Tag: police accountability

D.A.R.E. Officer Dies of Overdose While Raiding Evidence Locker and Gets a Parade the Next Day

In June of this year, a police officer with over two decades on the job was found dead in the Winnemucca Police Department’s evidence locker. He had a bag of fentanyl in his pocket, yet when his death was announced, it was reported that officer Matt Morgan died of “natural causes.” The very next day, dozens of police departments from around the area put together a procession parade two hours long in his honor as people stood along the route to pay their respects. But Morgan didn’t die of natural causes and he had no business being in the department’s evidence locker that day.

“A procession honored Winnemucca Police Department Detective and community hero Matt Morgan, 47, who passed away unexpectedly while at work on Thursday, June 25, 2020, of apparent natural causes,” the report read after Morgan passed away.

But his death was not natural. Weeks later, an investigation would reveal that Morgan overdosed on fentanyl and methamphetamine in that evidence locker. What’s more, Morgan was not supposed to be in the locker that day and the investigation revealed that the evidence (seized drugs) had been tampered with by this “hero cop.”

According to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, who is conducting the investigation, it is still ongoing.

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Cops Mistake Innocent Man for a Suspect, Publicly Execute Him

Stagger’s story was buried in the media and written off after police claimed that he shot at them. CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi initially said officers had returned fire after a suspect shot at them. However, it would later be revealed that cops made that up and Curtis never fired any gun.

It would then take months to get any transparency in the case. Although Curtis was murdered in May, the body camera video was not released publicly until many months later.

According to police, they initially believed Stagger was wanted in connection with the shooting death of 15-year-old Jaylin Ellzey. But he was not. Nevertheless, a heavily militarized police SWAT team descended on the neighborhood. Whether or not they had the right person was apparently of no consequence to the officers.

When police officers found Stagger in his vehicle, they quickly surrounded him and opened fire through the window, killing him. Stagger never even tried to run.

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Police killings more likely in agencies that get military gear, data shows

Hardware designed for war exerts subtle pressure on police culture, experts say.

Americans have seen it time and again in recent months on the nightly news: Protesters in the streets confronted by local police officers carrying assault rifles, some atop armored vehicles, looking more like soldiers than public servants.

Much of that equipment has trickled down to police departments from a controversial Defense Department initiative known as the 1033 program, a 30-year-old federal initiative that provides a way for the military to dispose of surplus equipment by sending it to local police.

The impact on policing has been huge. In Georgia alone, police departments and sheriff’s offices have received more than 2,700 military rifles, night vision goggles and laser gun sights, and literally hundreds of armored vehicles, including more than two dozen mine-resistant vehicles built to fight the war on terror abroad.

To get the military equipment, police departments pay only for the shipping costs. But that does not mean the program comes without other costs.

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High Ranking Lt. and 5 Cops Keep Jobs After Admitted Involvement in Teen Sex Trafficking Case

An abused little girl was only 12-years-old when she was forced into the sex trade, forever altering the course of her life. For years, this little girl was “exploited by pimps” until she finally broke away and made it to an Oakland police officer. For a brief moment, she thought she was safe — but, according to a lawsuit, she was wrong and the cops began trafficking her. And all of it stems from police being entirely unable to hold problem cops accountable—even when there is evidence of sexual misconduct and a paper trail of sexting.

This week, we find out that a high-ranking Richmond police official and five other officers who exchanged explicit messages with the teen were all given written reprimands — and kept their jobs!

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Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report

When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.

That’s the primary theme of a new report, “Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent,” released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.

This new report drills into all of the exonerations they’ve archived up until February 2019. That’s 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.

In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.

Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.

The most common type of misconduct involved concealing exculpatory evidence, which is evidence that suggests the defendant is not guilty. The National Registry of Exonerations found that evidence was deliberately concealed in 44 percent of the cases that ultimately resulted in exonerations. The 218-page report documents the many ways that police and prosecutors break the rules in order to get convictions, from fabricating evidence and manipulative conduct during interrogations to fraudulent forensics and flat-out lying in court.

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