“Years after a SWAT team in Texas destroyed an innocent woman’s home while trying to apprehend a fugitive, the local government will have to pay her $60,000 in damages plus interest, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
That decision may sound like common sense. But the ending was far from guaranteed in a legal odyssey that saw Vicki Baker of McKinney, Texas, left with a dilapidated house—and the bill for the damages—even though she was never suspected of wrongdoing.”
“In one of his first acts after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to delete a nationwide database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement.
Along with rescinding former President Joe Biden’s executive orders on policing, Trump scrapped the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers and agents across various agencies.”
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“”BOP and CBP employees comprised more than 70 percent of the more than 5,200 misconduct instances recorded in NLEAD between 2017 and 2024,” The Appeal reported. “BOP officers accounted for more than 2,600 incidents—over half of all entries.”
By deleting NLEAD, Trump isn’t protecting beat cops from woke witch hunts—he’s covering for two of the most sprawling, unaccountable, and expensive law enforcement agencies in the federal government.”
A story of police incompetence resulting in an innocent man killed.
“At that point, according to the complaint, the officers “finally announced themselves, and Kimberly Dotson told them that someone had shot her husband and requested their help.” She “did not realize even at that moment that the three police officers had killed her husband,” which she did not learn “until she was finally told eight hours later at the police station where she was detained.”
After the shooting, the lawsuit says, “the officers involved did not disclose to investigators that they were at the wrong address, which was the error leading to the tragic result and without which it would not have occurred.” The mistake “was discovered by other officers who arrived at the scene.””
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“In Garcia’s view, the late-night visit at the wrong house that resulted in Dotson’s death did not amount to such recklessness. He is not alone in concluding that police cannot reasonably be expected to make sure they are in the right place when they approach or even break into someone’s home.”
“That the government indeed thinks it is asking too much to do basic due diligence here—a.k.a., requiring agents to ensure they are in the right place before detonating an explosive inside a home and ripping the door from its hinges—epitomizes the state’s general allergy to accountability. More dire is that the argument has worked.”
“Corral’s reckless chase was in pursuit of someone suspected of soliciting prostitution. The whole business was kicked off by the suspect offering to pay an undercover female cop posing as an adult sex worker.
Police put in danger the lives of countless people in order to arrest someone for trying to have consensual but non-state-sanctioned sex.”
“In 2023, the Military Police in Brazil recorded having killed 6,296 people (approximately 17 people per day)—eight times the U.S. police lethality rate—yet evidence points to the actual number being much higher. The overwhelming majority of the victims are black, poor, young, male, uneducated, and living in the urban peripheries.”
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“As Brazil’s militarized policing has continued to expand, so have the gangs’ control and influence. Brazilian authorities seized 72.3 tons of cocaine in 2023. Gangs have bought, threatened, and manipulated elections, politicians, and members of the judiciary. Last year, 3,238 people were found to be enslaved by gangs, and gangs have control of entire cities and the prison system. They have major stakes in real estate, mining, petroleum, casinos, and cryptocurrency, valued at billions of dollars. There have been hundreds of cases of police working directly for organized crime, including as contract killers, creating an incentive against eliminating criminality.”
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“Most of the weapons used by Brazilian police come from U.S. suppliers. This includes the Colt M4 carbine, the Mossberg 590A1 shotgun, the Browning M2 machine gun, various sniper rifles, night vision systems, armored vehicles, and helicopters—all American-made.
The gangs also use American weapons, sold to intermediaries without strong checks by U.S. manufacturers (and very often provided by police officers involved with gangs and militias). These U.S. weapons were once legally sold by the U.S. government to the Brazilian police.”
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“The U.S. State Department, along with the FBI, has provided various training programs and exercises with the Brazilian military police. One of these programs, promoted by both the Trump and Biden administrations, the “Rapid Response to Active Shooters Course,” began in 2019 and is meant to “quickly and effectively respond to attacks involving shooters in public spaces.” In the overwhelming majority of police killings in Brazil, officers and their precincts insist that they “were met with gunfire,” despite many prominent cases showing that the police shot first.”
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“Today’s Military Police is a remnant of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which was also supported by the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and the CIA during the Cold War. Then, the Military Police was used as a political hammer to bludgeon political opponents, union leaders, and any Communist threats. The U.S. government produced local anti-Communist propaganda while funding and arming the state’s death squads. U.S. agencies also trained the Military Police to use some of the most extreme tactics still in use today.
A democratic Brazil has done little to reform the Military Police’s ruthless and repressive practices, with continued U.S. backing. Last year, the U.S. State Department gave $11.7 million to the Brazilian security state, returning to Bush-era numbers despite little progress made. The overwhelming majority of U.S. security assistance went to Brazilian law enforcement, financially rewarding ineffective policing.”
“Qualified immunity allows government officials to avoid liability even in cases where courts find that they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Defenders of qualified immunity say it protects police from frivolous lawsuits, but in practice it also short-circuits credible allegations of civil rights violations before they ever reach a jury.”
“If the Ninth Circuit applies that same reasoning after it hears the case this week, it would deal a serious blow to the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections in other contexts. In effect, that would say that as long as law enforcement has at least one legitimate reason for cracking open the safe deposit boxes, agents of the state are free to engage in all manner of rights violations without the targets having any legal recourse. It would be equivalent to saying that if the owner of a parking garage is suspected of a crime, all the cars (and the contents of those cars) stored there could be forfeited by the government.
“If the FBI can get away with this here, it’s a green light for the government to try the same ruse again throughout the country,” warns Johnson. “And it’s not just safe deposit boxes. The government could pull the same trick with storage lockers, hotels, even apartment buildings.””
“”Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FBI agents unsuccessfully attempted to pressure a group of innocent Muslims, including Muhammad Tanvir, to become informants for the Bureau,” notes the Institute for Justice (I.J.), which filed an amicus brief in Tanvir v. Tanzin. “Tanvir and the others—who were all either American citizens or lawful permanent residents—declined to become informants, because doing so goes against their sincerely held religious beliefs. FBI agents then harassed the group and placed them all on the No-Fly List.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights acts as co-counsels for the plaintiffs alongside the CUNY School of Law’s CLEAR Clinic. They sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ Muslim faith forbids them to inform on coreligionists. The defendants—FBI agents who put Tanvir and the other plaintiffs on the no-fly list—protested that the RFRA doesn’t provide for monetary damages against government officials who violate rights, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise in an important 2020 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas.”
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“In 2021, The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain wrote about Aswad Khan’s mistreatment by the FBI when he refused to be an informant. That same year, Ahmad Chebli, a U.S. citizen, described a similar ordeal.
“Agents threatened my family and me,” he wrote. “They said that if I didn’t agree to become an informant, my family would be investigated, my wife and I could be arrested, my children could be taken away, and my wife’s immigration status could be at risk.”
Chebli was finally removed from the No Fly list after the ACLU sued on his behalf.
Watchlists aren’t supposed to be used this way. In 2014, a federal district judge declared the byzantine process for people to challenge their inclusion on the no-fly list unconstitutional and ordered better guarantees of due process. But as Chebli’s case demonstrates, it’s easy for the government to put people on the lists and then pull them off years later only after they’ve gone through the hassle and expense of filing a federal lawsuit—if they ever do. With no further consequences, that leaves administrative tools like the No Fly List available for ongoing abuse.”
“While Mills’ claims and the video she recorded are chilling, she faces an uphill battle in receiving restitution due to the specter of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil liability even when their actions are unconstitutional.”