Police/correctional officers behaving badly

The Sandbox Political Topics
61

I completely thought this was posted here but guess not.

Police (allegedly illegally) raid pot farm. While there, they destroyed 8 figures worth of product, stole personal belongings, and threw a pizza party.

I don’t have further context, but the article notes that the sheriff recently ordered the power and water to their home to be shut off, and shortly after the house “mysteriously” caught fire and burned down.

It’s pretty much a given that the cops planned a holiday weed party and used the arrest as an excuse for all-you-can-carry pot and a venue without a rental fee which they could trash and leave.

Wonder how much the cops profited off selling that weed illegally.

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62

Police response: “Come on, we’re better at hiding evidence that that!”

63

“Sure glad we kept that $10,000,000 in weed out of dispensaries. Here’s the $8M in weed we confiscated. Make sure that $5M of weed goes into evidence. Wouldn’t want that $1M in weed to get into the black market.”

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64

This reminds me of when I was at my first job after college, living/working in a bone-dry county.

I got an invite to the party where the sheriff’s deputies “disposed” of all the booze confiscated from spring breakers who were stopped while passing through the county.

This was the same county where, shortly after I started that first job, but still a few weeks shy of my 21st birthday, I attended a dinner held by the company management, inviting the salaried employees (managers and a few specialists) and a few friends of the management team from the community. One of those friends was the sheriff…who handed me my first-ever glass of champagne.

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65

The way it has been interpreted, qualified immunity will get that case kicked out fast. I’m guessing there hasn’t already been precedent of cops illegally raiding a farm, destroying things, and having a pizza party, so there’ll be no exception to qualified immunity here.

66

To be honest I read that and thought “Bullshit”, figuring there must be precedent.

While this case REALLY floods the search results, I’ve gotta admit I haven’t found any other cases of police raiding a place then ordering pizza for a party there.

Many cases of police opening fire on pizza parties but that’s not the same.

67

Special circumstances due to munchies.

68

Scratch that, I found a case where BATF officers raided the house of Harry and Theresa Lamplugh in Pennsylvania guns drawn, stomped a few cats to death, paused the raid to order pizza and soda then throw the empty containers around, and ultimately never charged them or noted any violation. This was back in 2003.

https://www.fpparchive.org/media/documents/war_on_terrorism/Family%20recounts%20terror%20at%20hands%20of%20ATF%20agents_Michael%20Hedges_Apr%2013,%201995_The%20Washington%20Times.pdf

This article only notes one kitten killed by blunt force trauma. Looking at multiple incomplete sources, I gather they stomped more than one cat. Hard to tell given the age. The article also has the government explaining that the man is a convicted felon and therefore was illegally owning guns. However, they refused to state what the felony was. The man and his attorney both say there are no records of a felony, and the government merely said they made that information known to the attorney - who does not agree.

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69

My first thought was Super Troopers

70

This is a judge rather than a police officer, but putting it here anyway.

Judge throws out rape conviction and lets him out of prison basically because he thought the victim had it coming. Fortunately he’s now been removed from the bench for violating the law by doing this.

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71

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/supreme-court-prison-rastafarian.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rk0.B1dK.KgWO24aviSRR&smid=url-share

72

It’s a time-honored tradition for white men in power to denigrate Black people by forcing them to conform to white hairstyles.

I believe it was the Army or Marines that just recently allowed some dreads, rather than forcing every Black woman to straighten her hair, for example.

Shaving hair worn religiously is extra egregious, but ultimately just another act of racism.

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73

A man and his dog go for a walk and at some point the dog returns home on his own. The man’s son calls police to report his dad missing.

Good news… Police get the son to confess to murdering his father.

Bad news… The father is still alive. He’d gone to the airport to pick up his daughter. The son who confessed to murdering him attempts suicide and is locked up in the psych ward for 3 days.

Outcome… Police settle for $900,000

74

i watch enough of the news magazine shows where they show clips from a police interrogation room and i am leaning towards thinking the police should be required to get the person an attorney before questioning. will that allow some guilty folks to go free? yes. but it will prevent a whole lot of bullshit from happening.

75

I helped with a psych study in college where we tested students, then accused them of cheating and extracted false confessions. We were merely threatening them with a referral that could result in discipline if they didn’t confess (if they did, we would “throw out their results”), yet about half of the students cracked and admitted to the cheating that they didn’t do.

It’s quite obvious why people would falsely confess when the police say they know you did it and present you with an option between 5 and 20 years in prison.

According to the US-based National Registry of Exonerations, 81% of people with intellectual disabilities confess to homicide when accused and interrogated, even if they didn’t do it.

76

That sounds like a fascinating study.

Must have been hard to do though (emotionally speaking).

77

I was only helping the professor verify the statistical portions of his paper, and general review of the rest of it before he published. That study helped push me solidly toward the camp of “the death penalty is inappropriate, at least for all but the most obvious, clear, unmistakable cases.”

We’ve had too many people executed and then exonerated, and we’ll never know how many additional executed were innocent but never exonerated. Many exonerated innocents originally confessed to their crime.

More detail on the study just for fun:

We had a plant also taking the test in the same room as them. The plant was supposed to once ask the other person for an answer, and a second time clearly be looking at their paper such that they could notice. If they actually gave the other person an answer, they fell into the smaller category of “actually cheated” and we still accused them to see what would happen, how many guilty people would confess vs. hide it.

I can’t recall if the different between innocents and guilty confessing was statistically different, but it wasn’t far different.

Following the test, the proctor would take their tests, then come back and harrumph and separate them. We’d explain to the subject that it’s clear they cheated, because the two of them had different tests but selected the same answers, and the other person was correct whereas the subject wasn’t, so it’s clear you took answers from them. Then we started in on, “Listen we’re just here to get the data, we don’t want to deal with reporting people either. So just tell us you cheated and we’ll throw away your results, you’ll still get the class credit and we won’t have to report you. Deal?”

We knew the results weren’t perfectly analogous, but it was enlightening. And definitely I can see that relative to 20 years in prison, 5 years is “basically no consequence” when the police say they have you dead to rights, and staying silent only makes their jobs harder and the judge will be annoyed. But we can get you the minimum sentence if you help speed this up. (NOTE: The police do not decide sentencing, but are allowed to say they do.)

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The test also studies psychopaths who volunteer to help with the study.

79

Seemed way less emotionally damaging to either party than it would be being a cop. In the study there’s no actual consequence, as opposed to a cop ruining the life of an innocent.

I doubt I could be a cop, because staying silent about bad behavior around me would almost surely grind me down into panic attacks or depression.

80

IFYP

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