RCMP officers who arrested an autistic 16-year-old at a St. Albert playground will not face criminal charges even though Alberta's police watchdog says the teenager was mistakenly identified as a drug user and unlawfully detained.

In a report released Wednesday, the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) detailed results of its investigation into the October 2022 detention of Ryley Bauman.

ASIRT concluded that charges of unlawful confinement and assault should be considered against the three arresting officers. The Crown, however, has declined to pursue a criminal case, citing the unlikelihood of conviction.

Block said three of the four civilian witnesses who saw the arrest recognized the teen could be, or likely was, neurodivergent, a term used to describe people whose brains develop or function differently.

Around 6:30 p.m. on May 26, Brittany Shamily was at home with her children, including an infant, when police used a battering ram to bust in her front door. “What the hell is going on?” she screamed, terrified for herself and her family. “I got a three-month-old baby!”

...

While the family was detained outside, the SWAT team "ransacked" their house, the lawsuit says. One SWAT team member punched a basketball-sized hole in the drywall. Another broke through a drop ceiling. They turned over drawers and left what had been an orderly house in disarray.

After this had gone on for more than half an hour, the AirPods were located — on the street outside the family's home.

It later came to light that one of Shamily and Briscoe’s daughters saw what was likely the stolen Charger careening through their neighborhood a little before 7 a.m. that day. (The vehicle later crashed on the 1700 block of Foley Drive, about six miles from the family’s home.) It stands to reason that someone in the Charger tossed a pair of stolen AirPods onto the street in the vicinity of the quiet house police later busted into and ransacked.

The family, represented by Schock and Erich Vieth, is suing for damages stemming from embarrassment, unreasonable use of force, loss of liberty, and other factors. The lawsuit notes that neither Shamily or Briscoe had been in any trouble with the law for at least a dozen years prior to the incident. "There was no probable cause for the search warrant and had the affidavit contained complete information, the state court judge would not have approved the warrant," the suit allege

All charges against three Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers accused in the fatal shooting of an 18-month-old boy during an abduction investigation in Kawartha Lakes in Nov. 2020 have been dropped, a Crown attorney on the case confirmed to CityNews on Monday.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13526278

"Fort Dodge authorities said that Tyler Stansberry had an active warrant out for violation of probation stemming from a domestic abuse case.

The charges stemmed from a mental health episode and the family asked to not press charges"

This same shit happened to me. Police press charges, coerce a guilty plea, bing bang boom criminal underclass created and maintained by the police. fr the news shouldnt be skating over this aspect. he wasnt shot for being schizophrenic, he was shot for daring to resist as a second class citizen.

An undercover police officer arranged to buy 2 magic mushroom chocolate bars over Instagram then opened fire within seconds, killing the driver and injuring the passenger for selling $100 worth of antidepressants. Perfectly justified.

Kane Niyondagara was walking home from a Starbucks in Ottawa's east end when he heard the sirens.

"Get on your knees," he remembers one officer calling.

But Niyondagara, 27, hadn't done anything wrong. He dropped his hands and shrugged, as if to ask why. He looked at the sidewalk under his feet and said he was afraid of being "brutally arrested" against the hard concrete.

The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) won't say much about that encounter or what followed, except to explain that it was all a case of mistaken identity.

Niyondagara, who is Black, said he was shocked with a stun gun, pinned down, struck in the face and handcuffed before police realized their mistake. Parts of the incident were captured on video by a bystander who shared it with CBC News.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/11657686

Mississippi police officer accused of forcing prisoner to drink his own urine

Michael Christian Green to appear in court on Thursday after incident at Pearl police department

Archived version: https://archive.ph/8yymE

DEDHAM, Mass. — The Massachusetts State Police Internal Affairs Unit is investigating a State Police Detective for a potential violation of department policy in connection with the Karen Read murder case.

25 Investigates learned of the internal affairs investigation Wednesday, one day after a hearing for Karen Read, the woman accused in the death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe.

Her defense argued that Detective Michael Proctor was not truthful with his relationship with people he has identified as witnesses in the case.

According to the defense, Proctor admitted this to a federal grand jury. Federal probe findings revealed in court as Karen Read’s defense team pushes to dismiss murder case

The defense also says text messages analyzed in the federal investigation revealed that one of the other witnesses offered to buy Proctor a gift when the case against Read was over.

Proctor is the lead investigator in the Read case.

State police tell 25 Investigates that Trooper Proctor remains on full active duty amid the investigation.

On Wednesday, Read’s lawyers filed a request for information from the state police internal affairs unit. The substance of that request is unknown because the defense has asked it be sealed by the court.

A Durham police officer has been handed a two-year demotion after he admitted to crashing his car on the way home from the bar before reporting it as stolen in an attempt to “evade criminal and civil liability.”

On Feb. 24, Const. Trevor Kathnelson of Durham Regional Police Service (DRPS) pleaded guilty to one count of professional misconduct at a disciplinary tribunal hearing presided over by Ontario Provincial Police adjudicator M.P.B. Elders.

Kathnelson was also criminally charged with one count of public mischief, to which he pleaded guilty back in August, in relation with the incident.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12919255

Posting here on advice from a politics mod. Hello everyone.

When I first went to a white high school, something I noticed right away is that there were these young men there, kids really, with a very very distinctly thousand yard stare. Every one of them had been subjected to a police raid, by swat or similar. I will use the phrase, “veterans of the war on drugs”, as a joke, but yeah, that is actually how I expect this time to be remembered. As an adult, I think it’s pretty obvious that the difference with this high school was that the families of the children subjected to these raids more or less abandoned them. Literally, in the case of those subject to incarceration. So it is not that urban schools are not also subject to the same raids; it’s definitely the opposite. Rather, it was so normalized that local community and family structures have adapted to resist them.

Anyway, the US is an authoritarian state. It’s not totalitarian. It’s not fascist, yet, and most people still recognize the democratic elements of the US as legitimate. However the fact remains, the US is ,through and through, from the heights of government, to society at large, authoritarian. Authoritarianism as a concept, can be broken down into two categories, institutional and individual. Anyone that has ever been a child in this country or met a man from here knows that this country has a serious and pervasive issue with individuals inclined towards authoritarianism in their daily lives. And and I am just so so sorry for this, but I don’t understand any other way than just ripping off the Band-Aid, you’re here, I have to assume you’re here for it: outside of the context of American exceptionalism, the idea that a slave society could ever under any circumstances be a bastion for freedom is fucking deranged.

America’s founding myth is just that, a founding myth. It is a fabrication, in support of a government, just like the founding myth of every other empire. Easiest one, America wasn’t the first democracy wasn’t the first modern democracy wasn’t any of this nonsense. You can tell because the government that it split away from and fought a war against, was a democracy. It’s not even the first republic, the Dutch were right there. The revolutionary war was a shortsighted power grab by local elites willing to sacrifice their community in exchange for a chance at securing their ill gotten gains. The founding fathers were warlords, propagandists and hypocrites of the highest order. Their glorious revolution left a third of the free population dead, and a majority of the remainder displaced, to say nothing of the conditions of the enslaved. Then they committed genocide on the Native Americans 100 times over, and helped invent scientific racism and codify white supremacy so deeply into the blood of America that there are people to this day, who would swear to you that it’s a real and natural part of the world. Bottom line, it’s all fine and good to recognize some democratic elements of the US government at its inception, but that does not exculpate the US for its crimes against humanity. Authoritarianism is not the opposite of democracy. They don’t cancel each other out.

Wrapup: by the standards of anyone not currently filating American exceptionalism, the US was an authoritarian state until at least 1963, with the official disintegration of the American racial class system. Immediately, the groundwork for the modern mass incarceration system was laid, and since at least 2001, the US is openly authoritarian again. Specifically, in terms of separate sets of rights for different groups of people, in particular along racial lines. Sorry, again, if through the course of conducting this research this conclusion is disproven, I will be ecstatic and happy to let everyone know. As it stands, the soul of America is not democracy or progressive change, it’s self destructive bourgeoisie capitalism stretched across a skeleton of white supremacy. That is the reality of the situation. I am sorry.

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting cleared local police officers of wrongdoing Thursday, despite acknowledging a series of rippling failures during the fumbled response to the 2022 classroom attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Several family members of victims walked out in anger midway though a presentation that portrayed Uvalde Police Department officers of acting swiftly and appropriately, in contrast to scathing and sweeping past reports that faulted police at every level.

“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.

Another person in the crowd screamed, “Cowards!”

Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council on Thursday, described several failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.

“There were problems all day long with communication and lack of it. The officers had no way of knowing what was being planned, what was being said,” Prado said. “If they would have had a ballistic shield, it would have been enough to get them to the door.”

Celena Morrison leads the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs and is a top aide to Mayor Cherelle Parker. Morrison’s husband, Darius McLean, runs a community center. Both are Black, while the Pennsylvania state trooper appears to be white.

“I don’t know why he’s doing this,” McLean cries to his wife Saturday morning as she records him being handcuffed, lying on his side, on the shoulder of the elevated highway during a rainstorm. Cars pass by a few feet away.

“It’s ‘cause I’m Black,” McLean says.

“It’s not ’cause you’re Black,” replies the trooper, who leaves McLean handcuffed on the highway shoulder and then moves to arrest Morrison.

Link to video

Cochran tells him about another library, where there is a "big glass room to put all those noisy teenagers in" that has a bookshelf in front of it with books she doesn't like: "So what do you call that, sheriff? Enticing?" "Promoting," he responds. "It's like the old fashioned guy in the van with a bowl of candy trying to entice. I have goosebumps even saying it, it's so disgusting."