Police Coverups, Conspiracies, and Cost to Taxpayers

Pasco County, FL
Future crimes and targeted harassment (Lawsuit)

The Pasco County Sheriff's Dept kept a list of people that they targeted with harassment. Sometimes they would show up to family's doorstep 5 times a day. Getting on that list doesn't necessarily mean that you were a criminal. People were added to the list if they were witnesses or even victims. Police continuously harassed these people, stacking ordinance violations on them in what appears to be an effort to drive them out of the area. The school system was sharing grades of students' with the police. The program has been shut down, but lawsuit(s) have been filed.

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From 2021

The Sheriff’s Office of Pasco County, Florida, harasses people in their own homes using a method they call “predictive policing.” The program has unfolded like a dystopian nightmare for the Pasco County residents it has ensnared, who have been subjected to near-constant police surveillance and harassment. The Sheriff’s Office claims the program’s goal is to predict and prevent crime before it happens by targeting people they suspect may commit crimes in the future, dubbing the approach “intelligence-led policing.” This euphemism may make it seem like there’s thoughtfulness to the approach, but there’s nothing fair or smart about it.

Using a crude computer algorithm, the Sheriff’s Office creates a list of people they think are likely to commit crimes in the future. It places people on the list based on their criminal record, but also based on things that the person may not have been able to control, such as whether they have been suspected of a crime, whether they witnessed a crime or even whether they were a victim of a crime. The Sheriff’s Office calls the people on the list “prolific offenders.”

Then, deputies are sent out to monitor, intimidate and harass people on the list. The deputies are instructed to gather as much information as possible about their targets, and routinely show up unannounced at people’s houses to interrogate them about their friends, their families and their comings and goings. Dalanea Taylor, who was placed on the prolific offender list because she had been incarcerated as a teenager, was harassed by Pasco deputies for years after she was released and had turned her life around.

Code enforcement is a favorite tactic for ensuring compliance during the deputies’ visits. To coerce people into letting the deputies into their home or answering their questions—or sometimes purely to intimidate them—the deputies slap their victims with citations for innocuous offenses like missing house numbers on the mailbox, chickens in the back yard or unmowed grass on the lawn. By design, family members of prolific offenders are ensnared by the program too. Robert Jones had a son on the prolific offender list, and Pasco deputies showed up at his door multiple times a week asking about his son. When the deputies decided that he wasn’t cooperating fully, they wrote him multiple citations for tall grass and other similar property code violations. They even arrested him several times on bogus charges.

Pasco Predictive Policing - Institute for Justice

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Tampa Bay Times coverage of the program with updates and several links.

• The Pasco Sheriff’s Office and the school board will no longer allow school resource officers to have access to student data, including grades and discipline histories. [May 4, 2021] The change came after the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into whether the school district’s data sharing practices broke federal law. [April 19, 2021]

• Four people targeted by the Pasco Sheriff’s Office are suing the agency with the support of a national public interest law firm. They allege that their constitutional rights were violated and call for an end to the sheriff’s program. [March 11, 2021]

• Civil liberties groups quickly denounced the Sheriff’s Office’s intelligence programs and promised to take action. [Dec. 5, 2020] Thirty national and state organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, CAIR Florida and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, later formed a coalition to oppose the Sheriff’s Office’s use of student data. [April 26, 2021]

• A national philanthropic foundation cut off funding to Pasco schools because of concerns with its data-sharing practices with the Sheriff’s Office. [Feb. 26, 2021]

Targeted, a Tampa Bay Times investigation | Investigations | Tampa Bay Times

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The Times found that the sheriff’s office used a computer algorithm to build the list of people, who were then subject to monitoring and harassment by deputies. Some targets were minors. Experts compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and authoritarian surveillance.

The federal government opened two investigations into the sheriff’s office after the Times reported on the practice. In 2021, four Pasco County residents who’d been targeted in the program filed a federal lawsuit against the sheriff’s office, alleging violations of their constitutional rights.

In a six-year period, the document states, the sheriff’s office conducted more than 13,000 “prolific offender checks” without warrants or evidence of criminal activity. Body camera footage showed deputies interrogating the plaintiffs and snooping around their properties, and subjecting them to citations and arrests, the document states.

The Times also investigated another sheriff’s office program that used data from the local school district and the state Department of Children and Families to assemble a list of children deemed likely to become criminals. Factors that contributed to inclusion on the list included student grades and abuse histories.

Pasco sheriff discontinues controversial intelligence program, court documents say

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Video from Institue for Justice



Video from Vice (Gator gear sighting)

 

Also Pasco

A federal civil lawsuit claims many leaders in the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office are “intoxicated with power.” The lawsuit was first filed in April by just three plaintiffs – one current and two former employees. Now, 20 former employees of the Pasco Sheriff’s Office have joined the lawsuit.

In the 427-page suit, they state that Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco and department leaders abused their power, harassed and retaliated against employees. The plaintiffs say they were either fired or pushed out for speaking out against the alleged abuses and wrongdoing.

“They ruined my name, so I couldn’t go get a job someplace else,” said former Pasco Corporal Cliff Baltzer. “It doesn’t surprise me that they would do it to other people.” Baltzer spent 18 years at the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. For many years, he worked in the K9 unit.

The lawsuit also names a former FBI agent who joined the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. According to that employee, a Pasco resident posted an old mugshot of a deputy. Supervisors allegedly instructed him to “look up and find any information” on the woman and her family in order to target them. When he refused, he said he was fired.


https://www.wfla.com/news/lawsuit-accuses-pasco-sheriffs-office-of-being-intoxicated-with-power/

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Many of the allegations accuse top ranking officials of filing or signing off on false internal affairs complaints against employees, making it difficult for them to be hired elsewhere.

In one instance, the suits say a plaintiff reported a case of gender discrimination to his superiors, essentially "blowing the whistle on women being discriminated against."

After reporting it, the suits says false complaints were filed against him in retaliation, which eventually lead to his termination.

"Some are suicidal. Some are fighting for their lives. Some are in fear for their lives. Some fled the state. They are unemployed many of them can't get a job because of these false allegations against them," McGuire said.

Threats, extortion alleged in 400-page suit against Pasco Sheriff's Office employees

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Circling back to my OP, there is a problem with policing and police culture. This is how officers who stand up are treated. Look at the WV state police, and the whistleblower there sure looks to be set up to be un-alived. I've read about whistleblowers getting assignments like cleaning up roadkill of the highway. Dead rats on whistleblowers cars. Not getting backup when called.

How can anyone say it's not a culture issue? It's cleary Us Cops VS the public and cops who report our misdeeds.

Video

 

Orlando officer does 80 in a 45. Gets pulled over, refuses to ID, leaves traffic stop.

Try that in your city and note the results. I'd imagine you'd get chased. Possibly get your car totaled after getting PIT maneuvered.

 

Chauvin still costing the taxpayers. Looking at the Minn Gov dashboard, payouts related to MPD has cost taxpayers at least $70,000,000 since 2019.

April 2023
Minneapolis approves nearly $8.9M to settle 2 Chauvin lawsuits | kare11.com

He used the knee on the neck in both of these. One was a 14 year old where he left it there for 15 to 16 minutes, twice as long as George Floyd's.

His treatment of these victims were considered were approved by supervisory sergeants.



Here is a clip from PBS's Frontline documentary "Police on Trial." A former Minneapolis lieutenant talks about how bad cops are covered for by using "coaching" instead of putting their transgressions in their personnel file. By not putting it in the personnel file, it keeps it shielded from the public. Also, he reported an out-of-control cop and got labeled in the department as a snitch, someone who "goes after cops."



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It sounds to me like a culture issue..

Cops who misbehave get coaching sessions to keep their bad deeds off the public record, leading to less disciplinary actions for officers. Less disciplined officers aren't reigned in and continue to accost and assault citizens. Cops who review incidents and actually report them are ostracized. Cops like Chauvin gets away with things he shouldn't and eventually kills someone.

Criminal elements of the public riot over the broad-daylight killing of a man. The police respond in force and some make a game out of it, "hunting" down protestors. Some target clearly marked journalist with aimed non-lethal fire. Some bad cops take it too far and brutalize more people, costing the taxpayers even more money, and further driving a wedge between the police and the community.

More accountability may have prevented the murder of someone by Chauvin, a riot, and huge taxpayer funded payouts for MPD misconduct.

 

The article from the thread.
Barry Jones Released From Arizona’s Death Row After 29 Years

Under the burdensome rules dictating federal habeas appeals, if a defendant failed to challenge their trial lawyers’ performance in state court, they would be barred from doing so in federal court. But in 2012, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Martinez v. Ryan carved out a rare path to relief for people like Jones: If the failure to bring such a claim was due to the post-conviction attorney’s own ineffectiveness, the petitioner should have another shot at relief.

In 2018, Burgess vacated Jones’s conviction. If not for the failures of his trial attorneys, the judge wrote, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.” Burgess ordered the state to retry Jones or release him.

Instead, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich appealed, first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the core of Burgess’s findings, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state’s lawyers insisted that under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Jones should never have been allowed to present the evidence that persuaded Burgess to vacate his conviction. The argument seemed far-fetched: It would mean gutting the Supreme Court’s own ruling in Martinez v. Ryan. But to the dismay of Jones’s legal team, the court took the case.

During oral argument, the attorney general’s office said that it didn’t matter if the evidence showed Jones was not responsible for the crime that sent him to death row. “Innocence isn’t enough,” the state’s lawyer, Brunn Wall Roysden III, said. In May 2022, the justices agreed, reinstating Jones’s death sentence and destroying a lifeline for incarcerated people whose lawyers failed them at trial.

 

Good lord.

 

New Haven, CT - 6/10/23

Would you rather:

A) Win a $45,000,000 settlement
or
B) Not be paralyzed from the chest down


Cops put a handcuffed man in a van without seatbelts. The cop who was driving the van was speeding, hit the brakes, which sent Randy flying causing him to hit the divider in the van. While I don't think this was intentional like Freddy Gray, it shows gross negligence and heartlessness.

Randy Cox, paralyzed in police van, reaches $45 million settlement with New Haven, Connecticut - ABC News (go.com)

New Haven, Connecticut, has agreed to a $45 million settlement with Randy Cox, who was paralyzed while being transported handcuffed and without a seat belt in the back of a police van following his arrest last year, the city's mayor and attorneys said Saturday.

The agreement was reached Friday evening following a daylong conference with a federal magistrate judge, Mayor Justin Elicker said. It came two days after the city fired two police officers who authorities said treated Cox recklessly and without compassion.

Cox, 36, was left paralyzed from the chest down June 19, 2022, when the police van he was riding in braked hard, sending him head-first into a metal partition while his hands were cuffed behind his back. Cox had been arrested on charges of threatening a woman with a gun, which were later dismissed.

Once at the police station, officers mocked Cox and accused him of being drunk and faking his injuries, according to surveillance and body-worn camera footage. Officers dragged Cox by his feet out of the van and placed him in a holding cell prior to his eventual transfer to a hospital.





Videos:

Overview



Bodycam

 

Chicago, IL

$2,900,000 settlement, officer fired this week for incident in 2019

Cops break down the door of the wrong house during a raid. Only one person lived there, an innocent lady, and she was handcuffed, naked, for over 10 minutes while a dozen offers shuffle in and out. This happened in 2019, the lady got a $2.9 million dollar settlement, and the officer deemed responsible, was just now fired this month in 2023.

This lady begs the cops to let her go. She's naked on display to everyone. She told them that they had the wrong house over 40 times. She was allowed to put on clothes after more than 10 minutes, but only with the help of a female officer because she had to remain cuffed. After getting dressed, they remained in her house for 30 minutes.

At what point do you review the situation and realize you're at the wrong house. Just so much bad in this interaction. I'll post the video at the bottom. If you give it watch, try to imagine how you would feel if this was your mother, wife, or daughter. Watch how many people meander around and watch this lady. Watch them go through her house and take pictures of her stuff, even thought they are at. the. wrong. house.

Cop's firing over botched raid is "small piece of justice"—Anjanette Young

The Chicago Police Board voted 5-3 to fire Sgt. Alex Wolinski for multiple rules violations and "failure of leadership" in the raid at Young's apartment, according to a 31-page written ruling, the Chicago Sun-Times reported

Wolinski, who had joined the Chicago Police Department in 2002, was accused of violating eight departmental rules, including disrespect to or maltreatment of any person.

"Though it was clear that the officers were not at the residence of the intended target, [Wolinski] nonetheless allowed Ms. Young to remain naked and handcuffed for an extended period of time—over 10 minutes," the ruling, issued last week, said.


Video:

 

Las Animas Co, CO

Federal lawsuit filed last month (Why is this guy allowed to be a cop?!)


Unhinged Las Animas officer, who has been previously arrested four separate times in Las Animas County for Disorderly Conduct: Displaying a weapon, misdemeanor harrasment, disorderly conduct: fighting in public, and another disorderly conduct roughs up a guy who probably wasn't breaking the law.

Aside from previously been arrested four times in the county he serves in, he's also been the subject of five restraining orders from 2002 to 2020, two of which allege domestic abuse. Hell, one of them barred him from possessing firearms, according to the Brady Handgun Violence Act, yet he was still allowed to be cop!

In 2002 he left Las Animas to join the Trinidad Police Department, where he was forced to resign due to multiple misconduct violations.

He was forced to resign in 2009 from Las Aminas County, and then was rehired and promoted. The two officers in this video have already been the subject of excesive force lawsuit that got settled. The victim in that lawsuit was a deaf lady.

These are the folks you really want on the streets? This is who police leadership back? The Sheriff's Office did not launch an investigation after the body cam was released. They only launched one after the lawsuit was filed.

(Read this because it's too much to quote)
Las Animas County Sheriff deputy named in excessive force lawsuit previously convicted of crimes | KRDO

Through employment records, 13 Investigates learned one of the deputies named in a federal lawsuit accusing the Las Animas County Sheriff's Office of excessive force has a criminal past spanning decades. The lawsuit alleges that he never should've been hired by the sheriff's office to begin with.

The lawsuit claims Las Animas County Sheriff Deputies Mikhail Noel and Henry Trujillo tased Kenneth Espinoza about 35 times, despite him being unarmed and not breaking the law. (one of those tazings was in the face)

When Trujillo walks away, Noel walks up to Espinoza and tells him to "leave, leave." However, as Espinoza begins driving away, Noel begins screaming "Stay, stay," and tries to open the driver's side door of the moving truck.

Twelve days before the incident, the Las Animas County Sheriff’s Office settled an excessive use of force lawsuit involving the same two deputies. In that case, Noel and Trujillo are accused of handcuffing a deaf woman to a hospital bed to transport her to a mental health facility. The deputies then forcefully removed the only person in the room who can speak American Sign Language (ASL) and translate for the woman.

Video:

 

They had a name for it, a "nickel ride." They've done it plenty of times before, and that one was definitely intentional.

 

I'm not familiar with the original incident. I'm going to look into it. It sounds bad on its face for an AG to try and reverse a conviction on a cop who took someone's life.