Seriously?

[MyDogHunts]

Rape by Instrumentation under Color Of Law ought to have some consequences.  Just sayin.

You are right.  And I remember the NYC cops with the broom sticks and all.  I would say there is no difference with regard to how far these officers and doctor went.  Cops in prison.  A real nightmare for them.

[nathanm]

Amazing how even other authority figures are willing to do whatever the hell another authority figure tells them what to do. Humans are so weird.

[MyDogHunts]

We, I speak to us guys, know that once you put a room of us together we can come up with some stupid "progress."  I'm talking about the time when on a Sunday afternoon at half-time the dishwasher breaks and we end up two weeks later in the middle of a kitchen remodel... what, you never did that.

Do women.  Do they jump in and go wild with those hormones... well, yea, i guess. 

anyway

[Vashta Nerada]

The woman here did everything wrong, but nothing she did justified the cowboys shooting into a vehicle full of children.

New Mexico police fired three shots into the back of a minivan that they knew had five kids inside after the mother resisted a traffic stop.
The disturbing dashcam video below shows what went down on October 28 near Taos, NM:

Cop Opens Fire at Minivan Full of Kids

Oriana Ferrell, the mom in the video, was pulled for driving at 71 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone. She argued with the officer and then, when he went back to his car to write her ticket, she attempted to drive off. The officer immediately pulled her over again.

The officer then started pulling her out of the car, upon which her 14-year-old son got out of the car to defend his mom. The cop got out his taser and the son retreated, and then a brief scuffle ensued. Then backup arrived and one officer broke a van window with his baton. Another cop fired three shots into the back of the minivan, which contained five children aged 6 to 18.

Ferrell then pulled away - perhaps understandably, given that police had just fired shots at her kids - and led police on a ten-minute car chase. She finally pulled into a hotel parking lot and was arrested. The district court later charged her with child endangerment, resisting arrest and reckless driving.

Former FBI assistant director John Miller was very critical of the officers. "In many departments, it's against policy to fire at a moving vehicle," Miller said. "Now, the officer later said he was trying to shoot the tires out. The problem is, when you're trying to shoot at a moving car, it's inherently ineffective. You almost never stop the car, and it's also dangerous. If you're firing on a car with five children, you're firing in the direction of two other officers who are in front of the car so, I think, for police, the biggest problem is going to be justifying the use of firearms in what is a traffic stop that's spinning out of control."

New Mexico police have recently come in for a lot of outrage after three different stories of unwarranted, forced rectal exams emerged.

[Vashta Nerada]

Miller continued: "There's a few problems with the woman's actions here. She's a mom in a minivan with five kids. This is like the picture of a soccer mom. She's getting a speeding ticket and not for going 100 miles an hour, it's 71 in a 55. I don't know anybody who is not doing 70 in a 55 today, but instead...she gets the summons. The cop wants her to pay it right there or go back to court and settle this now, and she drives off, so her first mistake is not dealing with it, and dealing with the officer right there, but driving away."

The mom deserves a fair amount of blame for a situation that she could have avoided, but for her actions, Miller said. However, the blame is not hers alone.
"Then you get to the police officers, Miller said. "These are trained professionals. When he is smashing out that window with the baton, remembering this is a speeding ticket here. Rather than lose control of this incident, a trained officer is supposed to be slowing this down, not speeding it up, looking to say, 'I've got five kids in the car, what's at stake here? A speeding ticket. How do I de-escalate this?' And one way to do that is call for backup and get better control of the situation, yet when they get there, it seems to have the opposite effect.

... Even when she flees, in this chase, she's not fleeing to get away from the police, she goes straight to a hotel. She's apparently looking for a populated area with people around because at this point she and her children are fearful of the officers.

The case against the woman is likely to go nowhere in court, Miller said. She's been released on $10,000 unsecured bond, and her son's been released. However the case against the state police on the civil side probably has some legs here.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57612743/n.m-police-fire-on-minivan-filled-with-kids-their-mom-how-it-happened/

[Vashta Nerada]

Police turn routine traffic stops into cavity searches


Timothy Young had just turned into a gas station in the small US town of Lorsburg, New Mexico, and was about to fill up his pickup truck when several police cars pulled up behind him.
The officers from the Hidalgo County Sheriff's Office accused him of failing to use his indicator, and asked him whether he was using or carrying drugs.

According to a complaint filed in the federal court in New Mexico, what happened next in the October 2012 incident was nothing short of a six-hour nightmare.

Young, 31, was forced to strip from the waist down in a public carpark and then submit his body to an X-ray and anal penetration at a nearby hospital, all under the supervision of peace officers searching for contraband.
The invasive search that Young alleges he was subjected to is not an isolated incident, his lawyers say, and is part of a larger pattern of cops, eager to make drug busts, crossing the line in order to try to uncover drugs and money at all costs.

"They're really pushing the envelope on these types of searches of people," said Joe Kennedy, an Albuquerque lawyer who is representing Young.
Complaints about police conducting public full-body cavity and strip searches, sometimes without warrants, have popped up in Texas, Wisconsin and Kansas in recent months, alarming civil rights attorneys and advocates.

In Young's case, the officers searched his truck with a drug dog, which "alerted" them that it had detected drugs in the driver's seat. The police couldn't find any drugs in the truck, so they ordered Young to drop his pants and underwear in the public parking lot to search him. Then, at 2am, they got a warrant for a body search at the local hospital, where Young was digitally penetrated and X-rayed, according to the complaint.

He was discharged at 4:30am, after cops failed to find contraband in his truck or hidden in his body. Later, Gila Medical Centre sent him a bill for $600.

Just a few months after Young's encounter, some of the same officers stopped another man, David Eckert, in a Wal-Mart parking lot for failing to yield at a stop sign. The officers searched his car with a drug dog that alerted them to the smell of drugs. But they couldn't find any contraband on Eckert or in his vehicle, so they obtained a warrant for a search of his body.

Over the course of 12 hours last January, Eckert was forced to receive an X-ray, CT scan, digital rectal exam, three enemas and a colonoscopy under anesthesia, according to his complaint filed in federal court this week. Eckert says the officers laughed at him at times while he was undergoing the procedures at Gila Regional Medical Centre, the same hospital where Young was taken.

Like Young, Eckert was also billed for the procedures — this time for $6,000.
"That's unbelievable to me," Kennedy, Eckert's lawyer, told Yahoo News. Young had no criminal record whatsoever, the lawyer added.

Young and Eckert are suing the officers and the county for violating their constitutional rights, including the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures under the Fourth Amendment. They argue in a complaint filed in a federal court that Young was "raped under the color of law" and that the officers' conduct "shocks the conscience."

The Hidalgo County Sherriff's Office declined to comment on the cases, referring Yahoo News to the county's attorney who did not return a request for comment.
"It's something we're quite concerned and often quite horrified at," said Ezekial Edwards of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's hard to imagine when it would ever be appropriate, absent some personal threat of safety to the officer, for a court to allow these kinds of intrusions like anal cavity searches."

Edwards linked the searches to the war on drugs and the nation's record-breaking high incarceration rate, which he says leads some police into a mentality of trying to lock people up even when it means bending the rules.

Policies of "stop and frisk" in large metro areas like New York City have gained in popularity in recent years, meaning police are searching and stopping more people than ever before. The opportunities for abuse, then, are higher.

"You see an increase not to just stops and frisks but the lengths to which law enforcement will go to uncover 'evidence' of drugs," Edwards said.

In the Eckert and Young cases, police did obtain a warrant to search their bodies, though Kennedy maintains the warrant would, at most, allow them to do a "squat and cough" type anal cavity search, not an X-ray, digital search or colonoscopy.

Laws on strip and body cavity searches vary state by state, but typically a judge must sign off on a warrant for a cavity search to take place. Medical professionals, not police, generally perform them, and they're usually confined to prison settings, legal experts say. Guards can request a warrant for a cavity search if they have probable cause to believe a prisoner is smuggling contraband into the jail, for example.

But these laws haven't stopped flagrant abuses.

Last July in Texas, Angel and Ashley Dobbs were stopped by a state trooper while on a road trip to Oklahoma, allegedly for littering. The cops then "thought they smelled marijuana" in the car, and subjected both women to a genital search on the side of the road. The trooper, who's since lost her job, did not even change the latex glove she was wearing in between searching the genitals of the women, the women allege. The Dobbs, an aunt and niece, settled the case for $185,000.

"It's embarrassing, it's humiliating," said Scott Palmer, the Dobbs' attorney. "I was proud of them, they didn't use pseudonyms, but now their names are forever known as victims of this very intimate, nasty search and it happened on video and it's all over the world."

The shame associated with the searches may prevent more victims from coming forward, Palmer said.

Six weeks earlier, two other Texas women say they were genitally probed by state troopers near Houston after they were pulled over for speeding and told there was "a marijuana smell" in their car. Texas' Department of Public Safety says troopers are prohibited from these types of searches and that there is no policy encouraging them.

Meanwhile, the city of Milwaukee is still defending itself against lawsuits from people who accuse eight officers of illegally searching their genitals and rectum to find drugs and other contraband, going back as far as 2009. At least four officers have lost their jobs in the case, and civil cases are pending. One of the victims was only 15 when he was illegally anally probed by an officer.

Tim Lynch, who runs the Project on Criminal Justice for the libertarian Cato Institute, said people who feel they are being searched illegally by officers should be clear that they are not consenting.
"When you're in the situation all you can do is make it absolutely crystal clear that you're not consenting to these types of invasive procedures," he said.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/19820549/police-turn-routine-traffic-stops-into-cavity-searches/

[patric]

Oh I really hope there is something else, doubtful it could justify the officer's actions, but at least give some kind of insight of why he's picking on that family.  That's just terrible!!  I'll have to remember to see what happens with this story.  Sad!

Here ya go:


PIEDMONT — A former Piedmont police officer fired after ticketing the mother of a 3-year-old child for allowing the boy to urinate in the front lawn of a home is suing the city.

The city of Piedmont is petitioning to have the lawsuit, filed last summer, heard in federal court, according to documents filed Monday.
Officer Kenneth Qualls issued the citation to Ashley Warden after he saw her son, Dillan, drop his pants in the front yard of the family home at 4505 Ryan Drive.

Qualls argues that he was given permission by a police lieutenant to issue the public urination citation on Nov. 4, 2012, according to a court petition. Qualls reportedly also called his direct supervisor before being directed up the chain of command for permission.
The Canadian County district attorney's office did not drop the charge, but told Qualls to amend it to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The city's police chief, Alex Oblein, was also informed of the citation the day after it was issued, but did not drop or dismiss it, court documents allege.

It was only after media reports about the incident surfaced that Qualls was terminated Nov. 16, 2012, without due process, the petition states.
The termination — which Qualls sought to reverse — was upheld by the Piedmont personnel board on July 1, 2013.

Qualls alleges his termination was without cause, was a violation of Oklahoma public policy and that his 14th Amendment rights were violated, according to the petition.
In media reports, Mayor Valerie Thomerson reportedly called Qualls "stupid," which he says tarnished his reputation, the petition states.

The city of Piedmont admits that the personnel board voted to fire Qualls, but denies the other allegations in the petition, according to court documents.
http://newsok.com/piedmont-officer-who-cited-3-year-old-for-public-urination-sues-city/article/3932726

[patric]

https://www.wrdw.com/content/news/A-deputy-cited-a-GA-mother-with-a-disorderly-conduct-charge-after-her-3-year-old-son-had-to-urinate-in-a-parking-lot-508068751.html