It’s been more than two years since Nassau County Police Officer Anthony DiLeonardo put two bullets into Huntington, New York, cabbie Thomas Moroughan, and he, together with his drinking buddy and fellow cop, Edward Bienz, are still on the job.  The fact that anybody would even think about them outrages Nassau County PBA president James Carver, who 

will seek “the strictest of sanctions” against whoever allowed a confidential Nassau police Internal Affairs report detailing an off-duty cop’s shooting of an unarmed cabdriver to remain in a federal court file.

“This is egregious,” he said in an interview. “How do you undo something that’s already been out there? This is something we take very seriously.”

On Feb. 27, 2011, according to a confidential Nassau County police internal affairs report obtained by Newsday, Officer Anthony DiLeonardo, off duty and drunk, shot at cabdriver Thomas Moroughan five times, hitting him twice, then beat the man with the butt of his gun. DiLeonardo had been barhopping in Huntington with his girlfriend, fellow Officer Edward Bienz and Bienz’s wife. Moroughan, who was driving a Prius cab with his girlfriend in the passenger seat, had gotten into a roadside verbal dispute with DiLeonardo.

DiLeonardo’s explanation for firing at Moroughan, which his companions backed up, was that he feared for his life because the cabbie revved his engine, then tried to run him down.

Within 12 hours of the shooting, Nassau County’s Deadly Force Response Team cleared DiLeonardo of wrongdoing and said he and Bienz had been “fit for duty,” not mentioning that they were intoxicated

Nor has any action been taken against the Suffolk County police officers that night who allegedly fabricated a confession and got a hospitalized Moroughan — drugged with morphine and carrying two bullets in his body — to sign it

And the culture of the cops must change. Protecting each other from the truth and its consequences is not noble. It’s a dereliction of duty.

Police officials and union representatives often say the bad apples are a tiny percentage of any force, and they’re right: The majority of cops are good people trying to do a tough job honorably.

Most police officers are good, it’s true. But no law, custom or culture ought to protect the ones who aren’t.

“The special agents acted in complete good faith,” Mr. Mulham said, “with the purpose of pursuing appropriate law enforcement interests.”

“A decision was made to coordinate among all the witnesses not to tell the full truth,” the judge said after he heard testimony from the arresting officers and from federal agents who helped to prepare a complaint against the man who was stopped, Tajuan Simmons, or who later testified before a grand jury.

Prosecutors in the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, strongly defended the officers’ testimony as truthful and accurate; they asked the judge to withdraw his findings, citing the potential damage to the officers’ careers. The judge refused.

Just at the start of the story, and already too many ironies to ignore. First, that there was hanky panky at all came out because an AUSA spilled the beans:

Last fall, before the suppression hearing began, a prosecutor told the judge that the government had informed the defense about some recently discovered “misstatements” in the complaint.

We might scoff at the word “misstatements,” since they would be more likely characterized as bold-faced, disgraceful, outrageous lies, if they came from a non-LEO’s mouth or hand, but that’s just a matter of rhetoric. Had the assistant said nothing, the lie would have gone completely unnoticed. And yet the same office, if not the same assistant, argued with a straight face that “misstatements” magically turned “truthful and accurate” when it came time to salvage these fine law enforcers’ careers.  After all, why ruin a fine career by calling a cop a liar just because he’s, well, a liar?

The details underlying this scheme are remarkably understandable. The call came in from a Confidential Informant, a rat busted for drugs who was flipped to save his own skin. He was told to stop committing crimes, but he didn’t. Bad boy, he was told, but that didn’t stop him from giving people up or the cops from working him.

The sergeant testified that he received the informant’s call around 11 p.m. on April 17, 2012, and after hearing his information, told him to dial a police hot line that offers callers anonymity and financial compensation for information about illegal guns; a hot line detective then called the 911 operator.

Two days later, when the complaint was sworn before a magistrate judge, it omitted any mention of the informant and said merely that “an anonymous individual had placed a 911 call” with the information about Mr. Simmons. Sergeant Nicholson said he had taken this step to protect the source.

It’s not that they cared whether the snitch lived or died per se, but they weren’t done squeezing him yet, and he still had plenty of juice. Once the CI gave up all he had, well, then his protection isn’t nearly as much of a concern. But I digress.

The complaint had also stated that Mr. Simmons, when he saw the police, immediately began to run to the north. “He did not run,” the prosecutor said.

Finally, Officer Matthew Barber, who had seized the gun and arrested Mr. Simmons, now recalled that he saw “a bulge” in Mr. Simmons’s waistband — a detail that had not been in the complaint.

Except none of this happened, and it was all part of a scheme to justify the arrest while omitting the snitch’s involvement. Not a big scheme. Not a sophisticated scheme to nail either a major bad dude or some innocent who made them angry. Just a banal scheme so that the CI wouldn’t be involved.  And what was the big deal, since Simmons really had the gun? No harm, no foul.

Asked by the judge whether that was a practice of his office, the agent responded that if there was other evidence that established probable cause for an arrest, and “you do not have to risk the safety of an informant by exposing them, then you try to do that if possible.” (The identity of the agent is being withheld at the A.T.F.’s request because he remains involved in undercover work.)

Judge Hellerstein said the agent was “shading the truth” in not telling the magistrate judge about the informant.

The agent responded, “It’s a safety concern.”

Judge Hellerstein called it “nonsense,” “not credible,” “false” and “not worthy of belief.”  So…

Nonetheless, he ultimately refused to suppress the gun, finding that the informant’s tip had been accurate. Mr. Simmons pleaded guilty to a conspiracy count, and in March he was sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum.

Didn’t I tell you the guy actually had the gun?  Just because the witnesses for the government at the suppression hearing lied through their teeth about everything along the way to everyone they could, and the government backed them up despite having been the party to reveal to the judge that he had been reduced to a pawn in their scheme to excise the snitch from the case while still getting Simmons, that would never serve as a reason not to get the bad guy. 

Because, as the cops say, the agents say and the judge found, no matter how many lies or scams law enforcement has as the means to get to the end, it’s all in complete good faith.

Last week, a new lawyer asked my advice on a business question. I responded with a simple equation:

revenues – expenses = profit

1. The amount of money you have has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good person. Being good with money is a little like being good with cards. People who are good at playing cards aren’t better or worse than anyone else, they’re just better at playing crazy eights.
   
2. Money spent on one thing is still the same as money spent on something else. A $500 needless fee on a million-dollar mortgage closing is just as much money as a $500 tip at McDonalds.
   
3. If you borrow money to make money, you’ve done something magical. On the other hand, if you go into debt to pay your bills or buy something you want but don’t need, you’ve done something stupid. Stupid and short-sighted and ultimately life-changing for the worse.
   
4. To go along with #3: getting out of debt as fast as you possibly can is the smartest thing you can do with your money. If you need proof to confirm this, ask anyone with money to show you the math. Hint: credit card companies make more profit than just about any other companies in the world.
   
5. There’s no difference (in terms of the money you have) between spending money and not earning money, no difference between not-spending money and getting a raise (actually, because of taxes, you’re even better off not-spending). If you’ve got cable TV and a cell phone, you’re spending $4,000 a year. $6,000 before taxes.
   
6. If money is an emotional issue for you, you’ve just put your finger on a big part of the problem. No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.
   
7. Like many important, professional endeavors, money has its own vocabulary. It won’t take you long to learn what opportunity cost, investment, debt, leverage, basis points and sunk costs mean, but it’ll be worth your time.
   
8. Never sign a contract or make an investment that you don’t understand at least as well as the person on the other side of the transaction.
   
9. If you’ve got a job, a steady day job, now’s the time to figure out a way to earn extra income in your spare time. Freelancing, selling items on Etsy, building a side business–two hundred extra dollars every week for the next twenty years can create peace of mind for a lifetime.
   
10. The chances that a small-time investor will get lucky by timing the stock market or with other opaque investments are slim, fat and none.
    
11. The way you feel about giving money to good causes has a lot to do with the way you feel about money.
    
12. Don’t get caught confusing money with security. There are lots of ways to build a life that’s more secure, starting with the stories you tell yourself, the people you surround yourself with and the cost of living you embrace. Money is one way to feel more secure, but money alone won’t deliver this.
    
13. Rich guys busted for insider trading weren’t risking everything to make more money for the security that money can bring. In fact, the very opposite is starkly shown here. The insatiable need for more money is directly (and ironically) related to not being clear about what will ultimately bring security. Like many on this path, now they have neither money nor security.
    
14. In our culture, making more money feels like winning, and winning feels like the point.
    
15. Within very wide bands, more money doesn’t make people happier. Learning how to think about money, though, usually does.
    
16. In the long run, doing work that’s important leads to more happiness than doing work that’s merely profitable.

Some are more fundamental than others. Some could benefit from a bit of fleshing out. But some points on this list, most notably Number 2, are utterly foundational and yet almost universally ignored. That shiny iToy you simply had to have so all the other kids at Starbucks will think you are the coolest person ever, and for which you ran up your credit card debt, will be the reason you can’t save enough money to buy a home for your family.  Do you see how it works?

Once you’ve worked hard enough, saved enough, delayed your gratification and used your money wisely, you may find yourself in a position to buy the goofy things that make you happy. It may take years. It may never happen. But it will most assuredly never happen if you spend more than you earn, squander your efforts for trinkets, are incapable of distinguishing things you need from things you want, or refuse to substitute the hard work of thinking for handing over what little money you have to some fast-talking schemer who plays you for a fool.

Your life. Your choice. But these are the rules by which we live.

Since I haven’t done a  reader mailbag in a while, it seemed like a good idea today.

Greenfield:

I know law real good, having done prison three times. So when I hired this lawyer, all he had to do is go with the story I told him. It was perfect. I told him about how I was innocent and how the cops beat me and lied and framed me, and all he had to do was tell the judge exactly what I told him.

But no. This guy started talking shit about perjury and all. Why did he think I was paying him all that money if he didn’t have a guy who would fix a few photos so my story worked?  His website said he would fight hard and cared about me, but all he did was tell me that my story sucked and he wouldn’t do it. What kind of lawyer is that?  He thought I was stupid and didn’t know what I was doing, but like I told you, I been to prison three times and I know how to get things done. I got the tats to prove it.

You seem to be a good lawyer and you have an Avvo 10, so you know what I’m talking about. Can you represent me pro bono? We can sue this lawyer and you can keep half the money. If you’re any good, you will get rich! And when you come to Idaho to take care of my case, I promise to take you out for lunch too, as long as you don’t eat too much. LOL.

Signed,
The Voice of Experience

Dear Voice,

Such a wonderfully tempting offer, and yet I must decline.  I’m curious that you think three stints in prison makes you quite the expert on beating the system.  It sounds more like you have a remarkable history of losing, which tells me that you may not be nearly as good at putting together a story as you think.

Regardless, the lawyer who refused to become complicit in perpetrating a fraud on the court by manufacturing evidence isn’t a bad fellow, even though he apparently did not think as well of your scheme as you did. You see, criminal defense lawyers are the people who represent people accused of crimes, as opposed to being criminals themselves.  The truth is, you didn’t pay the lawyer to do your bidding, but to represent you, zealously but within the bounds of the law. I know, that sucks, especially when you think you’ve put together a masterful scheme to prove your innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt.

In the future, may I suggest you consider urinating only in toilets in rooms specifically marked for your gender?  It’s really a very good rule to follow, plus eliminates the need for photos, which itself can present a bit of an issue.

SHG

If anybody out there wants to take on Voice’s cause, let me know and I can forward your contact information.  You will no doubt hear from him, perhaps for years to come.

Hello,

I am the marketing representative for John W. Blischak who is a Defense Attorney. I’ve taken a look at your website and noticed you have several articles pertaining to felony offenses and misdemeanor. I believe we can contribute a guest blog about evaluating possible criminal defense options and assessing if further legal assistance is needed.

John W. Blischak is based in Arizona serving several cities throughout the Valley. He practices criminal defense matters, personal injury and some business law as he also is a CPA. With over 25 years of experience in the law field, John would love the opportunity to share his knowledge on these topics with your readers.

The opportunity to guest post about criminal defense tips and how The Law Offices of John W. Blischak can assist would be an excellent opportunity and greatly appreciated. Let me know if you’d be interested or if you need any further information. Please feel free to contact me at this email or give me a call at 623.889.XXXX ext. 000. I hope to hear from you. Thank you for your time.

Best,

Phillip J. [x]

Marketing Representative for The Law Offices of John W. Blischak

Dear Phillip,

You are a true gem. Most marketing representatives lack your forthright nature, shifting the work off to some mill in Bangalore after pocketing the hungry lawyer’s cash. Not you. I hope your client appreciates that you are doing the legwork yourself with such a well-targeted and thoughtful email.

Usually, I don’t respond to requests for guest posts, but that’s because they tend not to involve lawyers or don’t mention who the client is. That’s what made your email special, and made me take notice. Here you are, floating John Blischak’s name to blawgers like me across the internet in the hope that someone will give you a chance to  guest post and get that precious backlink. There’s no quicker path to legitimacy than riding someone else’s coattails, right?

As for your suggested topic, however, “evaluating possible criminal defense options and assessing if further legal assistance is needed,” it strikes me that you haven’t really looked at my blawg, because if you did, you would notice that a post on your suggested topic doesn’t really fall within the nature of stuff I write about. In fact, it emits a rather unpleasant odor, kind of sleazy and worthless.

It makes me wonder whether John Blischak will be writing the guest post, or maybe someone from your outfit, . You do that sort of stuff, , don’t you?  Maybe when you wrote that Blischak would be the author of the guest post, you were stretching the truth just a bit. Come on now, Phillip, just a little bit?  Yeah, I knew it.

But poor John Blischak, by hiring you, now has his name all over the internet, thinking that he’s going to build a great internet persona and get tons of business from his first-page-of-Google website, except that’s not how it always happens for lawyers. Instead, sometimes they get embarrassed when they outsource their marketing and learn the hard way that they outsourced their reputation and ethics with it. Not all lawyers, Phillip, are cool with being part of the scheme.

That sucks, Phillip. But then, it’s not your fault Blischak hired you to do his marketing for him. It’s his.

Scott

P.S. If you do posts about ponies, I may know  someone who would be interested in a guest post.

For all I know, John Blischak is a great guy, a terrific lawyer and kind to small animals. Even so, the  Turk Rule still applies.

There are two things about rights that make them special. First is you get to exercise them without penalty. Second, if they’re violated, there is a remedy. If either of these is lost, then so too is the right. But rarely is the point driven home as clearly as it is in this video.



Peachy. While the right to refuse to blow into a breathalyzer is scrupulously honored, the price of exercise is that you will be arrested, at least in the legal sense of being seized while the police obtain a warrant for the forcible withdrawal of blood. They will strap you into a gurney, stick a needle into your body, and then seek to obtain evidence to be used to justify post-hoc the arrest and assure conviction. That’s how they roll in some counties in Georgia, United States of America.

The rationale is that drunk driving is a terrible thing, and children are killed and injured by people who drive drunk, breaking the law and putting children at risk.  It’s certainly true, though whether it’s as true as the claims say is a matter of methodology.  And nobody would argue that they neither care about the welfare of children nor want to see children harmed.  Nobody wants to children to be harmed.

But that gross rationale, based on the oft-abused logical fallacy of an appeal to emotion, misses the mark. The use of forced blood draws isn’t about finding, stopping, arresting drunk drivers, but about gathering evidence to assure convictions.

Before there was such a thing as a breathalyzer, or forced blood drawers, there were laws against drunk driving. There are people arrested and prosecuted, and they were convicted or not upon the testimony of the police officer, who would describe how they were driving before they were pulled over, their slurred speech, blood shot eyes and the odor of alcohol emanating from their bodies.

Granted, the use of technology, even if it’s about a magic black box, makes conviction far easier. No longer does it matter that they drove erratically, swerved across lines or, at its worst, hit something or someone. They might drive perfectly, without the hint of risk to anyone, but between their breath or blood, the proof of drunk driving condemns them to conviction. 

But this is America, the greatest nation on earth where we will fight to protect our freedoms, including the freedom to refuse to blow into a tube to create evidence for the sole purpose of convicting us.  And upon the exercise of that right, at least in certain counties of Georgia for now, this is the price paid for that freedom.  A cop asks a judge for a warrant to do this to a person, and that’s that. The finest legal system ever.

And lest you think the images of how a forced blood draw happens are barbaric, no video has yet emerged on even  less savory methods of evidence collection. If a forced blood draw makes your skin crawl,  forced catheterization is going to make you wretch. All to collect evidence to assure conviction. Isn’t it great to have rights?

While it’s hardly an answer to respond with images of beautiful children who died at the hands of a drunk driver, most of us will let our emotions overcome reason so that lesser harms to adults can be ignored for what we perceive to be a higher purpose.  Things like logical connections rarely play a role in such emotional games.

Yet, the person who isn’t drunk gets the same needle as the person who is. Take one for the team? The person whose crime is contempt of cop gets a special strap down and needle, to teach ’em not to mouth off to Officer Friendly. The person who is diabetic, or really suffering from any sort of medical condition that doesn’t fall within a police officer’s personal experience or empathy (because cops know all there is to know about humankind), gets strapped down just like the stone drunk.

And this is what it looks like to exercise the right to refuse to blow.

It’s not like it would ever happen to you or anyone you love, right?

Marketing philosopher  Seth Godin takes on an issue that I find particularly irksome, the inbound call to customer service.  As badass astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, recently twitted, “after 15 minutes, I’m beginning to think my call is not very important to you.” Me too.

Rules for treating inbound customer calls with respect:

0. Spend a lot more money on this. Hire more agents. Train them better. Treat them with respect and they’ll do the same to those they interact with. Have a bright red light flash on the CEO’s desk whenever anyone, anywhere, is on hold for more than 5 minutes. If it gets to seven, have the call automatically route to the mobile phone of the CEO’s spouse.

1. Have a very smart and very motivated front line. “I’ll connect you directly to the person who can help you if you let me know what you need…” Don’t have these people pretend that they can help. It leads to long conversations and frustration.

2. 80% of your inbound calls are about the same ten things. First, eliminate those problems in future products, packaging and policies. The best way to handle these calls is to eliminate them. Second, put clear, fun and complete answers to these questions online where they are easy to find. And third, hire talented voice actors to record engaging answers to each, and offer them as a first resort as a result of #1, above.

3. Change your onhold music to Bill Cosby and Woody Allen records.

4. Whenever the wait is more than two minutes, offer a simple way to be called back, and then make sure it works.

5. If you’re closed, tell us the hours you are open and the relevant websites. Make sure the information is accurate.

(NB it’s just fine to make it clear that a call is not important to you. I’ve never built a company around amazing phone support, precisely because it’s so difficult to keep the promise. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine for some industries to not do the phone well. Just be clear that this is the case by routing people off the phone or at least not lying about it).

Thank you for calling Megacorp, selling products you adore because they have all the really cool shiny bells and whistles that Americans so desperately want, made by orphans in the Fujian province of China.

If you really want to speak with a person, your hold time will be at least 57 minutes, as we outsource customer service calls to a 12 person call center in small town outside Bangalore, all of whom call themselves “Sue,” and we can get thousands of calls an hour because about 20% of our products fail miserably. The other 80% last until the warranty period expires, not that it really matters since it’s just legal gobbledygook intended to make you think we stand behind our products. Frankly, we’re just as surprised they last that long as you are.

If you choose to wait on hold for at least 57 minutes, you will speak with a young woman (her name will be “Sue”) who knows nothing more about our products then you do. You will be asked a series of questions about why you’re calling to give you the impression that the person you speak with has some sort of specialized knowledge, but you will actually get picked up by the next available person regardless of why you’re calling. Sue will repeat every word you say, getting it wrong the first time, in order to give you the impression that we’re paying close attention to detail. This will take at least 17 additional minutes of your life, which you will never get back.

Sue has never actually seen any of our products. Sue doesn’t even own a pair of shoes, because she can’t afford them on what we pay for her services. She will put you on hold and take a look at the manual, the very same one we sent you with our product. She won’t know any more about it than you would if you had read the manual. We know you can’t be bothered, which makes Sue seem as if she knows more than she does.

Because Sue has never actually seen any of our products, and doesn’t even own a pair of shoes, she really won’t care about your concern that you’re going to miss your mani/pedi appointment if she doesn’t get a move on, or can’t call your broker because you only get four bars on your gizmo. Her family eats one meal a week, and your first-world-whining just doesn’t rock her world. But she will pretend she understands.  

We understand, because we’re more like you, but then, nobody who actually works for Megacorp would spend their time talking to you. You see, you’ve already bought our product and we have your money. We have better things to do with our time. Like getting our own mani-pedi’s.

If you decide that it’s worth your while to spend at least 57 minutes on the phone waiting to speak with Sue, she will read from the script we’ve prepared that instructs her to tell you that she is sorry for your inconvenience, even though she had nothing to do with your problem and it’s unlikely that the word “inconvenience” really suits the situation. It’s just that nobody has come up with a more benign word that the lawyers will let us say. It’s never our product. It’s just that we feel your pain. See how that works?

Sue will then tell you that she can definitely help you, because focus groups tell us that it’s what you want to hear, even though there is nothing she can do to fix anything. But then, if you’ve sat on hold for that long, chances are pretty good that you will fall for a line like this and feel that, even though your problem wasn’t fixed, we care deeply about you. That’s enough for anyone willing to waste that much of their life, since you obviously don’t want to think too hard.

At the end of the call, Sue will ask if there is anything else she can do for you, even though she hasn’t done anything for you yet.  You will say “no,” allowing us to put out a press release about the marvels of our customer service satisfying 100% of our inbound callers. With that sort of claim, you will feel confident buying a new gizmo from us to replace the one that you called about which doesn’t work.

At Megacorp, your call is not important to us. In fact, we find it laughable that anyone would even bother spending a minute of their life on hold because of us. But if you still feel the need to speak to Sue, please hold.  While waiting, we hope you enjoy  a loop of the Best of Bill Cosby. Hey, hey, hey.

Two posts went up at two blogs yesterday, apparently without knowledge by either writer that the other would be writing on the same subject. One was by Jordan Rushie at Philly Law Blog. The other was by Leo Mulvihill at the Puddle. Put Jordan and Leo together and you’ve got the Fishtown Lawyers.

Both Jordan and Leo’s posts were motivated by a post by another baby lawyer,  Josh Camson, who announced that after 18 months of practice as a criminal defense lawyer, he was going to hire an associate. 

Amazingly, my partner and I have been up and running for about eighteen months now. We haven’t killed each other, we haven’t been disbarred, and we have kept the lights on. And now we’ve decided it’s time to expand. This summer we will bring on an associate attorney and get some real health insurance.

As I approached my graduation date in spring 2010, I faced a situation similar to many of my classmates: no jobs.

After graduation, while studying from the bar, I still faced that same situation:  no jobs.

After taking the bar, while awaiting the results: no jobs.

This was terribly frustrating.

But then, in fall 2010, just as the bar results were to be released, I received a call from a Judge whom I’d volunteered time working for back during my 2L year. He needed a clerk. He needed that clerk to start soon. He wanted that clerk to be me. So I took the job.

Luck: The judge needed me exactly when I was looking for a full-time job.

Making the best of that luck: While working for the judge, I read countless motions and pleadings, honed my research and writing skills, and sat in on several trials. Because I sat in on as many trials as I did, I met the attorneys who were regularly trying cases in our court. I’m still in touch with many of those attorneys today, who serve as referral sources and mentors. Furthermore, my judge was in the last year of his tenure before retirement. When he retired, he gave me most of his law books, which jump-started my firm’s legal library.

But I only got the job because I volunteered my time during my 2L year.

The saying is that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” There’s no guarantee that you will get lucky, but as pro golfer Gary Player said, “the more I practice, the luckier I get.” That’s how it happens. Nobody gets lucky in the practice of law by doing and thinking the least possible, hoping instead that the certainty of youth that things will work out will get you over the hump. 

Marcus Schantz found that out the hard way, when the success of his first two years of practice led to the red ink of his next two. And Josh Camson is only 18 months in, just like Jordan and Leo, but shows neither their humility nor desire to prepare so that they can get lucky.

* Many tell me that they hate the obscure references of some of the titles I give my posts. That’s a shame, as I find them amusing.  But this title, “Idiot Wind,” may prove particularly obscure, so I thought it might be fun to make it a contest, with the first person who can explain what it has to do with this post winning a copy of  Nathan Burney’s spectacular book, The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law.

Here’s a hint:

It looked like curtains for defendant Guillermo Alarcon Jr., when Los Angeles detectives claimed they saw him throw something to the ground as he fled them. VIa the LA Times :

The officers had claimed that they immediately found the drugs after seeing Acevedo’s client, Guillermo Alarcon Jr., throw an object as he ran from police.

The drug trial ended dramatically when [Los Angeles County Deputy Public Defender Victor] Acevedo produced grainy surveillance video of the area where the arrest took place showing a group of officers searching for more than 20 minutes before one announces that drugs have been found.

Describing his sentencing decision as among the most difficult a judge could face, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael E. Pastor called the officers’ conduct “regrettably shameful” but said he also took into account the careers and lives they had led.

Evan Samuel, 41, was sentenced Tuesday to perform 750 hours of community labor while Richard Amio, 34, was ordered to perform 500 hours.

“Do you know what this tells every potentially corrupt police officer? That you get a freebie, that you get a pass,” Acevedo said. “What all officers should be on notice of is that if they are found to commit this kind of corruption, they are going to prison.”

The problem for most people who would otherwise think an entrapment defense will save their sorry butts is that they are otherwise predisposed to commit the crime.  That makes small time criminals the perfect mark for the Bureau if Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which may not be able to investigate and find anyone actually committing a crime, but has become extremely good at making crimes happen.

Via Brad Heath at USA Today :

They were waiting for a phone call that would launch a daring and dangerous crime, sending them charging through the front door of a Mexican drug ring’s stash house to steal 50 pounds or more of cocaine from three armed guards. Their plan was to disguise themselves as police officers, tie up the guards, and slip away with a half-million dollars worth of drugs. If tying them up didn’t work, they’d kill them all.

Only the small army of federal agents watching them knew that it was all a lie.

There was no house. No drugs.

And the only things waiting for them when the call came were a team of camouflaged federal agents with rifles and stun grenades, and the promise of a long prison sentence for a plot to steal and re-sell non-existent cocaine.

So far, they rounded up more than 1000 would be winners of the criminal lottery this way, offering wildly profitable enticement to people who they’ve identified as potential bad dudes.  Maybe not violent. Maybe not big league. Maybe not of the sort that would ever consider taking down a big time stash house, but at least a naughty enough to take the enticement seriously and to squeak past entrapment.

(Updated to add in the video, now that it doesn’t include advertising or autostart. Thanks, Brad.)

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the agency in charge of enforcing the nation’s gun laws, has locked up more than 1,000 people by enticing them to rob drug stash houses that did not exist. The ploy has quietly become a key part of the ATF’s crime-fighting arsenal, but also a controversial one: The stings are so aggressive and costly that some prosecutors have refused to allow them. They skirt the boundaries of entrapment, and in the past decade they have left at least seven suspects dead.

The ATF has more than quadrupled its use of such drug house operations since 2003, and officials say it intends to conduct even more as it seeks to lock up the “trigger pullers” who menace some of the most dangerous parts of inner-city America. Yet the vast scale of that effort has so far remained unknown outside the U.S. Justice Department.

Cool name, trigger pullers, and calculated to put an immediate end to any potential sympathy they might otherwise receive. After all, the ATF reasons, these aren’t nice, clean kids who would never break the law otherwise, and when you call them killers, even if they’ve never harmed a fly in their erstwhile criminal career, you almost appreciate ATF going out and finding these trigger pullers before they find you.

In many cases, the records show the ATF accomplished precisely what it set out to do, arresting men outfitted with heavy weapons and body armor, and linked to repeated, and sometimes bloody, crimes. In the process, however, the agency also scooped up small-time drug dealers and even people with no criminal records at all, including Army Rangers. It has offered would-be robbers the chance to score millions of dollars of cocaine for a few hours of work. In at least one case, the ATF had to supply its supposed armed robbers with a gun.

So maybe calling them trigger pullers isn’t quite right, but you can no doubt anticipate the rationale.

Former ATF supervisor David Chipman, who left the agency last year, said the public deserves to know more about how the ATF is using its resources. “There are huge benefits, and there are huge downsides,” he said. “Do you want police to solve crimes, or do you want them to go out and prevent crimes that haven’t occurred yet? What are the things you’re willing to do so that your kid doesn’t get shot?”

Do you really want to wait until one of these trigger pullers kills your little angel? No, you don’t.  And neither does the ATF, which loves children too.

ATF officials reject the idea that they should focus only on people with violent records. “Are we supposed to wait for him to commit a (obscenity) murder before we start to target him as a bad guy?” said Charlie Smith, the head of ATF’s Special Operations Division, which is responsible for approving each sting. “Are we going to sit back and say, well, this guy doesn’t have a bad record? OK, so you know, throw him back out there, let him kill somebody, then when he gets a bad record, then we’re going to put him in jail?”

And so what if the trigger puller has never so much as touched a trigger before, or did much pulling for that matter. It’s not like the ATF could entice anyone to engage in their sting who wasn’t otherwise included to violence, drugs and mayhem. It’s not like they are dangling hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars in front of them. Oh wait.

As it becomes more widely known what the ATF is doing, the dubious tactics are becoming less accepted.

Critics, among them federal judges, say the ATF’s operations are flawed. In an opinion last year, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago dismissed the drug-house stings as a “disreputable tactic” that creates “an increased risk of entrapment because of the potential for the extensive use of inducements and unrealistic temptations to encourage the suspects’ criminal conduct.”

Not to mention seven targets died as a result of these stings.  But it’s so much easier and more effective to create phony crimes to ensnare the bad (and semi-bad) guys than to have to go out on the street and do something about crimes that happen without the finger of the government pushing the button.

Nobody doubts that cops give other cops a pass when it comes to the same conduct that they would happily slap cuffs on you, but rarely do you see a police-centric website like PoliceOne publish a story explaining the proper behavior for a police officer to get “professional courtesy” from one of his tribe.

Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Editor-in-Chief, riffs off this video of cops being jerks: 



Wyllie explains there’s no need to break this down for some excellent fingerpointing, as is invariably done when it’s cop versus citizen:

Ultimately, the video speaks largely for itself and there’s no point in further pointing fingers at either the uniformed officer or the off-duty cop who was stopped. They both made mistakes. Let’s move on.

Move along, cuz there’s no benefit in wasting any precious time on cops behaving poorly. That would just be negative, the sort of thing that mopes, mutts, punks and skells enjoy when disrespecting the fine law enforcement officers who protect and serve.  Got it. Haters. Screw ’em.

But it does provide an opportunity to talk about the notion of “professional courtesy” with regard to off-duty traffic violations. 

Aha! Something that matters to police officers, how to make sure you can break the law with impunity. Who couldn’t use a refresher course in that, right?

When you’re off duty in your POV and you’ve been stopped by another officer, make that “ideal violator” the model for your behavior. 

•     Keep your hands on the wheel
•     Keep your emotions in check
•     Keep your language civilized
•     Keep your badge in your pocket
•     Keep your fellow officer in mind

Don’t you want to be an “ideal violator” too? See all the important stuff you learn at SJ?  He goes on to explain that the off-duty LEO should first explain that he’s armed, and afterward that he’s a cop.

You have to remember that when you’re armed and off duty, and stopped for a traffic violation, the order in which you divulge information pertinent to officer safety (read: “I have a weapon” and “I’m off-duty LEO”) matters. 

This matters since you wouldn’t want to be shot first for being armed before letting the officer know that you’re one of “us.”  First things first, as the First Rule of Policing never takes a holiday.  But having assured mutual safety and behaved like an ideal violator, time for professionalism to kick in.

The Golden (and Cerulean) Rule

My good friend and PoliceOne colleague Dan Marcou puts it, “Do unto other officers in uniform as you would have others do onto you. That is the true meaning professional courtesy.”

I look at it this way: in order to be granted (or even considered for) professional courtesy, you first must be professional and courteous. Respect yourself and respect what the badge — not your badge, but THE badge — represents. And that goes for both parties at an off-duty LEO traffic stop.

If both individuals carry those values into the encounter, then they will both naturally (and mutually) behave in a respectful manner toward their fellow officer… 

And that, dear readers, is how an off-duty cop should properly handle being stopped for driving twice the speed limit. 

Of course, if you don’t have a shield, you will likely be ticketed, arrested or beaten. But you can avoid being beaten if you too are an ideal violator.

This has been another bit of excellent law enforcement advice from PoliceOne.