Tag: police accountability

‘Din’t get cracked’: Watch female police officer threaten to ticket ‘everyone’ because she didn’t have sex last night

A female police officer in the Houston area is now under investigation after posting a video on TikTok in which she threatened to give everyone a ticket because she did not have sex the previous night.

Harris County Constable Precinct 5 Deputy Jennifer Escalera was in uniform as she recorded herself writing on a notepad.

“Din’t get cracked last night so everyone is getting a ticket…” Escalera indicated in her now-deleted video.

Although she blurred portions of her uniform, the officer left her name tag visible.

“Our administration is aware and internal affairs has opened an investigation. We have no other comment at this time,” the constable’s office said.

The New York Post reported: “The female cop’s TikTok account features several posts showing her in uniform. She also posts about being a mom.

“One of the posts shows Escalera getting ready ‘to work as a female Police Officer’ as the text across the screen reads, ‘contemplating if I really need this job, knowing that I do.'”

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Veteran With PTSD Can Sue the Cops Who Arrested Him for Panhandling and Tased His Service Dog, Court Rules

A homeless veteran arrested for panhandling—and whose service dog was tased by law enforcement—can move forward with his lawsuit against police and the city, a federal court ruled this week.

Apart from the individual implications, the case also raises broader questions about the constitutionality of anti-panhandling ordinances, which have suffered defeats in various courts in recent years.

In October 2021, law enforcement in Gastonia, North Carolina, arrived at an intersection where Joshua Rohrer was standing on a median after a 911 caller phoned in to report Rohrer was “using [his] dog to make people feel sorry” for him. An officer requested backup from the Gastonia Police Department (GPD), and the scene quickly became somewhat of a circus, with several patrol cars and a slew of officers dispatched to address an alleged panhandler.

An officer demanded to see Rohrer’s identification, after which he furnished his Veteran ID card. Police said that did not suffice, promptly arresting him and ultimately booking him for solicitation and resisting arrest. (You can watch the bodycam footage here and decide for yourself if he resisted arrest.)

During that interaction, an officer tased Rohrer’s service dog, Sunshine, who ran off and was later hit by a car, killing her.

The government would ultimately drop the charges against Rohrer. But even after the ordeal, law enforcement has continued to subject him “to a relentless campaign of harassment” according to his complaint against the City of Gastonia and several officers with the GPD. It alleges violations of his First and Fourth Amendment rights, including for excessive force and the unreasonable seizure of his service animal.

Rohrer’s complaint also notes that the GPD has posted “hundreds of statements that belittle and disparage Mr. Rohrer and spread false and misleading information about the incident” on social media.

“You also know that two grand juries supported the charges and that Mr Rohrer and his private legal team could have challenged the charges in court but that’s not what they chose to do now was it?”the city posted on its official GPD page. “Instead they accepted the plea deal that was offered to him. Perhaps to avoid having an actual court date where evidence and testimony would have been presented. Who knows why they chose to accept the deal offered.” Rohrer did not, in fact, plead guilty to anything tied to the October arrest.

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Exonerated Missouri woman sues police for conspiracy and coverup that put her in prison for 43 years

Sandra Hemme’s federal lawsuit accuses St. Joseph Police of suppressing and destroying evidence that pointed to a fellow officer who was guilty of the 1980 murder. Before being freed last year, Hemme served the longest sentence of any wrongly convicted woman in American history.

Sandra Hemme, the Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison for a murder she did not commit, has sued the city of St. Joseph and eight police officers in a 10-count federal lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution, a coerced confession and conspiracy.

“There was never any objective evidence tying Plaintiff (Hemme) to the crime,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit also points the finger at a former police officer, Michael Holman, as the killer of librarian Patricia Jeschke in 1980.

“To protect Holman, the Defendants concealed evidence of his guilt and chose not to follow the evidence leading to Holman,” according to the lawsuit. Holman died in 2015.

Hemme served the longest sentence of any wrongly convicted woman in American history, her lawyers have said. She was finally exonerated and freed last year after a lengthy legal battle that saw the Missouri Attorney General fighting to overturn her innocence ruling.

A year ago, in July 2024, Livingston County Circuit Court Judge Ryan Horsman overturned Hemme’s conviction — writing that she was “the victim of a manifest injustice.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey battled all the way to the state Supreme Court to keep Hemme in prison. She won her final freedom after the Missouri Court of Appeals rejected all of Bailey’s arguments, and in March the Buchanan County prosecutor declined to refile charges.

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“Settlement tsunami”: Chicago spends more than double city budget on police misconduct settlements

The City of Chicago is searching for financial solutions amidst hundreds of pending police misconduct cases, spending more than double the $82 million budget.

Eight years ago, police burst down the door of the Mendez family home unannounced, pointing guns at Hester and Gilbert Mendez, and their sons Peter and Jack (who were 9 and 5 at the time) – only to find they’d raided the wrong apartment.

After years stuck in the legal pipeline, between COVID delays and multiple changes in the judge presiding over the case, Mendez et al. v. City of Chicago finally began on Monday, April 21, 2025 in Courtroom 1941 at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago. 

The Mendez family was seeking financial compensation for their rights being violated and the trauma their children endured. 

The city of Chicago has already spent more than $164 million in taxpayer money this year on police misconduct settlements and judgments – more than double its $82 million budget. With hundreds of cases pending, including from people alleging torture by notorious former officers, the Mendez case illustrates how these situations often play out: the city launches into a costly trial, putting families through trauma and stress, only to settle for a large sum at taxpayer expense. Officials say there’s a better way to do it – offering substantial settlements earlier – not the unfairly small settlements that the city often uses to avoid trial, as lawyers see it; or ideally avoiding police misconduct in the first place. 

During the Mendez family’s trial, a now 17-year-old Peter Mendez described on the stand how he was traumatized on the evening of November 7, 2017. “My life flashed before my eyes, my heart was pounding, and I thought maybe I could die.”

To this day, the event has left Jack, the youngest child, with the same recurring nightmare of police shooting his mother, cuffing and taking his father away to jail, and separating him and his brother as they get taken to different orphanages. 

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New Orleans Police Officer Who Shot a Puppy Will Face Trial

A Louisiana police officer who shot and killed a puppy in 2021 will now face trial, after a lengthy legal battle.

On April 10, 2021, two New Orleans Police Department officers were called to Derek Brown and Julia Barecki-Brown’s home after receiving a noise complaint. According to legal documents, as the pair approached the house, one officer, Derrick Burmaster, claimed he made “kissy noises” to attract any dogs. Believing there were no dogs nearby, the officers approached the Brown’s house. As they did so, a dog began barking, and Burmaster drew his firearm. While the other officer left the Browns’ yard after hearing the barking, Burmaster stayed, and the Brown’s two dogs then ran down the stairs of the home and approached the officers.

One of the dogs, a 16-week-old, 22-pound puppy named Apollo approached Burmaster while wagging his tail. Burmaster fired three shots at Apollo, striking the dog in his neck and chest. Hearing gunshots, the Browns came into the yard, and Derek “held Apollo as he died from the gunshot wound,” according to the couple’s lawsuit.

The couple filed a lawsuit against Burmaster and the City of New Orleans in 2022, alleging that Burmaster unconstitutionally ‘seized’ Apollo by shooting him. “It is clearly established that an officer cannot shoot a dog in the absence of an objectively legitimate and imminent threat to him or others,” the suit reads. “A twenty-two-pound Catahoula puppy, standing less than a foot and a half tall, does not present an objectively legitimate and imminent threat to police officers.”

A yearslong legal battle followed. Earlier this year, the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled against Burmaster’s attempt to appeal a lower court’s decision that the case could not be thrown out on qualified immunity grounds. 

“A reasonable jury could conclude that Burmaster did not reasonably believe that Bruno, a small puppy who was wagging his tail shortly before the shooting, posed a threat,” the decision reads. “A reasonable jury could further conclude that Burmaster did not reasonably believe he was in imminent danger, based on Bruno’s [sic] size, Burmaster’s ability to exit the yard, and the availability of non-lethal tools like the taser and police boots.” (The ruling appears to have confused Apollo’s name.)

Despite efforts to toss the Browns’ suit, the case is now set to go to trial. This is far from the first case of “puppycide,” where a police officer has shot a dog that posed no obvious threat to his saftey. Burmaster himself fatally shot another dog in 2012, according to The Associated Press. Earlier this month, another Louisiana police department announced that it was investigating two different incidents in which officers shot dogs. It’s not uncommon for puppycide cases to be particularly nonsensical. Last year, a Missouri man sued an officer who shot his 13-pound, deaf and blind Shih Tzu. In 2023, another Missouri family’s dog wandered away from their home during a storm. When a neighbor found the dog and called to police for help, the officer shot the dog and threw its body in a ditch, rather than simply returning it to its owners. 

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Trump Deletes Database Containing Over 5,000 Police Misconduct Incidents

In one of his first acts after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to delete a nationwide database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement.

Along with rescinding former President Joe Biden’s executive orders on policing, Trump scrapped the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers and agents across various agencies.

In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said Biden’s executive order creating the NLEAD database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’ President Trump rescinded the order creating this database on Day 1 because he is committed to giving our brave men and women of law enforcement the tools they need to stop crime.”

It is unclear what tool Trump is giving to law enforcement by deleting a nonpublic misconduct database—besides protection from future background checks.

Centralized databases of police misconduct are important because, traditionally, poor information sharing between departments and lax background checks have allowed problem officers to hop from one department to another, leaving a string of misconduct, rights violations, and expensive lawsuits.

Once upon a time, even Trump thought the database was a good idea. In 2020, the Trump White House issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “create a database to coordinate the sharing of information between and among Federal, State, local, tribal, and territorial
law enforcement agencies concerning instances of excessive use of force related to law enforcement matters, accounting for applicable privacy and due process rights.”

Biden’s NLEAD was actually less ambitious than Trump’s plan: It included only federal law enforcement, and access was limited to federal agencies. Still, federal law enforcement unions objected, complaining that the database included minor administrative infractions and didn’t give officers due process channels to dispute their inclusion.

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Audit finds dozens of police custody deaths in Maryland should have been ruled homicides

An audit of past rulings by a controversial medical examiner found that 36 cases of police custody deaths deemed accidents should have instead been classified as homicides. 

The comprehensive review of 87 determinations regarding deaths resulting from police use of force stretched back 16 years from 2003 to 2019. It highlights the often questionable conclusions the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) used to determine that police were not culpable.  

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, whose agency managed the audit of former Chief Medical Examiner Dr. David Fowler, said the audit was disturbing and that the reclassified cases warranted further scrutiny. 

“These findings are of great concern and demand further review,” Brown wrote in the preface of the report. 

The report is simply an audit. It does not formally reclassify any of the cases that have been reviewed. Normally, changing an autopsy determination requires a hearing in front of a judge.

The push to examine Fowler’s past rulings came after he testified at the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin was charged with murder after video surfaced of him sitting on George Floyd’s neck for roughly nine minutes. Floyd later died at a nearby hospital.  

The case sparked outrage and nationwide protests.  

Fowler testified that Floyd did not die from positional asphyxiation, the result of the downward pressure of Chauvin’s knee. Instead, he attributed carbon monoxide poisoning from a nearby tailpipe to be the primary cause. 

The testimony sent shockwaves through the medical community. An open letter penned by roughly 450 medical experts called for a review of Fowler’s rulings in light of his testimony. The pushback prompted the state to undertake a comprehensive audit, the findings of which were released in a 90-page report. 

But prior to Fowler’s testimony and the subsequent review of his rulings, family members of victims and activists had been calling attention to his determinations. TRNN also consulted an independent pathologist to review Fowler’s cases. 

Among them is the death of a 19-year-old Eastern Shore resident, Anton Black. 

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‘No trace of alcohol’: Police thought Amazon worker’s stroke was a DWI, then threw him in jail for 7 hours and caused him to go blind, lawsuit says

A Missouri man who was wrongly arrested for DWI while he was exhibiting symptoms of a stroke is suing the sheriff’s office for not getting him the medical treatment he needed.

In a complaint filed in federal court in April, Paul Espinosa, 54, claimed that while he was arriving at the parking lot of the Amazon Warehouse in Republic, Missouri, where he worked, he was pulled over by Greene County Sheriff’s Deputy Kyle Winchell. Winchell claimed that Espinosa’s car was “weaving,” and the deputy suspected he was driving while intoxicated. Espinosa agreed to a field sobriety test, including a Breathalyzer test, which yielded a reading of 0.000% — indicating there was “no trace of alcohol in his system,” the lawsuit states.

However, Espinosa showed signs of “swaying” during other parts of the test, and Winchell arrested Espinosa on suspicion of DWI. Espinosa was put in the back of Winchell’s vehicle and transported to the jail. Espinosa began “sweating profusely” during the transport, despite the car’s air conditioning running throughout the trip. Upon their arrival at the jail, Espinosa’s “motor skills were declining,” the lawsuit states.

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Former Smith County constable chief deputy gets probation after pleading guilty to stealing while serving 2021 eviction notice

A former Smith County constable chief deputy was sentenced to 18 months’ probation after pleading guilty Thursday morning in connection with stealing while serving an eviction notice alongside former Pct. 1 Constable Curtis Traylor-Harris.

LaQuenda Banks, who was a Smith County Pct. 1 Constable’s Office chief deputy, entered a guilty plea in the 241st District Court after she previously testified during Traylor-Harris’ trial in December 2022. The 18-month probation sentence was then handed down. 

Banks, Traylor-Harris and former Smith County Pct. 1 Sgt. Derrick Holman were arrested in November 2021 on official oppression and property theft by a public servant charges for accusations of stealing items from a Tyler home in late January 2021 while issuing an eviction.

Traylor-Harris was convicted on a theft by a public servant charge and sentenced to five years’ probation in December. He was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine. If he breaks that probation, he would go to a state jail facility for two years.

In August, Holman was found not guilty of the same theft charge during a trial. Banks also testified in Holman’s trial.

Banks’ attorney Brett Harrison said on Thursday she received probation for the official oppression charge, which is a misdemeanor, and the prosecution agreed to drop the felony theft by a public servant charge through the guilty plea. 

Harrison said Banks received no deals prior to or in exchange for her testimony in both Holman and Traylor-Harris’ trials. 

“She is obviously remorseful for her actions,” Harrison said.  

Arrest documents said Banks’ body camera footage, which was turned on accidentally, showed Traylor-Harris, Holman and Banks stealing from a home during an eviction. 

The stolen items included watches, ammunition, cash, Oakley sunglasses, Ray-Ban sunglasses, makeup and a safe containing antique coins, quarter collection, military medals, a diploma, a birth certificate and a social security card, the affidavit read.

During her testimony at Traylor-Harris’ trial, Banks said on the stand she felt “forced” to take the items and if she didn’t do it, she would’ve gotten fired. 

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Gloucester Police Officer Charged with Child Pornography Offense

A police officer with the Gloucester Police Department has been charged with receipt of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).  

Alexander Aiello, 34, of Gloucester, was charged with one count of receipt of child pornography. Aiello will appear in federal court in Boston at a later date.

According to the charging documents, Aiello is a patrol officer employed with the Gloucester Police Department. It is alleged that Aiello was identified as a user with a registered account for a dark website, which provided a platform for users to download, view, advertise and distribute CSAM. Searches of Aiello’s person and residence on April 28, 2025, resulted in the seizure of the defendant’s cell phone and laptop as well as a USB thumb drive, which was found in Aiello’s nightstand in his bedroom.

It is alleged that a preliminary examination of the devices revealed that a TOR Browser – an application that provides anonymous web access and access to dark web hidden services – was installed and actively running on Aiello’s laptop. It is further alleged that the application had evidence of downloaded files consistent with recent use. Additionally, the preliminary examination allegedly located encrypted folders on the USB drive and laptop computer.

“As a law enforcement officer, Mr. Aiello was entrusted with safeguarding the community – and that includes protecting children from exploitation and abuse. Instead, he allegedly participated in one of the most reprehensible forms of exploitation,” said United States Attorney Leah B. Foley. “This case underscores our unwavering commitment to combating child exploitation in all its forms. Whether the offender is a private citizen or a public official, our mission remains the same: to protect children and pursue justice for victims.”

“As a police officer, Alexander Aiello was sworn to protect and serve, but today, the FBI charged him for receiving images of children being sexually abused,” said James Crowley, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Division. “Those who seek out this despicable material are perpetuating the victimization of innocent children. That’s why the FBI Boston’s Child Exploitation – Human Trafficking Task Force diligently pursues these cases. Protecting kids from this physical and emotional trauma is our priority.”

The charge of receipt of child pornography provides for a sentence of at least five years and up to 20 years in prison, at least five years and up to a lifetime of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and statutes which govern the determination of a sentence in a criminal case.

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