Getbig Main Boards > Politics and Political Issues Board

Police State - Official Thread

<< < (1111/1112) > >>

Skeletor:
Once again, a "brave hero" attacks an old man and break his neck...
As usual, the cop union is defending the attacker, praising him for his "professionalism". What "professionalism", leaving the old man broken neck, a broken eye socket, and a brain bleed?


Oklahoma City cop is investigated for slamming 70-year-old man to the ground

An Oklahoma City police officer is under investigation and on paid leave following the release of body camera footage that shows him slamming an elderly Vietnamese man to the ground during a traffic stop. The man suffered a brain bleed and remains hospitalized after the incident.

The footage shows the Oct. 27 event that begins with Officer Joseph Gibson explaining to 70-year-old Lich Vu that he was being issued a ticket for an improper U-turn.

There appears to be a language barrier between the two as they argue over whether Vu would sign the citation. Vu eventually exits the car and the argument continues.

Gibson insists that if Vu won't sign the ticket, he'll be taken to jail.

"I'm ready to go to jail," Vu said.

They continue arguing and Vu appears to tell Gibson to "shut up" while tapping the officer's chest with the back of his fingers.

That prompts Gibson to slam Vu to the ground.

A woman, who had earlier in the video identified herself as Vu's wife, asks Gibson to call an ambulance as the officer continues to put handcuffs on a seemingly unresponsive Vu.

Vu's daughter posted to Instagram that her father was frail and already in ailing health before the slamming incident — suffering from bone cancer —and that the force of the shove left Vu with a broken neck.

"This is not how you treat someone that is 5'3, 115 lbs with bone cancer after a car accident," Teresa Vu wrote on Oct. 28, alongside pictures that showed Vu's head bloodied, dented and bruised.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5191723/oklahoma-city-police-investigation-70-year-old-man-bodycam

Skeletor:
Biden commuted the sentence of the judge who was responsible for the "kids for cash" scheme, i.e. the judge was getting a cut from private for-profit prisons for every kid he sentenced to prison. No surprise that Biden would grant this favor to a scumbag who preyed on children. Maybe for every kid sentenced there was also a 10% for the big guy? Incidentally, both judges in this scheme were Democrats.


Biden stirs outrage in Scranton by commuting 'kids for cash' judge's sentence

President Biden has sparked anger among Pennsylvanians after he commuted the sentence of a corrupt judge who was jailed for more than 17 years after he was caught taking kickbacks for sending juveniles to for-profit detention facilities.

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, former Judge Michael Conahan shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and shared $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Another judge, Mark Ciavarella, was also involved in the illicit scheme, the effects of which are still felt today among victims and families.

The scandal is considered Pennsylvania’s largest-ever judicial corruption scheme with the state's supreme court throwing out some 4,000 juvenile convictions involving more than 2,300 kids after the scheme was uncovered.

Conahan, 72, pleaded guilty in 2010 to one count of racketeering conspiracy but was released from prison to home confinement in 2020 because of COVID-19 health concerns with six years left in his sentence.

But Biden, the so-called favorite son of Scranton, commuted his sentence Thursday as part of the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history in which he commuted jail sentences for nearly 1,500 people and granted 39 pardons.

The decision has raised questions as to why Biden would choose to commute the sentence of a judge who is detested in the area.

Sandy Fonzo, who once confronted Ciavarella outside federal court after her son was placed in juvenile detention and committed suicide, said that the president’s actions were an "injustice" and "deeply painful."

The scheme began in 2002 when Conahan shut down the state juvenile detention center and used money from the Luzerne County budget to fund a multimillion-dollar lease for the private facilities. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.

In 2022, both Conahan and Ciavarella were ordered to pay more than $200 million to nearly 300 people they victimized, although it's unlikely the now-adult victims will see even a fraction of the damages award.

The scheme, per The Citizens Voice, involved former Pennsylvania attorney Robert Powell paying Ciavarella and Conahan $770,000, who in turn funneled juvenile defendants to two private, for-profit detention centers Powell partly owned.

Powell served an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to felony counts of failing to report a felony and being an accessory to a conspiracy.

Real estate developer Robert K. Mericle paid the judges $2.1 million and was later charged with failing to disclose to investigators and a grand jury that he knew the judges were defrauding the government. Mericle served one year in federal prison, per The Citizens Voice.

Ciavarella is serving a 28-year prison sentence on honest services mail fraud charges, per the publication.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-stirs-outrage-scranton-commuting-kids-cash-judges-sentence

Skeletor:
No surprise. These "courtesy cards" have been around for years, along with cop union cards/decals available for a price after "donations" or "back the blue" stickers.


NJ Police Gave Drivers With Courtesy Cards Or Police Ties A Pass On Serious Traffic Violations


The New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller says that NJ police give “preferential treatment” to some motorists.

Those drivers simply had a “courtesy card” from another officer, claimed to know a cop, or flashed a badge themselves.

Bodycam video shows several instances of exactly this behavior.

All citizens are equal before the law, right? Well, apparently not as far as the State Police in New Jersey is concerned. According to an investigation by the Office of the State Comptroller, the department routinely provides preferential treatment to some drivers. Those drivers offer a courtesy card to the officer, claim to know another police officer well, or simply flash a badge. Across 501 no-enforcement stops made by the NJSP, 139 showed evidence of this preferential treatment.

The OSC says that bodycam footage of no-enforcement stops is rarely reviewed. These are stops where “tickets were not given, arrests were not made, and no one was even ordered to exit their vehicle.” The stops reviewed by the OSC all come from a small 10-day period in late 2022. As mentioned above, in 139 of the 501 stops, drivers received preferential treatment.

In one case, officers pulled over a speeding Alfa Romeo Stelvio. It was weaving between lanes, not using turn signals, and driving at over 94 mph. When officers first made contact with the driver, he immediately gave them a card indicating that he had a relationship with another officer. He then admitted to having two drinks at the place where he’d just been. The officers who pulled him over tried to contact the cop that the driver reportedly knew.

When they can’t reach said officer one of the two says “I’ll do the right fucking thing,” before letting the driver go with little more than a verbal slap on the wrist. He even admits to the driver that “If you didn’t have this (the absent officer’s card), we’d be going a whole different way,” and then that “Let’s be real, you crash… there’s going to be a fucking problem, right?” It would seem that he’s openly admitting that he would personally be liable to some degree if the driver crashed the car later down the road.

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/12/nj-cops-let-drivers-with-police-connections-off-the-hook-in-dozens-of-serious-traffic-violations/

Skeletor:
So when can we expect to see mass arrests and prison terms for blatant violations of the Constitution? (rhetorical question of course)


Federal Court (Finally) Rules Backdoor Searches of 702 Data Unconstitutional

Better late than never: last night a federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed.

In the intervening years, Congress has reauthorized Section 702 multiple times, each time ignoring overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the intelligence community abuse their access to databases of warrantlessly collected messages and other data. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which Congress assigned with the primary role of judicial oversight of Section 702, has also repeatedly dismissed arguments that the backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment, giving the intelligence community endless do-overs despite its repeated transgressions of even lax safeguards on these searches.

This decision sheds light on the government’s liberal use of what is essential a “finders keepers” rule regarding your communication data. As a legal authority, FISA Section 702 allows the intelligence community to collect a massive amount of communications data from overseas in the name of “national security.” But, in cases where one side of that conversation is a person on US soil, that data is still collected and retained in large databases searchable by federal law enforcement. Because the US-side of these communications is already collected and just sitting there, the government has claimed that law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to sift through them. EFF argued for over a decade that this is unconstitutional, and now a federal court agrees with us.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/victory-federal-court-finally-rules-backdoor-searches-702-data-unconstitutional

Skeletor:
Qualified immunity strikes again...


An Oregon woman’s nude cellphone photos ended up the talk of town. She tracked it back to the DA

An Oregon woman’s nude photos ended up the topic of conversation in her small town after a prosecutor looked through her sensitive cellphone data and told the county sheriff what he found despite no warrant, no consent and no suspicion that she had committed a crime.

But the district attorney involved won’t face legal consequences under a federal appeals court ruling released Monday.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-to-1 that Grant County District Attorney Jim Carpenter’s actions amounted to “a troubling example of the intrusion on Fourth Amendment rights” against illegal searches.

But all three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit.

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2025/02/an-oregon-womans-nude-cellphone-photos-ended-up-the-talk-of-town-she-tracked-it-back-to-the-da.html

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

Go to full version