Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Officer Sucker Punches Man On Fathers Day For Talking Too Loud, Leaving Him On Life Support

"Sgt. David Clifford, a member of the Minneapolis SWAT team, turned himself in to authorities on Sunday after a father of four who he reportedly “sucker punched” for talking too loud spent Father’s Day in intensive care.

Mike Archambault told KMSP-TV that his longtime friend, Brian Vander Lee, was at a restaurant in Andover on Saturday when a stranger at another table asked him to be quiet.

“He did a Superman punch,” Archambault recalled. “Brian went back, feet up in the air, and the guy landed on top of him and his head bounced off the concrete.”

Archambault said the suspected fled the scene and Vander Lee was taken to a nearby hospital where doctors performed emergency surgery for bleeding on his brain.

Witnesses identified the assailant as Sgt. David Clifford but police did not find the officer at his home. Commander Paul Sommer said that Clifford finally turned himself in at about 1:30 p.m. on Sunday after retaining a lawyer. He is expected to be charged with third-degree assault.

“I think he realized now, I don’t think he realized how serious it was last night,” Archambault explained. “And now that word got out — that Brian is in the condition he’s in — that he better do what’s right.”

An online biography indicated that Clifford had served with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as team leader of Personal Security Detachments in Kosovo and Iraq.

After two brain surgeries, Vander Lee was still on life support Sunday. Doctors are hopeful that he will recover."

Original post: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/18/man-on-life-support-after-minneapolis-cop-punches-him-for-talking-loud/#.T_17hGSiTGp.facebook

Austin Man Facing 10 Years in Prison After Photographing Cops Making Arrest

"It was just after midnight on New Year’s Day when Antonio Buehler spotted a pair of Austin cops manhandling a woman at a gas station during a DUI investigation, so he pulled out his cell phone and began taking photos.

That, of course, prompted one of the cops to storm up to him and accuse him of interfering with the investigation.

Austin police officer Pat Oborski shoved Buehler against his truck before handcuffing him. He later claimed in his arrest report that Buehler had spit in his face.

Buehler was charged with resisting arrest and felony harassment on a public servant, the latter punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

After spending 16 hours in jail, Buehler began seeking witnesses to the incident.

“We started posting flyers around the gas station,” Buehler said in an interview with Photography is Not a Crime Sunday afternoon.

“I went on Facebook and on Twitter and I put something up on Craig’s List.”

 By January 4, he had obtained a video from a witness who had been standing across the street watching the exchange between Buehler and Oborski.

The video doesn’t show Buehler spitting on the cop but it might be difficult to capture that from across the street with a cell phone camera.

However, it does show Oborski pinning Buehler against the truck, making it obvious that the cop had stormed up to him rather than the other way around.

But in the arrest report, Oborski claims that Buehler was “in my face,” which is why he had to place his hands on his shoulders to “distance him away.”

Oborski also claimed that he wiped his face after Buehler had supposedly spit on him, then pulled out the handcuffs to arrest him, but the video doesn’t show that either.

All the video shows is Oborski pushing Buehler against the truck before wrestling him down to arrest him.

The video also shows Buehler's friend acting as if he is video recording the arrest, but Buehler says he was not recording.

Buehler also attempted to obtain Oborski’s dash cam video through a public records request, but that request was denied after the city attorney consulted with the Texas attorney general.

Buehler then filed an internal affairs complaint against Oborski in late January thinking that the cell phone video – coupled with dash video and audio from the patrol car, the footage from the gas station surveillance camera and audio from a recorder Oborski was wearing on his uniform – would prove that he was unlawfully arrested.

But as we’ve seen so many times before, internal affairs did not substantiate a single one of Buehler’s complaints against the officers.

Not only that, but the letter dated June 15 also informed that he would be forbidden to “view, posses or receive copies of the Internal Affairs Division’s investigation.”

The letter did say he was welcome to meet with a “Police Monitor for a Police Monitor’s Conference,” where a cop would go over the details of the investigation with him.

But naturally, he would be forbidden from recording that meeting, even though he would be allowed to take notes.

Buehler said this is a policy stemming from the police union’s contract that states the investigation will only be made public if the accusations against the officer were substantiated.

So in other words, the public must take their word that they did, in fact, conduct a thorough and honest investigation.

But despite all this and the fact the charges are still hanging over him, Buehler remains upbeat.

On July 2, he will plead his case before the Austin Citizen Review Panel, which is made up of seven cities and was created to provide oversight to the police department.

The board does not have the authority to discipline but it can make recommendations.

Buehler also took the police department up on its offer to review the investigation in person where he was allowed to view all the evidence he had not seen before.

He posted his findings on Faeebook on a post that received more than 140 “likes.”

“I found it very interesting that you can only see driver’s side, you can’t see the passenger’s side,” he said of the dash cam video.

“All the other dash cam videos I’ve seen show a wider angle where you can see both the driver side and passenger side.”

Buehler is referring to the car that police had pulled over that night prior to his altercation with them, which apparently has a tight crop of the driver’s side, which is rare indeed.

In the car were two women. The driver was undergoing a sobriety test. Oborski claims the passenger was interfering with that investigation by yelling out the window.

He also claims he had to twice walk over to the passenger side to tell the woman to settle down while he was conducting the sobriety test on the driver.

Buehler was pumping gas observing the situation. His friend was in the passenger’s seat.

“I didn’t hear her yell the entire time,” he said of the passenger. “She clearly wasn’t yelling to the degree that she was interfering like they claimed.”

But before he knew it, Oborski had yanked her out of the car and was manhandling her.

“We pull out our cameras and try to take pictures with our cell phones,” he said. “She sees me taking pictures and says, ‘please, take pictures and videos.’

“I asked the cop, ‘why are you hurting her, she didn’t do anything wrong, stop hurting her.’

“They pick her up and walk her right past us. Oborski then turns around walks back towards me.

“’He said, ‘who do you think you are?’

Oborski walked up right up to Buehler, sandwiching him between the back of his truck.

That is where the cell phone video starts recording.

While that video doesn’t pick up much audio and the dash cam video doesn’t show the passenger’s side - and the recorder Oborski was wearing is conveniently undecipherable, coming across muffled as it had been covered - the dash cam video does provide clear audio of the interaction.

“The audio shows that he keep raising his voice escalating the situation,” Buehler said.

Oborski claimed in his report that it was Buehler who escalated the situation by continually raising his voice.

Then there is the chuckle.

“All of a sudden, he chuckles and says, ‘you spit in my face,’” Buehler said. “I said, ‘I didn’t spit in your face.’

“If someone spits in your face, do you chuckle?”

The gas station surveillance video shows the entire incident without audio, but from the beginning, unlike the cell phone video, which began recording once the two were in each other’s faces.

“It shows me taking pictures, then it shows the cops coming up to me, pushing me,” he said. “It shows I am completely passive in my demeanor.”

Today, more than six months after the incident, the case has yet to go before a grand jury, which will determine if the case will go to trial.

In the mean time, he created Peaceful Streets, a project will encourage Austin residents to record police in an effort to maintain accountability.

The program offers Know Your Rights workshops and will eventually hand out 100 video cameras to residents.

“We want to encourage people to take their liberty and security in their own hands,” he said.

Buehler has also created a petition where he is trying to gather 5,000 signatures to send a message to the district attorney to investigate Oborski and his partner.

As of today, the petition has 1,394 signature but more than 3,000 Facebook likes, which goes to show you just how lazy some of us have become.

Please send stories, tips and videos to carlosmiller@magiccitymedia.com."
Original post: http://www.pixiq.com/article/austin-man-facing-10-years-in-prison

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Recording The Police is a Dangerous but Necessary Thing to Do

NYPD Auxiliary Cop Caught With Kiddie Porn

 SARAH ARMAGHAN
Friday, February 03, 2012

An NYPD auxiliary cop was caught with a slew of sickening kiddie porn at his upstate home, the New York State Police said.

Daniel Sayer, 59, was arrested and charged with two felony counts of possessing child pornography, officials said, and is being held in lieu of $15,000 cash bail in Orange County Jail.

He was dismissed from his volunteer position as a Deputy Inspector of the Auxiliary unit at the upper West Side’s 20th Precinct as a result of the arrest, the NYPD said.

From 1972 to 1998, Sayer owned and operated “Dan’s Cougars Children’s Sports Club” in the city, coaching youngsters in sports, authorities said.

Police raided a vacant rental home in Blooming Grove, where they later discovered Sayer had been staying, on Jan. 26 and found photos of boys under 16 years old engaging in sexual acts. They found more graphic images at his residence in Greenwood Lake on Feb. 1, the State Police said.

Original Post

Jason Arbeeny, NYPD Cop Guilty Of Planting Crack On Innocent Couple, Sentenced To Probation Only


February 3, 2012 10:13:14
A former New York City police detective found guilty of planting drugs on two innocent people was spared prison time after a dramatic courtroom mea culpa Thursday.
Jason Arbeeny, a 14-year-veteran of the NYPD and former member of the Brooklyn South Narcotics Team, was sentenced to just 5 years probation and 300 hours community service. He had faced up to four years in prison.
Arbeeny was found guilty of eight counts of falsifying records and official misconduct stemming from a 2007 incident in which he planted a bag of crack cocaine inside the car of a couple in Coney Island.
Arbeeny's defense claimed he was under enormous pressure to meet arrest quotas (or as the NYPD calls them, 'productivity goals') and resorted to the "flaking," a practice Arbeeny's trial revealed may be widely used by NYPD officers.
"I can't look at myself in the mirror anymore," Arbeeny tearfully told Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach, according to The New York Daily News. "Sir, I am begging you, please don't send me to jail."
He then apologized to his victims. "My oath went down the window, my pride went out the window," he said.
Arbeeny even mentioned that his young son, worried over his father's fate, was in therapy and threatening suicide.
It all caught Justice Reichbach by surprise. According to The Associated Press, the judge had shown up to court convinced Arbeeny's crime required jail time. Reichbach admitted that Arbeeny's pleas had gotten through to him. "I frankly didn't expect the defendant, at the 11th hour, to be making these claims," he said.

Huffington Post

NYPD Assinate Teen In His Home Because He Had Weed



NYPD Cop Shoots And Kills Unarmed 18-Year-Old Ramarley Graham In The Bronx

February 3, 2012 09:13:43

For the third time this week, an NYPD officer has fatally shot and killed a suspect.

18-year-old Ramarley Graham was gunned down Thursday inside the bathroom of his Bronx home following a foot pursuit by a team of plainsclothes cops. He was unarmed.

Investigators say police spotted Graham--who's had 8 prior arrests on charges including robbery, marijuana possession and resisting arrest-- on White Plains Road when he started to run. Police chased Graham to his home at 749 East 229 Street. After a struggle, an officer fired one shot at close range from his 9mm semiautomatic handgun. The bullet hit Graham in the chest and he collapsed. It's unclear, according to The New York Times, if the gun was fired during the struggle or if the two were separated when the shooting took place. [UPDATE: The New York Post reports the two officers involved in the incident believed Graham was carrying a weapon. Commissioner Ray Kelly says the two officers have been placed on restrictive duty. The NYPD now believes Graham did not struggle with the cops. In the apartment, one of the officers reportedly screamed, "Show me your hands! Show me your hands!", followed by "Gun! Gun!" before firing the fatal shot.]

A small amount of marijuana was found in the toilet and police found no weapons in the house. According to The Daily News, officers had seen Graham moments before the shooting adjusting his waistband, and thought he had a gun.

Graham was pronounced dead at Montefiore Medical Center.

"Everybody's kids get into trouble," Graham's grieving mother, Constance Malcolm, told CBS. "He smoked a little weed, but you know, like all the little, young kids does. And that's what he had on him when they were chasing him."

She added, "In the bathroom they shot him. My 6-year-old son was there and saw everything," Malcolm said. "I'm going to get justice."

The teenager's neighbors struggled to comprehend the tragedy Thursday. From The Times:

Near a local deli on Thursday, Jessica Rodriguez, 34, said Mr. Graham had offered to pick up coffee for her every morning. "When I bring my kids to school, he's getting a peppermint tea," she said. "He played football in the backyard with my kids."

At the deli, a group of boys gathered, blasting a Jamaican song from a small set of speakers. The lyrics chronicled the death of a young man at the hands of the police, they said.

On January 26, an off-duty cop shot and killed a 22-year-old carjacking suspect. And on January 29th, another off-duty cop shot and killed a 17-year-old who was trying to mug him.


And check the surveillance video - he is not "running" from the police

Police Beating Motorist In Diabetic Shock



Adam Greene is on his stomach as a pack of police officers pile on him, driving their knees into his back and wrenching his arms and legs. One officer knees him in the ribs; another kicks him in the face. "Stop resisting," officers on the video yell, but Greene, his face pushed into the pavement, hasn't resisted. He doesn't even move -- maybe can't move -- because he's gone into diabetic shock caused by low blood sugar. The video, recorded more than a year ago by a police car dashboard camera, was released Tuesday by Greene's lawyers. The same night, the Henderson City Council approved a settlement of $158,500 for Greene. His wife received $99,000 from Henderson, which is just under the minimum amount that requires council approval.



Listen to the laughter at the end