“A New York police officer is under investigation after video emerged showing him intentionally damaging a person’s car while executing a search warrant.
The local news outlet North Country Now reports that the police department in Massena, New York, has launched an internal investigation following the release of a 20-second video. The video shows the officer, identified by North Country Now as Brandon Huckle, entering a garage. The door hits a silver car as Huckle enters. Huckle then intentionally grabs the door and swings it twice more into the side of the car.
There have been countless accusations over the years of police maliciously ransacking houses during the executions of search warrants, but it’s not often captured on video.”
“When Ronald Greene, 49, was killed after an encounter with Louisiana state troopers in 2019, the authorities originally told his family he died when his car crashed into a tree during a high-speed chase.
That description turned out to be a lie. In reality, Greene was brutalized by the troopers who pulled him over, tased, beaten up, and even dragged. The initial crash report made no reference to a fight with police, but a medical report from an emergency room doctor documented that Greene’s injuries included stun-gun prongs in his back. The injuries did not add up. Though official documentation indicates that Greene died of cardiac arrest, it’s actually not fully clear how he died, due to the subsequent secrecy from Louisiana State Police about what happened.
Just over two years later, the Associated Press has obtained 46 minutes of body camera footage recorded by one of the state troopers on the scene and has released clips and described the footage.
Greene did apparently lead troopers in a high-speed chase after they attempted to pull him over for an unspecified traffic violation outside Monroe, Louisiana. The chase did end in a crash, but that’s not what killed him. The car only suffered some minor body damage. The body camera footage the A.P. released Wednesday shows troopers approaching Greene’s car after the crash, and as Greene attempts to tell the troopers that he’s scared, they immediately start tasing him. He is forced down to the ground on his stomach, attacked, and tased repeatedly by the troopers even as he wails apologies.
Greene is handcuffed and then left on his stomach for at least nine minutes, something police use-of-force experts interviewed by the A.P. say cops are specifically taught not to do to avoid suffocating someone. The suspect is supposed to be turned to one side or put in a seated position. At one point in the video, Greene attempts to turn himself to his side, but one of the troopers uses his foot to force him back down on his stomach. After Greene’s wrists and ankles are shackled, Trooper Kory York drags him briefly along the ground by his ankles.”
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“The A.P. didn’t get the video due to a public release of body camera footage from the Louisiana State Police. In fact, the police still refuse to release any body camera footage and responded to the A.P. with a press statement that “premature public release of investigative files and video evidence in this case is not authorized and…undermines the investigative process and compromises the fair and impartial outcome.”
That response might have had more credibility had the troopers not initially lied to the family about the circumstances behind Greene’s death and if the state hadn’t waited 474 days to open an internal administrative investigation to determine what actually happened. Local prosecutors declined to charge the troopers involved with any crimes, but did refer the incident to the Department of Justice, which is independently investigating the circumstances of Greene’s death.”
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“The entire incident shows why body camera footage can be so valuable. Yes, the emergency room report highlights the suspicious nature of Greene’s injuries compared to the official police account, and yes the family was made suspicious when they saw that Greene’s car suffered only minor damage from the crash. But absent body camera footage, would anything have come from those suspicions? It took over a year and a lawsuit for the Louisiana State Police to even start investigating its own troopers’ behavior.”
“On January 28, 2019, plainclothes narcotics officers broke into a house on Harding Street in Houston and killed all three occupants: Dennis Tuttle, a retired 59-year-old machinist; his 58-year-old wife, Rhogena Nicholas; and their dog. The couple’s families marked the two-year anniversary of that deadly home invasion by filing federal civil rights lawsuits against the city, its police chief, and 13 officers implicated in the operation.
The raid, which was triggered by a phony tip, was based on a no-knock search warrant that Officer Gerald Goines obtained by falsely portraying Tuttle and Nicholas as -dangerous drug dealers. The centerpiece of Goines’ search warrant -affidavit was a fictional heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant. Another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, backed up Goines’ story. Goines and Bryant eventually were charged with several state and federal crimes, including two counts of felony murder against Goines.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who hailed the cops who killed Tuttle and Nicholas as “heroes” and 10 months after the raid was still dismissing “the chances of this being systemic,” would like the story to end there: with two bad apples whose lies led to the regrettable but necessary use of deadly force against two people who, in turned out, were not actually heroin dealers. But the lawsuits argue that the blame extends to 11 other cops who helped instigate the raid, executed it, or allowed it to happen; Acevedo, who has never apologized for posthumously defaming Tuttle and Nicholas or given a full explanation of why they died; and the city, which built a moldy barrel where apples were bound to go bad and spread their rot.”
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“Goines was not the only allegedly corrupt officer in Squad 15. Since the Harding Street raid, Harris County District -Attorney Kim Ogg has charged a dozen current or former narcotics officers with felonies, including lies about overtime and drug purchases.
“Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug -payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors,” Ogg said in July. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was -circumvented.””
“When deputies in Pasquotank County, Tennessee, shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr. while attempting to serve a drug warrant, the whole event was captured on body camera footage.
So we should be able to see it and judge whether the deputies were in danger when they opened fire on Brown, who was behind the wheel of his car at the time of the April shooting. But thanks to North Carolina’s extremely restrictive body camera laws, a judge is refusing to release the footage to the public and is even restricting how much Brown’s family can see.”
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“When the law was originally passed, Reason warned that North Carolina’s law would not serve justice. This isn’t the only time that forecast has been borne out. In 2017, a judge blocked release of the footage of a teen’s violent encounter with the police despite the wishes of the family and the City Council of Greensboro, where the incident took place.”
“The nation has finally learned what it takes to remove a bad officer from a police force and provide some modicum of justice in a police-abuse case. We need only capture on video an officer slowly snuffing out a man’s life, have that video go viral, endure some of the most far-reaching protests and riots in modern history and, then, after nearly a year of soul-searching and debate, wait for a jury to render a verdict.”
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“The causes of that incident, however, took place long before the awful scene we watched unfold last May.
“(A)nyone who looked closely at Chauvin’s record would have known—should have known—that one day something bad was likely to happen while he was on the job,” noted Jonathan Last in a column this week in The Bulwark. Chauvin “had 18 official complaints against him in his file—these are only the ones that citizens actually got up and followed through on registering.”
In discussing police reform on social media and with friends, people often will say, “Police departments should just fire dirty cops.” That’s the right idea, of course, but legislatures and courts have created a multi-layered system that makes it nearly impossible to accomplish that seemingly simple task. Public-safety debates become emotional and divisive, so it becomes difficult to pass reforms that advance that common-sense outcome.”
“It’s remarkably rare for a police officer to face criminal charges for the misuse of force. We know that Chauvin had 22 complaints filed against him by the time he was arrested for Floyd’s death, and that he was allowed to remain with the MPD through all of them.
When it comes to fatal encounters, we have a slightly better idea of the disparity: Only about 139 officers since 2005 have been charged with murder or manslaughter in relation to an on-duty shooting, though about 1,000 fatal police shootings occur each year. Of the officers charged, a small minority are convicted.
Counting fatal encounters omits many more victims of police misconduct who live to tell about it. The data we do have paints an incomplete but unsettling picture, as police departments often refuse to make public reports against officers. A report from ProPublica is instructive: “In 2018, the [Civilian Complaint Review Board] looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force [in the New York Police Department],” wrote Eric Urmansky last summer. “It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days.”
In other words, people whose rights are violated by police can’t always count on the criminal courts or even police departments to reprimand their employees; civil suits are often the only avenue to justice. Yet thanks to qualified immunity, those individuals often find that road blocked off, too.
The legal doctrine, manufactured by the Supreme Court, protects government officials from federal civil rights lawsuits if the official’s specific behavior was not “clearly established” as a rights violation in a precedent handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court or by another court within the same circuit. In other words, for a plaintiff to sue a police officer in federal court, a prior plaintiff must’ve already sued over the exact same violation and won. Any plaintiff who sues after being harmed in a remotely unique way risks being told that the officer who harmed them could not have been expected to know they were violating the Constitution.”
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“Chauvin might seem like an example unbefitting of this discussion—the City of Minneapolis settled with Floyd’s family for a reported $27 million. Had the case not been filmed and highly publicized, as in the above examples, that might not have happened.
“Incredibly, had the city not chosen to settle the lawsuit, Derek Chauvin would have had a very plausible chance of getting the suit thrown out on qualified immunity grounds—even after being convicted of murder,” says Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute. “There is no preexisting case in the Eighth Circuit under which it was ‘clearly established’ that pinning a suspect under one’s knee for nearly ten minutes until they lose consciousness and their heart stops beating violates the Fourth Amendment.”
The video footage here was the game-changer—something that victims aren’t always afforded. It’s also something that government officials may take issue with. In 2014, officers in Denver, Colorado, attempted to force a bystander to delete a film he took of them beating a suspect during an arrest. Though a federal court ruled those cops violated the First Amendment in doing so, it gave them qualified immunity.”
“The bill would prohibit racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at every level while banning chokeholds at the federal level and no-knock warrants in federal drug cases. The federal policies would be tied to law enforcement funding for governments at the state and local levels.
The measure would also eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement, mandate data collection on police encounters and create a nationwide police misconduct registry to hold accountable problematic officers who are fired or leave an agency.”
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“the bill’s fate in the upper chamber is still uncertain, as Democrats would need at least 10 Republicans to send the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk.”
“Five years ago, NBA guard Thabo Sefolosha was standing outside a nightclub when he was tackled by five New York Police Department officers, one of whom broke his leg with a baton.
Sefolosha sued, and the city paid its largest settlement for alleged police brutality in years, $4.5 million. After all, Sefolosha had to have surgery and couldn’t play basketball for a year. And a jury had acquitted Sefolosha of the charges against him for allegedly resisting arrest. The whole incident had been caught on tape.
But the payout — which didn’t cost the officers a dime — is where any accountability ended. The city had insisted during the case that the officers were blameless, and they ended up facing no significant punishment.
It’s left Sefolosha frustrated. “To get a settlement was a small victory. But big picture, it’s a small drop,” Sefolosha told ProPublica from his home in Vevey, Switzerland. “When are people going to be held accountable? You have to have repercussions. They’re going to do it over and over again.”
New York City has paid more than $1 billion over the past five years to settle lawsuits against the NYPD, according to data released by the city. ProPublica examined dozens of the biggest payouts in cases where civilians had also filed complaints with the city agency that reviews alleged police abuse. Again and again, the officers faced minimal or no discipline.
In one case, the city paid out $125,000 when officers allegedly fractured someone’s cheekbone with a flashlight. The officers were not disciplined. In another case, officers allegedly bashed in a man’s car window with a baton, then broke his ankle dragging him from the vehicle and charged him with resisting arrest. The charges were dropped and the city paid $460,000 to settle. The officers again faced no discipline.
In the 45 cases we examined, the harshest penalty any officer received was a loss of 15 vacation days — for punching a teenager and knocking him unconscious in an incident caught on tape that went viral. The city settled that case for $200,000.”
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“Over the past seven years, at least 800 officers have been named as defendants in five or more suits settled by the city.”
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“In a few cases reviewed by ProPublica, the city has defended officers who seem to have lied or engaged in what was clearly misconduct.”
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“Byrne dismissed the idea that settlements can be useful in identifying problematic officers. “My belief is the settlement means nothing,” he said. Settlements often happen when the city decides lawsuits are not worth fighting and “not because the officer did anything wrong.”
But at times, the Law Department’s ferocious approach to defending the NYPD has drawn criticism from judges handling the cases. In one case, a federal judge in Manhattan admonished the NYPD for not having turned over evidence in a case where a man died after being tackled by police outside Yankee Stadium.
The city’s lawyers had long claimed that there were no recorded radio calls from the incident. When the judge insisted the head of the NYPD’s legal bureau sign an affidavit attesting to that, the calls suddenly turned up.”
“The Phoenix City Council on Wednesday unanimously agreed to pay $3 million to the family of Ryan Whitaker, who was shot and killed several months ago by police investigating a noise complaint and who did not receive immediate medical assistance after the incident.
Taxpayers will be footing the bill. Taxpayers are also footing the bill for the salaries of the cops—Officer Jeff Cooke, who pulled the trigger, and Officer John Ferragamo, who too was on the call—as they are both still employed by the Phoenix Police Department (PPD).”
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“Whitaker answered the door with a firearm at his waist, which he legally owned, and can be seen in the body cam footage immediately getting on his knees in surrender. Cooke then shot him twice in the back.”
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“The PPD has developed somewhat of a sordid track record of late. The city shelled out $475,000 to Dravon Ames and his family after police brandished their weapons and threatened to shoot him and his pregnant fiancée when their 4-year-old daughter shoplifted a Barbie from a Family Dollar store in May 2019. “I’m gonna put a fucking cap right in your fucking head!” a cop can be heard saying in video footage captured via a bystander. That same officer, Chris Meyer, is seen kicking Ames after he had been handcuffed, and the family’s suit alleges the officer punched Ames “very hard in the back for no reason.” Meyer has since been terminated.
And in August of this year, Ramon Lopez died after a group of cops pinned him down on hot asphalt for several minutes, streaking his back with what appear to be burns. He was reported for loitering in a parking lot, “sticking his tongue out,” and “looking at people’s cars.”
All three instances provide a gruesome window into excessive force. But they also put forward an important lesson on the potential effects of overcriminalization—particularly in Whitaker’s and Lopez’s cases—where armed agents of the state are routinely relied upon not only to address violent crimes, but to investigate minor inconveniences.”