You’ll never be told how many FBI agents cheated on the Bureau’s exam testing their knowledge of the law of surveillance:

“I’ve got a general idea. But I do not know how many,” have cheated, [FBI director Robert Mueller] said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And I’m not sure the IG knows how many either.”

But, Mueller added, the IG “has pointed out instances orally to me where there may be persons and a particular office where it was widespread. And it may be attributable to a lack of understanding and confusion about the procedures.”

Bullshit.  To become a special agent:

You must possess a four-year degree from a college or university accredited by one of the regional or national institutional associations recognized by the United States Secretary of Education.

The cheating agents were trading answers during the open-book exam testing their knowledge of the constitutional and statutory law that governs the basic requirements of their job.

It’s pathetic enough that the FBI gives these people, who we’re told are the elite, an open-book exam, but each and every one of these agents must have graduated from college.  Everyone who graduates college, even the football and basketball players, knows that trading answers during an exam is cheating, even if they do it.  Now we’re told that the creme de la creme of our nation’s law enforcement agents lack understanding, and are confused, by this simple rule that most kids learn in elementary school.

Hell, even a meter-maid should know that’s cheating.

But few of the agents in question will be fired.  None will be named and disgraced.

Question (no looking in the book to see the answer):

If X special agents are willing to cheat on the exam testing their knowledge of legal surveillance procedures, what is Y, where Y is the percentage of X who will go on to file false affidavits and commit perjury during their careers as special agents?

We previously covered the story of Evelyn Towry, a 54 pound eight year old girl who refused to take off her cow hoodie and was denied cake.  Now Ms. Towry and her parents are suing the Lake Pend Oreille Idaho School District and the Bonner County Sheriff’s Department.

Not for the denial of cake, but because Evelyn was hauled to jail in handcuffs and charged with criminal battery.

Evelyn was a third-grader at Kootenai Elementary School last year when she was handcuffed and arrested. School staffers say she spit on and inappropriately touched two instructors.

Evelyn and her parents say their rights were violated.

The school and county plan to defend the claim by demonstrating that Evelyn’s disruptive behavior made her arrest appropriate.  54 pound Evelyn, pictured below, suffers from Asperger syndrome, a relatively high functioning form of autism.   So it was right and proper to deny Evelyn a slice of cake for refusing to be a good little girl, and remove her cow hoodie.  And it was wrong and evil of Evelyn to throw a tantrum, indeed, to molest and assault her teachers.

So deputies had no choice but to lead the half-pint hooligan to jail.

Cow Hoodie Criminal

Of course the policeman has a hard job, something that selfish autistic children don’t seem to appreciate, especially where cake is concerned.  While it must have been difficult for two deputies to arrest this terrorist tot without resort to a Taser or OC spray, Evelyn doesn’t seem to appreciate the kindness she was shown.

Indeed, Evil Evelyn should be grateful that her teachers aren’t suing her, for her inappropriate touching.  Sadly, it seems the school has failed in its efforts to teach Evelyn that big girls don’t cry, or sue.

But when I became a man, I put away childish fears.

It would appear that for some police officers, the trauma of third grade never ends.

Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town.

The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.

Ms. Wells was tased for refusing to tell Officer Tim Murphy, of the Richland Police Department, the name of a man Murphy erroneously suspected of assaulting her.  Ryan Smith, of the nearby Lumpkin Police Department, did the tasing after Wells had already received a workover and a thorough dosing of pepper spray from Murphy.

“’You don’t need to know that,’” Murphy wrote in his report was Wells’ response. “I told her that she would need to give me the information that I needed or she would be arrested for obstruction. I explained that state law mandates that we investigate to determine if there has been any family violence.”

Now I’m not a Georgia lawyer, but neither is Murphy.  And I suspect this is a case in which a police officer is just making shit up as he goes along. It’s hard to imagine Georgia law would support a charge of obstruction of justice against the victim of a suspected crime, for refusing to divulge the suspect’s name.  A suspicion that, by the way, was completely off base.  Wells had called to report a possible burglary, and the man whose name Murphy sought was a family friend who agreed to wait with Wells for police to arrive, then was told by Murphy to get lost.

Meanwhile, Murphy had a 57 year old third-grade teacher to work over.

She retrieved her purse and began walking around the side of her house until Murphy said he was taking her to jail.

“Janice then backed up from me in a fight or flight stance and I grabbed her arm and placed a handcuff on it,” Murphy wrote. “She pulled away and she took off. I sprayed her with pepper spray. I chased her around the house and tripped and fell, injuring my knee just as I caught up with her. As I was once again walking her to the car, she broke loose again and ran. She tripped and fell and I grabbed her again. As we got to the car, I attempted to get the other handcuff on her and get her in the car.”

Now this is the point where our police apologist readers will point that if Ms. Wells had only obeyed the officer’s lawful command, everything would have worked out fine.  All she needed to do was to tell the officer the name of the man who’d beaten her (except he hadn’t), or to stop what she was doing (on her own property), and go along peacefully with her arrest (which was illegal).

But then it gets weird. Murphy, unable to subdue an elderly schoolteacher, called for backup.

Smith answered Murphy’s call for backup.

In his report, Smith wrote he was concerned for Murphy’s welfare because his voice was weak. “[He] sound[ed] as if he could barely talk,” Smith wrote.

The camera recorded images of Smith’s short drive down a two-lane road, but once he got within sight of the Wells’ clapboard house, the dash cam also began recording sound.

Yes, poor Murphy had injured his little knee so badly that his fellow officer was concerned, afraid, frightened for Murphy’s welfare.  After all, 57 year old schoolteachers are known to carry dangerous weapons, like sarcasm and even rulers.

So they tased the shit out of the old woman.  Watch for yourself.  Or rather, listen.  The screams are heartbreaking.

Though both officers have resigned or been fired, this doesn’t seem to be that big a deal to Georgia law enforcement.  Smith, who says that he wouldn’t do anything differently, that “I did what I had to do to take control of the situation,” was a hot property.  He’s now employed by the Chattahoochee County Sheriff’s Department, free to zap old ladies at will in another jurisdiction.

As for Richland, at least one cop is willing to tell it like it is:

Stewart County Sheriff Larry Jones, who came to the house seconds after the last electric shock was administered, suspects the outcome would have been different if the woman had been white and the officers black.

“I don’t think they would have done a white female like that,” said Jones, who is black. “If they had, it wouldn’t have been any doubt about whether they need to be terminated.”

I’m sorry to say that I can’t disagree.

I’ve often mentioned that I enjoy Cracked Magazine, the superior online version of what was once an also-ran to Mad. Cracked frequently manages to say things in the guise of satire that people are reluctant to say outright, which is supposed to be the function of satire in the first place.

This week, in a riff on one of our frequently discussed themes, Cracked tackles Six Completely Legal Ways Cops Can Screw You. Their #1 way is well-chosen. Read about how Ohio cops stole the identity of innocent citizen Haley Dawson, who is not a stripper, and gave it to criminal justice student and cop-wannabee Michelle Szuhay, who used it to go undercover as a stripper at a club suspected of promoting drugs and prostitution. Szuhay used Dawson’s social security number and a copy of her driver’s license to work as a stripper in the suspect club, but things when south when she began to get chummy with the owners.

The police did not get Haley Dawson’s permission to use her identity it what sounds like the plot to a Cinemax movie. I doubt the police will clear up any legal or credit or tax consequences for her. The police say they are allowed to do it. For the good of the citizens.

As I write this, I hear many sirens. Sounds like the LAPD is rolling out patrol cars to the vicinity of the CCB, where a jury just found former Oakland Police Officer Johannes Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but not guilty of second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter, for shooting unarmed, prone, handcuffed Oscar Grant in the back. Mehserle claims that he mistakenly grabbed his Glock rather than a taser.

As I write this, it is still possible there will be riots. There’s a lot of anger about the case, and about the verdict. A quick Google or Twitter search will show it to you right now. But I wonder: how many people who are angry know the difference between second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter?

Continue Reading »

You don’t believe me?

1.  Scientific and legal proof that every day is July 5.

2.  “How could I go to school after that and pledge allegiance and sit through good government bullshit?”

Every day is July 5.  The 4th of July is a myth perpetuated to keep normals in line, and to oppress God-fearing, and godless, weirdos.

Via Radley Balko I see that yesterday the ACLU released its much-anticipated report on police surveillance of (and interference with) protest activity. Read it and weep, as they say. It has dozens of examples from many states, and includes links to descriptions of each incident.

A few highlights:

LAPD Special Order #11, dated March 5, 2008 includes a list of 65 behaviors LAPD officers “shall” report. The list includes such innocuous, clearly subjective, and First Amendment‐protected activities as, taking measurements, using binoculars, taking pictures or video footage “with no apparent esthetic value,” drawing diagrams, taking notes, and espousing extremist views.

Ask Rodney King about the LAPD’s sense of esthetics.

During the 2004 and 2005 Air‐Sea Shows, the Friends Meeting of Ft. Lauderdale distributed information about conscientious objection to recruiters and interested civilians and handed out peace literature. Peter Ackerman learned that this action had landed him on a government watchlist when, shortly after news broke about domestic surveillance by the Department of Defense, a local reporter called him and asked if he was a “credible threat”.

Caitlin Childs was arrested after a peaceful protest on public property outside the Honey Baked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County for taking down the license plate number of the car belonging to the DHS agent who had been photographing the protestors all day.

A plain‐clothes Harvard University detective was caught photographing people at a peaceful protest for “intelligence gathering” purposes. Protesters who then photographed the officer were arrested.

The ACLU aggregates distinct problems: detaining or arresting people for extremely dubious reasons (like for photographing police), on the one hand, and surveillance of protected activities, on the other hand. Those are distinct problems, and require distinct responses. False arrests require vigorous defense and, where appropriate, lawsuits. Questionable surveillance, on the other hand, often doesn’t ripen into a constitutional violation. Policing that sort of activity requires vigorous inquiry, tools like FOIA requests, good journalism, and halfway-decent executive oversight of law enforcement. Those are in regrettably short supply — and public tolerance for law enforcement surveillance of dissenters remains appallingly high.

Don’t Tase my granny!

Police Tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn’t breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance, the woman and her grandson claim in Oklahoma City Federal Court. Though the grandson said, “Don’t Taze my granny!” an El Reno police officer told another cop to “Taser her!” and wrote in his police report that he did so because the old woman “took a more aggressive posture in her bed,” according to the complaint.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Did he fire six shots or only five?  Sorry, that’s not what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, dude’s making this up.  This comes from The Onion. It’s a parody of the spate of recent news stories on criminal assaults by the police against civilians.

But it isn’t.  It comes from Courthouse News Service, which is a respectable web service quoting directly from lawsuits filed in federal court, in this case the western district of Oklahoma.

And from this, we know or can strongly suspect the following to be true:

1) Lonnie Tinsley found an attorney with the guts to make these allegations in federal court, so I assume there’s some basis in fact for the allegations.  The lawyer on Seinfeld wouldn’t invent a story like this;

2) Lonnie Tinsley’s grandmother, Lona Varner of El Reno Oklahoma, is 86 years old and hooked to an oxygen tank;

3) Lonnie Tinsley became worried that his grandmother hadn’t taken her medications, so he called 911 to ask for medical help;

4) Multiple El Reno Oklahoma police officers responded instead, and shot Lona Varner with a TASER;

5) There is an incident report, filed by an Officer Thomas Duran of the El Reno police department, which says this:

Instead, the apparent leader of the police [defendant Thomas Duran] instructed another policeman to ‘Taser her!’ He stated in his report that the 86 year-old plaintiff ‘took a more aggressive posture in her bed,’ and that he was fearful for his safety and the safety of others.

6) Lonnie Tinsley, who called 911 for medical help for his grandmother, was then arrested and thrown into the back of a police car.

I don’t know anything about Varner’s attorney, but I do know this: no sane lawyer would file a federal suit claiming that an officer had Tased an 86 year old woman in her bed, justifying it by claiming that grandma “took a more aggressive posture in her bed,” without a document from which he could quote that actually said that.  And without an arrest report.

So it stands to reason that Lora Varner, 86 years old, probably demented, and hooked up to an oxygen tank, was Tased by officers fearful for their safety, because she took an “aggressive posture in her bed.”

WTF?!?

Update: Thanks to our friend Jag for the police report, which we’re posting here but originally comes from Carlos Miller: 33557136-Dallas-Org-El-Reno-Police-Report-on-Lona-Varner

I’d encourage you to read Miller’s link, which has a photo of Ms. Varner.

To place things in context, the very obviously demented Varner, according to Duran, pulled a kitchen knife on Duran from under her pillow.  So she was shot with a Taser, placing her at risk of heart failure or (because a Taser needle can penetrate plastic tubing as easily as skin) exploding in a fiery holocaust of pure oxygen death.

On the other hand, I could disarm this lady, and so could you, and we’re not ten police officers.

“If there’s a gun I take the bullet.  If there’s a knife I take the blade.” — Mr. T.

Because Thomas Duran and his keystone cops couldn’t disarm an 86 year old invalid grandmother, she was Tased, and her grandson who probably, for some irrational reason, objected to the Tasing was arrested.

If only Mr. T had been around, everyone would have settled their differences with a tall, icy glass of milk and a nice bowl of cereal, and the people watching on television would have learned a valuable lesson about sharing, friendship, and respect for one’s elders.

Things I’ve wanted to write about this week, but haven’t been able to hit.  Fortunately, they’ve been well handled by other bloggers:

• Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller, whose neglect of her responsibilities killed a man, had her removal hearing.  Grits for Breakfast covered it.
• We ignored the case of James Dave, the Chattanooga officer who arrested Eric Wright for having the gall to ignore Dave’s lawful command that Wright stop trying to save his new bride’s life.
• The University of Texas is allowing police to conduct experiments on mentally ill prisoners.  Some doctors should lose their licenses.
• This is what the tax return for a small corporation looks like. I’m surprised they could find a camera with a lens wide enough to take in the whole monstrosity.
• And finally, from Kids Prefer Cheese, an old post about the worst Mexican restaurant on earth.  Or at least Germany. It made me laugh.

Just thought you’d like to know.

If you want a textbook case of what’s wrong with the drug war, look no further than Marietta Robinson’s bathroom.

Full disclosure:  I take everything Ms. Robinson has to say on faith.  Why?  Because Marietta Robinson has never lied to me.

Marietta Robinson, to my knowledge, has never invaded a 62 year old lady’s home, looking for someone who doesn’t live there, and shot a 13 year old dog which had been placed out of harm’s way for his own protection.

Marietta Robinson has never described the dogs she didn’t shoot as “pit bulls,” because she doesn’t shoot dogs, and even if she does, they aren’t pit bulls.

Marietta Robinson has never used her victim’s water fountain to wash the blood off her hands after casually firing eight shots into that victim’s pet.

Marietta Robinson has never tried to fob off fortune cookie wrappers as glassine bags containing drug residue.

All of this, on the other hand, is Standard Operating Procedure, Business As Usual, in the War on Drugs. Of course, Marietta Robinson is lucky to be alive, much less not arrested because the fortune cookie wrappers didn’t actually contain any drugs, so she should shut up and stop complaining.

Out! Out! Damned Spot!  Oh, I’m sorry.  The dog’s name was Wrinkles.

I, on the other hand, don’t have to shut up.  This could never happen to me. I’m a white male lawyer of good family and reputation, not an old black lady.  So I’ll say it.

Everything about the drug war is a miserable failure.  Millions of otherwise productive citizens languish in the criminal justice system, while drugs continue to circulate, making billionaires of the criminals who control the trade.  That’s a problem of policy, not the fault of the police, who are merely following orders.

But it’s also a problem of execution, and that’s the problem with the people who are just following orders.  Because it takes a special sort of person, the sort of trigger-happy goon who would be drummed out of the military for bloodthirstiness, to want a job that involves home invasions and shooting 13 year old dogs.  We hire the dregs of society, base animals barely better than the dogs they shoot, to enforce our laws.

The fault, dear Marietta Robinson, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.  We vote for the people who retain and expand these laws.  We pass bonds to pay for more prisons, and more thugs in uniform.

And until we do something about it, it will continue.  It just won’t happen to people like us.

Carl Bryan had a shitty morning.

Now, we all have bad days, days that would look highly unfortunate if described painstakingly in print (for instance, in the factual section of an opinion by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals).

But Carl’s morning was unusually bad. Carl Bryan’s morning involved a crescendo of arrested-adolescent personal dysfunction (“He began crying and moping, ultimately removing his t-shirt to wipe his face”) that ended unpleasantly when Officer MacPherson of the Coronado, California Police Department tased him, causing him to fall face-first onto the unforgiving asphalt, breaking his teeth and suffering facial contusions.

The question presented to the Ninth Circuit was this: did Officer MacPherson violate Mr. Bryan’s rights by tasing him for the offense of standing outside his car in his tennis shoes and boxer shorts, “yelling gibberish and hitting his thighs”?

It’s worth reading the whole opinion, but to cut to the chase for you the answer is yes with a but. Yes, it was excessive force to tase Mr. Bryan when he was really doing nothing but standing there being highly dysfunctional. But police officers like Officer MacPherson could reasonably be confused about whether it was appropriate to tase someone for standing there in his underwear sniveling. Because law is complicated and stuff, and who can keep track of all the people you should or shouldn’t tase? Quite frankly I’m not certain that the Ninth Circuit can keep it straight. So Officer MacPherson is immune from suit.

In the meantime, Carl Bryan has learned that if you stand there in your underwear acting like a dork, some law enforcement officers may be sufficiently intimidated to use non-lethal force on you.

Sit down, and let me tell you about two police officers cruelly accused of perjury.

Perjury — lying under oath, breaking one’s oath to God or affirmation, bearing false testimony against one’s neighbor — is a terrible thing. Really, it’s in the Bible and everything. Look it up. So it’s a hard, hard thing to be accused of lying.

No doubt that’s what inspired the warm-hearted sympathy of Washington County, Minnesota District Judge Gregory Galler towards our first officer, who, thanks to protective local reporting, must remain nameless. See, defense attorney David McCormick was cross-examining the officer — you know, trying to get a criminal off on some technicality, or trying to mislead the jury — when McCormick did the unthinkable: he suggested through his cross-examination that maybe the officer was not being truthful. Who the hell does he think he is? Mister, that officer is the thin blue line between you and utter anarchy that would make Mad Max look like a direct-to-video Strawberry Shortcake movie. When Wigmore said that cross-examination was the greatest legal engine ever invented for discovery of truth, he certainly didn’t mean to suggest that upstart lawyers ought to question the veracity of police officers. The idea!

Righteously offended, Judge Gregory Galler demanded an apology:

Galler ordered McCormick to write an apology to the officer for “impugning the officer’s integrity,” according to court documents.

It would seem that Judge Galler’s order might have emerged from a heart of pure righteousness, rather than from sober reflection:

Reached in his Stillwater chambers, Galler confirmed that he “might have” ordered the apology and asked, “How has that become a story?” When told the demand seemed unusual, Galler said, “Not really.” He declined to comment further.

Yes, Galler ruled from his gut. He ruled from the place where (some) judges know that the criminal justice system is about processing people, not about testing the adequacy of the government’s evidence under a set of rules, and certainly not about some Quixotic search for truth. So naturally he reacted with anger. How dare Mr. McCormick question that nice officer’s veracity? That officer is just playing his part. It’s unfair and uncouth to subject his testimony to the harsh and unforgiving light of scrutiny.

Fortunately most folks understand this. That’s why Montgomery County Police Officer Dina Hoffman, our second officer of the day, will remain part of the thin blue line. Dina Hoffman just got acquitted of perjury by an obliging jury. See, Officer Hoffman wrote in her report, and testified on the stand, that accused drunk driver George Zaliev was passed out in the front seat of a running car. A video tape — a crude, thoughtless thing, that can’t grasp the role that police play in protecting us from peril, and can’t understand how hard it is to be a cop — revealed that Zaliev was, if you want to get “factual,” passed out in the back seat of a car that was not running.

It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re spending all day administering justice.

Now, I don’t know. Maybe the Montgomery County jury did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Maybe — instead of cutting Officer Hoffman a break because she’s part of the thin blue line — that jury actually listened to her defense lawyer’s legal defense and found that there was reasonable doubt as to whether she was just forgetful after many traffic stops.

But I think it’s more likely that the jury saw their proper role, the role of all free people in a free society: to recognize the privilege of police officers to say whatever they like without crass questioning of their veracity.

Hat tip to Simple Justice.

[Note: there is no coordination or design, so far as I know, behind a recent spate of police misconduct stories here. But the topic is a natural fit for any blog concerned with individual liberty and how social norms lead us to scorn or abandon it.]

Or was it James Ellroy?  It was definitely James Ellroy.

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective is the subject of an internal investigation looking into accusations that he had an affair with a woman whose husband he had investigated and helped prosecute for allegedly threatening her.

The department opened an investigation into Det. Phillip Solano in April after the allegations were brought forth by the husband, Alberto Gutierrez. Solano, who had been assigned to the City of Industry station, is on administrative duty for now.

The facts, as alleged by Alberto Gutierrez in a Section 1983 suit filed in the Central District of California, would be that Detective Solano carried on an affair with Gutierrez’s wife while investigating and serving as a prosecuting witness for charges of stalking and domestic violence.  According to Gutierrez, Solano cooked up the charges to help the wife obtain a restraining order and full custody of Gutierrez’s daughters.

Gutierrez only learned of the affair when his defense attorney’s investigator turned up a Facebook friendship between the wife and Solano.

Now this is really “inside baseball” stuff, but for you non-lawyers out there, Facebook is not the typical means by which the police maintain contact with crime victims.  At least not in the United States.

And again, I apologize for the boring monograph on police procedure, but typically the police don’t exchange expressions of romantic desire, love, “I miss you,” or the like with witnesses.  No, usually the police confine themselves to factual matters, such as asking questions about where the incident took place, the identity of the assailant, the names of other witnesses, whether a weapon was used, and such things.

Evidently this breach of police procedure, which is to say Facebook friendship and other evidence of a romantic relationship between the complaining witness and the investigating officer, was enough to convince the judge presiding over Gutierrez’s criminal trial, over a year after charges were filed, to dismiss the case.

We lawyers call this a “technicality.”

Anyway, Gutierrez alleges that the relationship was common knowledge in Solano’s division of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and that Solano’s superiors allowed him to stay on the case, prosecuting his lover’s ex-husband, while conducting the affair.  That the Sheriff’s office turned a blind eye while Detective Solano used his office and power to send his lover’s ex-husband to prison.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, of course, calls Gutierrez’s charges against Solano “ridiculous” and “unfounded,” even as it concedes its Internal Affairs unit is investigating Solano, and that the Detective has been transferred from the field to administrative duty.  Which is to say, the Sheriff doesn’t know the facts either, but still denies everything.

We lawyers call this “standard procedure.”  Laypeople, as opposed to lawyers, might call it “bullshit.”

Via Radley Balko

After a hard morning, busting his butt to meet the city’s traffic ticket quota, New York Police Officer Daniel Chu needed a delicious maple cream donut and an icy Coolata coffee.

It all began when a city councilman allegedly caught the agent doing something extremely illegal: using his flashing red lights, and speeding, to buy coffee!

It wasn’t a red light camera, but a red-haired councilman who caught traffic agent Daniel Chu red-handed, waltzing out of a Dunkin Donuts the other day with a cup of coffee.

Now some would call Officer Chu’s behavior stereotypic, but I’ll point out that Officer Chu, a member of New York’s finest, could have sped through traffic, run through stop signs, and endangered pedestrians on his way to any pastry shop.  It didn’t have to be a Dunkin Donuts.

And of course Officer Chu’s behavior, after being caught on camera, was hardly stereotypic.  Most policeman love and respect the law, so it was hardly typical of Officer Chu to cite New York Councilman Daniel Halloran with a criminal charge of, um, taking pictures of a policeman walking out of Dunkin Donuts carrying a box of delicious donuts and a sweet cool Coolata brand iced coffee.

Nosirree.

Chu apparently didn’t like being caught on candid camera, so he whipped out his ticket book and handed the councilman a $165 ticket for what Halloran says are trumped-up charges.

“He says, ‘you’re going to take pictures of me? Well, I’m going to write you a summons,’” Halloran said.

Of course, we weren’t there.  We can’t judge this brave, fine, decorated officer for his actions.  He might have been suffering from a hypoglycemia attack.  He must have needed those mouth-watering donuts.  Or he might have been having a bad day.

It turns out that Officer Chu has something of a history in the neighborhood. Former NYPD cop Tim Dillon told CBS 2 he was a pallbearer at Gleason’s Funeral Home when Chu showed up.

“The family was getting ready to transfer the body from the funeral home to the church,” Dillon said. “The traffic agent felt that they were all double-parked. There was a confrontation – he started yelling and screaming at the family members.

“Traffic Agent Chu had a cigarette in his mouth, screaming at everybody. He took his cigarette and flicked it toward the area of the family and indiscriminately just started scanning the cars up and down, cursing at them, yelling at them,” Dillon said.

Ok, a really bad day.  But always remember, brave policemen like Daniel Chu protect us.  They’re the Thin Blue Line that stands between ordinary people, like you and me, and traffic felons, unlicensed funeral mourners, and criminal photographers.

But for the policeman, we’d have anarchy in the streets.

Via Injustice Everywhere.

Of course he is.  Any street fighter knows that the best locations to deliver a punch are the back of the head (a “rabbit punch”), or the temple.  These sites are more likely to produce a concussion, temporarily or permanently incapacitating one’s opponent.  The goal of any accomplished fighter is to produce an immediate brain injury.

But Officer Ian Walsh?   He can barely beat up a teenaged girl:

Fortunately for Officer Walsh, the Seattle Police Department will not fire him for his incompetent pugilism.  Instead, he’s been sent for retraining.

Maybe next time he punches a jaywalker, he’ll land a better blow.

Update: According to Packratt from Injustice Everywhere (a blog that everyone should read), this is only one incident in a long string of Seattle officers using force to eliminate the scourge of jaywalking.