Audit Slams RCMP on Mental Health, Public Safety Minister Says Findings "Disappointing"
"A third report that exposes the RCMP’s failure to ensure a safe and healthy workplace for employees led the public safety minister Tuesday to contradict Canada’s top Mountie on what ails the iconic police force.

It came after Federal Auditor General Michael Ferguson released an audit that found the RCMP failed to allocate enough money and staff to implement a mental health strategy it rolled out in May 2014.

'There’s a good strategy on paper, but the challenge is to actually make that work,' said Ferguson, whose audit directly ties mental health issues to operational effectiveness. 

'This audit is important because poor mental health has a direct impact on the well-being of members, their colleagues and their families. Left unmanaged and unsupported, mental health issues can lead to increased absenteeism, workplace conflict, high turnover, low productivity, and increased use of disability and health benefits.'

'Ultimately, members’ poor mental health affects the RCMP’s capacity to serve and protect Canadians.'”

View the Full Report 
 

Chicago Rarely Penalizes Officers for Complaints, Data Shows

"In 18 years with the Chicago Police Department, the nation’s second-largest, Jerome Finnigan had never been disciplined — although 68 citizen complaints had been lodged against him, including accusations that he used excessive force and regularly conducted illegal searches.

Then, in 2011, he admitted to robbing criminal suspects while serving in an elite police unit and ordering a hit on a fellow police officer he thought intended to turn him in. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. 'My bosses knew what I was doing out there, and it went on and on,' he said in court when he pleaded guilty. 'And this wasn’t the exception to the rule. This was the rule.'

Mr. Finnigan is one of thousands of Chicago police officers who have been the subject of citizen complaints over the years but have not been disciplined by the department, according to data released this month by the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization, and the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School. Such information is rarely made public and has come to light in Chicago only after a decade-long legal battle by the institute and the clinic."

Law Enforcement Response to Child Abuse
Portable Guide to Investigating Child Abuse 
Produced by the U.S. Dept. of Justice. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Policing

Ferguson gets Free Military Gear from the Pentagon - Like so Many Police forces 
"The images coming out of Ferguson, Mo., in the last few days have been harrowing, and one element in particular has shocked those watching the events unfold. American law enforcement decked out in military fatigues, patrolling the streets in armored vehicles that look like they were plucked out of Afghanistan or Iraq."
 

Related Articles: 

• To Terrify and Occupy: How Excessive Militarization of the Police is Turning Cops into Counterinsurgents
• A Former Marine Explains all the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson

Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?
"The killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was no anomaly: As we reported yesterday, Brown is one of at least four unarmed black men who died at the hands of police in the last month alone. There are many more cases from years past. As Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Missouri chapter put it in a statement of condolence to Brown's family, 'Unarmed African-American men are shot and killed by police at an alarming rate. This pattern must stop.'

But quantifying that pattern is difficult. Federal databases that track police use of force or arrest-related deaths paint only a partial picture. Police department data is scattered and fragmented. No agency appears to track the number of police shootings or killings of unarmed victims in a systematic, comprehensive way."

Why Body Cameras Alone Won't Solve Our Police Abuse Problem
"Tensions between protesters and police escalated since 18 year-old Michael Brown was gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri over a week ago. Police use of military-like force against peaceful protesters and journalists, coupled with a reluctance to release the name of the shooting officer or details of events that led to the shooting, have protesters and activists demanding for extensive changes to police protocol. Chief among those changes are mandating all police officers wear body cameras so there’s clear, objective footage of every police encounter with civilians."

5 Scathing Border Patrol Revelations From An Ousted Agency Chief
"In an unauthorized interview, former CBP internal affairs chief James F. Tomsheck gave what could be the most scathing public criticism of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency by a high-ranking official."

Considering a Theoretical Framework for Ethical Interaction in Public-Private Policing  
"This paper considers a theoretical framework to benchmark the interaction of the two sectors in formal and informal public-private partnerships in policing.  As social pressures increase on government to deliver more security to the community in the face of financial and resource constraints, the closer cooperation, collaboration, and possible integration of the public and private sectors in policing is increasing in level and scope...."

How Facebook and Twitter Control What You See About Ferguson
"Social media is controlled by algorithms – a mathematical formula that dictates what you see and when. In the past week, people have noticed something curious about the way these algorithms have filtered news about protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown."

After Police Killings, Georgia Teens Create Cop Accountability App
"Three teenagers from Decatur, Georgia have created an app designed to foster a culture of accountability and accessibility for citizens dealing with local law enforcement and to reduce instances of police brutality."

Privacy and Criminal Justice

 Police Want Right To See Medical Records Without Consent
Police want new and expanded rights to access medical records and other confidential data without an individual's consent, a senior police chief has told the Guardian.

Sir Peter Fahy, the Greater Manchester chief constable, said the extra access to sensitive data was needed to help police cope with growing numbers of vulnerable people.


Judge Orders Rape Accuser To Turn Over Facebook Account
A New Jersey judge has ordered a teen who accused a man of rape to turn over access to her Facebook account, providing another example of social media's growing use in courtrooms and the resulting privacy concerns.

Mercer County Superior Court Judge Robert Billmeier this week agreed to a request from David Stevens-Parker's defense attorney, and the judge said he will privately review two weeks of Facebook postings for any comments related to the alleged rape before deciding whether any can be used in court.

Police Officer: ‘Policing Mostly Became a Response to the 911 Call Machine’

For three years in the early 1970s, journalist Studs Terkel gathered stories from a variety of American workers. He then compiled them into Working, an oral-history collection that went on to become a classic. Four decades after its publication, Working is more relevant than ever. Terkel, who regularly contributed to In These Times, once wrote, “I know the good fight—the fight for democracy, for civil rights, for the rights of workers has a future, for these values will live on in the pages of In These Times.” In honor of that sentiment and of Working’s 40th anniversary, ITT writers have invited a broad range of American workers to describe what they do, in their own words. More "Working at 40" stories can be found here.
In Working, Terkel interviewed two Chicago police officers, Vincent Maher and Renault Robinson, both of whom were dissatisfied with their jobs. Maher, a white cop, complained, “We have lost complete contact with the people. They get the assumption that we’re gonna be called to the scene for one purpose—to become violent to make an arrest.” Meanwhile, Robinson, a black cop, was sharply critical of the Chicago Police Department’s emphasis on arresting its way out of crime. Robinson organized the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League “to improve relationships between the black community and the police” because "as policeman, we were the only organized group that could do something about it.”

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Fascism and Contemporary Canada.

A series of articles by Robin Mathews, professor, poet, and political activist.

Part One:  Locating The Present Conservative Government Led By Stephen Harper

Part Two: The Strangulation Of Democracy in Canada. The New Global Partnerships

Part Three.  Canada's First Nations and TEPCO 

Part Four. Police, Government, Corporations

Part Five. Capitalist Fascism or Democratic Socialism

Part Six. The Courts. Jessica Ernst And The Honourable Neil Wittmann, Chief Justice, Court Of Queen's Bench, Alberta 

Part Seven.  The Prime Minister's Office - A Criminal Organization?

 

Bouncers Beat Patrons, and Cops Look the Other Way

The night of the beating, the beach bar pulsed with drunken euphoria. It was well past midnight on that cool December evening last year, a moment for celebration for two Canadians who ambled inside Dirty Blondes. One of the men, Erik Kormos, a yacht captain, had just gotten engaged to marry, so he and his friend Ernesto Palij, a chef, barhopped through this throbbing row of bars along A1A near its intersection with Las Olas Boulevard. Now, nestled into chairs around the bar, they ordered what would be the first of many drinks.

One hour melted into the next. Then, around 4 a.m., the two friends heard screaming and stepped outside to investigate. There, in an alley, two women — short skirts, messy hair, bloodied — thrashed at each other with nails and knuckled fists.

"Yo, man, do your job!" the 42-year-old Palij remembers yelling at a nearby bouncer standing at the melee's edge. "They're going to kill each other! Do something!"

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Canada’s soaring police costs are unsustainable: Toews

Police services across the country must change the way they operate or risk drastic cuts, Canada’s public safety minister says.

Speaking at the start of a national summit on the economics of policing, Vic Toews said the current system is financially unsustainable and needs to be reformed.

“I’ll be blunt. Police services face two options: they can do nothing and eventually be forced to cut drastically, as we have seen in some countries,” Mr. Toews said. “Or they can be proactive, get ahead of the curve and have greater flexibility in designing and implementing both incremental and meaningful structural reforms.”

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Couldn't they just cut health care, and education budgets and save the police. Tom

They Can Do That?! 10 Outrageous Tactics Cops Get Away With

Thanks to the war on drugs, the war on terror and general public apathy about civil liberties, police can stomp all over your rights.

Talk to someone who has never dealt with the cops about police behaving badly, and he or she will inevitably say, “But they can't do that! Can they?” The question of what the cops can or can't do is natural enough for someone who never deals with cops, especially if their inexperience is due to class and/or race privilege. But a public defender would describe that question as naïve. In short, the cops can do almost anything they want, and often the most maddening tactics are actually completely legal. 

There are many reasons for this, but three historical developments stand out: the war on drugs provided the template for social control based on race; 9/11 gave federal and local officials the opportunity to ensnare Muslims (and activists) in the ever-increasing surveillance and incarceration state; and a lack of concern from the public at large means these tactics can be applied, often controversy-free, to anyone who resists them.

What follows are 10 of the innumerable tactics the police can use against a population often incapable of constraining their behavior. 

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Police vs. public scrutiny

Withholding information from the public about the use of force by officers only serves to undermine confidence in police, especially in Los Angeles.

Kennedy Garcia, 23, was one of a group of suspected graffiti vandals in the process of being arrested and handcuffed by police on Oct. 12 when he reportedly took off running. The police called for backup, and two officers in the South L.A. neighborhood spotted him trying to crawl under an SUV. They dragged him out by the ankles and, although he was reportedly lying on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back, saw something metallic that they mistook for a gun. Both opened fire, and Kennedy was critically wounded after being shot in the back. He was not armed.

This is now public information, no thanks to the Los Angeles Police Department. At the time, the LAPD put out a news release making the incident sound like a routine officer-involved shooting — no mention was made of the handcuffs, nor that Kennedy was lying prone. After The Times questioned police brass, they acknowledged the additional details and said they were withheld to avoid tainting witness testimony. That's plausible, but we can think of a few other reasons they might have wanted to keep the affair out of the headlines.

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This is an editorial from the LA Times.  Tom 

Guns In School: Plainfield Police Propose Storing Assault Rifles In High Schools To Protect Students

An Illinois community southwest of Chicago is astir after the local police chief proposed a new method to protect students: bring more guns to school.

Plainfield Police Chief John Konopek wants officers regularly assigned to district high schools to be allowed to keep an AR 15 semi-automatic rifle under lock and key in school offices so they are better prepared to handle school shootings, if the situation were to arise.

School officers will be the only ones able to access the weapons, NBC Chicago reports. Konopek notes that training exercises have shown that officers are "much better equipped to handle this type of incident" while using a long gun -- with greater range, accuracy and stopping power -- versus a handgun.

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Are Police in Schools Making Students Safer, or Putting Them at Greater Risk for Abuse?

Police intervention in our public schools is on the rise. Whether that's a good thing for students has yet to be determined.

In spring 2012, student organizer Malik Alaya began rallying students to respond to proposals for school closures in his Bronx district. While passing out flyers in a hallway, he was spotted by the school’s safety officer and sent to the dean’s office. Whatever happened inside that office led to the decision to summon a representative of the New York Police Department’s School Safety Division, and Alaya was ticketed for his actions . Less than two weeks later, he received another ticket for filming police officers on a subway platform while they conducted a stop and frisk. 

Read on....

Occupy Movements Spotlight Disappearing Rights

Early this morning, police raided the makeshift camp of Occupy Boston and arrested anywhere between fifty and 100 people for the crime of sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Officials claimed the reason behind the mass arrests is because the Rose Kennedy Greenway, the second home of Occupy Boston, sits across from Congress Street where expensive improvements in renovation have just been made.

Police asked the protesters to keep the movement isolated to Dewey Square, their original location, but the request proved impossible since the square couldn’t hold all the activists.

Police assume the protesters will mangle or graffiti these luxurious renovations across the way sometime in the future. No damages have occurred yet, but the clairvoyant folks in the Boston Police Department have a bad feeling about all of this.

The Rose Kennedy Greenway’s Executive Director Nancy Brennan, meanwhile, expressed her support for the activists. Brennan’s organization, which maintains public parks, also supports free speech, according to Brennan. She simply asked the protesters to take care of the park during their stay.

Read on...

Ottawa cops reviewing detention policies after release of disturbing videos

OTTAWA — A beleaguered Ottawa police force is reviewing its detention policies and defending the rank-and-file after videos were released showing officers striking two prisoners and cutting a woman’s clothes off.

Chief Vern White says the videos have shaken the public’s confidence in the force.

“I’m always concerned about public confidence,” White told a news conference on Thursday.

“The public, overall, I think have tremendous confidence in what we do. And I understand they’re shaken by what they’ve seen.”

White was the chief of police for the Durham Regional Police Service before taking up the position in Ottawa.

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Maybe Canada needs something like National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project. Tom

10 Ways to Outfox Cops That Are Abusing Their Powers to Trick You

What few people understand, but police know all too well, is that your constitutional rights only apply if you understand and assert them.

As a 33-year law enforcement veteran and former training commander with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department, I know how easy it is to intimidate citizens into answering incriminating questions or letting me search through their belongings. This reality might make things easier for police looking to make an easy arrest, but it doesn't always serve the interests of justice. That's why I believe all citizens should understand how to protect their constitutional rights and make smart decisions when dealing with officers of the law.

Unfortunately, this important information has remained largely unavailable to the public, despite growing concerns about police misconduct and the excesses of the war on drugs. For this reason, I agreed to serve as a technical consultant for the important new film, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. The 40-minute docudrama aims to educate the public about basic legal and practical survival strategies for handling even the scariest police encounters. It was produced by the civil liberties group Flex Your Rights and is narrated by former federal judge and acclaimed Baltimore trial lawyer William "Billy" Murphy, Jr.

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You can check out some video excerpts from this docudrama at the library's Facebook page. Remember this is a U.S. story. For Ontario see the Law Union of Ontario's Post G20 Action Guide. Tom

Peter McFarland Tased By Sheriff's Deputies In His Own Home (VIDEO)

Peter McFarland of Marin County, Calif. is suing the county sheriff's office for tasing him in his own home while his wife pleaded with them to stop.

The deputies arrived June 29 of last year after McFarland fell outside his home while he and his wife Pearl were returning from a charity fundraiser, and he said something to the effect that if he had a gun, he'd shoot himself in the head.

It was hyperbole, McFarland told the deputies, who arrived after paramedics had already helped him inside. A rare survivor of pancreatic cancer, he considers himself lucky to be alive.

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Never joke around when the police are around. Tom

G20 editorial: Brutal spectacle failed a city and its people

Police rush as protesters scatter after a second police car was set on fire during G20 Summit protests on June 26, 2010.

By John Cruickshank

The G20 security strategy has been spectacularly successful at cocooning the world’s leading politicians and staggeringly ineffective at protecting the property and peace of mind of Torontonians. And the one, inevitably, led to the other.

By bringing in thousands of heavily armed strangers and throwing up barricades everywhere to regular traffic, frightening off good and decent citizens, Canadian authorities created a ghost town in the heart of our city.

Perfect for the political leaders. Protesters were kept blocks away from where the deliberations were going on.

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Feel free to weigh in with any comments. What did you think of the G20 conference? The police behaviour? The protesters behaviour? The raid on UofT? etc. Tom

How far are we willing to let the police go?

by teacherken

You are walking down the street. You are stopped, ordered to spread, frisked by police, your identity checked, and questioned. There was no probably cause to stop you, this is a random check. You are found carrying no weapons or drugs, your identity does not bring up any hits on wants or warrants.

So other than the indignity - visited far more often on young Black and Hispanic men than anyone else - other than the demeaning nature of the encounter, it's over, right?

WRONG. All of your biographical information will now be stored indefinitely by the New York City police in a data base

"used primarily by department investigators during the course of a criminal investigation"

according to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

If you are not shocked by this, why not? Whether or not you are, you should read Bob Herbert's column today, Watching Certain People, which will be the basis of this posting.

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Cop Tases 10-Year-Old Girl

Arkansas mother suggested stun gun treatment for unruly daughter

NOVEMBER 18--An Arkansas cop tasered an unruly 10-year-old girl after her mother called police to report that the child was crying, screaming, and refusing to go to bed. The tased girl, Kiara Medlock, is about 65 pounds and 4' 6", according to her father. Anthony Medlock, a truck driver who does not live with the fifth grader and her mother, provided TSG with a recent photo of his daughter, which can be seen at right.

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