Even as APD has moved into compliance with nearly every reform mandated by a U.S. Department of Justice consent decree, nothing has rectified the department’s most glaring problem: the fact that it has more police shootings now than ever.

Though the federal government’s oversight appears to be on the verge of ending, Albuquerque police continue to kill people at a higher rate than any other police force in the country. In 2014, when the DOJ issued its consent decree, city police were involved in nine shootings. Last year, the department logged 13 shootings — a 44 percent increase in a city of 561,000 people.

“How the hell do we have more shootings than we did before they came here?” asked Shaun Willoughby, a patrol officer and president of the Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association. “You absolutely did not get what you paid for.”

The man who has arguably benefitted the most from the consent decree is its independent monitor, James Ginger, who has collected more than $12 million since he took the job in early 2015, according to city invoices.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240411114233/https://magazine.atavist.com/the-devil-went-down-to-georgia-handcuff-man-atlanta-crime-lgbt/

Should police officers who fatally shot a mentally ill man in crisis have their names shielded from the public?

That's the question facing Ontario's Superior Court of Justice amid a lawsuit by the family of Ejaz Choudry, a father of four with schizophrenia, shot and killed by police west of Toronto in June 2020 after his family called a non-emergency line for help.

Lawyers for the five Peel Regional Police officers involved in the death of the 62-year-old — including one who fired two bullets into Choudry's chest — say publishing their names could put them and their families at risk of physical violence.

Lawyers for the family say there is no credible risk to the officers and that a publication ban would infringe on the public's right to know the identities of the officers entrusted with the powers that ended with Choudry's death and the media's ability to report openly on the case.

A former Prince George Mountie was given an absolute discharge Monday for hitting a handcuffed suspect in a burst of anger following a tense chase and an exchange of gunfire that a prosecutor said left the officer fearing for the lives of his colleagues.

In a brief Vancouver provincial court hearing, Crown counsel Cory Lo said Const. Paul Ste-Marie punched Dilmeet Chahal on the chin with the back of his fist in August 2022 as Chahal sat in a cruiser breathing heavily.

Lo said the officer's actions violated the fundamental principles of the justice system — that prisoners are entitled to be safe and that it's not up to police officers to mete out justice.

But if not excusable, Lo said Ste-Marie's actions were understandable given "unique" circumstances that saw the 27-year-old officer rammed by a vehicle flagged for homicide and gang connections before a foot chase with bullets flying.

After arriving at the Murry family home, police instructed everyone inside to come out with their hands up. Nakala Murry says that's when Aderrien emerged from around a corner, running toward the door. Capers then opened fire.

After arriving at the Murry family home, police instructed everyone inside to come out with their hands up. Nakala Murry says that's when Aderrien emerged from around a corner, running toward the door. Capers then opened fire.

After arriving at the Murry family home, police instructed everyone inside to come out with their hands up. Nakala Murry says that's when Aderrien emerged from around a corner, running toward the door. Capers then opened fire.

After arriving at the Murry family home, police instructed everyone inside to come out with their hands up. Nakala Murry says that's when Aderrien emerged from around a corner, running toward the door. Capers then opened fire.

After arriving at the Murry family home, police instructed everyone inside to come out with their hands up. Nakala Murry says that's when Aderrien emerged from around a corner, running toward the door. Capers then opened fire.

https://youtu.be/QvN8FEcW59c?si=TZKMFJ4kiold_0A3

When Tamera Hutcherson was arrested on January 8 in Dallas, she says, she was ordered by a woman officer to remove her hijab and lift up her shirt with the instruction: “Lift up your top like it’s Girls Gone Wild.” When she did, her waist beads — worn as part of a deeply-held spiritual belief — were revealed, and the officer allowed her to continue wearing them.

But then, she says in a new lawsuit, she was escorted to take a mugshot. Another officer, a man, ordered her to remove her hijab again, this time in view of both men officers and inmates. She tried to explain that she wore her hijab — a head covering — for religious reasons but was ignored. Hutcherson eventually complied but was shaking and crying so violently that the photograph had to be taken three times just to capture an in-focus image.

Hutcherson was arrested alongside two other women wearing hijabs that day — Donia El-Hussain and Nidaa Lafi — after participating in a protest demanding that the Biden administration call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The three women have filed a civil lawsuit against Dallas County, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and the individual officers involved, saying their religious garments were unlawfully removed for mugshot photos. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Huma Yasin, the lawyer representing El-Hussain, Hutcherson and Lafi, said she hopes this legal action prompts policy changes.

read more: https://19thnews.org/2024/04/women-dallas-lawsuit-hijabs-mugshots/

News article

https://ourtallahassee.com/video-shows-tallahassee-police-officer-planting-evidence-during-dui-arrest/

Canonical YouTube link

Guess who the primary ghost plate offenders are?

Flock Safety — a relatively recent entrant to the surveillance tech arena — is branching out. It’s courting cops with cheap ALPR cameras, unproven claims about crime reduction, and a little lawbreaking of its own.

But it hasn’t abandoned its roots. It first hit the scene with plate readers it pitched to the Fun Police: homeowners associations and the even deeper pockets overseeing our nation’s many gated communities.

Flock tells HOAs and the heads of carefully curated communities things like “Flock Safety is the only security camera that stops property crime.” It’s a laughable claim. For one, Flock’s cameras are cameras and pretty much any security camera will have some effect on crime. Second, cameras don’t prevent crime. They simply make it easier to investigate crime.

The ALPRs sold to HOAs by Flock may have a bit more of a preventative effect. “May” is the operative word — one not found in Flock’s advertising materials. And, given what’s already been reported about Flock’s HOA inroads, it appears Flock views itself as just another cop shop, albeit one that has (until recently) courted private markets.

It apparently encourages private purchasers of its cameras and plate readers to regard themselves the same way. As this report by Eli Wolfe for The Oaklandside points out, Flock customers are doing what the city of Oakland can’t (at least at this point): filling neighborhoods with ALPRs and providing cops with access to whatever’s been collected.

read more: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/03/california-hoas-are-buying-up-flock-license-plate-readers-giving-cops-open-access-to-them/

Some devices have the potential to reveal not just the wearer’s location, but also capture personal data.

In an ad released last spring by top electronic monitoring manufacturer BI Incorporated, viewers are introduced to the VeriWatch, one of the latest in the company’s suite of digital surveillance tools. The short video follows a day in the life of a VeriWatch user: how he starts his morning unplugging his charger, getting ready for work, and snapping a selfie using his watch — which looks similar to an Apple Watch. Prepared for the day, he then grabs his keys, goes to work, and later returns home to spend quality time with his wife and son, being sure to charge the device along the way.

The ad highlights how the VeriWatch departs from a typical smart watch available to the general public. For example, the selfie snapped in the morning isn’t for social media; it’s a biometric authentication to confirm the wearer’s identity to parole or probation officers. The ad also intends to convey how minimally the device impedes the user’s daily life. It seeks to show how this new era of electronic monitoring differs from the ankle monitors traditionally associated with “house arrest.”

Companies are increasingly developing these tools to pilot within prison and jail systems and on those living under “community supervision” — meaning people who are surveilled and monitored while living beyond prison walls. These tools are often presented as “alternatives to detention,” but privacy and human rights advocates argue that they actually expand the system instead of replacing it.

This expansion can be particularly insidious when it takes the form of digital tools that the public is already familiar with, creating a veneer of innocuity that shields the monitoring devices from more widespread scrutiny.

read more: https://truthout.org/articles/new-electronic-monitoring-tech-piloted-both-inside-and-outside-of-prisons-jails/

It appears the New Jersey Department of Health still believes the state’s residents are better served by giving law enforcement another way to dodge the Constitution.

The Department of Health was sued two years ago by the state’s Office of the Public Defender (OPD). That lawsuit targeted the state’s peculiar practice of holding on to newborns’ blood tests for nearly a quarter century and turning these over to investigators who just don’t feel like following the Fourth Amendment rules.

read more: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/03/new-jersey-sued-again-for-giving-cops-access-to-newborn-babies-dna/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/18331579

Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.

Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.

And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.

Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. And despite that, each died after police used a kind of force that is not supposed to be deadly — and can be much easier to hide than the blast of an officer’s gun.

Every day, police rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them, such as physical holds, Tasers and body blows. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death — as happened with George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing. And while that encounter was caught on video, capturing Floyd’s last words of “I can’t breathe,” many others throughout the United States have escaped notice.