Tag: police accountability

Police Bodycam Footage Shows Moment Disabled Woman Flashes Arm Stump After Cop Accuses Her of Texting with Her “Right Hand”

Newly-released police bodycam footage shows the moment a disabled woman flashed her arm stump after a cop accused her of texting with her “right hand.”

A Palm Beach County officer pulled over Kathleen Thomas, 36, for distracted driving earlier this year.

The officer told Thomas that he pulled her over for “holding the phone with your right hand” while she was driving on North Dixie Highway.

Thomas immediately showed the officer her handless arm and flashed her stump.

“So I’m obviously not. So you wanna just call this a day?” Thomas said to the stunned officer.

The officer did not back down from his claims.

“I don’t want to call it a day. You had a hand up,” the officer said.

The officer continued to humiliate Thomas and asked her to put a “hand to God” to promise she wasn’t texting with her right hand.

“Hand to God,” Thomas said as she held up her stump.

“The other hand to God,” the officer said.

The officer issued Thomas a citation; however, the citation was later dismissed after Thomas challenged it in court.

Keep reading

Ohio Officials Who Excluded Christian Group From Foster Care System Forced to Pay Massive Sum

Officials in Montgomery County, Ohio, agreed to a more than $120,000 settlement after reversing a decision to exclude a Christian organization from the foster care system.

Gracehaven, which assists young people rescued from sex trafficking, filed a lawsuit in 2024 accusing the county of barring them from “a public program and benefit for which it is otherwise qualified.”

The decision was “based solely on the ministry’s commitment to hire only employees who share and adhere to its religious beliefs,” according to a May 12 release from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Montgomery County had previously contracted with Gracehaven for years, reimbursing the ministry with public funds in exchange for their care services.

But they “suddenly decided to exclude” Gracehaven after the organization “told county officials that it was not waiving or surrendering its constitutionally protected freedom to employ those who share its faith.”

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio ruled last year that Gracehaven could not be excluded from the foster care program because of its policy to only hire employees aligned on faith.

Keep reading

Hawaii To Pay Up After Trying to Criminalize Political Memes

Hawaii has agreed to pay $118,237.47 in attorney’s fees and costs to The Babylon Bee and local activist Dawn O’Brien, closing the books on a failed attempt to make some political satire a criminal act.

The state chose not to appeal a January ruling that struck down its so-called deepfake law, Act 191, as facially unconstitutional. It tried to ban speech. It lost. Now, taxpayers are covering the bill.

The settlement comes with an unusual wrinkle. Hawaii can’t actually pay yet. The agreement is contingent on the state legislature appropriating the funds during its next session, which runs from January to May 2027. If the legislature doesn’t approve the money by September 1, 2027, the Bee and O’Brien retain the right to file a formal motion for attorney’s fees, meaning the case would reopen and the final number could climb.

Act 191, signed by Governor Josh Green in July 2024, banned the distribution of “materially deceptive media” during election seasons if it risked “harming the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate” or “changing the voting behavior of voters.”

The only escape for satirists was to slap joke-killing disclaimers on their content, disclaimers that had to appear throughout the entirety of a video and be printed in letters as large as any other text on screen. Violations carried fines, civil lawsuits, and jail time.

The law didn’t require anyone to actually be harmed or deceived. It punished speech based on a speculative “risk” of harm, a standard so vague that the person posting had no reliable way to know whether they were complying. US District Judge Shanlyn Park found that the law “muddies the line between compliance and noncompliance by forcing speakers to base their conduct on their own risk assessment, rather than on clear, objective standards.”

She noted the law created an “inherently subjective assessment for enforcement agencies” that “could conceivably lead to discretionary and targeted enforcement that discriminates based on viewpoint.”

Hawaii argued the law was needed to protect election integrity. Park acknowledged that interest but found the state couldn’t show it had chosen the least restrictive means.

Hawaii’s own expert agreed that digital literacy education would work, objecting only that it “would require a larger investment of resources” compared to a ban. Park cited the Supreme Court: “The First Amendment does not permit the State to sacrifice speech for efficiency.”

ADF legal counsel Mathew Hoffmann said: “Hawaii’s war against political memes and satire has come to an end, thankfully. The First Amendment doesn’t allow any state to choose what political speech is acceptable and censor speech in the name of ‘misinformation.’ That censorship is both undemocratic and unnecessary.”

Hawaii follows California, which lost a similar fight against the Bee. Minnesota’s version is still being litigated before the full 8th Circuit.

Keep reading

Tennessee man jailed for Charlie Kirk meme wins $835,000 settlement

Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer, was arrested in September after sharing memes on Facebook about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Tennessee officials have now agreed to pay $835,000 to settle the lawsuit filed by Bushart against Perry County, its sheriff, and the investigator who obtained the arrest warrant.

Bushart’s case drew national attention because, while many people across the U.S. reportedly lost jobs over social media posts about Kirk’s death, his was a rare case where online speech led to criminal prosecution. Authorities later dropped the felony charge against him in October.

The post that prompted Bushart’s arrest featured President Donald Trump and the words “We have to get over it,” referencing a remark made in 2024 after a school shooting at Perry High School in Iowa. AP reported that the meme was posted with the caption: “This seems relevant today…”

Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems said last year that most of Bushart’s posts were lawful free speech, but claimed residents were alarmed by the school shooting reference because there is also a Perry County High School in Tennessee. However, Weems also said he knew the meme referred to the Iowa school shooting.

“Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” Weems said in a statement to The Tennessean last year.

Keep reading

The FBI’s FOIA Blacklist

The Freedom of Information Act was designed to empower citizens to hold their government accountable. But evidence suggests the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has quietly adopted a practice that turns that principle on its head: labeling some of the people who file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as “vexsome.”

In effect, the agency has created a FOIA-specific blacklist. Yet when asked, it denies having done so.

The FBI has maintained what it calls a list of “vexsome” FOIA filers for years. The label itself is odd — the proper term would be “vexatious” — but the implication is clear enough. Certain individuals and organizations who file frequent records requests are flagged internally as troublesome.

That practice is deeply at odds with the very text of the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exists because the late Representative John Moss (D-CA) spent 10 years encountering delays, evasions, and outright refusals by federal agencies and departments to give him information he needed for oversight purposes. Moss understood that many citizens and watchdog groups asked the same kind of persistent questions of executive branch officials as he did, but they lacked a statutory basis to force such information disclosures. It’s why Moss worked so hard to get FOIA into law. Investigative journalists, transparency organizations and researchers often file dozens — sometimes hundreds — of requests in pursuit of public records. The law anticipates and protects that behavior.

There is nothing in the FOIA statute authorizing federal agencies to maintain lists of “vexatious” requesters or to single out particular citizens for special scrutiny because they use the law frequently. The statute’s presumption is exactly the opposite: that access to government records belongs to the public, and that agencies must justify withholding them.

Yet internal records obtained through FOIA requests by transparency researcher John Greenewald, who runs the document archive The Black Vault, show that the FBI has indeed categorized certain requesters in this way.

The Cato Institute learned this firsthand when the FBI labeled it a “vexsome” FOIA requester during the previous administration. More recently, when I filed a FOIA request seeking records explaining how the FBI defines or uses that designation, the Bureau responded that it could find no records responsive to the request — even though records labeling individuals or groups as “vexsome” were previously available to Greenewald.

The FBI cannot both maintain a category of “vexatious” requesters and simultaneously claim no records exist describing how that category is used. That’s why Cato has filed a new FOIA lawsuit to force the FBI to produce the records at issue.

The deeper problem is what such labeling represents. FOIA was enacted in 1966 to prevent federal agencies from deciding which members of the public deserve access to government information. Congress deliberately structured the law so that requests are judged by their legal merits — not by who submits them or how often they do so. Indeed, the statute has been updated multiple times over the past 60 years in response to agency or department tactics designed to evade the statutes’ very purpose.

Once agencies begin categorizing requesters as nuisances or troublemakers, they create a de facto enemies list composed of the very taxpayers and citizens they are sworn to serve. A system meant to promote transparency risks becoming one in which the government quietly tracks and stigmatizes those who seek to hold it accountable for its conduct — or misconduct.

Agency and department heads routinely claim that FOIA is administratively burdensome — yet they never ask Congress for line-item appropriations to ensure processing is quick and efficient. Agencies process hundreds of thousands of requests each year — and in tens of thousands of cases invoke one or more of FOIA’s nine exemptions to keep information secret that in most cases should never have been withheld in the first place. Those tactics alone force requesters to retain lawyers capable of litigating through the delays, obfuscations, and denials. The FBI’s “vexsome FOIA filer” program takes this bureaucratic game to a whole new level.

Keep reading

A Jury Approves Damages After 2 Texas Cops Snatched a Supposedly ‘Abandoned’ Girl From Her Home

More than seven years after two Texas cops kidnapped a teenaged girl they falsely claimed had been “abandoned,” a federal jury has concluded that the officers violated her Fourth Amendment rights by unreasonably seizing her from her home. In a verdict delivered last week, the jurors said that seizure also violated her parents’ due process rights under the 14th Amendment. And they agreed that one of the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment by searching the family’s kitchen without a warrant, consent, or exigent circumstances. In the second phase of the trial, the jurors approved $175,000 in compensatory damages and $125,000 in punitive damages.

The verdict validates constitutional claims that Megan and Adam McMurry made in a  federal lawsuit they filed in October 2020, two years after Officers Alexandra Weaver and Kevin Brunner, both of whom worked for the Midland Independent School District, visited their apartment and left with their daughter, Jade, then 14. That intervention, the jury concluded, was not justified in the circumstances, since Jade was not in any danger. The verdict “was vindicating after having our lives turned upside down and trampled through for the past seven and a half years,” Megan McMurry told KMID, the ABC affiliate in Midland.

The bizarre episode at the center of the case happened when Adam McMurry, then a member of the National Guard, was deployed to the Middle East, and Megan McMurry, a special education teacher at Abell Junior High School in Midland, was in Kuwait looking into a job that would have allowed the family to live near him. Megan McMurry had alerted her colleagues to her trip and had asked two neighbors, Vanessa and Gabe Vallejos, to keep an eye on Jade and her brother, Connor, then 12, who was a student at the school where McMurry worked.

On October 26, 2018, the guidance counselor who was supposed to take Connor to school was ill, so she texted Weaver, who lived in the neighborhood, asking if she could give Connor a ride. Although another Abell employee ended up bringing Connor to school, Weaver’s involvement did not end there.

Weaver was convinced that Jade had been “abandoned” and was in urgent need of a “welfare check.” Brunner, her supervisor, agreed, which is how they both ended up at the McMurrys’ apartment that morning.

Jade, who was homeschooled and in the midst of her online studies, did not understand what the cops were doing there. But within a minute, they had decided she needed to be rescued.

Keep reading

Jury Clears Afroman of Defamation for Mocking Cops Who Raided His House

An Ohio jury on Wednesday found the rapper Afroman not liable for defaming the sheriff’s deputies who raided his house nearly four years ago.

The verdict is a free speech victory for Joseph Foreman, a.k.a. Afroman, best known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High.” Over the course of a three-day civil trial that captured social media attention, Afroman, who appeared in court dressed in an American flag-print suit, insisted that he had a First Amendment right to make fun of the deputies who kicked down his door and pawed through his belongings. Afroman released several music videos about the incident using surveillance footage of the raid.

“I got freedom of speech. After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my back yard, use my freedom of speech, and turn my bad times into a good time, yes I do,” Afroman told jurors on Tuesday. “And I think I’m a sport for doing so, because I don’t go to their house, kick down their doors [and] then try to play the victim and sue them.”

The sheriff’s deputies, meanwhile, were reduced in court to watching full-length music videos of Afroman mocking them and testifying about how the rapper had called them “dipshits” and made claims to sleeping with their wives.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio, which filed an amicus brief in support of Afroman, applauded the verdict.

“We’re very pleased with this outcome, and we think the jury got it right. Robust protection for free speech requires leaving room for speakers to give their opinions in strong, florid, or figurative terms without fear of criminal or civil consequences,” says David Carey, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Ohio. “All the more so with speech involving criticism of government officials and their actions. Juries exercising common sense and considering the full context and actual meaning of a speaker’s words are a critical part of that system.”

Adams County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputies executed a search warrant on Afroman’s house in 2022. According to a search warrant, Afroman was suspected of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon. 

Body camera footage of the raid showed the deputies—after the initial excitement of busting down the front door—ambling through Afroman’s house, rifling through his clothes and CDs, and trying to find false walls and secret rooms. But the hourslong search turned up no evidence to corroborate the claim of a basement dungeon. Part of the problem may have been that, as Afroman’s record label told Vice, the house did not have a basement.

Afroman was never charged with a crime.

Keep reading

In Senate Testimony on DHS Shootings, Kristi Noem Lies About Her Lies

After Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees fatally shot Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti on January 24, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed he was “brandishing” a gun and “attacked those officers.” She also said Pretti “committed an act of domestic terrorism.”

None of that was true, as bystander video immediately showed. But when given the opportunity to correct the record during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Noem instead lied about what she had said. Her obfuscation and dishonesty provoked angry rebukes not only from the Democrats on the committee but also from Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.), who reiterated his recommendation that she resign.

“I did not call [Pretti] a domestic terrorist,” Noem told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.). “I said it appeared to be an incident of [domestic terrorism].” Noem offered the same revisionist account when Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) asked her about the “domestic terrorism” label. “In answer to questions at the press conference that afternoon,” she said, “it was that it appeared to be” domestic terrorism.

Here is what Noem actually said on the day of the shooting: “When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism. This individual, who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers, committed an act of domestic terrorism. That’s the facts.”

Those were not, in fact, the facts. Videos showed that Pretti never “attacked those officers” and never drew his holstered pistol, which he was licensed to carry. The officers did not even notice the gun until after they tackled him, and he had been disarmed by the time the shooting started. Yet Noem did not merely say Pretti “appeared to be” a domestic terrorist, which would have been bad enough; she asserted, flat out, that he was a domestic terrorist.

By contrast, the official DHS statement about the incident hedged a bit. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” it said.

Initial impressions are often wrong, of course, which is why it was reckless to describe Pretti as a would-be mass murderer just a couple of hours after he was shot. That is especially true because the only basis for that characterization was the self-interested account of the same immigration agents whose conduct was at issue.

“We were being relayed information from on the ground from CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents and officers that were there,” Noem said during a Fox News interview five days after Pretti’s death. “We were using the best information we had at the time.”

Noem reiterated that excuse during Tuesday’s hearing. “We were relying, in the hours after that incident that was so horrific, on information we were getting from the ground from our agents,” she told Klobuchar. “We’re relying on reports from the ground and from agents that are there,” she told Sen. Richard Durbin (D–Ill.). “I was getting reports from the ground from agents at the scene, and I would say that it was a chaotic scene.”

Keep reading

Here’s How We Know the Left Really Wants to Eliminate Police Body Cameras

It wasn’t too terribly long ago that the Left was demanding the widespread use of police body cams. They claimed, contrary to all evidence, that police were engaged in systemic racism and targeting Black Americans in law enforcement efforts, and that police intentionally shoot more Black suspects.

The Left was really hoping cameras would show rampant police brutality. Instead, the public got an eye-opening glimpse into the violence and danger police face on a daily basis. That’s why the narrative is shifting around body cams, with the Left now calling them “tools of propaganda” because they no longer support the Left’s narrative.

On February 2, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced ICE agents would be wearing body cams nationwide. Just two days later, New York Magazine dropped this story, attacking body cams once again.

Here’s more:

The worst 40 minutes of April’s life are a hit on YouTube. The lengthy, humiliating clip has 195,000 views and more than a thousand comments, nearly all insults and jokes at April’s expense. It includes her full name, unobscured face, and clear voice. April can’t bring herself to watch it through, but she’s read every comment. She fantasizes, sometimes, about replying, letting everyone know that she’s no longer the person in that video. “This is April,” she would write, “and I’ve now been sober for three years.”

It happened during the pandemic, back when April’s addiction was at its worst. She was in her third year of college, and her small southern city was a sleepy place. Just about the only thing to do, she tells me, was drink. And so she drank. On the night in question, she got into a fight with her best friend: It was late, they were a few shots in, and things got heated. He stormed out, and she drove off to look for him. She was “completely tweaked.” She crashed into a parked car and was arrested on the spot. The video starts as the officer steps from his cruiser, clicking on his body camera. April looks frantic and disheveled. She protests that she’s sober and tries to talk her way out of things. That doesn’t work, and the video ends at the county jail. The commenters call her a “liar” and a “brat.”

April was sentenced to a year’s probation, and during that period, she changed a lot in her life. She took time off school and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Her family supported her recovery, even attending her two-year celebration. Today, her life is markedly different. Three years clean, she’s finished her degree and now works as a schoolteacher. Her job is exhausting, but she has a sense of purpose: She’s fulfilling a lifelong ambition. She’s in a relationship, too, and she’s finally feeling a little more grounded.

Keep reading

Noem directs federal officers in Minneapolis to immediately start wearing body cameras

omeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Monday that the Trump administration is deploying body cameras for every federal agent in Minneapolis after two protesters were killed during clashes with agents in the city last month. 

Minneapolis has been a hotspot for Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the wake of revelations of large-scale public fraud linked to the Somali expat community in the state, which has prompted anti-ICE riots in the city.

Noem said that the order was made in conjunction with President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons.

“Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Noem said in a post on X. “As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country. The most transparent administration in American history—thank you [President Trump]. Make America Safe Again.”

The move comes as congressional Democrats push Republicans to include body cameras as part of their demands to pass a DHS funding bill this week. Democrats are also calling for the legislation to include requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, a ban on agents using masks while on duty and creating a “uniform code of conduct and accountability.”

The move also comes after a federal judge in Chicago last year ordered federal agents to wear body cameras, following the agency’s use of tear gas against protesters.

Keep reading