Gangsters in Blue

I am back in Auburn for the next couple weeks — visiting my folks while also taking in the Tractatapalooza that Kelly and Arata are putting on (today - March 5, at the Museum of Art), and also dropping some science for the Molinari Society panel on Spontaneous Order, which will be at the Austrian Scholars Conference 2011 (March 10-12, at the Mises Institute).^[1] Since I generally avoid flying these days, and Greyhound over that distance is too long to be workable, getting to Auburn meant renting a car, and a long drive, mostly along I-40, from Las Vegas to Alabama.

While I was in Texas, I was stopped on a flimsy excuse, detained, interrogated, and subjected to a long forced search of my car by two cops from the Texas Highway Patrol.

I am fine: I was not arrested, not ticketed, and nothing was seized; at the end of the day, aside from a paper warning, I ended up with nothing other than an annoying delay, an attempt at a petty humiliation, and a sad reminder of the sort of random-sweep police state tactics that are routinely used, with the minutest of ritual gestures at a sort of farce on due process, against people who are often legally innocent, who are suspected on the most unreasonable of suspicions and detained on the most specious of pretexts, and who, even if they are legally at risk, are almost never morally guilty of threaten the rights or liberties of any identifiable human victim whatever. I am awfully lucky in a couple of respects, and the sad fact is that many people are subjected to this kind of thing who come away from it a lot worse, even though they are no less innocent than I was.

I didn’t have much at hand to record what was going on, and I had a long drive ahead of me, so bear in mind that this is all written from memory, and the location is an estimate. Because there was no escalation of legal threats against me, I just got on my way as quickly as possible and did not take down the details or the detaining officers’ names.

I had stopped for the night in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and in the morning I set out along I-40 into Texas, towards Amarillo. About half an hour past the state border, near Vega, a black Highway Patrol SUV pulled onto the road behind me and followed me in the left lane. The posted speed limit was 70 mph, and at the time I was driving on cruise control at about 75 or 77mph or so. Since my speed was so close to the posted limit, I wasn’t sure whether the cops intended to pull me over or just wanted to pass me and drive up the road, so at the next opportunity I signaled and shifted over to the right hand lane, then slowed down to 70mph even. The patrol car did not get over or flash their lights, but did not pass me either, and continued driving in the left lane just a little behind me or to the side of me for several miles. (We passed by at least one exit.) There’s no way to know for sure, but in retrospect I wouldn’t be surprised he was hanging back to see if he could catch me in a traffic violation that would provide a stronger pretext for the stop. Finally he got tired of waiting for me to change lanes without a signal or whatever; he slowed down again, shifted into the right lane behind me, and flashed their lights; I pulled onto the shoulder, took out my wallet and waited with my hands on the steering wheel.

Now the first state trooper gets out of his SUV, in the usual Texas Highway Patrol silly-suit. I didn’t ask for a name, so we’ll call him Cowboy Hat. Cowboy Hat tells me he pulled me over for driving a little fast; I said sorry about that, handed him my driver’s license, and when he asked for proof of insurance I told him that the car was a rental and handed him the rental contract. Cowboy Hat asked where I was going and I said Alabama; he thought about this for a minute and then decided to have me step out of the car, then sit down on the passenger side in the Cowboy-mobile while he typed things up on his computer. He then began asking more questions, mostly about things that were none of his business (where I worked, what I did, how I could take a two-week vacation from my job to visit my family, why I live in Las Vegas, what my wife does there, where my luggage was, why I rented a car to drive out of town, etc.) When he began repeating questions that were already asked and answered, changing subject seemingly at random, and peppering them with questions about my history with the law — if I had any warrants out, if I’d ever been in trouble, it became clear that he was using the standard cop procedure to try to put me off guard and work up an answer that would help him gin up some reasonable suspicion. Then Cowboy Hat came around directly to asking if I had any drugs in the car. Nope. Any guns? Nope. Any cocaine? Nope. Any marijuana? Nope. I should have forgotten about trying to get back on the road quickly, and just trusted my instincts earlier that this was where the whole thing was going and simply said that he had my identification and I would not answer any more questions without an attorney. This wouldn’t have changed my situation with him any — it was clear enough by now that he was going to do anything he could to get to a search of the car, but it would have made me feel better and relieved me of having to try to explain my business to a belligerent armed stranger who believes that it is his job to try to trip up, manipulate and lie to the Suspect Individuals he forces off the road.

In any case, at this point Cowboy Hat wrapped up by asking me if he could look in the trunk. I told him, calmly, Not without a warrant. The dramatic irony here is that I knew there was in fact nothing at all in the trunk — literally nothing, not even my underwear; just the rental company’s spare tire and jack. I had no drugs or guns to find anywhere in the car, and I had left all my luggage plainly visible in the back seat. But I do not believe in allowing police to search me or anything of mine without a warrant. I value my privacy, and I do not believe in giving government police any latitude to harass or humiliate random people off the street. (There is in any case no possible legal benefit to helping out the police in their efforts to search, seize or question; you may as well make them work for it.)

To his partial credit, Cowboy Hat didn’t go out of his way to try and further bully or intimidate me after that. (I’d say he was polite, but of course there is no way to be polite to someone when you’ve used coercion to pull them off the road, while they are minding their own business, and interrogated them about a lot of things which are none of your business.) He simply said that he was giving me a warning for the speed, and he would be calling a canine unit to do an open-air search with a drug sniffing dog. I shrugged and waited in the SUV. While we were waiting for the handler and the dog to arrive, Cowboy Hat suggestively informed me that I seemed a bit nervous, as if he meets a lot of people every day who love to be pulled over and interrogated by highway police.

After a very short time — maybe 2 or 3 minutes at most — another SUV comes down the highway and pulls over onto the shoulder. Another cowboy hat gets out — we’ll call him Officer Friendly with what looks like a golden retriever. They then commence to engage in the Supreme Court-approved method of ginning up Probable Cause for a warrantless forced search when you don’t have any; it looks something like this. Officer Friendly jogs all the way around the car with the dog at a run. Then at a slightly slower pace he directs the dog over to the car, pulls back a little on the leash to get the dog to jump up and stick its face at the door or window, and jogs down a bit to the next part of the car. When it’s jumping up at the passenger-side front door the same way it jumped up at the other doors, the dog paws at the door a bit. They come back around and do the same trick again. I guess this is signalling. Of course, this is odd, since I know that there are no drugs in the car. There are, however, food from breakfast and wrappers from some gas-station snacks in the front seat.

Officer Friendly comes over to talk to Cowboy Hat for a minute then turns to me to ask whether there are any illegal drugs in the car. Nope. Any guns? Nope. Cowboy Hat then informs me that the dog signaled and that he is going to search the car. The passenger-side window was rolled down to talk to him when he first made the stop, so he goes over and unlocks the car at that door, then starts rifling through my stuff in the front seat and the back seat while I sit in the SUV and wait. Officer Friendly comes by, I guess to watch me.

He’s a chatty fellow and tries to talk. I guess it’s possible he was doing a Good Cop/Bad Cop thing in tandem with Cowboy Hat to try to get more information or check my story, but I don’t think he had much invested one way or the other in the bust and didn’t ask much in the way of direct questions, so I chatted with him about websites and college football. Meanwhile Cowboy Hat is now rifling through my luggage in the back, dragging out my box of book and pamphlets to look through, and finally comes back around to demand the keys for the trunk. The dog didn’t indicate anything at all anywhere near the trunk, but whoever said probable cause has to be very probable? He takes the keys and opens up the trunk, to find nothing at all in it. He stands there staring for a minute and then picks up the cover to look down at the spare tire compartment. He stands there staring for another minute, feels around in the compartment, and finally shuts the trunk. But while he’d gotten what he asked for, he hadn’t gotten what he wanted. I expected I’d be done in another minute, but instead Cowboy Hat goes around and spends another five or ten minutes opening up the hood and staring at the engine block, feeling around under the car to find my magic compartment or whatever he expected, and finally tossing everything back into the backseat and closing up the car.

He gives the keys back and has Officer Friendly hand me back my driver’s license and printed citation. Officer Friendly tries to shrug off the obvious false positive from the dog-sniff, and says that, since it was a rental, there’s No knowing what was in that car the day before yesterday. I shrug and Cowboy Hat mutters that I’m free to go and I should drive safe, at which point I waited for the next opportunity, got back on the road, and changed my planned route so as to spend as little time on Texas highways as possible (I was going to take I-40 to I-20 through Dallas; instead I took I-40 across the panhandle, straight through to Oklahoma City and on to Memphis). I didn’t take down the time, but my subjective recollection is that the whole thing took about half an hour or so.

On my way from Vega to Amarillo and out of the state, I noticed that the Highway Patrol was everywhere — there had been one stop I saw before Cowboy Hat stopped me, and by the time I got past Amarillo I saw a total of 7 or 8 other cars pulled over, with more than one of them involving multiple lights-flashing patrol cars on a single pulled-over car, and more than one with another person being obviously interrogated at the side of the road. I wonder how many of them were trying to work their way up to a search like the one inflicted on me. Given the response time for the dog handler on my own search, it’s obvious that they were keeping the dogs nearby. I don’t know, but given the obviously pretextual stop in my case, the really dense police presence, and the high number of multiple-cruiser stops, I wonder whether this was part of another stupid drug corridor sweep.

As for the search: it was based on suspicion that consisted entirely of the fact that I was very slightly over the speed limit (no more so than surrounding traffic), that I was driving a rental car from out of state, and Cowboy Hat’s completely unquantifiable gut feeling that I must be hiding something. When I refused to consent to a baseless search this was taken as reason to detain me longer and find a way to carry out the search by hook or by crook. The hook in this case was a farcical ritual in which a dog was jogged around the car to get a signal which I know to have been a false positive, so that Cowboy Hat could toss my books and papers, pop my car’s hood, and rifle through my underwear. I never had any drugs and in fact I have never carried drugs or a gun in my car in my entire life. If I had, this would, of course, be a peaceful lifestyle choice that is none of Cowboy Hat’s business anyway. But I hadn’t, and the fact that the magical dog-search was used to justify a warrantless contraband search of a random car pulled over on something that couldn’t even merit a traffic ticket is a good indication of just how secure you are in your person, papers, and effects these days. There are, I guess, four possible explanations of why the dog signaled in the first place. I know that it is not because there were drugs in the car (as Cowboy Hat found out); that leaves us with the following:

1. It could have been a fraudulently-obtained false positive. Handlers of course have no trouble making trained dogs do more or less whatever they want them to do. You might think that it’s uncharitable to believe that police would do this as a pretext for an otherwise-baseless search, but given the long history of acknowledged police abuse, the incessant series of baseless asset forfeiture cases, and the weekly parade of corruption stories, I have no reason to extend the benefit of the doubt to a random cop off the street.

2. It could be a simple false positive; sometimes dogs do the things that human trainers interpret as a signal, even though they didn’t smell anything, either for reasons of their own or because they are expected to. There’s no way to ask the dog for clarification, of course. Without any conscious manipulation police dogs have been observed to give absurdly high false-positive rates, especially when handlers subconsciously signal the fact that they expect to find something.

3. It could be that the dog was jumping at the food I had in my passenger-side front seat — there were left-overs from breakfast and snack-wrappers there, and if the dog could smell drugs he no doubt could smell breakfast too.

4. As I repeatedly told Cowboy Hat (because he repeatedly asked), this was a rental car which I had had for all of one day (which was clear from the rental contract). Of course, it’s possible that the dog really smelled drug residue; although I have no reason to assume that that’s the case. But if it is the case, I was, after all, driving a car that had been driven by hundreds of people before me. Any one of them could have put anything in the car.

Some of these explanations are more benign and others are more malign. But whichever explanation is the correct one, it ought to be a reminder how incredibly thin and really stupid this sort of evidence is as a probable cause basis for holding me or anybody else hostage and rifling through our stuff. Given how absurdly little transparency there is in the training and handling of police dogs, that dogs are far more likely than not to signal when subconsciously primed by their handlers, that the signals are all common dog behaviors that may be provoked by any number of things, and that even if the signal is in some sense accurate, in a case like mine there is no way to determine whether it came from anything I did or from something that any one of a hundred people before me did, causes for search can get by on being pretty improbable.

I am glad that I stood up for my rights in all this, whether or not I had anything to hide. I’d do the same in a heartbeat, and would in fact cooperate less than I did. I should say that there are a couple respects in which I was just plain lucky. I happened not to be carrying any drugs or guns, but if I were, there is no reason why I ought to be subjected to this kind of interrogation, or search, or hauled away to be locked in a cage at the end of it. I am lucky that Cowboy Hat, unlike some cops, did not choose to escalate his intimidation tactics when I asserted my rights, although if he had I would have stuck to my refusal all the more firmly. I am relatively privileged, as far as law-force encounters go, in that I’m white, Anglo, no longer a teenager, and seem obviously to be what the cops would consider middle class. If I spoke with a different accent, or had a different color of skin, or looked younger, I would no doubt have had it even worse. And it is just sheer, dumb luck that, besides not carrying any drugs or guns in the car, I also was not carrying any significant amount of cash (I had all of $3 in singles in my wallet).

Whether or not they found anything, no matter how flimsy the pretext, had I been carrying any amount of cash above what Cowboy Hat personally felt to be reasonable and lawful, I could quite probably have been subject to asset forfeiture, based on nothing more than the sniff-test and the amount of the money. It’s happened plenty of tims before, including with Texas cops. If I had had cash, and they decided to seize it, it would almost certainly be gone forever; the money would be kept back in Texas, and the burden would be on me to prove (how?) that it wasn’t drug-related. Lots of people are, unfortunately, much less fortunate than I am in some or all of these respects, and are subjected to all kinds of hell on similarly flimsy grounds (the car, it was 5mph over the speed limit! the dog, she barked! I had a feeling!). I was just lucky.

The consolation in all this is twofold.

First, the entire experience was exasperating, but since I knew ahead of time that there was nothing — literally nothing — in the trunk, I did get the minor satisfaction of watching Cowboy Hat standing around like a jackass staring at an empty trunk, peeking with fading hope at the spare tire, and then spending the next few minutes wandering around trying to find some kind of secret compartment in my engine block or under the car.

Second, while I was subjected to a flimsy stop, a harassing interrogation, and an utterly bogus forced search, I asserted my rights, and while they were harassing me, Cowboy Hat, Officer Friendly, and their magic golden retriever were off the road for a good half-hour or more, occupied on petty harassment of me with nothing at all to show for their effort at the end of it. That all sucks, but the minor consolation is that at least while they wasted their time on me, the road was that much more open for honest drug-dealers, gun-smugglers and people with cash under their seat to drive through unmolested. I didn’t volunteer for this, but given that I was drafted into it I consider making the cops work for their search, and this entire waste of police time and resources, to be a minor act of public service to my fellow motorists, who might have came out of it worse than I did.

See also:

• ACLU, BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters
• Prof. James Duane, Don’t Talk to Cops
• FlexYourRights, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

1. ^[1] I’ll be presenting the current iteration of Women and the Invisible Fist, which I suppose will be rather different fare from that normally offered at the ASC. The panel is the same Spontaneous Order panel we had intended to put on at last December’s APA Eastern Division meeting in Boston, which the gods buried in an impassable snowdrift. ASC graciously allowed us the time slot to reschedule the panel, and since Roderick and both of our original commentators live in Auburn, it seemed like a natural fit. ↩

Officers’ safety comes first, and not infringing on people’s rights comes second. — Lieutenant Fran Healy, Special Adviser to the Police Commissioner, Philadelphia Police Department

(Via Radley Balko.)

See also:

• GT 2010-08-20: Your authorization says shoot your nation

• Last month AOL News ran an anecdotal Data-less Trend Story about city governments in small towns firing the city government police force in order to cope with budget crunches.^[1] I’d like to know what the actual data here is; typically, cash-strapped city governments react by cutting everything except police and jails. If governments’ financing crises are finally leading them to reduce the number of police patrolling city streets, that’s surprisingly good news. Most of the towns mentioned are very small towns — with populations ranging from about 700 to 4,500. The outlier, Maywood, California, has about 30,000 people living in the town (with a whopping 4 murders in 2008! twice the national average!). Apparently part of the reason they fired the police department was because a lot of the city government’s $450,000 budget deficit, and its trouble securing insurance, came from lawsuits, many involving the police. Government employees and hangers-on are going nuts about all of this. After the vote in Maywood, ex-City Treasurer Lizeth Sandoval told the city council You single-handedly destroyed the city, by which she means that they outsourced the city government. (You won’t find any burned-out buildings, torn-up streets, or dead bodies; the places and people in the city of Maywood, California are still right where they were, going on as happily as they were before; the only things destroyed were the government jobs of tax-eaters like City Treasurer Lizeth Sandoval.) Jim Pasco, national executive director of the Fraternal Order of Pigs, said that decisions to fire local police were penny wise and pound foolish, because sheriff’s departments and state police will be spread thin patrolling larger areas, and no amount is too much to spend on city cops, because The absolute threshold responsibility of a government at any level is to ensure the safety of its citizens.

• For example, consider local hero Officer Bryan Yant, liar and killer for the Las Vegas Metro police department, who by making up lies to obtain fraudulent search warrants and by violently breaking into citizens’ homes late at night, where he ensures the safety of Las Vegas’s citizens by kicking down doors and shooting unarmed black men with his AR-15 assault rifle, based on furtive motions and a glimmer or something shiny that nobody but Officer Bryan Yant ever saw, and which is plainly contradicted by forensic evidence related to the angle of the shot. Local government in Las Vegas has fulfilled is threshold responsibility by once again^[2] ensuring the safety of Officer Bryan Yant from any legal consequences for shooting innocent, unarmed men in the head during a hyperviolent raid to investigate a completely nonviolent, victimless crime, all of it based on demonstrable falsehoods and mistaken identity — oops! my bad! All of which should free Officer Bryan Yant up for a fourth Internal Investigation, in which his government colleagues will once again either exonerate him or let him off without any criminal penalties, for lying and fabricating fictitious search and arrest warrants in at least one other drug investigation involving another hyperviolent late night home raid. The polite term in local media for Officer Bryan Yant’s work ensuring the safety of Las Vegas citizens is sloppy. A better term would be fraudulent and lethally violent. How much safer does it make you feel that this lying, killing 4-time winner is still a fully-paid member of the Las Vegas Metro police force?

• Meanwhile, in El Reno, Oklahoma, government police officers are ensuring the safety of El Reno citizens by forcing their way into an 86-year-old bed-ridden grandmother’s home on a wellness check, and then, if she should object to 10 armed strangers busting into her house, by stepping on her oxygen hose and torturing her with electrical shocks in her own bed, until she passes out from the pain. El Reno Police Chief Ken Brown justified this use of extreme violence against an elderly woman who could not possibly have physically harmed anybody more than a couple feet away from her on the grounds that she was holding a kitchen knife, and she told officers She was in control of her life. Thus, Police were forced [sic!] to use a Taser on the woman until she could be forced into a hospital psychoprison — not because she was actually charged with any crime, of course, but so that she could be cured of her deranged and dangerous belief that she was in control of her own life.

• Meanwhile, in New York, New York, Officer Patrick Pogan, a government police officer working for the New York city government, ensured the safety of New York citizens by body-slamming an unarmed bicyclist to the ground for trying to avoid hitting him, and then lying about it in his police reports, where he claimed that his victim was trying to ram into him, rather than swerving around him. His government colleague Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley, in turn, fulfilled his threshold obligation by ensuring that this lying violent thug would face absolutely no criminal consequences whatsoever for the crimes that he had been convicted of.

• Also, in New York, New York, government cop Detective Louis J. Eppolito ensured the safety of New York citizens by taking a second job as an informant and hit-man for the Luchese crime family. He took a special interest in ensuring the safety of Brian Gibbs by framing him for murder — among other things, making up fictional witness statements, threatening witnesses in order to get testimony against Gibbs, withholding evidence that would have proven Gibbs’s evidence, and torturing Gibbs himself until he extracted a false confession. Brian Gibbs lost 19 years of his life locked in prison. The New York Police Department spent years fulfilling its threshold obligation to keep Detective Louis J. Eppolito safe from any consequences for his violent crimes, even though — years before he tortured and framed Brian Gibbs — they had direct evidence that he was working for the Mafia (including having his fingerprints on police reports he had handed off to a fellow gangster). The Incident was, of course, Internally Investigated, and Detective Eppolito was let off without even facing any administrative disciplinary actions. Which freed him up to go on murdering and imprisoning innocent people for the mob. The city government in New York still officially maintains that Brian Gibbs is guilty of murder. However, they’ve decided to sign a $9,900,000 settlement; dedicated public servants that they are, they will send the bill to innocent New York City taxpayers who had nothing to do with the crimes committed against Brian Gibbs.

• Meanwhile, in Sebastian County, Arkansas, government drug investigators are ensuring the safety of citizens by staging heavily armed, late-night raids on citizens’ houses, where they threaten the lives of everyone in the house, including sleeping babies — without bothering to check the address on the mailbox to see whether they are actually even forcing their way into the right house. (Oops! My bad!) Then, after releasing their innocent victims from the shackles they had forced them into, the cops they went down the street to the right house, where they broke into somebody else’s home, threatened three other innocent people’s lives, and forced them into cages at gunpoint, for the completely nonviolent offense of having marijuana.

• Meanwhile, in Universal City, Texas, government police are ensuring the safety of citizens by surrounding innocent women and children in their cars, pointing guns at them and screaming at them to put their hands up, and then forcing their way into the car before they realize — oops! our bad! — that they had the wrong car and the wrong people, and were threatening the lives of a black woman with three children who had nothing to do with the white man they were trying to ambush. Since government police never face any consequences whatsoever for their fuck-ups, no matter how high-stakes, violent, reckless, traumatic or dangerous to the safety of innocent citizens, the police department is waving it off as an unfortunate coincidence. They refer to the use of such high-stakes, violent tactics in uncertain situations, with incomplete information, to terrify and overwhelm innocent women and children, as doing our jobs, and publicly state that We would not change what we did. Of course they wouldn’t; who’s going to make them?

• Meanwhile, in Tavares, Florida, government police are ensuring the safety of citizens by interrogating and then arresting Latina women who are not suspected of any crime, for not giving her name fast enough or producing identification papers on demand. The government police officer told his victim that she had to provide ID because he needed to put her name in a database. When she said she needed to go to the car to get it, the cop arrested her for resisting arrest and had her locked in a jail cell for 5 hours.

• Meanwhile, in Hamilton, Ontario, government police are ensuring the safety of citizens by staging hyperviolent drug raids, forcing their way into apartments at gunpoint, forcing the citizens in them to the floor, then slamming their faces into the floor and kicking them when they try to explain that the cops have the wrong address. Po Lo Hay’s safety was ensured so good and hard that he ended up with stitches above his eye, a bloody nose, welts, and a broken rib.

• Meanwhile, in Bridgewater, England, government police are ensuring the safety of citizens by threatening them with electrical torture devices and then accidentally hitting them with a 50,000 volt electric shock to their genitals, in the course of an unnecessary traffic stop intended to investigate whether or not they were committing the completely nonviolent offense of driving without government-mandated corporate car insurance. For accidentally inflicting the worst pain that this innocent man has ever been subjected to in his life, government cops are offering an Oops! Our bad!

I sure am glad that government cops are out there to ensure our safety, and local governments are there to extract tax dollars to force us all, on threat of prison, to pay for this threshold obligation. If government cops weren’t there to harass, threaten, torture, frame, jail or kill innocent citizens, all with complete legal impunity so long as they can shout an Oops! My bad! that some fellow cop or other government employee will believe, who would keep us all safe?

1. ^[1] When city governments fire police forces, county sheriffs or state police forces generally take over the busting of heads and jailing of suspects. But the shift does mean that patrol cops are fewer and farther between, and local taxpayers are much less likely to get soaked with local tax increases to pay for salaries or benefits packages. ↩
2. ^[2] Yant has gunned down three people during his police career — killing two of them, including Trevon Cole — and has been exonerated by the police department and the Clark County government’s coroner’s inquest. ↩

NewsOne recently published an interview with an anonymous Black cop on the NYPD, where they asked him for his thoughts on police brutality and racism in the wake of a string of high-profile stories about overkill shootings, grown-ass male cops appropriately punching 17 year old black girls in the face over suspected jaywalking, etc. The fact that the cop being interviewed happens to be Black ends up contributing basically nothing to the interview — so, hey, it turns out that Black police think and act like police, and they generally defend their colleagues and their own professional interest in being able to inflict violence with impunity. But the interview is interesting for a few things: a really amazing display of cognitive dissonance; an amazing exercise in unintended irony; and one of the few times you’ll see a cop actually come out and just say it in public.

First, the cognitive dissonance. When NewsOne asked him about race relations at the NYPD, Officer Anonymous says his gang brothers like to tell racist jokes to their colleagues, and discriminate against people based on their appearance, taking signs of urban Black culture as being (in and of themselves) evidence that somebody ought to be treated like a criminal, up to and sometimes including targeting, harassing and arresting people over how they look:

Officer: […] If anything, the only thing I could comment on is that some officers believe there is a certain ‘look’ that most perpetrators have and that tends to be those who follow the trends of urban Hip Hop culture. That would consist of cornrows, saggin jeans, earrings, fitted caps, etc.

So, if a cop fits this mold in his civilian clothes, they often joke ‘you look like a perp.’ I believe some of them try to mask it behind a few smiles, but they really believe that. Though, many do fit this ‘profile’, at least in the communities I’ve worked in, it’s still an unfair generalization.

Newsone: Have you seen officers unfairly target individuals who look like this?

Officer: As I said earlier, though its wrong and not right as law enforcement, I have seen that type of behavior and at times [it’s] led to arrests.

Then he says he’s never encountered any racism from his superiors or fellow officers:

Newsone: Have you ever encountered any racism from your superiors or fellow officers?

Officer: I have not.

Elsewhere in the interview, he’s asked about the recent 46-shot overkill police shooting in Harlem, where NYPD cops lit up Angel Alvarez at a late-night part — hitting him 21 times, killing Luis Soto (the main they were supposedly intervening to save) with 6 gunshots, and hitting 3 bystanders, and one of their fellow cops, in the process. (This is, of course, the same city government police force that lit up Sean Bell (50 shots, killing an unarmed man) and Amadou Diallo (41 shots, killing an unarmed immigrant who was holding a wallet so that he could show the cops his ID). Officer Anonymous wants us to go easy on the Gangsters in Blue, and wait until Official Sources tell us what to believe about what happened.

Newsone: What about the recent event in Harlem where a cop shot a man 21 times?

Officer: A lot of the facts haven’t come out yet. Many in the department are mad because the media is so quick to paint us as the bad guys. I suggest people wait until all the facts come out.

Newsone: But you can understand the rush to judgment in a city like New York where Louima, Diallo, and Sean Bell occurred?

Officer: I do understand that, but think about all the other incidents where people jumped the gun and were wrong about us.

Gosh, that’s tough.

It must be so hard for the police, what with how people get the situation wrong, and jump the gun.

Further down, NewsOne asks Officer Anonymous about the NYPD’s standing policy of subjecting random people of color to unreasonable searches and seizures. It’s not often that a police statist will come out and just lay certain things on the line; but here we go. Emphasis mine.

Newsone: What do you think of the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy?

Officer: The stop and frisk policy is an important tool in helping the department curb serious offenses.

Newsone: I disagree. It is a violation of our civil rights.

Officer: It is, but at the same time, crime would have never gone down in the Giuliani era to now if it weren’t for these small measures.

Officer Anonymous goes on to say Sometimes you have to do things that may not be approved by the public to make everyone safer. By which he means that police should roam the streets with unchecked power to stop and search anyone they damn well please — for no reason at all — in open contempt of the civil rights of their victims. The same racist-ass, hyperviolent, power-tripping, domineering, twitchy police who have proven themselves more than willing to beat up anyone who questions their actions, to torture those who won’t comply with their arbitrary bellowed orders, to open fire into a crowd at late-night parties, and to light up unarmed men with dozens of shots during routine stops. Does that make you feel safer on the streets of New York City?

Professor Crim Pro I ain't, but it seems to me that anybody who has used a computer can pretty easily grasp the holding of Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. __, No. 08-1470 (June 1, 2010) [PDF]. In that opinion, handed down just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court toggled the default on the Miranda warning. A five-justice majority held that silence will not suffice for citizens who want to invoke Miranda's protections against self-incrimination; we now must ask for our Constitutional rights. Think of it like a computer program that annoyingly assumes you want unsolicited advice from a chirpy paper clip--except this paper clip throws you in cuffs and tazes you if you talk back.

The Berghuis decision inspires me to offer a new piece of legal armor—this time in the form of a t-shirt:


Click on the picture to buy a shirt, or borrow the text (I've uncopyrighted it) to make your own version from scratch. Combine that notice of your Miranda rights with the bumper sticker and magnetic sign I offered earlier, in defense of your rights to record and report what public officials do to you, and you might just dodge some serious legal hurt. Or—who knows?—you might inspire some interesting and important litigation.

I leave detailed analysis of how Berghuis jibes with Miranda and other precedents to other, more knowledgeable commentators (see supra, "ain't Prof. Crim Pro" disclaimer). I dare say, though, that Justice Sotomayor's dissent hit a nice note:

Today’s decision turns Miranda upside down. Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent—which, counterintuitively, requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.

Slip. op. at 23 (Sotomayor, J. dissenting).

I guess that you could say the Berghuis majority took a cue from the (so-called) libertarian paternalists and engaged in some legal nudging. In this case, however, the Court nudged our defaults away from individual liberty and toward prosecutorial power. Call it statist paternalism.

Thanks, Supremes, for giving us worse than nothing. Ah, well. As I read Berghuis, even the justices in the majority would not deny us the opportunity to answer their new default with a firm "No!" Thus might we recover our Constitutional rights with a t-shirt.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and The Technology Liberation Front.]

(Via Fr33 Agents and Drunkenatheist 2010-05-14.)

Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, it’s fallen to the Western nations to take up the banner of the War on Photography, formerly a stereotypically East German sort of preoccupation for the Securitate…

—GT 2010-01-01: Friday Lazy Linking

A few days ago, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the United States government’s Marshals attacked, arrested, and imprisoned my friend George Donnelly, an Anarchist based out of Philadelphia. They attacked him because he was filming the Marshals attacking somebody else, Julian Heicklen, who was peacefully distributing pamphlets about jury nullification in front of a federal courthouse. When Marshals got up in Heicklen’s face, he started arguing with them; like most government cops, the Marshals are happy to gang up on old men, and like most government cops, they believe they have the right and duty to use physical violence in order to put an end to purely verbal arguments. When the Marshals started attacking Heicklen, some of them went after George for filming what they were doing. Since he wouldn’t stop filming or hand over his camera on command, the Marshals tackled him, planted a knee on his face and pried the camera out of his hands. Then they arrested him for resisting arrest, and forced into a Federal jail for about 2 days before he was finally released, after a concerted effort by George’s friends at Fr33 Agents to make calls demanding his release.

He is safe at home for now with his wife and child. But the bullshit charges are still pending. Here’s George:

Thank you so much to everyone who noted my disappearing by federal agents and took steps to aid me. I am blessed and grateful to have such dear friends and comrades. Thank you. I will post more when I can. I’m currently recuperating from the relatively mild torture tactics deployed against me (and many other peaceful individuals I had the pleasure of meeting) in the local federal prison.

I’m currently seeking a criminal defense attorney who can assist in defending me against the federal onslaught. I am infinitely grateful for any assistance you can render. Thank you.

—George Donnelly (2010-05-14): A Million Thankyous

Here’s Vicki Moore’s call for solidarity with George. I couldn’t agree more.

As you can imagine, the next few months (or years, however the hell long it is for him) are going to be rough for George and his family. It’s hard enough being in a he said-she said case against a regular person; imagine being in a he said-she said against the government with only two libertarians backing you up! He is going to be under a crazy amount of stress until these charges are (hopefully!) dismissed.

This is where your help is needed.

George needs a good criminal defense attorney who is well versed in first amendment cases and doesn’t mind taking on the federal government. He will also need a legal defense fund; he’s got a wife and a young son at home, let’s try to help ease the financial pressure on them. As of right now (Friday, May 14th, 2:46 am EST), George is taking donations through his paypal account (link located here). I will update if I find out anything else regarding a legal defense fund for him.

I know that the internet regularly sucks my will to live, but incidences like these are one of the few times I feel like I can have faith in the ‘tubes. This whole situation kills me. Admittedly, it’s in part because even though we haven’t met (yet), George and I run in some of the same circles and have several shared acquaintances/irl friends. Please help him in whatever way you can; even if you can’t donate money right now, just spread the info around and maybe you know someone who can.

—Drunkenatheist 2010-05-14: Move it along, sir!

She also has a good round-up of links to the reporting on the police riot at the courthouse. I don’t have much to add, except my best wishes and solidarity for George and his family, and my hope that y’all will spread the word about this police assault and what we can do to help George get through this.

Solidarity with George Donnelly! Free all political prisoners!

See also:

• GT 2008-08-22: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#5)

The Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, on their understanding of Officer Safety:

This time it was a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, essentially ruling that unless an officer is actually under physical attack, he/she cannot use a Taser to subdue a suspect. And, for good measure, these starry-eyed jurists, who probably have never been in a physical fight in their lives, opined that police officers should not fear irrational suspects defying officer commands as long as the suspect stays 15 feet from the officer.

As every street cop knows, any suspect within 15 feet who is actively resisting verbal commands is a threat to officer safety.

If a suspect complies with an officer’s commands, the use of force or a weapon is unnecessary. When a suspect fails to comply with verbal commands, it means the situation is rapidly escalating and some form of force will be required to gain compliance.

—Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, lapd.com: The Official Blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League (2009-12-30): The Ninth Circuit’s year-end ‘gift’ to law enforcement

(Via William N. Grigg.)

See also:

• GT 2010-01-11: Tiny weapons searches
• GT 2008-10-25: Translation from cop-speak to English
• GT 2009-10-12: The Police Beat: Officer Marc Rios, the Bronx, New York, New York
• GT 2008-06-30: Law and Orders #8: Memphis cop Bridges McRae exceeds expectations by punching Duanna Johnson repeatedly in the face with handcuffs over his knuckles for failing to stand up on command in the booking area at 201 Poplar
• GT 2008-06-13: Law and Orders #7: Portland cops Erin Smith and Ron Hoesly find it would be necessary to pull Phil Sano down off his bike, beat him up, and taser him repeatedly, for biking without a headlight
• GT 2008-02-01: Law and Orders #6: Pigs at the Trough
• GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed, retreating woman
• GT 2007-12-07: Law and Orders #4: Wichita cops take control by shocking a deaf man for not following orders he couldn’t hear
• GT 2007-12-01: What a shock.
• GT 2007-11-27: Law and Orders #3: John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol tasers Jared Massey in front of his family for questioning why he was pulled over
• GT 2007-10-11: Law and Orders #2: Florida cop was within bounds when he punched and pepper-sprayed a 15-year-old girl for breaking curfew
• GT 2006-11-16: Law and Orders: UCLA campus police found it necessary to repeatedly taser an Iranian student already lying helpless on the ground
• GT 2009-07-29: Clown suits
• GT 2008-10-06: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#7)
• GT 2008-05-11: Cops are here to protect you. (#4)

So here’s something a judge on the Massachusetts Appeal Court recently said — in reply to government cops who forced their way into Wilbert Cruz-Rivera’s car, without any warrant, and opened up a pill bottle while rummaging around in his things, and then claimed that this invasive warrantless search, conducted on the private property of a man who was not accused of any criminal offense, was justified as an officer safety search:

On this record, it simply was not reasonable to believe that the defendant might, upon his release with a message that he was free to go, enter his car, reach into the console, open a pill bottle, extract a weapon smaller than four-and-one-half inches by one-and-three-fourths inches, and use it in an effort to harm the two nearby, fully armed police officers who had just released him.

—Quoted in The Boston Globe (2009-12-17): Court: Concern about tiny weapons didn’t justify search

I suppose I am glad that a judge said this. But the fact that a judge had to say it — to clarify to a gang of pushy government cops that officer safety really is not a excuse reason to go on a warrantless search for tiny weapons hidden in closed pill bottles — and that to do so they had to overturn a lower court’s ruling, which upheld this ridiculous opportunistic lie — does not really make me very optimistic about the reliability or effectiveness of those constitutional brakes on police power that the court is supposedly out to save.

From Mike Gogulski (2009-10-22): Report on Slovak State Police attacks against Mike Gogulski, 5 September 2009. Mike has asked that this information be republished as widely as possible in order to spread the word about it, and, I presume, in order to make it impossible to suppress the information by suppressing a single distribution point. I lazy-linked the story as soon as possible after Mike let me know about it; now, in the interest of spreading out the record as far as possible, I will also reprint it in full. If you have a blog, you might do the same. Here you go:

To all who pledged to support me in this matter, I would ask that you republish the below information as broadly as possible, and without delay.

Also available in MS Word 2003, PDF, and MS-Word exported filtered HTML formats.

REVISION HISTORY

• v1.0 – 20090906
  • Original version, real names, episodes 1-9, 6 image attachments
• v1.1 – 20090908
  • Name labels harmonized in preparation for generation of 2 versions
  • Forked into full and no-names versions
  • Minor cleanup throughout
  • Added WITNESS
  • Added offense “Abuse of Authority by Public Official”
  • Introduction added to Episode 1, including first interaction with WITNESS
  • Episode 9 expanded
  • Episodes 10 and 11 added
  • Catalogue of injuries added
  • Tables of contents and figures added
• V1.2 – 20091022
  • Release version, with relevant, known names

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REVISION HISTORY.. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS. 2

CAST.. 3

LOCATIONS. 4

CATALOGUE OF INJURIES (created 8 September 2009) 5

EPISODE 1 – Saturday, 5 September 2009, inside building, BAR.. 6

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR.. 7

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR.. 8

EPISODE 3 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR.. 9

EPISODE 4 – RESIDENCE.. 12

EPISODE 5 – POLICE STATION.. 13

EPISODE 6 – POLICE STATION.. 14

EPISODE 7 – POLICE STATION.. 15

EPISODE 8 – POLICE STATION.. 16

EPISODE 9 – POLICE STATION, Kramáre hospital, RESIDENCE.. 17

EPISODE 10 – RESIDENCE – Saturday, 5 September 2009. 18

EPISODE 11 – RESIDENCE – Sunday, 6 September 2009. 19

EPISODE 12 – RESIDENCE, POLICE STATION – Monday, 7 September 2009. 20

CAST

Michael Jude Gogulski – Bar patron, victim, complainant, victim, prisoner, victim, patient, witness.

WITNESS – Female who frequents/works at BAR. Brunette, short hair, late 20s to early 30s. Knows me by sight and by name.

BARTENDER – Early-30s female, black hair. Bartender/supervisor at BAR.

ATTACKER – Manager/owner of BAR. Early 40s (?), moustache, straight greasy hair. Presumably Ján Kurtulík, owner/officer of KELLE, s.r.o., operator of the BAR.

BLONDE – Unknown blonde female associate of ATTACKER’s, possibly his business partner.

MIROSLAV PAŠEK – Police officer and main police attacker, about 5’10”, muscled, close-cropped hair, early to mid-30s. Standard police uniform. Identified by name tag pinned to uniform chest, left side. Two-stars plus wings rank insignia (uncertain).

CURLY – Police officer with short dark curly hair, fat with prominent belly, early to mid-40s. Equal in rank or superior to MIROSLAV PAŠEK. Standard police uniform.

ROOKIE1 and ROOKIE2 – Early-20s police officers wearing blue jumpsuit type police uniforms.

DISPATCHER – Emergency police dispatcher responding to my call at telephone number 158.

MARTIN – English-speaking police officer assigned to interpreter duty. Late 20s to early 30s.

FRIEND1 – My friend who I called from jail.

GUEST1 and GUEST2 – Two female couchsurfing guests from Slovenia staying at my residence.

FRIEND2 – My friend who met me at the hospital and drove me home.

LOCATIONS

POLICE STATION – Police station where I was taken. Šuňavcova 2, Bratislava – Nové Mesto

BAR – “Erotic Salon” establishment at Mikovíniho 2, Bratislava, Slovakia. Called variously “Wild Angels” and “Nymfa Salon”. Operated by Kelle, s.r.o., operated in turn by its officer, Ján Kurtulík. Location of attack by ATTACKER.

RESIDENCE – My flat.

CATALOGUE OF INJURIES (created 8 September 2009)

1. 2-cm round dermal abrasion, outer left elbow Possible Source:  Falling to ground after being struck by ATTACKER; Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
2. 1.5-cm oblong dermal abrasion, inner left elbow Possible Source: Scraped BAR wall while being held in pain-lock hold against wall by MIROSLAV PAŠEK
3. Several other dermal and epidermal small abrasions on outer left elbow Possible Source: Uncertain
4. 2-cm round dermal abrasion, inner right elbow Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
5. 1-cm epidermal cut, right index finger Possible Source: Uncertain
6. Two .5 to .75-cm dermal abrasions to head, 3cm above hairline at forehead Possible Source: Head smashed into wall at BAR by MIROSLAV PAŠEK (multiple times)
7. 3-cm dermal laceration, behind left ear Possible Source: Uncertain
8. 1-cm dermal abrasion, top of left knee Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by ATTACKER; Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
9. 1.5-cm light dermal abrasion, front of left knee Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by ATTACKER; Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
10. 6-cm x 5-cm deep contusion, inner side top of left knee. Purpling bruise Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
11. 5-cm x 4-cm light contusion, left thigh, 10-15-cm from kneecap. Light bluish bruise. Possible Source: Uncertain
12. 8-cm x 4-cm contusion, upper right inner arm. Banded and jointed pattern reflecting 2 or 3 fingers’ grip. Possible Source: Attack by MIROSLAV PAŠEK in holding cell
13. 6-cm x 2-cm light contusion, right side of back below scapula, near side. Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR
14. Contusion to right pectoralis. Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at BAR
15. Contusions to ribs and connective tissue below right pectoralis. Possible Source: Punched by ATTACKER1, by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR, or by MIROSLAV PAŠEK in cell
16. Contusion to upper lumbar spine Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR
17. Contusion to lower tip of right scapula Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR

EPISODE 1 – Saturday, 5 September 2009, inside building, BAR

~4:00 AM: I arrive at BAR and order a whiskey. As I walk to a free table, WITNESS sees me and calls my name. I’ve introduced myself to her by name and spoken to her at length during two previous visits. We greet each other and I offer here some of my whiskey. She drains the glass instantly. I get another from the bar.

~4:35 AM: I am told “You must leave” by BARTENDER. She has been giving me trouble for only buying drinks rather than the other services on the menu as well.

After refusing to leave for no valid reason, and after dashing briefly upstairs in reaction to hearing a woman screaming but finding nothing amiss (WITNESS had gone upstairs with a patron), BARTENDER makes a phone call. Shortly after, ATTACKER appears in BAR with BLONDE. ATTACKER has a conversation with BARTENDER, stands behind bar looking at me. He is clearly the owner or manager. BLONDE also stands behind bar, and I observe her doing paperwork. ATTACKER and BLONDE retire to back room.

There were several other people in the establishment who witnessed me reacting to the scream, and being asked to leave and refused service: three presumably Slovak patrons, and 3-4 female staff.

After relenting to her demand and while asking a final time for a last drink (she told me they had stopped serving, then went to deliver drinks to some guests), I take a photograph of BARTENDER with my mobile phone and exit the building into the courtyard. As I leave, I observe BARTENDER hurrying into the back room.

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR

Between Episode 1 and 4:53 AM

I approach the outer gate to the courtyard and find it locked. I turn around to see ATTACKER emerge from door to back office and walking toward me. ATTACKER carries some sort of blunt weapon (metal baton?) in right hand, resting the weapon against the back of his head as he approaches me.

ATTACKER approaches me and a verbal exchange begins. I demand the door be unlocked. ATTACKER demands that I delete the photo of BARTENDER. I refuse. ATTACKER makes threatening gestures and continues approaching me more closely. Exchange continues until ATTACKER strikes me at least once, possibly twice, on right side of upper body with his left hand. He then strikes me open-handed on right side of face, causing my glasses to fly off and clatter to the floor of the courtyard somewhere.

I tell ATTACKER now that I will delete the photo of BARTENDER. I take the mobile phone (Nokia 6120c) from my pocket. He takes it from my hand and begins looking for the photo. I snatch it from his hands, show him the screen, locate the photo of BARTENDER, delete it, then page through other photos until he is satisfied it has been deleted.

ATTACKER now opens the gate to the courtyard and walks back into his the back room office, inside which I can see a number of active video monitors. He sits behind a desk looking toward me, while BLONDE sits in a chair in front of the desk, facing the video monitors. I search for my glasses on the ground and cannot find them.

CHARGEABLE OFFENSES: False Imprisonment, Assault and Battery (all to ATTACKER)

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR

Still in the courtyard, I dial 150 on my mobile phone at 4:53 AM. I tell respondent I need police. I’m told this is the fire department, and to call 158. I hang up and call 158 to be answered by DISPATCHER at 4:54 AM.

I tell DISPATCHER that I may have been robbed of my glasses and that I have been physically assaulted, requesting the police to come. I give him the location and address.

I continue searching for my glasses, to no avail, remaining in the courtyard. Several times I approach the open door to the back office where ATTACKER and BLONDE sit as described above, tell them that I’ve called the police. Over the course of ~10 minutes waiting for the police to arrive, I make an escalating series of demands for money from ATTACKER to simply leave and forget the incident, starting at €500 and ending at €3000. ATTACKER is impassive, says nothing. BLONDE never looks in my direction, and I don’t hear them speaking to each other.

EPISODE 3 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR

~5:05 AM. Two police cars arrive, carrying MIROSLAV PAŠEK, CURLY, ROOKIE1 and ROOKIE2.

I stand behind open gate to courtyard, smoking a cigarette. Police stalk past me and enter ATTACKER’s office directly. Presumably a conversation occurs between ATTACKER and/or BLONDE and one or more police officers.

Either ROOKIE1 or ROOKIE2 remains outside the office. I tell him that I’m the one who called DISPATCHER. He says something to other police officers, who emerge from office.

Officers begin asking me questions, which I have trouble following. I tell them that ATTACKER attacked me, knocked off my glasses and that I can’t find them – presumed stolen.

Main interrogator quickly becomes MIROSLAV PAŠEK, who is short-tempered and aggressive. He asks more questions about incident. I try to respond as best I can in broken Slovak. MIROSLAV PAŠEK grabs my cigarette out of my hand and throws it to the floor. “What are you doing?” I ask (or something to this effect).

MIROSLAV PAŠEK: „Občiansky preukaz.” (“ID card.”)

Me: „To nemám.” (“I don’t have that.”)

MIROSLAV PAŠEK: „Pas.” (“Passport.”)

Me: „To nemám.” (“I don’t have that.”)

There may be more words after this exchange. My memory is cloudy.

At this point, MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me several times in the right side. At least the first blow is with his left hand. I cry out in pain and fall to the ground.

I cannot remember the remainder of the sequence of events which occurred at the BAR courtyard clearly.

MIROSLAV PAŠEK demands I stand, and I comply. I tell him this is going to make an interesting story for tomorrow’s SME or Pravda, featuring his name. He becomes enraged, strikes me again at least once, grabs my right arm, pushes me to wall of BAR building between entry door and back office door. Pushing me into the wall causes my head to impact the wall. MIROSLAV PAŠEK pins my upper body to the wall and wrenches my right arm up behind my back, putting extreme strain on my right shoulder and elbow. MIROSLAV PAŠEK says something to the effect that he doesn’t want to hear anything about seeing himself in SME or Pravda.

During all attacks by MIROSLAV PAŠEK, I cry out in pain and terror. Neighbors may have heard, and should be interviewed.

Other incidents during Episode 3:

Police finally understand that I have neither an ID card nor passport because I am a stateless person. They demand to see my Travel Document, which is not with me.

At one point, either CURLY or MIROSLAV PAŠEK makes some sort of threatening remark referring to “Američan.” I laugh. MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me again several times, and I collapse again.

I am pressed up against the entry door to the building in the pain-restraint hold as before. With my left hand I attempt to open the door to escape MIROSLAV PAŠEK’s attacks. It is locked. MIROSLAV PAŠEK and others observe me. MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me several times in the lower back, right side, and spine. At least one other police officer strikes me in the ribs, spine or lower back.

After more insults and threats, demands for respect and compliance, “speak this way”, etc., I am turned around and released to face MIROSLAV PAŠEK. I gaze at his name tag and memorize his name. MIROSLAV PAŠEK observes this and asks what I am looking at. I don’t respond. MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me several times and places me back in the restraint hold, smashing my head into the wall again. He asks again what I was looking at. I laugh. He wrenches my arm much harder, either forcing me up the wall or causing me to rise onto my toes. The pain is extreme. “Nothing,” I say.

At one point after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK, falling to the ground, beaten by MIROSLAV PAŠEK while on the ground and then demanded by MIROSLAV PAŠEK to stand, I remained sitting and raised both arms with wrists crossed, asking to simply be taken to jail. Laughter resulted from MIROSLAV PAŠEK and several other officers, followed by MIROSLAV PAŠEK’s repeated demand to stand.

At some point they may have demanded proof that I deleted the photo of BARTENDER from my mobile phone. I laugh and say that proof of this is impossible, but page through my photos anyway until they are satisfied it is gone.

Ant some point during this encounter in the BAR courtyard, one of the police officers (not MIROSLAV PAŠEK) walked to the outer gate which was standing open. He closed the gate, making exit or observation impossible.

Toward the end of this engagement, one of the female staff, WITNESS, opened the door to the building and looked out. She looked me directly in the eyes, I believe as I was sitting on the ground, freshly beaten. She closed the door quickly.

Eventually, agreement is reached that we will go together to my flat to retrieve my Travel Document so they can verify my identity. I am bundled into a police car, back seat right side. I can’t recall the driver. ROOKIE1 or ROOKIE2 sat in the back to my left.

CHARGEABLE OFFENSES: Assault and Battery plus Abuse of Authority by Public Official (MIROSLAV PAŠEK and unknown officer who struck me in ribs), Failure to Report Crime (other 2 officers)

EPISODE 4 – RESIDENCE

ROOKIE demands I wait in the car, opens car door, demands I exit and stand by car. I am then escorted to front door of RESIDENCE building. I open front door with my electronic key. Officers ask on which floor I live, and I tell them the 5^th. Two officers (one ROOKIE and another not recalled) take the stairs, while I ride the elevator with the others. ROOKIE takes position in front of my door, demands I opened it, asking if anyone else is in the flat. I tell them two couchsurfers are present, GUEST1 and GUEST2.

ROOKIE allows me to open door with my key and reach inside to turn on lights. I call to GUEST1, asking her to bring my backpack to the door. I retrieve my Travel Document from the backpack and give it back to GUEST1. Officers take Travel Document. I tell GUEST1 repeatedly to call FRIEND1, tell her what was happening, that I was going to jail, and that she could find info on my computer.

Police officers demand I come back down stairs with them, load me back into car and drive me to POLICE STATION.

EPISODE 5 – POLICE STATION

My memory is increasingly cloudy. I am trying to hold on to a single fact, the name of MIROSLAV PAŠEK. I am told to sit on a bench while discussion goes on inside an office near the entry to the building of my case. The officers have my Travel Document with them. ROOKIE1 or ROOKIE2 stands in hallway outside office watching me.

ROOKIE1/2 demands I empty my pockets, take off belt, turn off mobile phone, leave all objects on table opposite holding cell door. I comply. I am led into holding cell. I ask for water and to visit the toilet and am told “soon”.

There is part of a bottle of water in the cell. I drink it and place the empty bottle next to another one in the cell.

I lay down on the bench to rest. I notice my jeans are wet on the back side, presumably from falling on to wet ground at the BAR courtyard. I take off my jeans and lay them on the bench to dry, and lay down again. A passing officer tells me I must put my jeans back on. I refuse, telling him they are wet. He says that I must, since other people are passing by the open-bar door of the cell. “Prežijú,” I tell him – “They will survive.” He goes away.

After some time I am led out of the cell into an office. A male officer with short dark hair and a black laptop computer wants to interview me. He is assisted by another officer, female with long blonde curly hair. I answer a few basic questions. Female officer asks me for my mother’s name. I tell her. She doesn’t understand, asks me to write it down. I ask her if I may have paper and pen to make notes. She refuses. I refuse to write anything unless I can take my own notes. Eventually she relents and writes down my parents’ names herself with spelling assistance from me.

The male interrogator is asking a series of questions about the events of the evening. He asks why I took the photograph of BARTENDER. I state that I don’t want to answer. I am told that I must answer. I tell the officers that I’m not going to answer any more questions without an interpreter and an attorney.

During interrogation I state that I was beaten by police at BAR courtyard. Police officers are impassive.

During interrogation CURLY appears at the door to the room. When I turn to look at him he turns away before I can view his name badge, while he looks me in the eyes.

I am taken back to my cell, and lay down again. I am in extreme pain all over the right side of my body. I cannot lay on that side, and moving is painful. I feel extremely cold, and parts of my body are trembling at random.

POTENTIAL OFFENSE: Failure to Report a Crime (two officers)

EPISODE 6 – POLICE STATION

MIROSLAV PAŠEK comes to the door to my cell after a few minutes. MIROSLAV PAŠEK demands that I sit up. I ask why. He says I must obey him. I refuse and lay down. He calls me insulting names and threatens me. I ask if he really wants to do that while on video (camera mounted at back of cell near ceiling) and he snarls. MIROSLAV PAŠEK enters the cell, demands again that I sit up. I ignore him. MIROSLAV PAŠEK grabs my shirt collar and right upper arm with his left hand and attempts to haul me up, loses his grip. MIROSLAV PAŠEK grabs me again, hauls me to my feet, strikes me several times in right side, and on head. I fall to the floor, striking my head on the floor. MIROSLAV PAŠEK demands that I get on the bench and sit. I comply.

CHARGEABLE OFFENSES: Assault and Battery, Abuse of Authority by Public Official (MIROSLAV PAŠEK)

EPISODE 7 – POLICE STATION

An English-speaking police officer who calls himself MARTIN appears at my cell door saying he’s been asked to help me with the interview since my Slovak is not so good.

I ask MARTIN if I’m being charged with anything, and he says no. I ask if I’m free to go, and he says no, I must give a report. I tell him I’m not giving any information without an attorney.

MARTIN goes away and comes back several minutes later. Normally I would give the attorney’s name to them and they would call, because it’s “not like America here”. But they give me my mobile phone. I call FRIEND1, explain situation, ask for help. I turn the mobile phone off and return it to MARTIN, who places it back with my items on the table opposite the cell.

I remain sitting. I am dizzy and in great pain. My head hurts like nothing before. I feel like my temperature is dropping rapidly. I continue to experience tremor in my extremities.

Some time later I stand and go to the cell door. MARTIN sees me, asks if I am all right. I tell him about my symptoms. He asks if I want a doctor. I say yes. He says a doctor will be here shortly. I ask him if there is a rule that I cannot lay down on the bench. He says no. I ask him then if his friend Miro (MIROSLAV PAŠEK) is still here, since he beat me in the cell because I would not sit up. He states that MIROSLAV PAŠEK has left, his shift having ended.

POTENTIAL OFFENSE: Failure to Report a Crime (MARTIN)

EPISODE 8 – POLICE STATION

MARTIN returns to my cell and leads me to another office. Two more senior police officers are there. One is typing something on a typewriter. They ask me a number of questions about answering questions for the report, which I refuse to do. MARTIN interprets. I again state that I was beaten by police officers at BAR, and then by MIROSLAV PAŠEK in the holding cell. They seem incredulous.

POTENTIAL OFFENSE: Failure to Report a Crime (MARTIN, two interrogating officers)

The older officer sitting on the right side of the office at one point says that I can leave if I pay a penalty of €30. I refuse, saying I’m not paying anything.

Two paramedics arrive. One speaks English and asks me about my condition. They decide to recommend that I go to the hospital, and I agree. They fill out and ask me to sign a Patient Agreement. I comply. I demand a copy of what I signed and they refuse, saying “You don’t need that, that’s just for us,” until finally they give me a blank copy of the same document (ATTACHED).

MARTIN tells me that I’m to be released with a “predvolanie” order to appear at the police station at 8am Monday morning (ATTACHED), and that I’ll be taken to the hospital without escort “So it doesn’t seem like you’re a murderer or something.” I agree, and sign an envelope (ATTACHED) indicating my receipt of the predvolanie document.

The paramedics call the ambulance service. There is trouble because I don’t have my insurance card with me and can’t remember the name of the insurance company. The paramedics require €2 in payment for something. I have a five-euro note, which I give them. They don’t have the proper change. They return a €2 coin to me, and I tell them to keep the change. They give me a cash receipt (ATTACHED).

Knowing I’m released, I ask to make a phone call. My phone and other items are given to me. I phone GUEST1 at 8:34AM, who has already left my residence with her friend.

EPISODE 9 – POLICE STATION, Kramáre hospital, RESIDENCE

I go with the ambulance personnel and am taken to the hospital at Kramáre. Female paramedic takes my blood pressure and presumably pulse prior to departure. At the hospital, I am given an intake examination in the emergency room. I am then X-rayed 3 times for the head, twice for the chest. I am given a physical examination by one doctor. I am given an ultrasound examination of the abdomen and lower chest. I am given a second examination of a sort (see below), during which the doctor reviews the X-rays. I am discharged without admission or treatment, with a medical report (ATTACHED).

Between examinations I lay on seats in the hallway and try to sleep. I cannot sleep. The pain in my right side is debilitating, and I continue to experience peripheral tremors.

During the second general examination (largely verbal) in the emergency room, I point out to Dr. Michal Magala that I have a number of cuts, scrapes and bruises that I received while being beaten by the police. I ask that they be examined and noted in the file. Magala tells me that these are “somariny” (“jackassery”), and that I could have gotten them anywhere. I insist that I’m here for a medical examination after being attacked, and want all of my injuries noted in detail. Magala yells at me, again saying these are “somariny”, approaches me threateningly and smashes his left fist into a cabinet between us for emphasis.

My friend FRIEND2 meets me at the hospital and drives me home, where I arrive about 11:20AM, Saturday, 5 September 2009.

Deficiencies in the medical report:

1. The notation “Homans negat.” indicates that a physical test for indications of deep vein thrombosis was conducted. No such test was conducted.
2. “bez vytoku krvi genitalu” indicates there was no discharge of blood from the genitals. No questions about this were asked, nor was I ever asked to remove my trousers for the necessary examination.
3. The report claims that a pelvic palpation examination was conducted. No such examination was conducted.
4. The report claims that an examination of the legs was conducted. No such examination was conducted.

EPISODE 10 – RESIDENCE – Saturday, 5 September 2009

I take 800mg of ibuprofen, make some phone calls and fall asleep around 12:30, for about sixteen hours. I’m in extreme pain. I cannot lay on my right side, my head hurts, I feel dizzy, moving my chest in any fashion causes great pain. The tremors have ceased. I am terrified, and can’t think clearly.

EPISODE 11 – RESIDENCE – Sunday, 6 September 2009

I begin writing this report, and share early versions with a number of people.

I photograph some of my injuries with my mobile phone camera and a mirror.

A friend comes and photographs my injuries, and takes with him the unwashed clothing I was wearing during the attacks.

I am supposed to give a statement at 8am on Monday. Numerous contacts to lawyers result in failure. All are either not certified for the criminal system, on vacation, don’t speak English, or otherwise unavailable.

I make contact with a court-certified interpreter, and arrange to meet at her flat at 7:30am.

I go to a restaurant to have dinner around 8pm. A friend’s contact calls to give me the number of a qualified lawyer. I arrange with the lawyer that I will phone him at 7:30am, and he will call the police station to exercise my right to postpone the interview until I can have counsel present.

I go home and make phone calls and other arrangements. I cannot sleep. I am terrified, in pain and can’t think clearly. I set five alarms on my mobile phone to awaken me before 6am, and finally get to sleep around 4am.

EPISODE 12 – RESIDENCE, POLICE STATION – Monday, 7 September 2009

I awaken at 10:40, having not heard 5 alarms or a call from FRIEND1 at 8:11am.

I shower, dress, take 800mg of ibuprofen and go to a restaurant to have coffee. I phone the interpreter and ask her to call the lawyer for me, for him to call the police station, apologize for me and to arrange another time. She phones him and calls me back, saying that I should just contact them myself. He doesn’t want to represent me now, because he does not speak English.

I walk to the POLICE STATION, appearing there around 11:45am. Since I have no interpreter, they will arrange one.

While I am waiting, I briefly catch sight of CURLY entering the building. I am terrified.

The police tell me that the interpreter will arrive at 1:00pm. I leave to meet a friend, and show her an early version of this report in hardcopy.

I return to the police station, part with my friend and enter at 1:00pm.

Around 1:15pm the interpreter arrives.

The interviewing officer is the same one who told me to put my jeans back on while in the cell, and who attempted to conduct the interview previously. The interpreter is presumably another police officer, unknown to me previously.

I apologize profusely for being late. The officers seem to accept this.

I ask if I’m being charged with anything. No. But I could be charged with a breach of public order offense, a misdemeanor which carries a €100 fine.

I tell them that I want to move the interview to a time later in the week when I can have counsel present. It’s not clear whether or not this is permitted, but they insist on carrying out the interview now.

The parameters of the interview are set such that I can discuss things with the interpreter at length, and he will then dictate a summary in Slovak to be entered into the report.

I tell them that I am reluctant to give any information, because I was beaten by the police at the scene and while in the holding cell. They seem incredulous and shrug this off.

I tell them I don’t want to file any charges or register any complaints.

I end up signing a “witness statement” of some sort, which contains a very vague description of events, roughly this:

Around 4:00 AM on Saturday, 5 September 2009 I went to BAR. I had a couple of drinks. There was a conflict between me and the bartender. As I left, I could not find my glasses. I called the police. The police arrived and asked me for my ID, but I didn’t understand. The police took me home to retrieve my ID, and then to the police station to file a report. I was released to the hospital for medical treatment.

I was not resisting the police in not providing my ID, there was a misunderstanding.

I sign two copies of the statement, and ask for one copy. I am refused, the interpreter telling me that they are not allowed to give me a copy.

I leave the police station around 2:30pm. I go home, take 800mg of ibuprofen and sleep for six hours.

—Mike Gogulski (2009-10-22): Report on Slovak State Police attacks against Mike Gogulski, 5 September 2009

• Officer Justin Barrett. Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Police Commissioner recently suspended and moved to fire Boston patrol cop Officer Justin Barrett, after being forwarded a racist-ass e-mail that Barret wrote in response to Yvonne Abraham’s Boston Globe column criticizing Sergeant James Crowley for his stupid arrest of Henry Louis Gates. All the news stories have mentioned how Barrett stated I am not a racist, but I am [prejudiced] towards people who are stupid and repeatedly described Gates as a banana-eating jungle monkey. Some also mentioned active patrol cop Barret’s statement that, had he been in Crowley’s place, he not only would have arrested Gates but would have pepper-sprayed him in the face. None of the mainstream media articles I’ve read so far have mentioned that active patrol cop Officer Justin Barrett also complains that Your defense [4th paragraph] of Gates while he is on the phone while being confronted [INDEED] with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and will always be a suspect. (Brackets in original; emphasis mine.) Or that, alongside the violent racism and explicit totalitarianism, he adds some crude misogyny, writing to the immediate target of his letter, Yvonne Abraham, that You are a hot little bird with minimal experiences in a harsh field. … You have no business writing for a US newspaper nevermind detailing and analyzing half truths. You should serve me coffee and donuts on Sunday morning. He later repeats the joke about coffee and says that you just need to get slapped. Officer Justin Barrett, when not a racist, sexist, police-statist patrol cop, is also a veteran of the United States government’s Army; he felt comfortable forwarding his racist, sexist, police-statist e-mail to a few of his buddies in the Boston police force and several of his buddies in the Army National Guard. Since the story hit, Barrett has complained to the media that in the uproar over his repeated use of the phrase banana-eating jungle monkey, People are making it about race. It is not about race, and that, although he made a poor choice of words, I didn’t mean it in a racist way. I treat everyone with dignity and respect. His lawyer says that he plans to fight to hold onto his cop job at the upcoming hearing.

• Disorderly conduct. Patrolman Robert Lang, Patrolman Jared Bock, and Patrolman Shawn Panchick. Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Three white patrol cops in Pennsylvania are being investigated by another local government’s cops in response to allegations that they beat and robbed a three black teenagers who they arbitrarily commanded (why?) to clear off of a friend’s front porch where they were hanging out late at night. I don’t know whether or not the allegations of robbery are true — one of the victims, Kyle Dudley, claims that he was beat down and robbed of his watch and money by a group of cops possibly different from the three who originally responded to the call, which makes it hard to compare stories — but I do know that, whether or not those allegations are true, the story that the cops all agreed on for their report is more than enough reason to call their conduct belligerent, violent and stupid. Cops have exactly no business singling out black teenagers to be hassled, or for forcing them down and arresting them on a disorderly conduct beef simply for refusing to obey arbitrary bellowed commands that they leave a private residence where they have been invited to hang out with their friends, or a neighborhood where they are hanging out on public property. And once again, it is clear that disorderly conduct charges are the sheepdogs’ favorite threat for making that the sheep stay just where they’ve been herded, regardless of whether or not anyone is actually doing anything that would threaten anyone’s rights even in the slightest.

• Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont’d.) By sideswiping our cars while they tear down the road at 20 mph over the posted speed limit with no lights and no sirens on. Then by concealing information or flat-out lying in the accident report and to the media about how fast they were going, until they finally reveal, a couple days later, that the accident was, after all, clearly the fault of the cop’s speeding. Where have I seen that before…? I guess his victim is lucky that he wasn’t doing 100; if he had gotten himself hurt or killed in the crash he caused, she probably would have been arrested for reckless driving and smeared as a cop-killer all over the local papers.

• Fun for ages 7 to 70. Unnamed patrol officer, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Deputy Chris Beize. Austin, Texas. In Knoxville, a government cop, who had important business to do Investigating reports of some neighbor kids getting into a fight, has been accused of trying to coerce a 7 year old boy into talking more candidly by handcuffing the child and cussing him out, while the boy was crying and asking for his mother. The 7-year-old was not involved in the fighting and was never suspected of, or charged with, any crime. Officials refuse to so much as disclose this dedicated public servant’s name, but they promise that the matter is being Internally Investigated.

  Meanwhile, in Texas, Deputy Chris Beize tasered Kathryn Winkfein, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, twice during a routine traffic stop, after she refused to sign a ticket and he decided to escalate the situation by ordering her out of her car, instead of just mailing the damn thing to her home address. Beize claims that she swore at him (which is not a crime) and that she pushed him into oncoming traffic (no she didn’t; the dashcam video clearly shows that he lunged over and grabbed her and shoved her back several feet, when she tried to de-escalate the situation by sidestepping him to get back to her truck). Then he blasted her with a 50,000-volt electric shock from the taser, and then tasered her again while she was lying on the ground. Then he arrested her for resisting arrest. His superior officers in the paramilitary chain of command have defended Beize’s hollering belligerence, physical assault, and torture by repeated electrical shocks, against an unarmed, 4′11″, 72-year-old great-grandmother who never threatened any physical harm and was guilty of nothing more than a moving violation and contempt of cop, as an appropriate reaction to a dangerous situation. By the by, when Beize is not busy shocking the hell out of elderly women, he is a taser instructor for the local police.

• Officer Morris Taylor. Springfield, Missouri. Officer Morris Taylor, a cop formerly on the Springfield, Missouri city government’s police force, is facing misdemeanor assault charges for beating John Sedersten, a prisoner under his authority, after Sedersten had been restrained and booked in the Greene County Jail. The story’s in the news because Sedersten, the victim of the beating, recently decided not to testify against Taylor in the criminal case, on advice from his attorneys, because of the danger that his testimony will open him up to lines of questioning that the government can use against him in his pending criminal cases. Sedersten is pursuing a separate civil lawsuit against Officer Morris Taylor for the beating; apparently he’s just not particularly interested in working closely with the same government office that is trying to lock him up in other cases, particularly not for so minor a vindication as a misdemeanor assault conviction. Even without his testimony, apparently portions of the assault are recorded on video.

  Besides having spent 11 years in local government police forces, Officer Morris Taylor also has experience in dealing with prisoners from working as a government soldier in the U.S. government’s war and occupation in Iraq.

• Deputy Marcus Smith. San Joaquin County, California. San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputies stopped a car on a routine traffic stop near Manteca; Charles Inderbitzen was riding in the car. Inderbitzen was ex-con out on parole, and believed that he had a warrant out on him, so he got nervous around the cops. He tried to leave the scene without the cops’ permission; even though the police had no reason whatever, at this point, to suspect that he had committed any crime, or even (since he was not the one driving the car) of even the most minor civil infraction. But government cops in America aren’t actually interested in dealing with crimes; they are interested in targeting suspects, and are more than willing to summarily declare you a suspect sort of guy based solely on your failure to follow their arbitrary bellowed commands, or your decision to try to leave the scene when they are present. So a gang of police chased Inderbitzen down, cornered him in a back yard, drew their guns on him, and ordered him to get on his knees and put his hands on his head. After Inderbitzen complied with their orders, with several cops pointing guns at him and while physically at their mercy, Deputy Marcus Smith hopped the fence, kicked Charles Inderbitzen in the gut, punched him in the back of the head, kicked him two more times in the stomach, and then punched him about 5 or 10 more times until Inderbitzen was beaten unconscious. I guess he’s lucky they didn’t taser him to death instead.

• Oops. Our bad. Deputy Matthew Paul. Seattle, Washington. Christopher Harris was trying to get away from a group of King’s County police (or rather, a gang of beefy, heavily armed strangers, dressed all in black, who didn’t bother to identify themselves before they started hollering and chasing after him late at night). Turns out he didn’t actually do anything wrong (they were chasing him because a witness fingered him as having been involved in a bar fight; the witness was wrong). But rather than risking the possibility that someone possibly might get away from the cops (even when he had no way of knowing they were cops, who had every right to leave the scene, who posed no physical threat to anybody, and who, at the very worst, was suspected of some minor-league drunken fighting), Deputy Matthew Paul, who outweighed his victim by about 100 pounds, decided to put an end to things by waiting until Christopher Harris slowed down to a walk, and then body-tackling him so hard that he knocked him eight feet into a wall, slamming Harris’s head into the concrete so hard it put him into a coma. The story’s in the news because Deputy Matthew Paul’s coworkers in the King County government’s prosecutor’s office have announced that, as far as they’re concerned, Deputy Matthew Paul did not violate Christopher Harris’s rights and the only personal consequence that Deputy Matthew Paul will face, for putting his falsely accused, completely unarmed and physically harmless victim on life-support, is having been given a paid vacation from his job for a while during the investigation. According to the county government, It’s a tragic incident. Well, oops. I guess he’s lucky they didn’t just shoot him in the back instead.

• Non-Lethal Force (Cont’d.) Unnamed officer, Officer Debra Lynn Indovina-Akerly and Officer Charles Watson. Swissvale, Pennsylvania. Last summer, a 37 year old unarmed black man named Andre DeMon Thomas was extrajudicially electrocuted by a gang of three Swissvale cops, who tortured him with three 50,000-volt electric shocks, handcuffed him, and, after he was handcuffed, kicked him, punched him, and crushed him until he vomited, passed out, and died. They were electrocuting him, incidentally, For His Own Good, after he begged neighbors to call the cops to help him out. He was unarmed; he wasn’t acting aggressively; none of the neighbors felt threatened by him; he was never at any point charged with any crime at all by anyone; he seemed disoriented and terrified, and he wanted the cops there to keep him safe. But in cop-think, being terrified and disoriented means acting erratic, and acting erratic in the judgment of a cop, even if you pose no threat to anyone and even if you have not been so much as accused of committing a crime and even if you are yourself seeking help, is reason enough for you to get Served and Protected good and hard until you are physically subdued. Or dead, whichever comes first. [And]((http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/06/22/the-police-beat-3/) yet again, it became necessary to kill Dre Thomas in order to save him. The case is in the news again because the family has filed a lawsuit and the coroner’s autopsy report, which revealed deep and widespread bruising all over Thomas’s body, contradicts the Medical Examiner’s initial report absolving the cops and claiming that Thomas died from a mythical made-up condition called agitated delirium.

• Gang cops (Cont’d.). Gang Strike Force, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Seven victims of racist shakedowns by a multi-agency paramilitary Gang Strike Force in the Twin Cities have filed suit against the members of the Strike Force, the city governments that put it together, and the boss cops who commanded it. The Strike Force was permanently shut down earlier this month after repeated complaints about the cops on it making improper seizures, which is to say armed robberies under color of law, of money and property from innocent people with no connection to gang activity, but who happened to be immigrants (hence easy targets). If only we had some warning, had some way of knowing, that an elite gang police unit with an unlimited mandate, overwhelming force, and extremely broad legal powers to roust people and take their property with minimal legal accountability, might end up just acting like the baddest gangsters on the block. But who could possibly have foreseen that? It’s not like anything like this has ever happened before.

• Detective Keith Alfaro. San Antonio, Texas. A couple years ago Detective Keith Alfaro of the San Antonio police department got himself involved in what the media at the time dignified as a poolside scuffle with a teenager. By which they meant that he punched an 18 year old girl in the face, then, after he knocked her down, got on top of her, put her in a chokehold, and, according to an unrelated witness, pummeled her black and blue while she was on the ground. After Alfaro ran away from the Sheriff’s Deputies who responded to a call, Vaughn had to be taken to the hospital; she still couldn’t open her jaw for weeks after the attack. The reason he did this was that she told him to put out a cigar he was smoking; the community pool had a no-smoking rule. Tamara Vaughn claims she asked him politely; Alfaro claims she copped an attitude, got up in his face, dared to say some vulgar words in his hearing, and tried to swipe the cigar out of his mouth. Apparently, even if we grant his story to be true, Detective Keith Alfaro believes that that’s good enough reason for a grown-ass man to throw the first punch, then beat the living hell out of an 18 year old girl while she’s lying on the ground, and that doing so was totally defensive … It was her own actions that forced me to take those measures. Perhaps that’s also what forced him to answer her request that he not smoke a cigar at a non-smoking pool by telling her to take that East Side attitude back over there; maybe that’s also what forced him to call her a nigger and a half-breed while he was beating the hell out of her, or to tell Vaughn, who is a lesbian, that You wanna look like a man, I’m gonna treat you like a man.. Detective Keith Alfaro testified that his problem was not with her race but with her attitude (you know, the East Side kind), and that She though she was talking to a child, … She thought she was talking to someone she could bully — not an adult family man. Apparently Detective Keith Alfaro believes that an adult family man deals with tense social situations by punching 18 year old girls in the face and dislocating their jaws. In any case, this adult family man bragged in an online profile for an Ultimate Fighting website about his countless street KO’s.

  The story is in the news again because Keith Alfaro finally ended up going to trial this year on a misdemeanor assault rap, along with some resisting and evading arrest for having run away from the Bexar County Sheriff’s deputies. And just today, after the judge refused to allow Bexar County prosecutors to tell the jury about the online bragging about street fights, or about the numerous existing complaints against Alfaro in his internal affairs file (complaints which, of course, never endangered his position with the San Antonio Police Department, until he got into a fight on another police agency’s turf), the jury voted to acquit Alfaro on the assault beef. They convicted him on the misdemeanor evading and resisting arrest charges, because apparently busting up an 18 year old girl’s jaw is OK, but they’ll be damned if they’ll let anyone get away from the po-po.

• Rapists on patrol. Officer Feliciano Sanchez, Los Angeles, California. (Possible trigger warning.)

  Officer Feliciano Sanchez, formerly hired muscle for Los Angeles County’s Bell Police Department, recently plead guilty to using his police powers to abduct a woman he had detained on a traffic stop, drive her to an isolated location, and then flashed his gun and coerced sex from her before he would let her free. Bell Police Department Captain Anthony Miranda says he is shocked to hear that a male cop might use his government-granted legal powers and his arsenal of deadly weapons to intimidate and violently coerce sex from women who come under his power. He says that he’s in disbelief because he’s never heard of such a thing before. Well, I’m not. I have.

• 18 shots for running a stop-sign. Officer James Arnold. Fort Wayne, Indiana. The city government in Fort Wayne, Indiana just spent $335,000 of other people’s money in order to cover Office James Arnold’s ass after he shot an unarmed immigrant named José Baudilio Lemus-Rodriguez 18 times, after Lemus-Rodriguez refused to pull over for a routine traffic stop for running a stop sign.

  Fort Wayne Police Officer James Arnold, by the way, was just four months on the force when he lit up Lemus-Rodriguez’s car; before that, he had years of combat experience as a United States government Marine fighting for the U.S. government’s occupation and counter-insurgency operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards refused to file any criminal charges; the city hired on a PR flack to declare Arnold’s actions objectively reasonable. The city’s main concern in settling the family’s lawsuit, besides using taxpayer money to cover Officer James Arnold from any personal legal liability for his lethal actions, is apparently as a bribe to ensure that the objective video record of the objectively reasonable shooting remains permanently concealed from the public.