for several jurisdictions for 10 years after serving time in the Marines. He won't be a law officer again, Fayssoux said.

"He has to completely start over. He was branded a racist," Fayssoux said after the hearing. "All of that wasn't true."

Combs' guilty plea to the lesser charge was a good outcome because it punishes him for "a totality of poor judgment," Solicitor David Pascoe said.

The jury in the first case voted 9-3 to convict Combs. The jury in the second case voted 8-4 to convict, with four jurors wanting to convict Combs of murder, four wanting to convict him of voluntary manslaughter and four who thought he was not guilty, Pascoe said in a hearing at the Orangeburg County courthouse.

Fayssoux said he thought the juries were leaning even closer to an acquittal for Combs, but didn't give numbers.

Combs was one of four South Carolina police officers charged with felonies for on-duty shootings in the past year. The officers in the other three cases are awaiting trials.

Hunters in San Angelo are upset after a recent incident with guards from Goodfellow Air Force Base. On Tuesday, the opening day of dove season in Texas, six hunters were detained by base personnel while traveling through private farmland adjacent to the base. The property was leased by the company that organized the hunt, Wildlife Systems, and had been used previously for hunting. Despite that, 17th Training Wing Security Forces entered the property and detained the hunting party—which reportedly also included the property owner.

“I’m disappointed in our local Goodfellow Airforce Base Security for what they did today,” wrote Greg Simons, the operator of Wildlife Systems, on Facebook. “On a farm field that we lease that’s adjacent to the Base, surrounded by a security fence, they swarmed our group of 6 hunters, made them lay on their belly, spread eagle, for almost 30 minutes at gunpoint, two of them on asphalt in almost 100 degree temps and would not let them move, with our hunters pleading with them. One was laying in a red ant bed and they would not let him move.”

Base officials later stated that the hunters were detained because they were believed to be a threat, especially due to their proximity to the base. After it was determined that the hunters were only after doves, base officials said they were promptly released. According to the San Angelo Standard-Times, the hunters actually met with local police and wildlife wardens just to make sure such an incident would not occur.

“What’s even more amazing is that our local television news was there and minutes earlier had finished filming an interview on the importance of hunting to our local economy. Appears they may have also filmed this very unfortunate event,” Simons wrote. “Seems to me that Goodfellow should provide a formal apology to some folks. I’m thankful to our local police department for intervening and providing some relief to this matter.”

Sure enough, the local news crew, KIDY, did record footage of the incident. You can see the video below.

Pearland police released a timeline and dashcam video of a traffic stop of former NFL player Lamar Lathon after his claims that he was mistreated by the officer.Lathon, 47, was pulled over for speeding in the early hours of Tuesday morning at the intersection of Shadow Creek Parkway at Almeda Road.Pearland police said the former Houston Oilers player was talking on his cell phone when the officer approached and asked for his license and registration.

The officer three times told Lathon not to reach under his car seat, but he did, police said.The officer then drew his weapon and again told Lathon not to reach under his seat, according to police. When Lathon brought his hands back into view with his wallet, the officer holstered his weapon, police said.Pearland police said the officer returned to his vehicle.

Once a second officer arrived, the first officer asked Lathon to exit the vehicle. Lathon, according to police, can be heard in the video saying, "With all the stuff that's happening and I'm a big guy and you're a little guy."

Lathon got out of the vehicle and the officer told him he was going to search the car for weapons. Lathon objected because the officer pulled a gun on him and he was only
reaching for his wallet. The officer searched the car, then gave Lathon a speeding ticket.

Pearland police released a statement that read, "Based on review of the video footage, it is the position of the Pearland Police Department that the response of the officers involved in this traffic stop was professional and within both the law and policies of this agency. The primary officer was tactically aware, maintained control of the scene and attempted to de-escalate a volatile situation brought on by a driver who refused to follow directions and whose primary complaint seemed to be the issuance of a citation."

Since when has it been illegal to drink out of a brown bag in public?

Shawn Randall Thomas was unlawfully detained and arrested for drinking a non-alcoholic beverage in New York City last month.

On August 28, 2015, Thomas was walking home while drinking a malta in a brown bag.
Officer Kevin McAlister (badge number 17304) saw Thomas walking with the drink and approached him demanding to see identification.

Thomas refused, stating that he wasn’t breaking the law. McAlister assumed that Thomas was drinking alcohol in public.

As the officer asked to see the container – Thomas refused. McAlister proceeded to arrest Thomas for “open container.”

Handcuffed and in the police vehicle, the officers recognized that the beverage in Thomas’ brown bag was non-alcoholic; so they let him go.

However, before they removed the handcuffs, police confiscated Thomas’ wallet, cell phone and identification, a clear violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. Especially when it became clear he had committed no crime or violated any city ordinance. But those were eventually returned to him.

Thomas has retained ACLU legal backing in the past for Constitutional violations from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. He has also received a $3,500 settlement from the NYPD from a 2006 incident where he was wrongly arrested for video recording police.

That image above is Detective Raymond Mott of the Lake Arthur Police Department (LAPD—but not that LAPD). He has admitted as much according to the Jennings Daily News. The photo began circulating on social media and was picked up by the newspaper starting quite a stir—since he's straight up clearly in the Klu Klux Klan. The police chief of the Lake Arthur PD, Ray Marcantel is saying that if Mott doesn't resign by today, Marcantel will ask the town council to fire him. Raymond Mott has an answer that is so frightening it begs the question how this guy got his job in the first place.

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A former Metro Police captain who resigned rather than be demoted for helping a Guns N' Roses guitarist use the department's helicopter for an elaborate wedding proposal is poised to get his job back, have his record cleared and be paid what he would have earned since Dec. 20, 2013, when he left the department.

A state agency that resolves disputes between public agencies and employees ordered Metro Police Friday to reinstate David O'Leary to his job as captain.

Metro said in a statement that the agency disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal. Any appeal would be made to the state's district court in Clark County.

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O'Leary had been with the department for nearly 25 years and led its financial crimes division. He ultimately resigned before he could be demoted a rank to lieutenant, later applying with the department to rescind his resignation. It was not rescinded.

David Clarke, who acts as the elected sheriff of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County in whatever spare time is left over from his cable TV and talk radio appearances, is demanding the suppression – and even the eradication – of the “vulgar, vile, vicious” people whose “anti-cop rhetoric” he blames for the murder of police officers in Texas and Illinois.

“This is part of a pattern now,” Sheriff Clarke declared during an August 31 CNN discussion of the hideous, execution-style murder of Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth by a man who had been institutionalized for mental illness. “You would have to stick your head in the sand to think that this thing here wasn’t fueled by this vile, vulgar, slimy movement.”

Clarke’s chief target is the “Black Lives Matter” movement, to which he assigns the responsibility for a nationwide outpouring of criticism over police misconduct.

“This slime needs to be eradicated from American society and American culture,” Clark insisted during an August 29 interview with Fox News host Jeanne Pirro. While professing to “love the First Amendment” and “freedom of speech,” Clarke maintained that the right is “not absolute.” You can’t saying you want in the United States. You cannot threaten people’s lives…. This is not First Amendment-protected.”

Under existing judicial precedents (chiefly the US Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio) incendiary speech is protected by the First Amendment unless it displays an intent to bring about imminent, lawless action. By this standard, a small group of protesters chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” is engaging in a profoundly offensive exercise that is fully protected by the First Amendment.

Sheriff Clarke applies a different standard in which police officers are at “war” with a hostile public, and can view verbal hostility as a threat to “officer safety” warranting the use of potentially lethal force. This was made clear in yet another Fox News interview – this one with Meghan Kelly – discussing the arrest and subsequent death in detention of Chicago activist Sandra Bland.

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Asked by Kelly if he considered Trooper Encinia’s actions to be appropriate, Clarke said that he “wholeheartedly” supported the officer. This encounter, he continued, was a “classic case of a citizen who did not comply with an officer’s [illegal] lawful commands.”

A North Carolina police chief says his officers have shot and killed a man who pointed a gun at them after threatening to commit suicide.

Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez said at a news conference that officers negotiated with the 21-year-old man for at least 30 minutes Saturday morning before he began walking toward them, pointing his gun.

Lopez says it was a dangerous situation.

The chief says the four officers involved have all been put on administrative leave while the State Bureau of Investigation reviews the shooting. Their names were not released.

Authorities also did not release the name of the man killed by the officers.

Durham is about 25 miles northwest of Raleigh.

But one surreptitious video in a small-town Georgia court has led to an overhaul of court practices there. The video showed the judge threatening to jail traffic violators who could not come up with an immediate payment toward their fines.

“You can pay what you have, you can call whoever you need to call, go to an A.T.M. if you need to, do what you need to do,” Judge Richard A. Diment of Bowdon Municipal Court said to one defendant. “Call friends, call family, call your employer. But until you get $300 here tonight, you won’t be able to leave.” The defendant said she had recently begun working at a supermarket and had $150 with her.

To another defendant, a man who said he had been unemployed for two years and received food stamps, Judge Diment said: “You’re going to have to figure out a way to get this paid, do you understand me? Or you’re going to go to jail. One or the other. You understand?”

Neither defendant had a lawyer.

The United States Supreme Court has held that people cannot be jailed for failing to make a payment if they are unable to pay, but advocates for indigent defendants say that in many jurisdictions, meaningful assessments of ability to pay are rare. In Georgia, poor defendants are supposed to have access to a court-appointed lawyer if they face jail or probation.

Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based group that has been fighting what it calls “debtors’ prison” cases throughout Georgia, said Bowdon was unique only in that Judge Diment’s practices were caught on video.

“The practice that we see here is one that happens in courts around the state, and it shows an overzealousness to collect fines and fees at the expense of basic fairness,” she said.

The center sent observers to Judge Diment’s monthly court sessions this summer after it was alerted to the video, taken in February 2014 and later posted on YouTube. This June, the observers said in a complaint letter to the city, Judge Diment demanded immediate payments ranging from $20 to more than $1,000. One woman, on probation for driving with a suspended license, had already spent a month in jail but was ordered to remain incarcerated until she made a $500 payment, the letter said.

In July, a man who said he worked only a few days every other week asked to convert his court debt to community service. Judge Diment refused, the letter said, on the grounds that the man might find a better job.

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Baltimore officials have reached a $6.4 million wrongful death settlement with the family of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died in April from a neck injury he suffered in police custody.

The deal still must be approved by the city’s Board of Estimates, the governing body that oversees the city’s spending. That group, which includes Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), is expected to meet Wednesday.

The agreement comes a week after renewed demonstrations sparked by a court hearing in which a judge concluded that the six Baltimore police officers indicted in Gray’s death and arrest should be given separate trials. This week, the judge will consider whether those trials should be held in Baltimore or moved to another jurisdiction.

Gray was arrested the morning of April 12 and died days later from a catastrophic injury that occurred while he was being driven in a police van. Authorities said Gray was handcuffed and unbelted at the time.

An officer with the Montgomery Police Department and his wife are facing a domestic violence charges after an incident that occurred early Sunday.

MPD arrested 23-year-old Dan Barrett and his wife Trudy Barrett, 30, early Sunday morning for alleged domestic violence, according to Lt. Zedrick Dean with MPD.

The department also began termination proceedings against Barrett.

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Barrett’s arrest marks the third domestic violence related charge against a police officer in the last two weeks.

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), which keeps data on officer deaths going back over 100 years, 24 officers have been shot and killed by suspects this year. This puts the US on pace for 36 non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities in 2015. Each one of such deaths is a tragedy for the officers killed, their families and the communities they serve, but this would be the lowest total in 25 years, aside from 2013 which saw 31 such deaths.

Today, workplaces are much safer and healthier, going from 38 fatal injuries a day to 12. But there is still much work to be done.

New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board is an independent agency that is empowered to receive, investigate, mediate, hear, make findings, and recommend action on complaints against New York City police officers. According to the CCRB, nearly half (45%) of all claims of brutality and excessive force of NYPD cops have been substantiated by video in the first six months of 2015.

This increase is an 11% jump from 2014 alone.


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It is hard for people to remain blind to something that is shown to them day in and day out. One can only deny the police state for so long before they see enough videos of cops beating non-violent people to open their eyes.

A federal jury on Tuesday awarded $5.5 million to the family of a Euclid man shot and killed by an off-duty Cleveland police officer in March 2012.

The eight-member jury, which began deliberating on Friday following a week-long trial, announced its verdict a couple of hours after restarting deliberations that began before the Labor Day weekend.

It found that Cleveland police officer Roger Jones was liable for using excessive force when he shot Kenny Smith in the head at East 9th Street and Prospect Avenue following a disturbance outside Wilbert's Food & Music on East Huron Road. Jones had just gotten off his shift that night and was downtown to get a drink.

Smith, an aspiring rapper with no criminal record, was a passenger in a car driven by Devonta Hill, whom police believe caused the disturbance by firing into a crowd.

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But Gilbert, during his closing arguments, said that Jones has changed his story several times, between interviews, depositions and testimony. He also said two witnesses and a forensic scientist proved that Smith was not have been shot in the car and that blood was found a few feet away.

"They were banking on the fact that there was a gun in the car and that's all they needed," Gilbert said. "That's all they needed to justify, in their minds, that they did the right thing."

On June 20th, a man and his son were simply sitting on a public sidewalk, waiting for a friend to pick them up, when they were confronted by a person sworn to “protect and serve” the citizens.

Deputy Todd Hoy of the Lomita Sheriff’s Station (part of the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department), arrived on scene and claimed that someone had reported the duo as “suspicious.” . However, this wouldn’t be the first time a cop has liedto support his illegal actions.

Upon approaching the pair, Deputy Hoy demanded to know why they were sitting on the sidewalk. The citizen calmly stated that his reasons for being there were irrelevant. This single act of asserting one’s basic rights upset the officer enough to the point that he reached down and grabbed the citizen, trying to pull him up. The officer quickly stopped when the man demanded to know why the officer was touching him.

The officer could not think of a legal reason why he assaulted the man, so instead of answering the question, he demanded his identification. Luckily, this is one citizen who knows his rights under the law, even if the cop doesn’t.

Eventually, the citizen told the deputy multiple times that he was waiting on a friend, to which the deputy replied that his answer was “not good enough.” Deputy Hoy then radioed into dispatch, requesting backup because he was dealing with an “uncooperative citizen.”

The cop exhibited the gold standard of unprofessionalism when he stated, “You know what it is? You’re just being a jerk…You are being a jerk, brother.”

When the man told the cop that standing up for your rights doesn’t mean you’re a jerk, the officer responded with, “It just goes to show you that you’re a troublemaker” and that the father was “setting a poor example for this young kid right here.”




Apparently, any citizen who stands up for his rights under the law, under the Constitution of the United States, is a jerk, troublemaker, and an all-around bad father.

In what can only be described as a child-like temper tantrum, the officer had to get in the “last word,” telling the child, “Good luck in the future young man,” implying that he’ll end up in jail for standing up for his rights.

When an average citizen on the streets knows the law better than the officer trying to enforce it, it should prove to anyone that this cop is better suited for something else – perhaps standing in the unemployment line.

For a man who was just trying to fix his vandalized windshield, there is no break over the break.

"I got a ticket for something that I was close as I could be to resolving," Nick Berlin said.

A day after a vandal had thrown a rock at his windshield, Berlin made an appointment at a local auto glass shop to have it replaced.

Just as he was about to pull into the auto glass shop, an Adams County Sheriff's Deputy pulled Berlin over and issued him a ticket for an "unsafe vehicle."

The ticket was issued in the parking lot of Absolute Auto Glass at Broadway and West 64th Avenue on Aug. 19.

9Wants to Know acquired the ticket from the Adams County Sheriff's Department and reviewed invoices and schedules provided by Absolute Auto Glass.

Records corroborate Berlin's account of when and where he was issued the ticket and his set appointment at the shop.

The ticket shows the officer wrote up the citation at 3:39 p.m., just minutes after Berlin's set appointment.

"We were just standing here in our door and were ready for his appointment and all of the sudden we see a cop out there writing the guy a ticket," shop owner David Sprague said. "We were pretty astounded to think that was what happened."

Images provided by Absolute Auto Glass show damages to the passenger side of the windshield. "He had plenty of visibility on the driver side," Sprague said.

Berlin insists he tried explaining to the Adams County deputy he had an appointment to repair the windshield, but in the end, it didn't make difference.

"I don't know if he's a no-nonsense kind of cop," Berlin said, while claiming he never raised his voice or got angry with the officer. "It was definitely a bummer."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado called the ticket part of a larger problem.

"The more and more police officers see their role as ticketing as opposed to protecting public safety, that has a tendency to erode the public trust," said Denise Maes, the public policy director for the ACLU.