Tag: police accountability

Taxpayers to Be Held Liable After Black Pastor Arrested for Watering Flowers

On the day he was kidnapped and thrown in a cage, Pastor Michael Jennings had harmed no one, committed no crime and was actually being a good neighbor. He never thought that being asked to water his friend’s flower bed would lead to such a police interaction but thanks to ignorant and apparently-racial profiling cops in Alabama, that’s exactly what happened. Now, the taxpayers of Alabama will be held liable for the actions of the cops.

According to Georgia Public Broadcasting, Jennings, a longtime pastor at Vision of Abundant Life Church in Sylacauga, Ala., is being represented in his newly filed federal lawsuit by national civil rights attorney, Harry Daniels, and attorneys Bethaney Embry Jones, Joi Travis and Roderick Van Daniels. They hosted a news conference Saturday with the Alabama NAACP to discuss the case.

“I’m here for accountability, and I’m here for justice,” Jennings said.

“These poor judgment decisions reflect poorly on the type of training the Childersburg police officers receive … if they were acting in accordance within police guidelines,” Alabama NAACP President Benard Simelton said in a statement to NPR.

As we reported at the time, Jennings was kidnapped by police in May — his kidnappers, two officers with the Childersburg police department. The entire interaction was captured on video.

According to police, they showed up at Jennings’ neighbor’s house that day claiming they received a call about a suspicious person. Being that Jennings has lived in the neighborhood for years and is long time friends of his neighbors, he is hardly suspicious yet police would use this claim to violate his rights.

As the video shows, Jennings is literally watering his neighbor’s flowers when police show up because this is exactly what his neighbors had asked. When the unidentified officer asks the pastor what he is doing, Jennings told him that he had just gotten back from conducting church and he stopped at his neighbor’s home to water their flowers because they had asked him to do so.

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NO CHARGES Despite Video Showing Cop Dump 13 Rounds Into Unarmed Child—He Got a Bonus Instead

January of this year was the 4th anniversary of Sheila and Steve Albers’ son’s death. Their 17-year-old son was gunned down by police while unarmed. As is normally the case when police kill unarmed and often innocent people, no charges were filed against Overland Park Officer Clayton Jenison who shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old boy on January 20, 2018. On top of refusing to charge the officer, police have also repeatedly refused to release records concerning the case, despite claiming they would do so three years ago.

On Friday, the Department of Justice announced that it will not pursue federal criminal civil rights charges against Jenison, claiming they could not prove all elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

Officials met privately with members of the Albers family to notify them of the decision.

The DoJ’s decision is in spite of the fact that during a civil lawsuit based on this incident, the DOJ noted that a federal district court in Kansas ruled that a reasonable jury could find that the officer involved in the shooting had indeed used unreasonable force when he fired the first two shots at Albers. As WIBW reports, the federal criminal investigation found no substantial evidence inconsistent with this conclusion.

Unfortunately, as WIBW points out, unlike in the many state jurisdictions that have statutes criminalizing killings committed with lesser mental states, like criminal negligence or recklessness, the DOJ said the federal government has no statute to criminalize a police officer’s use of unreasonable force, if willfulness cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

As we reported at the time, police were called to the home of teenager John Albers after his girlfriend said she was afraid he was going to kill himself. Police arrived and Jenison opened fire on Albers as the teen backed out of his driveway.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened their investigation into the case in September of 2020. But now we see that it went nowhere.

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SWAT Team Raids Innocent Elderly Couple, Destroys Their Home Because Their Power Bill Was Too Low

Even in states with legal marijuana, law enforcement’s addiction to the drug war still lingers like a dark cloud over over the land of the ostensibly free. Even in California, who has paved the way in legalization of cannabis, police officers still violently, and with extreme prejudice, lay waste to the rights of innocent people who dare grow, use, or sell this most beneficial plant.

Because of their addiction to the war on drugs, cops in Riverside County have just cost the taxpayers of their town $136,000. The money was paid to Chen-Chen Hwang, 67, and her husband, Jiun-Tsong Wu, 75, to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that their two homes were broken into by armed agents of the state and ransacked as officers looked for non-existent marijuana plants.

According to Alex Coolman, the attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the elderly couple, police were monitoring power bills of town residents and used the low amount of the couple’s bill as reason to believe they were growing marijuana.

“This was a very strange and frightening incident,” Hwang said in a release from Coolman’s office. “We did nothing to deserve this, and it made us feel unsafe in our own homes.”

The raid unfolded on August 5, 2021 and caused thousands in damage to the couple’s home.

Apparently police in Riverside County monitor power consumption and when they see low power usage, they automatically assume that people are stealing power to grow marijuana.

“The deputies believed the defendants were stealing power to grow marijuana because their power consumption was low, and they said as much,” Coolman told the Press-Enterprise.

But the couple was not growing marijuana and their power consumption was low because they used solar power and were “thrifty,” according to Coolman.

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Cop Found Not Guilty Despite Video of Him Killing Innocent Woman While Trying to Kill Her Dog

As readers of the Free Thought Project know, police killing or attempting to kill dogs is an all too common occurrence — happening so often that it is caught on video much of the time. Also, as the following tragic case our of Arlington, TX illustrates, all too often, police will attempt to kill a dog — miss the dog — and shoot and kill an innocent person instead.

In 2020, a Texas grand jury indicted a police officer after he was seen on video trying to kill a dog and killing an innocent woman instead.

Arlington police officer Ravi Singh was charged with criminally negligent homicide for killing Maggie Brooks, 30, the daughter of an Arlington fire captain. On Monday, however, he was found not guilty — despite overwhelming evidence against him. Naturally, this news upset Brooks’ family.

“You see the video for yourself,” Brooks’ father, Troy Brooks said. “There’s nobody that owns a gun that would ever take that shot. Ever. But if you’re a police officer, you’re covered in absolute immunity. You can do whatever you want, and there are no repercussions for you.”

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Trans Pedophile Still Free After Attempting to Meet Child, Baby for Sexual Abuse

Berkeley Police allowed a suspected pedophile to walk away from a sting conducted by predator hunters despite being shown evidence that he had been expressing interest in molesting multiple children, including an infant.

On August 20, anti-pedophile vigilante group Predator Poachers uploaded footage of a sting they conducted in Berkeley, California to YouTube involving a trans-identified male who had been purportedly seeking to meet a 9-year-old for the purposes of sexually abusing her.

The girl was in fact a decoy established by the group as part of a months-long investigation into the man, who went by the name Sophia Westfall.

Speaking to Reduxx, predator hunter Alex Rosen says Westfall first contacted the decoy’s Instagram account in April, and soon after began initiating sexual conversations with the child.

Rosen is a full-time anti-pedophile vigilante, and he and his small team have traveled across the United States conducting stings on predators since 2019. Ample evidence is gathered prior to a confrontation, and police are then called.

Rosen told Reduxx that the sting uploaded on the 20th had actually been conducted on June 7 when he and his team were in California.

“Sophia was one of the reasons we were in California but we actually had multiple suspects in the state,” he explained, noting that Sophia had been picked up by two different decoys on two different platforms — Instagram and Telegram. Rosen says both decoy accounts had been populated using altered and AI-generated photos.

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More Than a Half-dozen Officers Stood and Watched for 8 Minutes as a Teen Hung Himself

Eight minutes — this is the amount of time multiple officers and a captain stood by and watched as 18-year-old Nicholas Feliciano wrapped a homemade noose around his neck and proceeded to hang himself in a jail cell. More than a half dozen officers and jail staff did nothing as he hung from his neck, flailed around before going completely limp.

Only after watching the 18-year-old go still and his lifeless body hang limp in the jail cell did anyone move to cut him down. On Nov. 27, 2019, the rope was cut and Feliciano’s limp body slammed to the floor.

According to court documents, Feliciano used a sweater to try to hang himself from a U-shaped piece of metal in the ceiling above the toilet. The ceiling fixture was supposed to have been removed after another detainee had used it to attempt suicide six days earlier. It was not.

For seven minutes and 51 seconds, seven correction officers, a captain and two paramedics walked by or watched on from a guard station as Feliciano hung himself, and according to the surveillance footage, not a single one of them acted.

For three years as Feliciano remained hospitalized with severe brain damage, requiring round-the-clock care, not a single one of the officers faced charges, and, in fact, they all continued to collect their paychecks from the New York City Department of Corrections.

Last week, however, that changed and Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney who has jurisdiction over Rikers Island, filed felony charges against four of the officers involved.

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Cops Claimed Handcuffed Woman Kicked Open Patrol Car Door, Fell Out and Died, But They Were Lying

When Hancock County Sheriff Terrell Primus visited Mary and Marvin Grier earlier this month, he told them that their daughter, Brianna Grier had been airlifted to Grady Hospital in Atlanta. Brianna, according to the sheriff, had kicked open the door on the patrol car and jumped out while it was rolling.

On July 14, her parents and sister had called 911 for help when Brianna had a schizophrenic episode. Marvin Grier told WMAZ that this wasn’t the first time Brianna has had a schizophrenic episode. He said usually EMS would come, transport her to Atrium Health Navicent Baldwin and take her to the psychiatric unit, but this time was different. Brianna got guns and badges instead of ambulances and hospital beds.

Instead of EMS, two deputies arrived at the home between 12 and 1 a.m. and put the 28-year-old in handcuffs and put her in the back of the deputy’s car.

She was supposed to be taken to the sheriff’s office but she would never make it there.

The sheriff told the family the next day that she had “kicked the door out and jumped out the car,” Marvin Grier told WMAZ.

When the Griers made it to the hospital to see Brianna, they were heartbroken to find her on life support.

“I just broke down and cried because it’s just ridiculous how she laying up there with tubes and pipes everywhere on her for no reason because it didn’t have to be that. It didn’t have to be that,” Mary Grier said.

Brianna would die four days later.

As the family began their grieving process, they also had lots of questions. Given that police patrol car doors cannot be opened from the inside, how was it that Brianna was somehow able to kick open the door and “fall” out of the car?

“I would do what any other parent would do, and that’s what we’re trying to do is find answers,” Marvin Grier said.

“If she got out the car, they had to let her out the car. That’s my interpretation, because in a police car, you can’t open the door from the inside, it had to be the outside,” Mary Grier said last week.

Fast-forward to this week, and Mary would be proven right. Brianna never kicked open the door — because the door was never closed.

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Cop Arrested for Showing up to 911 Call & Masturbating in Front of Family as Well as Multiple Sexual Assaults

Over the years, the Free Thought Project has reported on some utterly disturbing behavior by members of American law enforcement — up to and including public masturbation. Most of these incidents, however, involved cops who were off duty. However, a family in San Jose found out in April that cops responding to 911 calls can and will show up to a call and think they are on a porn set.

That officer was Matthew Dominguez — who began masturbating in front of the family — and has since been charged and arrested. After his case garnered national headlines, more victims came forward and detailed multiple allegations of sexual assaults.

One of the women says Dominguez turned off his body camera during a traffic stop before sexually assaulting her. Another woman detailed a sexual assault that took place at a barbeque. Notably, both of these women filed their complaints before Dominguez was caught masturbating in front of a family, and both of these women had their complaints dismissed.

Only after Dominguez was arrested and the women came forward again, did the department launch another investigation which led to additional sexual battery charges against the officer. On July 7, prosecutors added another misdemeanor sexual battery charge based on the woman’s account.

As TFTP reported at the time, on April 21, a family in San Jose called 911 to report that a mentally ill family member was being violent. Officer Dominguez, a 32-year-old who has been with the department for four years, showed up on the scene with two other officers.

Being the senior officer, Dominguez sent the two officers away to locate the allegedly violent family member. After he made himself alone with the women in the home, he decided it was time to act. As the two officers left, Dominguez started to masturbate in front of two daughters before the mother walked into the room.

When the mother walked in, seeing the two girls in shock, Dominguez took to exposing himself to her as well. Authorities said the victims were “shocked and scared” and ran away after realizing what was going on. Two male relatives were notified about Dominguez’s sick behavior as another witnessed him in the dining room masturbating as well.

Exactly what possesses a police officer to begin masturbating at a crime scene or even to think that it would be acceptable, is mind blowing. Yet here we are.

It would take nearly three weeks for Dominguez to be arrested and eventually he was booked and charged with indecent exposure. He has since been placed on administrative leave.

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