As much as video has fundamentally altered public understanding about how the police engage with the public (trigger warning: the word “fuck” appears with unfortunate regularity), and many of us ponder why the police don’t seem to have an adequate appreciation of the fact that people can see or hear what’s happening, it sometimes bites back.  And when the butt bitten belongs to an academic, it suggests that nobody has a firm grasp on the fact that lies aren’t going to fly.

Minati Roychoudhuri is an English professor at Capital Community College. Granted, it ain’t Yale, but then, it’s still a college.  When she was stopped by a police officer in Connecticut, she was sufficiently outraged to shoot off a letter to the Commissioner of Public Safety protesting her having been racially profiled.

Racial profiling? That’s bad stuff. It’s wrong for police to stop a driver just because of their skin.  Something should be done about it. And so she did:

Dear Sir/Madam Continue reading →

If we learned nothing else from the autopsy of Michael Brown after he was gunned down in the street in Ferguson, it’s that people don’t “get” autopsies.  Neither physics nor human bodies behave quite as simply as the simplistic minds that conclude it proves that something did, or didn’t happen.  And so it happens again, this time with 19-year-old Zachary Hammond.

The backstory exceeds sad and meanders swiftly into pathetic.  Driving the car, this 2014 high school student with no priors was out with a young lady who had some weed to sell. As it turns out, she was selling it to the cops.

Their son was not the target of the marijuana bust police were attempting, but the girl who was with him may have been, they said.

Tori Dianna Morton, 23, of Pickens was in the car but uninjured in the incident, police said. She was charged with simple possession of marijuana and released Monday from the Oconee County Detention Center, according to police and jail records.

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At The Watch, Radley Balko dissects the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in United States v. Bentley, holding that Lex the wonderdog is sufficiently fabulous to give rise to probable cause to search. Like all drug sniffing dogs, Lex went to doggy drug school. He did not do well. But still, he’s a dog.

Lex, the drug dog that searched Bentley’s car, had a 93 percent alert rate. That is, when Lex was called to search a car, he alerted 93 percent of the time. He was basically a probable cause generator. His success rate was much lower, at 59 percent. That is, the police actually found drugs just six of the 10 times Lex told them they would. That means that four of every 10 people Lex alerted to were subjected to a thorough roadside search that produced nothing illegal.

When dogs show up in court, figuratively, not literally, they are drug-sniffing heroes.  The reason is fairly obvious. When no drugs are found, no one gets arrested and, after having been detained and subjected to a search, the humans are released into the wild. No one knows. No judge is asked to pay attention.

Consider how much fun judges would have if every driver stopped and searched following a false alert was nonetheless taken to court for arraignment. Continue reading →

The first thing cops should anticipate when raiding a medical marijuana dispensary is that there will be video.  The second thing is that when the cops go around disabling the video, they’re going to miss a few cameras because they’re well hidden and, cops being cops, it’s just too much effort to do their job well.

Sucks if you’re one of the three Santa Ana cops who participated in the raid on Sky High Holistic.  Especially if, after you thought nobody was watching, you started munching down on those delicious chocolate brownies. Yum.

A lawsuit, filed last week in Orange County Superior Court by three unidentified police officers and the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, seeks to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal affairs investigators from using the video as they sort out what happened during the May 26 raid of Sky High Collective.

Lawyers for police and the dispensary said the video – which has been widely seen on television and several online news sites, could play a key role in the ongoing investigation into the officers’ actions.

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Reinventing law is all the rage, with those who see money to be made promoting the idea that roadblocks like the Unauthorized Practice of Law are sapping their potential profits.  They hate that.

But there is a far more nefarious effort to reinvent law happening on college campuses, as reflected in the handling of campus sexual assault and rape, where the reinvention doesn’t pertain to shiny devices (well, not directly anyway), but to the fundamentals of due process, the rules that have been developed over the millennia to provide fundamental fairness to those accused of committing an offense.

The failings of campus adjudication has been a subject of many posts here, but the upshot of these adjudications is that colleges and universities, at the direction of the Department of Education upon pain of financial ruin, have essentially wiped the slate of due process clean, and decided to reinvent their procedures as if this was a fresh debate with neither history nor understanding of what processes are needed to assure fundamental fairness.

The recalibration of due process has not gone well, with the arguments confused and irrational.  Arguments such as why the accuser is just as entitled to due process as the accused are proffered, though the simple answer is that due process is only for the accused because they are the person in jeopardy.  Continue reading →

Via Ex-Cop Lawyer, a video of traffic stops and police encounters gone stupid.

No, this isn’t to say that the police officers’ handling was laudable, but that there are a great many people who are ridiculously obstinate in their interactions because they believe that they know the law, their rights, the Constitution, and what they are entitled to do. And they’re wrong.  Sometimes humorously. Sometimes frustratingly. Sometimes, just insufferably stupid.

It’s one thing to argue that you don’t agree with the law, that you think the law should be different. Most of us do, though we don’t usually agree with what we would change to make the world better.  Indeed, some would have the law go in exactly the opposite direction that you think it should. Never assume that most people think like you. Continue reading →

In the New York Times, Matt Apuzzo profiles one of the most dangerous men in law enforcement. And he’s not even a cop.  His name is William J. Lewinski, and for $1000 an hour, he will explain why every person killed by a cop was a righteous shoot.

Dr. Lewinski said he was not trying to explain away every shooting. But when he testifies, it is almost always in defense of police shootings. Officers are his target audience — he publishes a newsletter on police use of force that he says has nearly one million subscribers — and his research was devised for them. “The science is based on trying to keep officers safe,” he said.

This, of course, is just as much bullshit as his doctorate and his science.  To his credit, Lewinksi manufactured his credentials the old fashioned way, building a resume out of publishing pandering stories in police magazines, getting hired to train cops in how to shoot first and make it home for dinner, and ‘splaining why they can do no wrong in trial after trial.  The guy is an apology machine. Continue reading →

Under a consent decree in 1992 brought by female prison guards who claimed they were denied hiring and promotional opportunity offered males, Delaware opened its guard positions without regard to the gender of prisoners.  It didn’t just result in women guarding men, but men guarding women as well.  A disaster ensued.

Martelli and current union president Geoff Klopp said guards are often the prey of convicted criminals who covet sex with captors to use it as leverage for prison jobs, extra food or other benefits.

Martelli said male guards, many whom are “23 or 24 years old and have never had sex,” are vulnerable in a women’s prison. “You’ve got a bunch of girls walking around buck naked or in towels, laying in bed with another girl. There was a lot of that going on.”

Some prisoners, he said, “find a way to manipulate these guys,” such as offering to perform oral sex in return for cigarettes or a phone. I’m surprised more girls haven’t come up pregnant.”

Doesn’t your heart just break at those young, virginal boy guards being enticed by those nasty criminal vixens? And no doubt, there was some of that, as people in prison tend to get imaginative to get favors and contraband.  Yet the problem of women prisoners seducing male guards is nothing compared to the problem of guards raping prisoners. Continue reading →

Shortly after the murder of Sam DuBose by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing, my pal Lee Pacchia went ballistic. Why do colleges have their own police forces?  Why do they need cops with guns? Fair questions, and because it’s Sunday and I’m an accommodating sort of guy, I will do my best to explain.

The New York Times has an article about this particular campus police department, which provides a piece of the answer, particularly the part about what a campus cop is doing ticketing a non-student driving off campus.

Six years ago, with crime creeping upward in the tree-lined, if slightly downtrodden, neighborhoods encircling the University of Cincinnati campus, the city and the university quietly signed an agreement giving the 72-member campus police force authority to patrol nearby residential streets.

The goal was “increased visibility,” university officials say, and the roughly 10,000 students who live in apartments and rowhouses off campus noticed a difference. Campus officers walked them home late at night or gave them rides. “I feel like crime has gotten pushed out,” said one senior, Jen Steiner, 21.

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It’s not just that we live in a time of nonjudgmental acceptance of diversity, but that liberal ideals preclude skepticism of alternative lifestyles.  So why not vampires?  A study (yes, there’s a study) addresses the dilemmas facing “real vampires.”

“Real vampires” are people who think they must feed on the energies of others, either physically or psychically, for their own wellbeing. Feeding takes a variety of forms. Some will drink blood from consenting human donors, others will rely on physical contact. For some, being in a crowded room is enough to recharge their batteries.

Okay. But as bizarre as this may seem, why is this any more bizarre a self-identification, or less worthy of acceptance, than any other?

The study’s authors identify two beliefs held by helping professionals that are central to a person’s reticence to “come out of the coffin” and disclose their “real vampirism”. Continue reading →