You also reminded me that I never heard back from any of the misconduct investigations I started against the various officers. I will FOIA now and update. There was one incident where I was walking out of jail and two officers from another jurisdiction, operating outside of their legal authority, cuffed me up, without any arrest warrant and put me in jail and I was held for over three years on that one alone. I want to see what the reports on that one say. I also filed one against the sheriff as I found an old law which says it is a crime if the sheriff does not provide detainees with three hot meals a day, and yet we only got one a day. It is literally a crime. But how do you report a police officer committing a crime? It is practically impossible, especially when he is the guy in charge.
Edit: Law is here https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=2004&C... "The Warden of the jail shall furnish each prisoner daily with as much clean water as may be necessary for drink and personal cleanliness, and serve him three times a day with wholesome food, well cooked and in sufficient quantity."
That's not how real-world police departments work, at least where I live. The police are lazy. They receive many complaints, and ignore most of them. Coming to the police with allegations and no evidence simply doesn't go anywhere.
Audit logs I provide won't be enough for criminal prosecution. They would be enough evidence to cause my local police to investigate, as well as adequate cause for a warrant to Google.
It's near impossible to even charge a cop or a prosecutor with a crime. I had cops and prosecutors commit crimes against me, but I ran into dead ends every which way I tried to even file police reports etc. Not a single police agency will take a report against an officer or a prosecutor. And in theory you can report crimes directly to a prosecutor's office, but again, they won't take reports against police officers (who are the ones that keep them in business) nor other prosecutors.
I don't know what the solution is.
Chicago has an agency specifically to report police misconduct, but it seems to get shut down every couple of years due to rampant misconduct inside the agency.
I was set-up and arrested in 2008 for simply being in a suspicious part of town where I knew an old family friend who fixed my car on occasion.
I was charged with a felony "destruction of evidence" because a totally crooked cop, whom was eventually kicked off the force for messing with hookers, claimed I ate the non-existent drugs, and actually tampered with the swab he used to wipe my mouth.
I was arrested and fired from my job the next week. Eventually, the case was "null-processed" as the cop had been fired for misconduct and the State had no case.
In a life of bizarre legal experiences, it was perhaps the most bizarre of them all, and since then I put absolutely nothing past police, although I do recognize they do a dangerous job of which I would want no part of.
I made a complaint on an officer once and the next day his supervisor (who is Chief of Police now) called me up and said,
"... are you suuure you want to go through with this? Because if we investigate and can't prove any wrong-doing, we will charge you with filing a false complaint!"
Now, I didn't back down and got a letter from them saying, "we investigated and, although we are not going to tell you the outcome for privacy reasons if there was anything we would have given the appropriate punishment," or something along those lines.
I think that a civilian-oversight board (and I am fine with making them have security clearances) that can look into these once a year to make recommendations to the City Commission is not too much to ask for considering this is paid for with tax money and currently has little to no oversight.
Trying to get a prosecution against a cop is almost impossible. For starters, the primary body you must report a crime by a cop to is the police station where he works, as generally they will have jurisdiction over the issue. And they are going to laugh you out of the station. What's your next move? Go to the prosecutor and complain? ROFL.
Believe me, I've tried all of these avenues. I should scan the letters I've received from these agencies, they're hilarious. Basically they'll come back and say that they have a policy of not investigating crimes by their officers and officers from other jurisdictions. I've even taken this through the courts. If the crime was committed as part of an investigation into a suspected crime, then the courts ruled that it is acceptable and not actionable.
The news articles you see where the cops actually got indicted are the million-to-ones. Even Kim Foxx (State's Attorney for Cook County - i.e. Chicago) has stated in interviews that even if she gets an indictment against a cop, getting a conviction is almost impossible.
>Now try filing a complaint about the police, but you have to go through the police to do it - good luck with that.
If city police officers intentionally violated one's rights, one can sue the offending officers (and the municipality [1]) in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. (However, under Supreme Court case law, officers have qualified immunity for honest mistakes.)
>No ... federal oversight - they make you go through them
Does that apply to elected officials? I thought it was only law enforcement?
If you mean report the police for not citing/arresting, then FBI/DOJ are not interested in prosecuting. Those actions fall under law enforcement discretion. The police have the power to decide not to arrest or cite someone, even if they plainly broke the law.
On a side note, I did file a DOJ civil rights complaint (results in injunctive relief instead of criminal charges like the FBI color of law) against the state police practices. It sounds like the DOJ gets too many complaints to handle and isn't interested in, or doesn't have the resources for, small rights violations.
So my experience is that literally nobody in the system is interested in investigating and upholding the integrity of out system. Our system is built on sweeping the dirt under the rug, as evidenced in the court rulings that releasing judicial complaints, even ones containing exculpatory evidence, would be too injurious to the system (the only way they would be injurious is if they were incompetent or corrupt with nothing being done about it).
I ran the background on an officer in a case against me. He had been found guilty in an internal investigation of badly beating an unarmed Mexican man. In his sworn statement he said the guy had run in front of his car. This didn't match the testimony of six different witnesses who all saw the incident.
The report found him guilty of the beating and noted his testilying. I think he was given a few days suspension for this. No criminal charges, obviously.
In another case, I told a friend to investigate the background of the lead detective against him. When we ran his file we found he had already been fired from the police department for using the computer system to change the upcoming court dates for another officer so he would miss court and not testify against a friend of the detective who had been pulled over for a suspected DUI.
I'm not really able to influence the DA. I've contacted them about rights violations related to a trooper knowingly holding a charge without probable cause, and they won't do anything.
The only reason they did something with this police department is because the grading was very clear in the statute and the police department posted false information about it on Facebook. So it was blatant and public. Unfortunately this false charge issue is only blatant and not public. So they just want to sweep it under the rug. Although I have contacted an investigative reporter to maybe change this. And maybe an injunctive relief civil rights filing with the FBI/DOJ.
Can someone explain to me why the county was liable here?
When the crime was reported, an investigation was started promptly; the accused officer was suspended; and upon the conclusion of that investigation he was charged, arrested, and is now in jail. It seems like the process worked exactly as it should here.
Was such criminal behaviour condoned (tacitly or otherwise) by the department? I've heard stories about this happening in the past, but there's no mention of anything like that in this article.
Was the department aware of prior complaints? It doesn't seem like it; while the article implies that this was not the first assault committed by this officer, the DA's investigation clearly wasn't able to uncover evidence of any prior complaints, and for all that police officers have a reputation for standing together I doubt they would bury complaints against a known rapist that effectively.
A crime was committed, and the criminal went to jail. How does the criminal's employer come into the picture?
You don't go to court unless you've been charged. I would imagine it's hard to keep your job as a police officer if you're charged with a crime every time you have a violent encounter with a person.
You speak as if there's no fact-finding at all. A police officer can face up to three such things; local, state, and federal. If not more.
That is a fair statement, as is Daeken's. I think half of what I was thinking of when I wrote that was also related to those police officer's private data (name, address, phone number, wife's name...). These things need not be shared, and the person I responded to, and their tone, seemed to suggest that this information should be released.
Do police have any obligation to be honest in these requests?
No. Infractions would have to be prosecuted by the district attorney, who has no interest to get on the bad side of the police because he needs them to be successful.
Consider the case of Arlington police! Arlington cops were in bed with a drug dealer because he supplied the force with steroids. In return for the goodies, the police informed their supplier about the competition. The maximum penalty for improper access of records would be 10 years in prison, but they gave the bent cop just 1 year. It really does wonders to restore trust in the system.
It should be surprising that they defer to the cop. That's basically assuming that one is guilty without proving it. At a minimum, it should objectively provide reasonable doubt.
I have an experience where a trooper lied to the court twice and I have evidence to back it up. Nobody cares. I tried a the ACLU (bigger fish to fry), a complaint with the department (they counseled him and made the excuse that they have a lot of new guys at this station), I wrote my state representatives multiple times (no reply, except for one, which was a form letter not even applicable to my scenario), we tried the DA's office (they participated in multiple rights violations), we tried the DoJ for civil rights violations (no updates for about 6 months), we submitted complaints against a magistrate and a judge with the board of conduct (no updates and over 6 months), we submitted complaints against the ADAs who participated in incompetent or misconduct to the Bar (was told they only investigate prosecutors if the court formally determines there was prosecutorial misconduct), talked to an civil rights lawyer (was told it was a violation, but the courts don't care unless large monetary damages were involved), and talked to an investigative journalist (ran a story similar to this but said to keep him posted if I find anything explosive).
There's literally nobody to turn to. Almost every person involved in the system made mistakes or misconduct during the process (cop, 2/3 magistrates - 3rd was arrested for an unrelated matter, the judge, 2 ADAs, etc). I have absolutely zero faith in the system.
There's a difference between stating an opinion ("The Exeter police are corrupt") and making a statement like "Police Chief John Doe took a bribe to overlook a crime." You can write an op-ed insinuating that based on your sources, the corruption at the Exeter Police Department goes to the top. It's something else to defame an individual specifically. For example, it's defamation to say "analyst74 raped and murdered a girl in 1993" unless I have at the minimum a good faith belief that that was the case.
To reiterate, it'd be protected speech to say like you just said that "corruption is a massive problem in American police forces." It's not so much protected speech if you accuse Officer John Doe of specific criminal acts in public if the statement isn't true.
For other reasons, this is not the best defendant just from a character perspective the ACLU could pick for this kind of situation (https://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20180531/exeter-man-char...). To actually challenge the law, they'd have to somehow reframe what he said as an opinion.
Obviously the cops aren't going to bring charges for the vast majority of these kinds of instances, but they did against Frese because he's a felon with a history of harassing the local police. And not a cute and cuddly felon either: he ran over a traffic worker after threatening to run him over. It's fine for the ACLU to take this as a test case but this is not this sort of situation that is a great test case.
I think the only real catching point is that the courts don't care about rights nor are police willing to really investigate claims against another officer. I have some very recent/on-going experience with this. There was a trooper who knowingly held a false charge against us, leading to restrictions in our freedoms and small costs. I contacted a civil rights attorney who told me the courts don't care unless we sustained significant costs/damages. Recovering costs would be great, but we would mostly like to see protections put into place so this doesn't happen to others (and maybe get this bad trooper removed). I filed one successful complaint against him. Then he took further actions and I filed another complaint. That complaint was closed without any investigation or justification - they didn't even tell me they were closing it.
You also reminded me that I never heard back from any of the misconduct investigations I started against the various officers. I will FOIA now and update. There was one incident where I was walking out of jail and two officers from another jurisdiction, operating outside of their legal authority, cuffed me up, without any arrest warrant and put me in jail and I was held for over three years on that one alone. I want to see what the reports on that one say. I also filed one against the sheriff as I found an old law which says it is a crime if the sheriff does not provide detainees with three hot meals a day, and yet we only got one a day. It is literally a crime. But how do you report a police officer committing a crime? It is practically impossible, especially when he is the guy in charge.
Edit: Law is here https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=2004&C... "The Warden of the jail shall furnish each prisoner daily with as much clean water as may be necessary for drink and personal cleanliness, and serve him three times a day with wholesome food, well cooked and in sufficient quantity."
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