Tag: police brutality

‘Can you take the dogs?’ Apache County deputy shoots 7 dogs that were abandoned and the county had no place for them

The deputy knew it was going to be bad.

“This is going to suck,” the bodycam records him saying.

He had corralled seven dogs that had been abandoned into a fenced-off area on their owners property.

And then he shot them, loaded their bodies into a truck and left them near a set of railroad tracks.

The incident happened in September 2023 in Adamana, an unincorporated community in Apache County about 26 miles northeast of Holbrook. The county doesn’t have animal control services and residents often complain about a problem with wild and stray dogs; one candidate for sheriff even has campaigned on a platform of dealing with the county’s abandoned dog problem.

The absence of animal control services in Apache County means that when there are dog issues, they’re often referred to a sheriff’s department whose policy is to try and place them with adoptive agencies. And sometimes, they can’t.

According to the deputy’s report, the couple that owned the dogs was going through a divorce and left the property with no plans of returning. During one visit, the deputy counted 10 dogs on the property. They had no food or water.

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Judges Investigate ‘Dreadful’ MDC Brooklyn Prison Abuse Where Inmates Die Begging For Help As J6 Political Hostage Pleads For Emergency Surgery: ‘They Sent Me To Here to Set Me Up’

J6 political prisoner Ryan Samsel is pleading for assistance from prison guards, his attorney, and the American public to get to an emergency room immediately after strange lumps surfaced on the back of his neck while the blood clots in his leg and foot that he developed months ago remain dangerously untreated.

The new lumps may be malignant tumors or blood clots, but getting to a doctor or the life-saving surgery he was prescribed over three years ago, before his arrest for protesting at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is an ongoing and uphill battle.

If Samsel suffers a medical emergency, it could take hours or days before anyone even notices while detained in perpetual lockdown in MDC Brooklyn, the jail system where Jeffrey Epstein allegedly killed himself, and inmates are known to die while begging for help from lazy, abusive prison staff.

And he suspects the notorious medical negligence within the understaffed correctional facility is exactly why the prosecutors and US District Judge Jia Cobb transferred him to the dangerous prison, “to set him up” to die or endure assaults while living on blood thinners.

“I’m on the eighth floor in a high-rise building in the back corner cell and literally in a corner and there is no call button. If I get sick, I might not see a CO for a full day. It’s dangerous here. It’s literally dangerous,” Samsel told The Gateway Pundit in an exclusive interview Wednesday.“ This place is as harsh as where Jeffrey Epstein died.

“They should not put this many inmates in the prison because they are understaffed, and we are constantly locked down. Judge Cobb knew how bad the conditions were in this jail a year and a half ago when she first sent me here.”

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Terrible: Police Officer Shoots Small Deaf, Blind Dog At Point-Blank Range

Bodycam video captured the moment a police officer in Sturgeon, Missouri, shot and killed a small blind and deaf dog for no apparent reason last week.

Responding to a call about a loose animal, the officer can be seen lazily trying to place a lasso around the canine’s neck before choosing to shoot it in the head instead of continuing to make attempts at leashing the animal.

Later in the video, the dog’s owner approaches the officer and confronts him over the unnecessary shooting.

When the sobbing owner tries getting answers, the cop is defensive and offers half-assed apologies.

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Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession

Within hours after Thomas Perez Jr. called police to report his father missing, he found himself in a tiny interrogation room confronted by Fontana detectives determined to extract a confession that he killed his dad.

Perez had told police that his father, 71-year-old Thomas Perez Sr., went out for a walk with the family dog at about 10 p.m. on Aug. 7, 2018. The dog returned within minutes without Perez’s father. Investigators didn’t believe his story, and over the next 17 hours they grilled him to try to get to the “truth.”

According to court records, detectives told Perez that his father was dead, that they had recovered his body and it now “wore a toe tag at the morgue.” They said they had evidence that Perez killed his father and that he should just admit it, records show.

Perez insisted he didn’t remember killing anyone, but detectives allegedly told him that the human mind often tries to suppress troubling memories.

At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

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A Brutal Suppression of Speech

Denial of civil liberties, accompanied by punishment for anybody who exposes those violations, has become commonplace in contemporary America.

Yet, nothing that the nation has experienced — and that the more discerning protest — prepared us for the grotesque spectacle on display in the brutal suppression of free speech on university campuses. 

What we witness is the iron fist of autocracy employed to intimidate, to hurt, to deter those who would question — however peaceably — the right of the powers-that-be to impose their confected version of the truth on the public. Moreover, it is grounded on an arbitrary assumption of power having no basis in law or customary practice.

Two singular features of this situation focus our attention. First, there is the stunning near unanimity of agreement by all segments of society’s elites on the rightness of the ruling narrative — and on the actions they take to enforce it. 

That is to say:

1) casting the issue as the dangerous radicalization of students by nefarious forces;

2) smearing demonstrators as “anti-Semites” — despite the large numbers of Jewish participants;

3) blanking out any reference to the cause and motivations of the protest: Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians; and

4) the need to crack down hard on these seditious students — physically by rioting police, and administratively by summary expulsions and suspensions without a semblance of due process.

These assertions emanate from the mouths of elected officials, police commissioners, media personalities, pundits and — most distressing — university presidents as well as boards of regents and trustees. 

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Mayor defends NYPD response after officers seen punching pro-Palestinian protesters

New York City Mayor Eric Adams defended the police department’s response to a pro-Palestinian street demonstration in Brooklyn over the weekend, calling video of officers repeatedly punching men lying prone on the ground an “isolated incident.”

“Look at that entire incident,” Adams said on the “Mornings on 1” program on the local cable news channel NY1. He complained that protesters who marched through Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section on Saturday had blocked traffic, spit at officers and, in once instance, climbed on top of a moving city bus. “I take my hat off to the Police Department, how they handled an unruly group of people.”

“People want to take that one isolated incident that we’re investigating. They need to look at the totality of what happened in that bedroom community,” Adams added.

Footage shot by bystanders and independent journalists shows police officers intercepting a march in the street, shoving participants toward the sidewalk, and then grabbing some people in the crowd and dragging them down to the asphalt. Officers can be seen repeatedly punching at least three protesters, in separate incidents, as they lay pinned on the ground.

A video shot by videographer Peter Hambrecht and posted on X shows an officer in a white shirt punching a protester while holding his throat. Hambrecht said the arrests took place after police told the crowd to disperse.

“They were aware they might get arrested, but many times people use that to justify the beating which is obviously ridiculous,” Hambrecht told The Associated Press in a text message.

Independent journalist Katie Smith separately recorded video of an officer unleashing a volley of punches on a man pinned to the ground, hitting him at least five times with a closed fist.

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Investigation Finds NYPD Disciplinary Records Often Go Missing

In the summer of 2021, New York Police Department officer Willie Thompson had sex at least twice with a witness to a Harlem carjacking that he was investigating. When a prosecutor questioned Thompson about his relationship with the witness, Thompson first lied, denying the relationship, before recanting and confessing the next day, according to an internal discipline report. About a week later, the woman, sounding upset, called the prosecutor and said Thompson had cornered her at a bodega, blaming her for getting him in trouble and threatening that officers from the precinct would be coming to her home, the document shows.

Thompson, who declined to comment, was found guilty by the NYPD on two misconduct charges and was placed on probation.

But if you looked up his disciplinary history on the department’s public database of uniformed officers, you would be unlikely to learn that.

ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.

ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”

Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.

“It is really disconcerting to see that there are records that are there one day that are not the next,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project.

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36 Years Ago Today, Police Fire Bombed a Neighborhood in Philly, Killing Women & Children

Since the beginning of time, there has been a constant struggle between people who want to be free and those who seek to control them. It is an unending war that that rages just beneath the surface of “civilized” society, waiting to reach a boiling point where violence can erupt on the streets between police and citizens—or the oppressor and the oppressed.

Since our history is passed down by those who seek to control us, this struggle is framed in a way where the oppressors are always the innocent victims, and the oppressed the senseless terrorists when in reality, the opposite is usually true.

Nowhere is this situation more obvious than in the media coverage and cultural myths surrounding the American Civil Rights movement. Police would regularly raid the offices and homes of civil rights leaders, shooting first and asking questions later. In fact, many civil rights leaders did not make it through the 60s and 70s alive, and most of the original Black Panthers were either killed by police or imprisoned for life. Yet this aspect of the situation was entirely absent from the media reports of the day and is even rarely discussed in modern times.

One of the worst acts of police terrorism against the Civil Rights movement occurred on May 13, 1985, when the Philadelphia Police Department bombed the homes of a black liberation group called MOVE, killing 11 people, five of whom were children.

MOVE was a Philadelphia-based organization formed by Civil Rights leader John Africa in 1972, with the goal of creating a radical change in society by creating communities that lived according to their own rules and values, instead of under the authority of the federal government. MOVE crowdfunded the purchase of multiple adjacent homes in the city to build their headquarters, where members of the group lived communally and planned protests. Unfortunately, it was not long before they caught the attention of local police, who were threatened by their philosophy and their presence in the community.

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An Atlanta Cop Killed This Man For Refusing To Sign a Ticket

Johnny Hollman called 911 after he was in a minor traffic accident. But instead of helping, the responding officer beat and tased Hollman after he was hesitant to sign a ticket, resulting in the 62-year-old’s death. 

Hollman’s family sued, and they’ve now been awarded a $3.8 million settlement.

“While nothing can undo what has been done,” Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens said in a statement this week, “my priority was to get this family as close to full closure from this unfortunate tragedy as soon as possible.”

During the evening of August 10th, 2023, Hollman was driving home when he was involved in a low-speed collision with another vehicle. According to Hollman’s family’s lawsuit, both Hollman and the other driver called 911 to report the accident. While no one was injured, both drivers disputed who was at fault for the accident. 

After more than an hour, Atlanta Police Department Officer Kiran Kimbrough arrived on the scene. Soon after, he decided that Hollman was at fault and wrote him a citation. 

However, Hollman was hesitant to sign the citation. “Deacon Hollman did not explicitly refuse to sign the citation,” the suit states. (Hollman was a Deacon at his local church). “But in each instance when directed to do so, responded that the collision was not his fault.”

Eventually, Kimbrough threatened to send Hollman to jail unless he signed the ticket, and Hollman called one of his daughters.

According to the suit, Kimbrough then began walking towards Hollman. Almost simultaneously, Kimbrough reached to grab one of Hollman’s arms, and Hollman said “I’ll sign the ticket.”

Hollman said several more times that he would sign the ticket. However, “ignoring Deacon Hollman’s concession to his request that he sign the ticket, Defendant Kimbrough performed a leg sweep maneuver on Deacon Hollman, taking Deacon Hollman to the ground,” the suit states. “While doing so, Defendant Kimbrough commented to Deacon Hollman: ‘You acting crazy!'”

Over the next several minutes, Kimbrough struck the back of Hollman’s head at least twice with his fist, tased him twice, and allowed another citizen to “assist” him by sitting on Hollman’s head and neck, while ignoring Hollman’s frequent statements that he couldn’t breathe.

Eventually, Hollman was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. An autopsy later concluded that the cause of Hollman’s death was homicide.

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Former Ligonier Valley police chief facing multiple felonies for alleged sexual assault

Officials with DreamLife Recovery reached out to Channel 11 on Saturday and confirmed that Berger had been fired.

A former Westmoreland County police chief is now on the other side of the law.

Former Ligonier Valley Chief John Berger is behind bars at the Westmoreland County Jail after being arrested Friday on sexual assault charges.

This comes after he was fired from Ligonier Valley Police last May following a raid by federal agents.

“It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it,” said Daniel Beranek. He was one of several people Channel 11 spoke to in Donegal, shocked to learn of Berger’s arrest Friday for allegedly sexually assaulting a patient at a Donegal rehab center.

“Very, very horrible,” said Beranek.

According to State Police, the sexual assault happened at DreamLife Recovery in Donegal.

Berger began working there in January as a Behavioral Health Technician following a stint at the drug and alcohol rehab center as a patient and his firing as the Ligonier Valley Police Chief last May.

He was fired after federal agents raided the department and seized his phone and police cruiser.

“There’s no excuse for it honestly but definitely being held accountable and being a police officer to held to a higher standard and falling like that is pretty atrocious,” said Zachary Buchholz, who also spoke to Channel 11 in Donegal.

Investigators say Berger first met the victim last year when they were both patients at DreamLife.

She told police, “Berger would make unwanted sexual advances towards her almost weekly if not daily.”

The police report states those advances resumed starting in March when the victim returned to DreamLife.

“Unbelievable honestly. I wouldn’t say that he should be working there anymore or around in that environment and definitely should probably seek a little bit of help for that as well,” said Buchholz.

On Monday around 11:00 pm, police paperwork states Berger went into the victim’s room while she was sleeping, woke her up by whispering her name and “forcefully started to kiss her.”

State Police say he then groped her and forced her to give him oral sex.

“I would never think a law enforcement officer would be doing that,” Beranek said.

In an interview with State Police Friday, investigators say Berger owned up to the charges.

Berger is now being held at the Westmoreland County Jail unable to post $100,000 bail.

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