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IH8Rice

I'm Mr. Negative! I Fail!
Aug 2, 2008
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hahaha
Three Santa Ana police officers want to quash a surveillance video that shows officers making derogatory comments about a disabled woman and possibly snacking on pot edibles during a recent raid of a medical marijuana dispensary.
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....

Matthew Pappas, a lawyer for Sky High, pointed to the irony of police seeking to shoot down the use of video as evidence in an investigation when they routinely use videos to investigate other crimes.

“It’s pretty pathetic for police to say if we don’t like something that it can’t be used as evidence,” Pappas said.

Corey W. Glave, a Hermosa Beach attorney representing the Santa Ana Police Officers Association and the three officers, said the video was taken without the officers’ knowledge and was handled by Pappas, among others, prior to being made public.

Glave said Pappas has altered the video in a way to make the police look bad.

“The attorney representing the drug dispensary intentionally has misrepresented what happened,” Glave said......

The lawsuit argues that the video doesn’t paint a fair version of events. The suit also claims the video shouldn’t be used as evidence because, among other things, the police didn’t know they were on camera.

“All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the suit.

The dispensary also did not obtain consent of any officer to record them, the suit says.

“Without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” the suit says.

Pappas counters that the suit is baseless because the officers were aware the dispensary had video cameras and managed to disable most of them.

“They knew they were on video. ... Just because they missed one camera doesn’t make it illegal.”
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/police-675722-officers-video.html
 

Toshi

butthole powerwashing evangelist
Oct 23, 2001
39,638
8,684
Logically it should be a slam dunk, but California is a two party consent state for recording... (which is stupid.)
 

IH8Rice

I'm Mr. Negative! I Fail!
Aug 2, 2008
24,524
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Im over here now
the best way to leave a positive impression with the youth
A Kentucky sheriff's deputy now faces a federal lawsuit for handcuffing elementary school children who were acting out as a result of their hyperactivity disorder and other disabilities, the American Civil Liberties Union said.....

Kenton County Sheriff Chuck Korzenborn is also named in the suit, accused of failing to properly train and supervise Sumner.

"Kentucky's school personnel are prohibited from using restraints, especially mechanical restraints, to punish children or as a way to force behavior compliance," Kim Tandy, executive director of the Children's Law Center, said in a statement. "These regulations include school resource officers. These are not situations where law enforcement action was necessary."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/04/us/aclu-disabled-students-handcuffed-lawsuit/index.html
 

IH8Rice

I'm Mr. Negative! I Fail!
Aug 2, 2008
24,524
494
Im over here now
Logically it should be a slam dunk, but California is a two party consent state for recording... (which is stupid.)
the SCOTUS ruling says you can record ANY police officer or public official whilst they are on duty.
The answer is not a simple yes or no, but in California, it is well settled law that with exceptions, yes, you can record cops. But you can only only film the police while they are on duty, and you can’t interfere with their official duties. (So look for bad cops trying to get in between the reporter and blocking their cameras, and then charging the photographer with resisting or obstructing them!)

Otherwise, cops are basically treated under the law as private citizens, subject to the same protections above, as anyone else. Other jurisdictions agree. The First Court of Appeals stated that is ok for the general public to video-tape public servants, eg, police officers, while they are working. This decision took place after cops were piecemeal arresting citizens who were recording them and the stories were run on television news channels. http://technorati.com/technology/article/federal-courts-rule-it-is-not/.
http://www.ehlinelaw.com/civil-rights/filming-police-legal/
 

Jm_

sled dog's bollocks
Jan 14, 2002
20,065
10,630
AK
"“All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the suit."

The funny part is that they were there to collect evidence. That's kind of blatantly the opposite of what is being said here....If the video showed something that helped them, they'd be humping it.
 

syadasti

i heart mac
Apr 15, 2002
12,690
290
VT

Witnesses said there had been a call about somebody waving sticks around. No one, at least no one that I stayed long enough after the filming, could say for sure where the call came from. One woman said that she heard someone say that one of the deli managers called. By the time I arrived where Joe Bland was (as we’ll call him), several officers had arrived on the scene, and forced this man to the ground, which is where this footage begins. And they held him down, much of the time half-naked, for at least half an hour on one of San Francisco’s busiest streets.

The sticks? They were his crutches. You can hear people in the background around say so much. From my vantage point on the shore of 8th street, I could see the man reluctantly hand over his crutches. The man, it turned out, only had one leg; the other was a prosthetic. It is often twisted and backwards in the video. And this was the crux of the heightened tension between the police and Joe Bland; they wanted his crutches and he did not want to give them away. “What are you doing this for?” he asked so many times. “These are my crutches. I use these to walk.” He repeats this throughout the footage. An officer can be seen at the 5 second time-mark stomping on the man’s prosthetic leg. In further efforts to subdue a man already on the ground with four people on top of him, they stood on his leg, held it, and twisted it around even after they had cuffed him and pinned him to the piss-stained concrete.

Even when restrained and clearly unable to walk, several officers continued to hold him down to the ground.

At one point there are at least 14 officers involved in restraining this one-legged man. Most of them were mainly trying to block the public’s view of what was going on.

This version of the video is 11 minutes long (the incident actually went on way longer and I have roughly 30 minutes of footage) but here’s a brief summary of what you can see.

5 seconds in, you can see a cop literally stomp this man’s real leg and prosthetic leg.

At 10 seconds, the man-handling of his head begins.

At 22 seconds the man says, “What the fuck is you doing this to me?”

Around 1:35, the “Blue Wall” begins to form to block my filming.

Around 3:11, you can see that the man is partially nude, his ass is exposed. You can also hear me responding to the things that officers are saying to me, even if you can’t really hear them. Among the things they said: “You don’t live here,” “What do you do?” and “Oh, you’re a journalist, right, for who?”

Around 3:55, you can’t hear him, but the man on the ground says, “they’re going to shoot me” and then you can clearly hear someone behind me say, “They ain’t gonna shoot you man, that’s why we have these cameras out here.”

4:00 the wall begins to deepen and you can also see his nude backside completely exposed.

Around 6:00 he begins saying how much it hurts — “this shit hurts” and at 6:44, he says, “ That shit hurts…I have a fucking sore, an infection, on my leg.”

Around 7:00 the man begins asking, “What the fuck is wrong with you, is this what you do? [inaudible? something “treat me”?] Is this respectable? When I say ‘no’, is this what you do to me?”

At 7:25 he’s explaining to them, as he has before — and other people in the background have also corroborated — that he was walking with the sticks that were confiscated from him.

It goes on.

...
I don’t know who Joe Bland is. I and others tried to get his name, but we could not make it out very well. Long after my meeting at Medium, watching the video by frames and discussing this with Bobbie Johnson about what to do next (who did a tremendous job in helping this come together and edit this), I was still at a loss for exactly what he’d done. But I do know that the police didn’t even put him under arrest: SFFD medics strapped him, against his will, to a stretcher and took him to hospital, for no apparent reason. I do know that he was humiliated, crying and deeply upset, but that and being physically handicapped are not enough reasons to be sent to the hospital. I do know that 14 officers to take down a presumably homeless man with one leg seems like a waste of resources and unreasonable.
 

IH8Rice

I'm Mr. Negative! I Fail!
Aug 2, 2008
24,524
494
Im over here now
glad to see the judge do the right thing

The Santa Ana Police Department can use a surveillance video in an internal affairs investigation over officers’ actions in a high profile pot shop raid, a judge has decided.

Santa Ana police made national headlines in June when a video recorded from a hidden camera showed officers making derogatory remarks about a disabled woman and purportedly eating pot edibles during a raid at Sky High Collective.

Arguing that the officers’ privacy rights were violated, the Santa Ana Police Officers Association and three unidentified officers filed a temporary restraining order against the city and police department to prevent internal affairs investigators from using the video to determine if department polices were violated.

When officers raided the store, they disabled all the surveillance cameras and moved the customers outside, but they missed a hidden camera on a shelf. The police union said officers had a reasonable expectation of privacy since they didn’t know they were being recorded.

But in a three-page ruling released Wednesday, Orange County Superior Court Judge Ronald L. Bauer rejected the restraining order, stating that officers did not have a reasonable privacy expectation since they were on-duty at the time.

“While the officers have declared that they expected privacy, the court has concluded that they had no objectively reasonable expectation that their words and actions would not be observed,” Bauer wrote.


“They should not expect privacy in their on-duty performance of an official function at a marijuana dispensary. They have made no claim that their work required secrecy or that it would be impeded by public review.”
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/officers-678388-police-video.html
 

Jm_

sled dog's bollocks
Jan 14, 2002
20,065
10,630
AK
Well, reading into the story, he shouldn't face charges if the work rules are as they say they are. What needs to happen is those rules need to change and the wrongful death lawsuit go forward. In general, any time you are acting within the scope of employment you are covered. On the other hand, there is a federal campaign/rule for us federal workers prohibiting using electronic devices like that in government vehicles. The idea that they don't have to is ridiculous, they are just as susceptible as any of us.
 

syadasti

i heart mac
Apr 15, 2002
12,690
290
VT
Contrary to stupid meme going around on clueless right-wing sites/timelines, there is no police death crisis. There are over a dozen different everyday jobs in America where workers put their lives at greater risk to make everyday life in America possible. Their lives matter just as much and more since they don't feel entitled to/demand special recognition like firefighters and especially police.

http://www.business2community.com/trends-news/the-22-most-dangerous-jobs-01302896


http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.html
According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund:
Reagan 6 years in - 1,129 LEOs
Bush 6 years in - 1,034 LEOs
Obama 6 years in - 807 LEOs (approx. equal to the number of people killed by LEOs in 8 months of this year)

A reduction in deaths is not a crisis. The US has 80 million more people today than when Reagan was 6 years into his presidency and falling rates (incidents/100K) make that all the clear to anyone paying attention to reality.

FBI.gov:
"Preliminary statistics released today by the FBI show that 51 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2014...From 1980–2014, an average of 64 law enforcement officers have been feloniously killed per year. The 2013 total, 27, was the lowest during this 35-year period."

Most importantly crime (or any other occupational hazard) is accurately reflected in rates per 100K because populations are not static - that's how the US Department of Labor reports on dangerous jobs. It's one of the safest times to be alive in human history and Fox News is full of shit as usual.

And lastly they're wrong about Obama not saying anything about LEOs and their precious position in our society. Most recently was 8/31/2015:

Obama said:
This afternoon, on my way to Alaska, I called Kathleen Goforth, the widow of Harris County Deputy Sheriff Darren Goforth – a veteran law enforcement officer who was contemptibly shot and killed over the weekend. On behalf of the American people, I offered Mrs. Goforth my condolences, and told her that Michelle and I would keep her and her family in our prayers. I also promised that I would continue to highlight the uncommon bravery that police officers show in our communities every single day. They put their lives on the line for our safety. Targeting police officers is completely unacceptable – an affront to civilized society. As I said in my State of the Union Address, we’ve got to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the door at the end of his shift. That comfort has been taken from Mrs. Goforth. So we must offer her our comfort – and continue to stand up for the safety of police officers wherever they serve.
 
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IH8Rice

I'm Mr. Negative! I Fail!
Aug 2, 2008
24,524
494
Im over here now
alert: if your car has bugs on it, thats probable cause that you might have some illegal agricultural products in your car and they can search... i mean inspect your car