THE POLICE PROBLEM

tl;dr, we need more time examples and research to say anything authoritative, but anecdotally things look very positive. One excerpt,

>There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job so far, according to experts. And data suggests unarmed responders rarely need to call in police. In Eugene, Oregon, which has operated the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (known locally as CAHOOTS) response team since 1989, roughly 1% of their calls end up requiring police backup, according to the organization. Albuquerque responders have asked for police in 1% of calls, as of January. In Denver, the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) team had never called for police backup due to a safety issue as of July 2022, the most recent data available. In Durham, members of the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART) reported feeling safe on 99% of calls. > >Many communities are still sending alternative responders to a narrow subset of calls, and debating whether it’s safe to expand their scope. For example, many cities will only send community responders to situations that are outdoors or in public spaces. Programs are also divided on whether disputes between neighbors or within families are a proper place for crisis responders, or calls involving suicidal threats.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240725114047/https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health-alternative-911

"This is a gruesome case, brought in 2005 by a Colorado woman named Jessica Gonzales. Gonzales had a restraining order against her ex-husband. But when he kidnapped her three children, the police ignored her requests for help. All three children were murdered. The Supreme Court ruled that the police had no obligation to enforce the restraining order."

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240725114640/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/the-quiet-epidemic-child-predators-police.html

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/25673016

> A police officer has been filmed kicking and stamping on the head of a man lying on the ground at Manchester Airport. > > The uniformed male officer is seen holding a Taser over the man, who is lying face down, before striking him twice while other officers shout at onlookers to stay back in a video shared widely online. > > Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms officers had been attacked while attempting to arrest someone following a fight in the airport's Terminal 2 on Tuesday. It said it had referred itself to the police watchdog. > > Anger has grown over the video and a crowd of what appeared to be several hundred people protested outside the police station in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday evening.

Headline is ridiculously generous to the cop.

>>The video from body cameras shows a tense moment in which former Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson yelled at 36-year-old Sonya Massey to set down a pot from the stove just seconds after she started pouring the water into the sink and the two giggled over her “hot steaming water.” He then threatens to shoot her, Massey ducks then briefly rises and Grayson fires his pistol at her three times.

>>Grayson tells her to give him her ID. Then he points to the kitchen for the other deputy to check on the stove. “We don’t need a fire while we’re here.”

>>Massey goes to the kitchen and after she and Grayson share a laugh, she says, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” and asks him a question.

>>“You better (expletive) not or I swear to God I’ll (expletive) shoot you in your (expletive) face.” He then pulls his 9mm pistol and says “Drop the (expletive) pot.”

>>Massey says, “OK, I’m sorry.” In Grayson’s bodycam footage, he pulls the gun and when she ducks, she raises her hands and it looks like she has the red pan in her hands. But Grayson is still in the living room, facing Massey, behind a counter dividing the living room and kitchen, 10 or 15 feet away.

>>The other deputy, who is not named, said “I’m gonna go get my kit.”

>>Grayson said, “No, it’s a headshot. She done. You can go get it, but that’s a headshot ... there’s nothing you can do, man.”

>>He added: “What else do we do? I’m not taking hot (expletive) boiling water to the (expletive) face”

>>Noting that Massey was still breathing despite losing a lot of blood, he relented and said he would get his kit too. The other deputy responded, “We can at least try to stop the bleeding.”

>>Speaking to responding police, Grayson told them “she had boiling water and came at me, with boiling water. ... She said she was going to rebuke me in the name of Jesus and came at with boiling water.”

Prosecutors alleged that when Grayson and his partner responded to Massey’s home, Grayson allowed her to move a pot of water heating on the stove, but as she set it on a counter, Grayson then “aggressively yelled” at Massey over the pot and pulled his 9mm pistol.

Massey then asked what the deputies were doing, to which Grayson responded, “Getting away from your hot, steaming water.”

“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Massey said twice, according to the documents reviewed by NBC News.

Grayson responded, “I swear to God. I will shoot you right in your f------ face.”

When Grayson drew his service weapon and ordered her to drop the pot, she let go, then crouched below a line of cabinets, and declared “I’m sorry” before being shot in the face, prosecutors said.

Grayson did not render aid to Massey and discouraged his partner from getting his medical kit because he thought her injury was too severe, according to the court document filed in support of keeping Grayson in custody without bond.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11483245

> Sonya Massey, 36, died after an early-morning encounter with deputies from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office on July 6, authorities said. > > Crosspost from the Pollice Problem community https://lemmy.world/post/17616605

AP News

> If a dearth of officers results in higher crime rates, Phoenix residents need to remember cops walked away from the job because they didn’t want to do if it required respecting constitutional rights. And if the city has trouble attracting replacements, that says far more about the people attracted to law enforcement careers than the specifics of the job itself.

Taylor said in filings that officers arrived at the school and interrogated her daughter without her present. Per the complaint, N.B. commented to a school nurse that she “wondered what spending one day in jail would be like.” According to the complaint, officers became upset by the comment and responded by handcuffing and arresting N.B.

The Honolulu Police Department (HPD) denied any racial motivation underlying their treatment of N.B. and defended their actions as an appropriate response to a genuine threat of harm. N.B. was never criminally charged for her actions.

Sgt. Fern Spellman couldn't stay for any more questions as there was a report of a caricature artist welding a pencil two streets over.

Seriously, I don't think that thing was sharp at all.

First officer is convicted of murder since Washington state law eased prosecution of police

via Reddit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17056255

> An officer in upstate New York shot and killed a teen fleeing while pointing a replica gun, police said Saturday.

> Nowacki was listed as a member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government extremist group that played a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He has a series of complaints against him, including excessive use of force, personnel violations, and allegations of misconduct, such as making racist remarks to South Side activists that stem from 2007 which he was minimally scolded for, records show. > > In 2020, Nowacki was reprimanded for making a series of Facebook posts during the pandemic that criticized the police command staff, mocked an online dashboard that tracks public sentiment toward the department and showed him wearing a cloth mask, according to the Sun-Times and WBEZ investigation. > > The Sun-Times reported last month the officer and eight others with ties to the Oath Keepers will avoid punishment. Neighbors and activists have repeatedly called for Nowacki to be fired. > > Linas told the crowd she wasn’t aware of the allegations or the investigation into the officer until it was brought up at the meeting. She said some of the officer’s social media posts were concerning, but the process of firing an officer is overseen by the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Chicago Police Board.

Video of his arrest obtained by our Target 7 team shows the officer repeatedly punching the man until he’s covered in blood.

It happened March 30, 2022, when former deputy James Wright arrested Joshua Barricks for skateboarding on a highway and public intoxication.

Barricks’ attorney explained the alleged crimes don’t fit the beating that followed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/23880779

> Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He still didn’t stop after pointing a hand out the window and turning onto a darkened dirt road as the trooper sounded his siren. > > Five minutes into a pursuit that began over a broken taillight, the 60-year-old Black man was dead — shot in the forehead by the white trooper who fired a single bullet mere seconds after forcing Lewis to crash into a ditch. Trooper Jake Thompson insisted he pulled the trigger as Lewis revved the engine of his Nissan Sentra and jerked his steering wheel as if trying to mow him down. > > “I had to shoot this man,” Thompson can be heard telling a supervisor on video recorded by his dash-mounted camera at the shooting scene in rural Screven County, midway between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.” > > But new investigative details obtained by The Associated Press and the never-before-released dashcam video of the August 2020 shooting have raised fresh questions about how the trooper avoided prosecution with nothing more than a signed promise never to work in law enforcement again. Use-of-force experts who reviewed the footage for AP said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.

> The investigators also asked Hair for permission to check his uniforms for semen. > > “I don’t know my rights. Do I have to?” the former officer asked. “I don’t think I want to do that.”

I plead the right to no blacklight searches!

"The arrest, she was informed, was for a peaceful sit-in she had attended at the Toronto office of Awz Ventures three months earlier, in January.

Suzanne is not the protester’s real name, and The Breach has agreed to keep her anonymous for fear of professional retribution.

Awz, an investment fund led by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is behind a facial recognition tech being used by the Israeli military to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza."...

And the appeal.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/23-10425/23-10425-2024-06-05.html

Sylvan Plowright filed a lawsuit against Miami-Dade County, its police chief, and two of its police officers after one of the officers, Sergio Cordova, fatally shot Plowright’s dog, Niles, during an investigation. The district court dismissed Plowright’s complaint, concluding that Cordova was entitled to qualified immunity because he did not violate any clearly established right when he shot Niles.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit disagreed with the lower court's decision. The court held that the use of deadly force against a domestic animal constitutes a seizure of its owner’s property subject to the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement. The court found that under the facts alleged in the complaint, no reasonable officer in Cordova’s position could have believed that Niles posed an imminent danger, and therefore, his decision to shoot Niles falls short of that requirement. The court reversed the dismissal of Plowright’s § 1983 claim against Cordova and remanded for further proceedings. The court also reversed the dismissal of Plowright’s claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress against Cordova. However, the court affirmed the dismissal of Plowright’s intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress claim against a second officer, as well as his claims against the county and its police chief.

https://lindatirado.substack.com/p/story-thirty-nine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Tirado

https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/05/26/minneapolis-settles-lawsuit-with-linda-tirado-journalist-blinded-in-one-eye-during-may-2020-unrest/

> "Pursuant to Ohio law, Plaintiffs drafted their amendment and summary, collected their one thousand qualified supporting signatures, and filed it with the Ohio Attorney General, David Yost. On at least six occasions, Yost declined to certify Plaintiffs’ summary."

> Tellingly, the AG’s office invoked sovereign immunity as another option to escape this lawsuit and the proposed injunction. Sovereign immunity is one of several immunities the ballot measure hopes to eradicate. If the AG detected any irony when raising this immunity, it certainly didn’t stop him from invoking it.

In a rare instance of too much transparency, an Ohio police department released the precise movements of a particular vehicle in response to a public records request.