The photo shows two white Chicago Police officers posing with an unidentified black man. The officers — Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan — are holding rifles as the black man lies on the floor with a dazed look on his face and with antlers on his head as if he were a prized, big buck finally hunted down.
Finnegan is smiling and grabbing the right antler, while McDermott is holding up the man’s head as if it were his trophy.
The photo was taken in a police station on the West Side of Chicago sometime between 1999 and 2003. The Chicago Police Department successfully kept it hidden from the public until a judge refused to keep it under seal and the Chicago Sun-Times pulled a copy from a court filing.
Finnigan is a notoriously dirty ex-cop who was a member of the police department’s elite Special Operations Section (SOS) until 2006, when he was charged with leading a gang of fellow officers who robbed suspects, illegally invaded homes and stole thousands of dollars in cash. He’s now serving 12 years in federal prison.
In a 2012 interview with Playboy, Finnigan admitted the SOS beat and tortured multiple suspects, and described shutting down an internal affairs investigation by appealing to one of his comrades in blue who worked in the Internal Affairs Division.
Tag: Police Brutality
US Marshal Shuts Down Citizen Recording By Grabbing Phone And Smashing It On The Ground
There’s a message being sent by this “tactical gear” and it says that these Marshals think they’re a military detachment and everyone around them not clearly labeled as law enforcement is the “enemy” — including anyone with a camera.
Now, it’s pretty well established that citizens have the right to film law enforcement officers while in public places. There are exceptions, of course, but none of those appear to be in play here.
What does appear to be in play is the mental exception far too many law enforcement officers feel they can deploy whenever they’d rather not be “watched.” According to an interview with Beatriz Paez, whose filming was “interrupted” by the US Marshal (and fortunately filmed by yet another person from across the street), the officers first turned their backs to her (which is fine) and then proceeded to keep moving towards her to block off her view.
When this more subtle intimidation failed to deter Paez, the US Marshal simply stormed up to her, grabbed her phone, smashed it to the ground and finally, kicked the shattered device back to her.
I guess she can be thankful he didn’t demand she hand over the phone as evidence. Although, if he had deployed that BS tactic, he’d just look stupid rather than abusive and potentially dangerous — a person armed to the teeth who can’t control his impulses.
New Jersey Cop Demands Camera From Eyewitness After Police Dog Allowed To Maul Prone Suspect
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide, right? That’s what the government tells us when it wants to erect cameras and fund domestic surveillance efforts. So, what do you tell a police officer who demands a citizen hand over their phone? Even if the officer has done something wrong, he still can at least attempt to hide it. And even if the effort fails, he still likely has nothing to fear. That’s the imbalance of power at work and it leads directly to this sort of thing.
New Jersey police may have gone too far when they took the cell phone from an onlooker who recorded their encounter with a suspect who was mauled by a police dog and later died.
The man, Phillip White, had dog bites all over his body last week, his lawyer said, and a jarring video shows cops struggling to pull the dog away.
A police officer took the video from a witness who was recording the arrest — possibly in violation of the law — but the footage was later obtained by NBC Philadelphia.
State Legislators Pushing Bills To Shield Police Officers From Their Own Body Camera Recordings
Police accountability remains a major concern. Lawsuits alleging improper police conduct are filed seemingly nonstop. The Department of Justice continues to investigate police department afterpolice department for a variety of civil rights violations. More and more police departments are equipping body cameras on their officers in hopes of trimming down the number of complaints and lawsuits filed against them.
Meanwhile, the public has taken police accountability into its own hands, thanks to the steady march of technology — which has put a portable phone in almost every person’s hands, and put a camera inside most of those phones.
So, we have two entities viewing accountability from seemingly opposite directions. Over the years, many officers have made it clear through their actions that being filmed isn’t something they’re comfortable with. This has resulted in additional misconduct and abuse of existing laws to shut down recordings. But what are these officers going to do when a city council — or worse, a Memorandum of Understanding with the Justice Department — directs them to start generating their own recordings?
One answer has already been presented by the Denver Police Department. They simply won’t activate the cameras.
During a six-month trial run for body cameras in the Denver Police Department, only about one out of every four use-of-force incidents involving officers was recorded.
Cases where officers punched people, used pepper spray or Tasers, or struck people with batons were not recorded because officers failed to turn on cameras, technical malfunctions occurred or because the cameras were not distributed to enough people, according to a report released Tuesday by Denver’s independent monitor Nick Mitchell.
This is a case-by-case “solution,” self-applied as needed by certain officers. For other departments, it appears the imposition of recording devices will be greeted by legislation. Legislators cite “privacy concerns” but their bills do little more than hand law enforcement agencies full control over body camera recordings.
Lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills to exempt video recordings of police encounters with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what can be made public.
Their stated motive: preserving the privacy of people being videotaped, and saving considerable time and money that would need to be spent on public information requests as the technology quickly becomes widely used.
A small amount of redaction (face-blurring, etc.) would address the privacy concerns. After all, reality TV pioneer COPS has run for years with minimal privacy complaints and that’s all it’s ever used. As for the latter concern — expenses related to open records requests — there are ways to address this that won’t cede complete control to law enforcement agencies. Seattle’s Police Department worked with a local activist to find a solution that would provide footage, protect privacy and stay ahead of voluminous public records requests. Unfortunately, the result of these efforts has produced nothing more than extremely blurry footage in which everything is “redacted” by default.
Justifications offered by legislators try desperately to skew law enforcement’s total control of body camera footage as some sort of win for the general public.
“Public safety trumps transparency,” said Kansas state Sen. Greg Smith, a Republican. “It’s not trying to hide something. It’s making sure we’re not releasing information that’s going to get other people hurt.”
The problem is that if it’s the public being abused in these videos, there are very few options available to obtain recordings of misconduct.
The Kansas Senate voted 40-0 last month to exempt the recordings from the state’s open records act. Police would only have to release them to people who are the subject of the recordings and their representatives, and could charge them a viewing fee. Kansas police also would be able to release videos at their own discretion.
The “fix” for possibly overbroad public records requests includes a) making acquiring a recording unaffordable, even for the person on the receiving end of alleged abuse and b) allowing the Kansas police to push out a steady stream of exculpatory video. The latter of the two is perfectly acceptable, but only if it’s balanced by the public’s ability to obtain less-than-flattering video of interactions with police officers. Nothing about this bill makes the public any “safer,” no matter what Sen. Greg Smith says.
The potential for abuse of laws like these is so obvious even the cops can see it.
“I think it’s a fair concern and a fair criticism that people might cherry pick and release only the ones that show them in a favorable light,” said former Charlotte, North Carolina, police chief Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
Arizona’s legislation goes even further than its Midwestern counterpart.
The bill declares that body camera recordings are not public records, and as such can be released only if the public interest “outweighs the interests of privacy or confidentiality or the best interests of the state.”
Not even the subject of the footage can demand a copy of the recording without somehow talking a judge into issuing an order for its release. Washington’s proposed legislation similarly exempts all body camera video from public examination and routes footage requests through the courts. In both cases, bill sponsors claim publicly-released video could be used for “criminal purposes,” but have yet to explain how a properly-redacted video would become a tool for “extortion” by “unscrupulous website owners.”
The attendant irony hypocrisy, of course, is that law enforcement agencies and local governments have declared arrest mugshots to be public records and have allowed “unscrupulous website owners” to post the shots and demand payment for their removal. But mugshots only involve members of the public, making them of lesser concern than footage that will also contain police officers. This sort of legislation is nothing more than the codification of a double standard, if that’s the motivation behind it.
On the other hand, some states are at least moving to ensure the general public can continue their unpaid police accountability efforts.
The Colorado bill, which you can read here, states that if a cop seizes a camera from a citizen without permission or a warrant or deliberately interferes with a citizen’s right to record by intimidation or destruction of the camera, the citizen is entitled to $15,000 in civil fees in addition to attorney fees.
This bill will help ensure at least one recording of an officer-involved incident remains intact, seeing as Denver police officers aren’t all that into capturing their end of these interactions.
Another bill in Texas which has not gotten nearly as much publicity comes from democratic representative Eric Johnson, which seeks to protect citizens from bullying officers as well as criminalize cops who confiscate cameras, only to destroy footage.
This pushes back against Texas Congressman Jason Villalba’s recently-introduced bill, which hopes to add a 25-foot no-recording “halo” around police officers at all times — stretching to 100 feet if the camera operator happens to be armed. Villalba has openly stated that “officer safety” is a greater concern than violated First Amendment rights, which would actually be criminalized if his bill passes.
California has also introduced a bill involving citizen recordings — one that will make an incredibly obvious statement into law… presumably because that’s the only way the state will get law enforcement to respect it.
In California, Senate Bill 411 would amend the state’s penal code to say that simply filming or taking a photograph of an officer performing his duty in a public place does not automatically amount to interference.
“Filming isn’t interference” would seem to be something that shouldn’t need to be inserted as an amendment to criminal statutes. As would the following, which is perhaps even moreinfuriatingly obvious than the sentence above:
Supporters say it protects the First Amendment and clarifies that filming alone does not give police officers probable cause to search or confiscate an individual’s property.
Undoubtedly, there will be law enforcement pushback against the proposed legislation, which should be referenced in the future as the “We Shouldn’t Even Need to Be Telling You This” Act, with “SMDH” as the short title.
Both sets of cameras will help increase law enforcement accountability, but one set is receiving the majority of proposed legislative protections. Shielding body camera recordings from the public eye limits their effectiveness as misconduct deterrents — the very reason they’ve been instituted.
Texas Bill Would Make It Illegal for You to Film a Cop Beating You
Section 38.15 of the Texas Penal Code makes it an offense to interrupt, disrupt, impede, or otherwise interfere with “public duties,” including those being exercised by a police officer. That’s the law pretty much everywhere, of course, but the question that has arisen in recent years is whether you are “interfering” (etc.) with a police officer just because you are recording what he or she is doing.
Actually, that’s not a serious question, it’s just something bad cops say because they don’t want to be recorded. The argument boils down to, “I had to stop what I was doing and come over and kick your ass because you were recording me, and you therefore interrupted my exercise of a public duty.” It’s a hilariously bad argument that way too many officers have gotten away with.
The Texas statute doesn’t say anything specific about recording, although it does say a person can’t be prosecuted if the interfering acts “consisted of speech only.” That would probably also cover “expressive conduct” (i.e., the middle finger) which also counts as speech under the First Amendment, but what about recording? Yes, say courts who don’t hate freedom, that’s protected too because it is “fundamental and virtually self-evident” that the reason for the recording is so you have proof when you tell somebody what happened. It is therefore unconstitutional to punish someone for doing that, whether via criminal prosecution or the more expedited procedure of just shooting them.
Okay, now along comes Rep. Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) with H.B. 2918. This bill would amend section 38.15 to expressly include within the definition of “interference” the conduct of “filming, recording, photographing, or documenting the officer within 25 feet of the officer,” or doing so “within 100 feet of the officer” if you are also carrying a concealed handgun.
Of course, the officer is always going to be “within 25 feet of the officer,” but let’s assume he meant to say that the person doing the filming must stay more than 25 feet away. (The 100-foot distinction makes no sense to me either, but let’s set that aside.) Villalba says the provision is only meant to provide a buffer zone—or as he insists on putting it, a “halo”—around police officers so they can do their jobs without interference. But the law already precludes actualinterference, so this provision adds nothing in that sense. And by legally defining any recording within 25 feet as “interference,” it plainly authorizes police to arrest anyone who’s doing that, whether they are actuallyinterfering or not.
Texas Lawmaker Wants To Make It Illegal To Film Cops From Less Than 25 Feet Away
Now that it’s pretty much settled that the public has the right to record the police*, legislators are now moving to peel back this begrudgingly “granted” First Amendment protection.
*Exceptions, of course. Far, far too many of them.
Filed by Dallas State Representative Jason Villalba (R), the bill prohibits anyone in public within 25 feet of police to record them. The buffer is even greater at 100 feet, for anyone recording video who is also carrying a gun. Only accredited news organizations, like KENS5, would be allowed to record without the buffer zone.
Guess who gets to decide whether any unaccredited videographers are “too close” to the action? That’s right. It’ll be the person deploying handcuffs or demanding the camera be shut off/relinquished. It will all be in the eye of the uniformed beholder who’s just going to eyeball the distance between him and the unaffiliated bodies of public accountability, and if it’s close, just go ahead and call it a crime. A crime with some rather hefty penalties, considering it involves recording public figures in public areas.
Anyone caught filming within the 25-foot radius could be prosecuted for a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine. For gun-carriers who step within 100 feet, it would be a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
The Thin Blue Line of Entitlement
Something unnatural is happening in Portland, and Police Union President Daryl Turner isn’t going to put up with it.
The proper order of things is upended. Black is white and white is black, cats and dogs cohabit. Madness!
A judge has disbelieved a cop.
Last week Circuit Judge Diana Stuart acquitted teenager Thai Gurule on juvenile charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and attempted assault on a cop. She acquitted him even though the cops said he did it.Is Judge Stuart some sort of pro-criminal agitator? Apparently. In an extensive written order she weighed the testimony of sworn police officers against irrelevant trifles like actual videorecordings of their encounter with Gurule. Even though the cops swore that Gurule threw punches at them, Judge Stuart disbelieved them simply because she could not see any punches on the cell phone videos. Is she some sort of video-fisticuffs expert? Worse than that, she specifically stated that she didn’t find some of their testimony credible. As if they weren’t cops.
But Police Union President Daryl Turner understands the natural order of things, even if this upstart judge doesn’t.
First, Turner understands that when a cop uses force, that decision should be beyond judicial review, and their description of the event beyond question
Detective Who Was Recorded Assaulting An Unarmed, Handcuffed Suspect Acquitted Of All Charges
Both a cop and his prime homicide suspect have walked away free men. But it’s the cop who’s gathered most of the attention. Donald Love was picked up by Milwaukee police on August 14, 2013, after his infant son died in a local hospital of traumatic brain injuries. Love wasn’t just a “person of interest.” He was alone in the house with the infant at the time the injury occurred.
Love was interrogated by detective Rodolfo Gomez Jr. This questioning was recorded. The highlight reel, as it were, doesn’t show much interrogation. It shows Gomez attacking the restrained suspect on two separate occasions. Love was punched, kicked and jabbed in the eye with Gomez’s thumb. The latter — and more excruciating “interaction” (caution: the video hosted here contains some very unnerving screaming) — occurred during Gomez’s “follow-up questioning,” and appears to have been provoked by Love’s justifiably angry yelling.
A jury acquitted Love of all charges more than year later. Another jury also acquitted Gomez of all charges, despite watching him assault a handcuffed man.
How do you defend someone against charges related to a videotaped beating? Well, you do everything you can to cast the person handing out the beating as the real victim. His defense lawyers helped, but they had to fight an uphill battle against both damning video footage and statements made by Gomez himself, most of which gave the indication that he had no idea how to handle a potentially dangerous individual.
First, Gomez admitted he said something he knew would provoke an angry response. Then he claimed his short-term memory went all haywire in the heat of the moment.
Albuquerque Police Dept. ‘Complies’ With Records Request By Releasing Password-Protected Videos… But Not The Password
If there’s one thing the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) does well — or at least, frequently –it’s shoot and kill Albuquerque residents. Its officers’ obvious preference for excessive and/or deadly force attracted the notice of the DOJ, which issued a (mostly) scathing review that was tempered somewhat by the DOJ’s appreciation of the inherent risks of the job, as well as all the hard work the city’s officers do when not shooting Albuquerque residents.
On May 3rd of last year, Gail Martin called the APD to help her when her husband, Armand Martin, threatened her and her two children with a gun. This turned into a lengthy standoff which finally ended when APD officers shot Martin as he ran from the house. According to the police, Martin was holding two guns at the time.
The APD released a number of records, including footage captured before and after the shooting, but nothing containing the shooting itself. Local law firm Kennedy Kennedy & Ives, representing Gail Martin for a possible civil rights lawsuit, requested a copy of police recordings containing the actual shooting under New Mexico’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA).
Over a month later, the APD responded. Sort of.
The Kennedy Kennedy & Ives Law Practice in the lawsuit said the department in mid-August released six CDs containing records on the May 3 shooting death of Armand Martin, a 50-year-old Air Force veteran, in response to the firm’s records request. But three of the CDs were password protected.
Now, this could have been a simple oversight, but if so, the problem would be solved already. Instead, it looks as though the APD is looking to keep the law firm from viewing the videos it requested.
The firm has tried to get the password from APD records, evidence and violent crimes personnel to no avail, according to the complaint…
Now the APD’s being sued. The firm is seeking not only access to the password-protected videos, but also damages and legal fees. According to the firm, access to these videos is crucial to determining whether or not Gail Martin has a legitimate civil rights case. Without them, the firm is no better positioned to make this call than the general public, which has only seen the lead-in and aftermath of the shooting.
This isn’t the APD’s only legal battle related to its IPRA non-compliance. Late last year, KRQE of Albuquerque sued it for “serial violations” of the law. That’s in addition to the one it filed over a 2012 incident, in which the PD stalled on its response to a journalist’s public records request before releasing the requested footage at a press conference, basically stripping the reporter of her potential “scoop.”
It’s common knowledge that law enforcement agencies are less than helpful when it comes to releasing documentation of alleged wrongdoing. It’s the one part they can’t completely seal off when circling the wagons. This leads to weeks, months… even years of obfuscation. And this often leads to lawsuits, paid for by the same public it doesn’t want to hold it accountable.
Report: Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Operating Domestic Black Site
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Department is operating a CIA-style black site on the city’s West Side, according to an explosive new report from The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman. The facility, an otherwise plain warehouse known as Homan Square, also houses military-style vehicles, according to Ackerman.
The Guardian reports that the CPD detains mostly poor, black and brown people at Homan. Once at the site, detainees are allegedly beaten by police, shackled for hours and denied access to counsel. There is no booking at Homan Square, so details about who has been detained at the facility are scarce. “Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are,” Ackerman wrote. “Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts.”
One detainee, 44-year-old John Hubbard, died in an interview room at Homan. There are no official records — or a coroner’s report — concerning Hubbard’s official cause of death, or why he was detained in the first place.
Jacob Church, a member of the NATO Three, was also held at Homan. The NATO Three — three men charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism when the NATO summit convened in Chicago in 2012 — also included Jared Chase and Brent Betterly. It was the first terrorism case Chicago had seen. Church told The Guardian that he was chained to a bench for 17 hours and denied phone calls. His lawyer eventually tracked him down and was allowed to speak to him through a weird “floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage.”