In the first story we have a tiny bit of truth that has emerged from the usual lies regarding the War on Drugs.  What is the purpose of this criminal justice system?  Take a look if you dare:

NYPD Detective Found Guilty Of Planting Evidence

Those Drugs They Came From The Police

Look at what the judge said on the case:

“I thought I was not naïve,” he said.  “But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.”

You see what he said is real slick right?  ‘I thought I was not naive’!!  Meaning, ‘I already know how NYPD narcotics departments get down, what with the drug planting and screwing lives up shit.’  It don’t even mess with the judge at all that it’s going down like this, he’s just shocked that it’s so ‘pervasive’ and ‘casual,’ I guess if these dudes were a little more uptight when they planted drugs the judge would be a little less shocked.

But damn, it don’t stop there!  Article #2 is about the racial views of “New York’s Finest,” and what happens when some racists get caught out (everybody acts like it’s just a few of them).  This has to do with a racist Facebook group of police officers and their friends hating on the West Indian Day Parade:

NYPD Officers Have Fun With Racist Facebook Group

“I say have the [West Indian Day] parade one more year and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out,” writes one commenter, Dan Rodney. The New York Times first broke the story and reached out to Rodney, who confirmed that he was a police officer and a user of Facebook but denied that he made that comment.

New York Police Department Investigating Racist Posts

In the postings, people participating in the September parade in Brooklyn were called “animals” and “savages, the New York Times reported.

9-year-old Brisenia Flores pleaded for her life but was murdered by Minutemen affiliates.

Gina Gonzalez says her 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, pleaded for her life. Opening arguments begin in the trial of Shawna Forde of the Minutemen movement, who is accused in the killing of the girl and her father.

more at:

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/25/nation/la-na-minutemen-murder-20110126

‘Cruel’ racist jailed in sex assault

T.J. Turcotte had seen a man struggling with a young woman near 106th Street and 38th Avenue, forcing her toward Charles Anderson Park. He ran to get his brother at a friend's house, then they raced back to search for the attacker. The twins searched and interrupted a violent sexual assault that ended only when the rapist, Ian Drako Bruce, saw the twins approach. The rapist tried to run, but the brothers chased him, struggled with him, and finally pinned him to the ground until police arrived.

LA judge frees thief who got 25 yrs on 3rd strike

From left, Stanford law school students Gabriel Martinez and Reiko Rogozen listen with Gregory Taylor as he wipes away tears during a hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court Monday, Aug. 16, 2010. A judge on Monday ordered the release of Taylor, a man serving a potential life sentence for stealing food from a Los Angeles church. (AP Photo/Anne Cusack, Pool)

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5heJ-iitiJR_RYwIjOjOIiybw7Q0QD9HL4OOO0

LOS ANGELES — After 13 years behind bars for trying to break in to a church kitchen to find something to eat, a man who became an example of the harsh sentences allowed by California’s three-strikes law has been ordered released from prison.

A Superior Court judge amended Gregory Taylor’s sentence to eight years already served and the 47-year-old, who was sentenced in 1997 to 25 years to life, will be a free man in a few days.

Tears streamed down Taylor’s face and Judge Peter Espinoza asked a bailiff to get him a tissue.

“I thought I was going to cry too,” said law student Reiko Rogozen, who started working on the case in January as part of Stanford Law School’s Three-Strikes Project, which filed a writ of habeas corpus seeking freedom for Taylor. “He was scared up until the last minute that it wasn’t actually going to happen.”

The district attorney did not oppose the group’s move.

Taylor quietly thanked the court and his lawyers for “giving me another chance … and my family for sticking by me.”

Taylor was arrested in July 1997 while trying to get into the kitchen of St. Joseph’s Church in downtown Los Angeles. He told officers that he was hungry.

The church’s pastor, the Rev. Alan McCoy, testified at the original sentencing that Taylor was often given food and allowed to sleep at the church. The priest described him as a peaceful man struggling with homelessness and crack addiction.

Taylor was convicted of third-strike burglary due to two robbery convictions in the 1980s, once for stealing a purse containing $10 and another time for trying to rob a man on the street. He didn’t use a weapon in either case, and no one was injured.

During an appeal, a dissenting state Supreme Court justice said Taylor was a 20th-century version of Jean Valjean, a character imprisoned for stealing bread in Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Miserables.”

Judge Espinoza said the church break-in was not a crime of violence “but drug addiction and homelessness.”

The three-strikes sentencing policies of the 1990s “produced inconsistent and disproportionate results,” he said.

Taylor was taken back into custody and will be released when his paperwork is completed in at least two days.

His mother and siblings applauded during the hearing and beamed in the hallway afterward. His sister, Angela Taylor, remembered the day her brother called with details of his sentence.

“I thought he was lying. Twenty-five to life? That’s crazy,” she said.

Taylor got his GED at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.

“Even in conversations over the phone, he sounds way more mature,” his sister said.

His 78-year-old mother, Lois Taylor, said her son was hungry for a home-cooked meal, so she’s planning a huge barbecue to celebrate.

He plans to live in Pomona with his younger brother who runs a food pantry where he’ll get a job.

Michael Taylor said he and his brothers are planning a West Coast cruise and if Gregory Taylor gets out before they depart Aug. 23, they’ll take him along.

When running for office in 2000, District Attorney Steve Cooley often used the case as an example of how unfair he believed the three-strikes law was. Cooley said if the third strike wasn’t serious and wasn’t violent, three strikes should not apply.

Cooley said Gregory Taylor’s release is “justice long overdue” because his crime was a minor offense.

But Cooley said the three-strikes law doesn’t need to be repealed as long as prosecutors apply it “proportionally,” taking into account the nature of the offense and the defendant’s previous criminal record.

This coverage follows a bunch of other articles we have posted on the New Orleans Police Department.  There is also a new CNN documentary about the NOPD’s conduct called “Shoot To Kill” and I have a link to the transcript here and the link to the video here.

Two New Orleans cops charged in 2005 beating death

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hR2VEqQYVZqM6wxHd8opyZHm7fBw

NEW ORLEANS — Two New Orleans police officers were indicted Thursday on federal charges in connection with the beating death of a civilian in their custody in July 2005, the Justice Department said.

The indictment charges officer Melvin Williams with violating the constitutional rights of Raymond Robair and alleges that the policeman kicked the man and beat him with a baton, resulting in his death, on July 30, 2005.

Williams and fellow office Matthew Dean Moore were also charged with obstructing justice in a federal probe of the case.

Williams faces a possible maximum sentence of life in prison. Moore faces a possible maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

According to the indictment unsealed in Louisiana federal court, the two policemen took Robair into custody on Dumaine Street in New Orleans on July 30. The man, who suffered fractured ribs and a ruptured spleen, was pronounced dead at Charity Hospital later that day.

The case comes two weeks after six New Orleans police officers were indicted in the shooting of unarmed civilians in the days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

In the incident known as the Danziger Bridge case, two civilians were shot dead and four others wounded in two separate shootings on September 4, 2005 — one week after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, causing massive flooding and displacing thousands of people.

The indictment Thursday follows guilty pleas from five former New Orleans Police Department officers who admitted to helping cover up the incident.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved

HERE IS THE LINK WITH THE ARTICLE ON PRIOR COMPLAINTS.

During this riot over poor conditions in a Kentucky penitentiary, one guard claimed to have personally identified over 100 inmates involved in the riot. Now this same guard has been caught smuggling drugs into the prison.

http://www.kentucky.com/2010/08/12/1389368/attorneys-say-prison-guard-isnt.html

New Orleans Police Struggle In Post-Katrina Era

Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brissette who was killed on the Danziger Bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, speaks to reporters on April 7 outside a federal court in New Orleans. Former New Orleans police officer Michael Hunter pleaded guilty that day in connection with a police cover-up of their shooting of unarmed civilians.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129090179

Five years ago this month, a powerful hurricane crashed into the Southern coast of the U.S., killing more than a thousand people. Katrina wiped out whole towns in Mississippi and left a major American city under water. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have recovered in surprising ways since 2005, but many scars remain.

One New Orleans institution that was already in deep trouble when the storm hit was the police department. The NOPD has long battled a bad reputation. But after Katrina, the department’s flaws unraveled: Officers deserted their posts, others got caught looting — even the police chief quit.

In the weeks following the storm, things went from bad to awful — and the city and its people continue to pay a heavy price.

With lawlessness engulfing the city and the cops’ leadership absent, individual acts of police heroism were overshadowed by allegations of brutality.

In a tape shot by an NBC News crew, police officers were filmed in a chaotic scene on the Danziger Bridge. Unarmed residents were shot. Two died of their wounds. Seven New Orleans officers would be accused in the shootings and a subsequent cover-up. In another case, five more officers were implicated in the death of a man whose burned body was found in an abandoned car near a police station. Both cases were never fully prosecuted by local officials.

Continued Mistrust

That perceived impunity and a persistent murder rate that remains more than eight times the national average have led to five years of increasing mistrust in New Orleans police.

You can see it on the streets as cops like Lt. Michael Brenckle work a minor burglary case.

“Did you all witness who stole this gentleman’s speaker?” Brenckle asks more than a dozen neighbors sitting on their porches.

“No, no, we just came from Bible school,” a kid replies.

Brenckle, a 20-year veteran of the force, grew up in this rough St. Roch neighborhood near the Mississippi River. He says people are afraid to be seen talking to the police, let alone coming forward as witnesses.

But times are changing.

Federal prosecutors have come to town and are looking into as many as eight unresolved police cases, including the Danziger Bridge shootings. Eighteen officers have been indicted.

And New Orleans’ new Mayor Mitch Landrieu has asked the federal officials to stay on and help clean up the department.

“The level of danger on the streets of New Orleans — the number of murders — is unnatural. We have to find an answer to it, and we’re going to work really hard to see if we can,” he says.

Landrieu also hired a new police chief — Ronal Serpas.

“We are going to make a difference, we are going to turn this police department around. We are going to make New Orleans safer,” Serpas says.

Serpas was an assistant chief in New Orleans before leaving to head the Washington state police and later the force in Nashville. He says his nine years away from New Orleans have given him the experience he needs to clean up the NOPD once and for all.

“We are going to support the officers who are professional in every way,” he says. “But I can’t be more crystal clear than this: If you have a different agenda as a member of this department of being professional and service-oriented, you might as well leave now, because I will go to bed every night thinking of ways to get rid of you.”

Misconduct, Murders

But many in New Orleans have heard this tough talk before.

In the mid-1990s, Len Davis was a cop who ran a cocaine ring out of the Lower Ninth Ward. When a resident filed a complaint with the police department, Davis called in a hit man — and it was caught on an FBI wiretap:

“Brown skin with light brown eyes … I’ve got the phone on and the radio … after it’s done go straight uptown and call me.”

Local civil rights lawyer Mary Howell says corruption on the force was unbelievable — you couldn’t make this stuff up.

“We had police officers involved in kidnappings, rape, murders, drugs, bank robberies. There was a guy who used to do, like, bank robberies on his lunch hour. It was just astonishing — at one point we had four police officers facing first-degree murder charges,” she says.

Back then, a reform mayor and police chief came in and pledged to work with federal officials. Changes were implemented; nearly 100 cops were fired. The murder rate dropped, community relations improved — but sadly the reforms didn’t stick.

By 2001, a different mayor and police chief took over and federal oversight began to wane. By 2005, when Katrina struck, the department had returned to its old ways.

And residents today say the misconduct and murders just keep coming.

In the back room of a community organization that protests police violence, relatives of family members who say they’ve been victims of the police were eager to tell NPR their stories.

Patricia Grimes talked about her son who was shot New Year’s Day in 2009 by nine plainclothes cops. She says the entire confrontation lasted minutes.

“I heard all the shooting — and it only took three minutes. That ain’t nothing but somebody ganging up on you. That’s hate, torture, murder,” she says.

Another mother told about police beating her son to death after a traffic stop. One man recalled how cops shot and killed his mentally ill brother in their home.

Theresa Elloie says her son was beaten by police inside the family-owned bar. There were 12 witnesses. The lead lieutenant in her son’s case has recently been indicted by federal prosecutors.

“If they would have handled my son case, not swept it underneath the rug and got those officers off the force, then these other people kids would be living,” she says.

Elloie’s family won a judgment against the NOPD, but can’t disclose the terms of the award.

Mounting Lawsuits

In addition to the significant human cost, the city is bearing a huge financial liability as the lawsuits mount.

Police Chief Serpas says he will get better training for his officers and new technology. He wants an early warning system to alert supervisors about potentially abusive cops — a standard in most big city departments.

And he says this time he’ll make sure that federal overseers stay longer, so reforms stick.

“This time, the difference is gonna be when we work collaboratively at the end of this process, there is going to be a document signed with the force of law so that if I won the lottery three years from now and I left, the next chief behind me couldn’t go back and change the stuff that we put in place,” Serpas says.

Serpas says all this will take time — especially if the culture of the NOPD is to be changed. At a minimum, he says, give him five years — right around Katrina’s 10-year anniversary.

Ex-Chicago Officer Guilty Of Lying About Torture

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128175844

A federal jury on Monday found a former Chicago police commander guilty of lying under oath about the abuse and torture of criminal suspects.

The jury deliberated over parts of three days before finding former Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Burge, who did not react as the verdict was read, can remain free on bond until his Nov. 5 sentencing, when he faces up to 45 years in prison. Attorney Flint Taylor, who represented some of the torture victims, hugged people around him.

Burge had long been suspected of abusing and torturing mostly African-American suspects, and allowing detectives under his command to do the same, during the 1970s and ’80s.

Suspects complained of being beaten, burned, shocked, having loaded guns stuck in their mouths and being suffocated with plastic bags held over their heads. Burge testified in his own defense at the four-week trial, denying he ever physically abused suspects or witnessed any other officers doing so.

The Chicago Police Department fired Burge in 1993 amid torture allegations, but neither he nor anyone else was ever criminally charged with torture.

An investigation by a special prosecutor in 2006 found evidence Burge and his underlings very likely tortured suspects, but the statute of limitations had run out. Federal authorities finally charged Burge two years ago with perjury and obstruction for lying about torture in a civil case.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said “a message needs to go out that that conduct is unacceptable” and asked others who feel they have evidence of torture to come forward.

“It’s a measure of justice; it’s not a perfect sense of justice,” Fitzgerald said of the verdict.

He also said “it’s sad that it took until 2010 for that to be proven in a court of law.”

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan released four condemned men from death row in 2003 after Ryan said Burge had extracted confessions from them using torture. The four later reached a $20 million settlement with the city.

The allegations of torture and coerced confessions eventually led to a still-standing moratorium on Illinois’ death penalty and the emptying of death row — moves credited with reigniting the global fight against capital punishment. But they also earned Chicago a reputation as a haven for rogue cops, a place where police could abuse suspects without notice or punishment.

Louisiana: Another Former Officer Is Charged in Cover-Up After Killings

Ronald Madison, 40, seen in this undated family photo, was killed by police on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans East Sept. 4, 2005. He was unarmed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22brfs-ANOTHERFORME_BRF.html

Another former police officer has been charged in a cover-up in which two unarmed people were shot to death and four wounded on a New Orleans bridge in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Ignatius Hills, 33, was charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice and misprision of felony. Four other former New Orleans police officers have pleaded guilty to charges related to the cover-up.

7-year-old girl, Aiyana Jones, Killed in Detroit Police Raid

"Everybody loved her," her father, Charles Jones, said. "And she loved everybody."

"I (saw) the light go out of her eyes," said Mertilla Jones, 47, grandmother of Aiyana. "They killed my grandbaby."

Family: 7-year-old shot by police was asleep

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g_pIuAhdzGl-lCCGzVbN5VxEYHrwD9FOEREO0

DETROIT — Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was asleep on the living room sofa in her family’s apartment when Detroit police searching for a homicide suspect burst in and an officer’s gun went off, fatally striking the girl in the neck, family members say.

Her father, 25-year-old Charles Jones, told The Detroit News he had just gone to bed early Sunday after covering his daughter with her favorite Disney princess blanket when he heard a flash grenade followed by a gunshot. When he rushed into the living room, he said, police forced him to lie on the ground, with his face in his daughter’s blood.

“I’ll never be the same. That’s my only daughter,” Jones told WXYZ-TV.

Assistant Chief Ralph Godbee said officers set off the flash grenade as they entered the apartment with their guns drawn about 12:40 a.m. Sunday with a warrant to look for a suspect in the Friday slaying of a 17-year-old boy. The lead officer’s gun went off after he encountered a 46-year-old woman inside the front room of the house and “some level of physical contact” ensued. Police do not believe the gun was fired intentionally, he said.

“This is any parent’s worst nightmare. It also is any police officer’s worst nightmare,” Godbee said.

Family members identified the woman as the child’s grandmother and Charles Jones’ mother, Mertilla Jones, who has said she was not involved in a struggle with the officer. Police later said the officer may have just collided with the woman.

Godbee said the shooting was being investigated and all information was preliminary. The officer was put on paid administrative leave, he said.

“This is a tragedy of unspeakable magnitude to Aiyana’s parents, family and all those who loved her,” Godbee said. “It is a tragedy we also feel very deeply throughout the ranks of the Detroit Police Department.”

Charles Jones said he had to wait for hours to find out what had happened to his daughter.

“I saw them (police) running with my daughter out of the house. They had my mother on the floor, and they just kept me there for like two hours,” Jones, 25, told The Detroit News. “I knew it was bad, and they probably had my baby at the hospital, because someone asked me if she had any allergies.

“Her blood was everywhere and I was trying to stay calm, but nobody would talk to me. None of them even tried to console me.”

The officers had a search warrant and were looking for a 34-year-old man suspected in the shooting death of 17-year-old Jarean Blake. Officers arrested the suspect during the search, Godbee said.

Blake, a student at Southeastern High School, was gunned down Friday by a liquor store in front of his girlfriend. Blake stumbled across the street, collapsed and died, police said.

Godbee would not comment on newspaper reports that neighbors told police there were children in the house and showed them toys in the front yard. The girl’s father said three other children besides Aiyana were in the house when the raid happened.

Charles Jones said he was trying not to be angry but wanted the story to be told. He said Aiyana was a lively child who loved to sing and had recently developed an interest in Hannah Montana and the Justin Bieber song “Baby.”

“She was just figuring out what she liked, what she wanted to do with her life,” her father said. “I want this story to be heard. This was a wrongful death.”