Notorious County Jail Allegedly Handcuffed And Starved An Inmate For 32 Hours
Back in June, a man brought to the Inmate Reception Center was given food and medical attention. But that may have been the only meal he received for more than a day. According to a statement from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, “The inmate ate upon entry to the jail, but was allegedly restrained for approximately 32 hours; during that time he received medical attention and a cup of water.” The inmate filed a complaint a few days later, which made its way to Sheriff Jim McDonnell last Thursday. The 10 employees — including a sergeant, a senior deputy, and several lieutenants — were relieved of duty within 24 hours.
The Sheriff’s Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau and Internal Affairs Bureau are currently investigating the complaint. In addition to looking into the jail workers’ behavior, officials have promised to evaluate “corrective policies and procedures” and revisit employee training.
I’m glad the department acted swiftly, but damn, what kind of training are these officers receiving? I’m guessing somewhere between ‘a little’ and ‘nowhere near enough’. The officer in the next story appears to have been fully trained-in how to kill a black man by choking him with a flashlight.
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Mississippi Cop Accused of Fatally Choking Unarmed Black Man
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has announced that it will look into the death of 39-year-old Jonathan Sanders, who died after an altercation with a police officer in Clarke County on Wednesday, the Guardian reports.
Sanders’ attorney, Stewart Parrish, told Newscaster 11, a local ABC-affiliate, that Sanders was exercising his horses in the town of Stonewall when Officer Kevin Harrington pulled him to the ground and choked him with a flashlight. Sanders’ girlfriend, Charita Kennedy, said Sanders told the officer he could not breathe and died at the scene.
Sanders, father of two, suffered “some kind of asphyxiation” during the altercation with Officer Harrington, Parrish told the Guardian. The account that he was choked with a flashlight comes, Parrish claims, from relatives who saw the incident unfold. Sanders was black; Harrington is white.
“We can’t really give out any particulars to it because it is an ongoing investigation. I can say that we’ve always had a good relation with the community, and we continue to do that,” Stonewall police chief Michael Street said.
Street denied the description of events that Parish offered, telling the Guardian that Sanders stepped out of his horse-drawn buggy and that he and Harrington engaged in a “fight” without using weapons. “We won’t know until the autopsy is over what was the actual cause of death,” Street said. “But there was no flashlight used to choke anybody—that’s false. And there were no shots fired by either man, there were no weapons at all, and he was not dragged off a horse.”
That last bit? Where the chief sides with Officer Harrington (I’m rather tired of police chief after police chief always siding with the officers in situations like this)? That’s interesting. If there was no flashlight used to choke Sanders, and no gun was fired, how then did Sanders die?
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Meanwhile, the brutal beating of a Philadelphia man by more than a dozen police officers has prompted an internal investigation which I’m sure will result in the officers involved being cleared of any wrongdoing, bc hey, this is the United States, where cops get to beat up on civilians-especially black people-with impunity.
A video posted to YouTube on Wednesday by Los Angeles-based blogger Jasmyne Cannick shows at least a dozen officers, some of whom repeatedly punch, kick and apparently tase a man lying facedown on Locust Avenue in East Germantown.
Cannick told the Daily News that the man in the video is Tyree Carroll, 22, whose family reached out to her in an attempt to bring exposure to his case. The family received the video only recently, Cannick said.
Court records show that Carroll was arrested April 4 and charged with drug offenses, aggravated assault, simple assault and reckless endangerment.
At the time of his arrest, Carroll was on probation from a 2014 guilty plea for drug possession.
The April case is active, and Carroll – who remains in custody – will be formally arraigned July 21, court records show.
Lt. John Stanford, a police spokesman, told the Daily News late Wednesday that the department was made aware of the video shortly after it was posted and that “an investigation into the matter is underway.”
Stanford said that Internal Affairs investigators were in the process Wednesday of identifying all of the officers depicted in the video, filmed with a smartphone by a bystander.
I hate that my first thought upon hearing this story was “at least he was only beaten brutally”. That’s setting the bar for ethical, moral, and legal behavior for cops incredibly low, when it ought to be very high. But a high bar is how things ought to be, while a low bar is how things are.
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One of the problems with raising the bar for acceptable behavior from police officers is that so many of them have authoritarian personalities. So many law enforcement officials think that civilians ought to or are required to submit to the authority of police officers in all situations, with no questions asked, and without expressing disagreement (no matter how civil). These LEO’s act as if their word is law and they are always right and should always be followed. That appears to be the case in this next story of a police officer who was out of line in his dealings with a homeowner in Orange, a border town between Louisiana and Texas:
It was a minor traffic stop involving a man on a bike without a reflector. He was pulled over on Ronald Warnell’s property, and Warnell wanted to know what was going on.
- MULHOLLAN: “Sir, can you back up please?”
- WARNELL: “Hold on, man; you are on my property now.”
- MULHOLLAN: “No, no. It’s my property right now.”
- WARNELL: “It’s not your property; you need to get your laws straight, brother.”
This officer is apparently unaware of how property rights work in this country if he thinks he can co-opt someone else’s property while handling a suspect.
- MULHOLLAN: “He [the biker] pulled on your property. I followed him on a traffic stop. Now back up!”
- WARNELL: “Make me.”
- MULHOLLAN: “Make you? OK.”
The officer and Warnell continued to argue.
- OFFICER: “Go ahead and put your hands behind your back.”
- WARNELL: ” I said, no.”
- MULHOLLAN: “You said ‘no’? OK.”
The video then shows the officer shoving Warnell to the ground.
Warnell later discussed the encounter with News 8.
“All of a sudden, he just bum-rushed and knocked me down, and almost hit my head, and started to wail on me,” he said.
Civil rights attorney Daryl Washington said Warnell had a right to ask what was happening on his property.“It was a situation that any police officer should have de-escalated the situation, but he escalated it,” Washington said.
In a letter obtained by News, 8 Mulhollan’s supervisor, Capt. C.A. Stephenson, said the officer was out of line and should have calmly dealt with Warnell.
“An officer should be expected to communicate with citizens without seeing every citizen being as a criminal or a threat,” Stephenson wrote.
Yeah, but that goes back to the bar for cops being set higher. In addition to not treating citizens as enemy combatants, they should be expected to perform ethically and legally at all times.They’re supposed to uphold the law and serve and protect the citizenry, not treat us as threats. But that’s how things ought to be, rather than how they are.
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Another problem with law enforcement officials is that they share the same human foibles as everyone else. Cops, however, have state-sanctioned power backing them up. Ideally, the power to detain, arrest, assault, or even kill civilians should only be in the hands of people who can demonstrate they are capable of wielding such power responsibly, but the sad reality is that many police officers are not moral, ethical agents. Los Angeles County Deputy Alejandro Flores is the perfect example of the kind of person that should not be a police officer:
Deputy Alejandro Flores is expected to appear in court Tuesday on multiple charges of domestic battery, aggravated assault, dissuading a witness, criminal threats, false imprisonment and assault likely to produce great bodily harm, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.
Prosecutors said his live-in companion suffered months of abuse, but it finally came to a head in June, when he held her head over the stove and set her hair on fire.
Flores has been “relieved of duty” and placed on administrative leave, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Deputy Amber Smith.
He has been employed with the department for more than seven years and worked in the Court Services/Transit Bureau, she said.
Flores was arrested June 30 after Buena Park police received reports of the abuse from the woman’s family, district attorney spokeswoman Roxi Fyad said. He has been released on $50,000 bail.
The woman had a romantic relationship with Flores. They lived together with a child in Buena Park, prosecutors said.
Flores is accused of arguing with the woman over the child’s pacifier on June 28 and hitting her inside their home, according to the district attorney’s office. He then dragged her into the kitchen and held her over the stove as he turned on the gas burner, prosecutors said.
Her hair caught on fire and was extinguished.
Flores, prosecutors said, turned up the volume on the TV to drown out her screams. He hit her, took her phone away and threatened her with violence if she called police, prosecutors said.
At some point during the attack, prosecutors said he retrieved his off-duty weapon from a bedroom and threatened to hurt her if she tried to leave their home.
The next day, when Flores went to work, she and the child escaped and sought the help from family members.
These are not the actions of an individual who should be entrusted with powers of the state. I don’t know what his issues are and frankly I’m not in the mood to care. Women in the United States face high levels of domestic violence, and they need police officers to protect them from harm, rather than cause them harm. Sadly, rather than protecting victims of domestic abuse, many police officers are perpetrators of domestic abuse.
I wish I could say I had confidence that the police officers in the stories above would be punished, but in truth, cops routinely get away with committing violence and murder without so much as a slap on the wrist, to say nothing of being fired or imprisoned. Hopefully, one day our criminal justice system will be overhauled and it won’t be so easy to find example after example of police behaving badly.
