Gangsters in Blue

So remember the Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy who killed a woman’s dog after stopping to ask for directions?

Here’s the video:

Not only wasn’t Deputy Sean Knight fired after that incident, he was actually promoted.

But it doesn’t end there. It turns out that another Sheriff’s Deupty named Michael Laffoon was moonlighting as a security manager at a local private golf club.  Laffoon got Knight a job working security at the club. Knight was later shown to have falsified his timesheets at that position. Meaning he was essentially stealing money from the golf club. Laffoon fired Knight from the secuirty gig, but took no disciplenary action against him as a sheriff’s deputy.

The kicker comes when the local newspaper asked the sheriff what he makes of all of this:

Sheriff Art Kell said, “I have enough to worry about with this other deputy stealing from the department to start an investigation over another deputy who may have falsified timesheets… until they break the law, I’m not going to get involved. I’ve had enough bad media press to deal with to start this up.”

Kell said that Winter Creek should have filed charges on Knight if they were concerned about stealing of company time, and added, “what my guys do on their own time is their own business, not mine, unless they break a policy or law.”

When asked if falsifying timesheets and stealing are against the law, Kell said, “Law, I don’t know of any law that says you can’t falsify time sheets at a golf course, so no. And if you (Reporter Mike Friend) want to keep asking me questions on this issue you’ll just damage any good relationship I have with the paper. You can’t tell me you don’t ever speed while you’re driving down the road, or that you don’t break the law and sin… so why is this such a big deal if the deputy was not working on department time? If I start calling you and asking you questions about your crimes and sins we’ll see how much you like it.”

The county is expected to settle with the owner of the dog in the video above for $15,000.

(Via Popehat)

It’s done a lot. We have a lot of prisoners in there totally naked. — Timothy Swanson, Sheriff of Stark County, Ohio.

STARK COUNTY — A story that already has people talking nationwide is certain to get more attention with a billboard that encourages former female inmates to report jail abuse.

The billboard along Route 62 near Root Avenue in Stark County was put up as a result of the civil lawsuit brought by Hope Steffey against Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson.

Steffey’s clothes were forcibly removed by both male and female deputies and she was left completely naked inside the Stark county jail for six hours.

Sheriff Swanson says Steffey was considered suicidal so her clothes had to be removed for her own safety. Steffey has denied she was suicidal.

The woman’s lawyers discovered during the lawsuit that at least 128 women between 1999 and 2007 were strip-searched or forced to remove their clothing or placed on suicide watch, homicide watch or naked detention.

The lawyers were unable to obtain the names of these women due to privacy rights. They are using a billboard along a busy four lane road to encourage these women to come forward and to tell their stories.

—Tom Meyer, WKYC (2009-03-12): Investigator Exclusive: Billboard encourages women to report jail abuse

What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it, and that they are especially willing to use it as a form of humiliating retaliation, in order to teach uppity or unruly women a lesson, under color of the law. And then, to crown all, to further insult the victim by proclaiming that they did it all For Her Own Good. The Stark County sherriff’s office are nothing more and nothing less than a pack of dangerous sexual predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.

—GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in uniform #3: A sixth woman comes forward

See also:

• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2008-03-07: Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward
• GT 2008-03-08: In Their Own Words: Just following orders edition
• GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in uniform #3: a sixth woman comes forward
• GT 2008-06-23: We need government cops and government courts because private protection forces and private arbitrators would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people. (#2)
• GT 2008-11-13: Rapists in uniform #4: Standard Operating Procedure
• GT 2008-09-14: Omerta
• GT 2009-01-31: Rapists in uniform #5: on invasions of privacy

The movie American Violet opens next month, and is based on the real-life experience of Regina Kelly, a waitress wrongly arrested and charged during a disastrous drug sweep in Hearne, Texas back in 2000. Kelly was one of 28 people arrested. Her refusal to accept a plea bargain eventually helped expose that District Attorney John Paschall case for the massive sweep was a sham, based almost entirely on the word of a pathological informant (who also claims he was beaten by police). Paschall promised his informant he’d drop the theft charges pending against him if the informant could produce information that would lead to 20 drug arrests.

Even after his case fell apart and Paschall had no choice to drop the charges against those who hadn’t alread plead guilty, he refused to exonerate anyone, telling the New York Times that of those charged, "I don’t doubt one minute their guilt in dealing drugs.” Paschall is still district attorney, and he’s not particularly happy about the movie. He told the Dallas Morning News, "The only way I’d watch it, I’d have to be handcuffed, tied to a chair and you’d have to tape my eyes open."

Like the series of wrongful drug arrests in Tulia, Texas, the Hearne scandal was largely attributable to the federal Byrne Grant program, which not only creates the unaccountable, multi-jurisdictional drug task forces like those responsible for Hearne and Tulia, but then also sets artificial, improper incentives by tying future funding to the number of arrests and drug seizures a task force makes. Oddly enough, the Bush administration actually phased out Byrne Grants. Obama and the Democrats in Congress are bringing them back.

I interviewed Regina Kelly a couple of years ago at an ACLU conference:

From the Philadelphia Daily News, this one will make your blood boil:

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.

Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.

The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.

“I so scared,” said Eunice Nam, 56. “We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants.”

The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail.

The Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco pouches.

When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.

The Nams’ story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in South Philadelphia.

It goes on like that, detailing story after story in which this rogue squad of thugs raided an immigrant-owned grocery store, terrorized the shopkeepers, cut the wires to security cameras, then helped themselves to the inventory. In one case, a grocery owner says the same narcotics squad came back for a second raid, but not to look for drugs. They came to confiscate a surveillance video from the first raid, a video that apparently captured the likeness of one of the cops just before he cut the camera’s wires.

Also, is it really illegal to sell small plastic bags in Philadelphia? Even if that’s the case, it obviously wouldn’t justify these tactics. But as Jacob Sullum explained in the February issue or Reason, generally speaking, for an otherwise innocuous product to be considered illegal paraphernalia, it would need to be sold in close proximity to something related to illicit drugs, or found in conjunction with an actual illicit substance. Perhaps Philadelphia has a specific law prohibiting the bags, but if it does, that wasn’t mentioned in the article.

MORE: Per the comments, this isn’t the first time Officer Cujdik’s name has been in the news.