|
(From The N.Y. Times, 11/7/2021) A
seatbelt ticket. A cracked taillight. A broken
headlight. |
|
These
minor offenses resulted in the deaths of unarmed motorists at the hands of
police officers. In a Times investigation of traffic stops that left more than 400 people dead over the past
five years, the police justified the shootings by arguing that the vehicle
was a weapon. |
|
In about 250 cases, The Times found that police
officers had fired into vehicles that they claimed posed a threat. Relative
to the population, Black motorists were overrepresented among those killed. |
Over the past five years, nine officers have been fatally run
over, pinned or dragged by drivers in vehicles. But in many instances, local
police officers, state troopers and sheriff’s deputies put themselves at risk. Some officers who fatally shot
motorists didn’t appear to be in any jeopardy at all, The Times investigation
showed.
https://apnews.com/article/idaho-police-government-and-politics-24ba6b7982bb6d9c07b7a8e46b0865ec
USA TODAY Article on 300 Bad Cop acts blown
From a tiny department in the mountains of Idaho to the New York Police Department, USA TODAY found more than 300 cases of officers who bucked law enforcement’s blue wall of silence by reporting or testifying against co-workers accused of misconduct over the past decade. In Colorado, an internal affairs investigator leaked a video of an officer punching a handcuffed man in a wheelchair in the head. In Texas, an officer reported a sergeant who had planted drugs in his ex-wife’s car. In Louisiana, a state trooper refused to participate in what he says was a cover-up in the case of Ronald Greene, who died in state custody after being beaten and stunned with a Taser. After speaking out, all of them were forced out of their departments and branded traitors by fellow officers.
What the data means
In our searchable database, the bold title for each entry and the sortable categories describe the nature of the allegation; they do not indicate whether the misconduct was proven to have occurred. The year column indicates when the purported wrongdoing happened. In some cases, it was reported later. Unless otherwise indicated, the accused officers and/or department leaders have denied wrongdoing.
Where the data comes from
USA TODAY spent more than a year unearthing the cases from thousands of documents from police and sheriff’s departments, prosecutors, oversight groups and labor regulators around the country, including federal files provided by confidential sources.
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Derek Michael Chauvin - GUILTY OF FEDERAL AND STATE CHARGES - 21 YEAR
SENTENCE
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J. Alexander Kueng -
GUILTY OF LESSER CHARGES
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Thomas Kiernan Lane "
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Tou Thao "
Robert Lewis, Investigative Reporting Program, and David DeBolt, Bay Area News Group
10:13 a.m. PT Nov. 14, 2019
More than 80 law enforcement officers working today in California are convicted criminals, with rap sheets that include everything from animal cruelty to manslaughter. They drove drunk, cheated on timecards, brutalized family members, even killed others with their recklessness on the road. But thanks to some of the weakest laws in the country for punishing police misconduct, the Golden State does nothing to stop these officers from enforcing the law. Those are among the findings of an unprecedented collaboration of newsrooms—including USA TODAY Network publications The Desert Sun, Ventura County Star, Redding Record Searchlight, Salinas Californian and Visalia Times Delta—which spent six months examining how California deals with cops who break the law.
The review found 630 officers convicted of a crime in the last decade—an average of more than one a week. After DUI and other serious driving offenses, domestic violence was the most common charge. More than a quarter of the cases appear never to have been reported in the media until now. And nearly one out of five officers in the review are still working or kept their jobs for more than a year after sentencing.
(It’s a small percentage of the 79,000 sworn officers across the state. But exactly how many cops with convictions are still on the beat today—or even the number of officers convicted over the last decade—is far from clear. Hindered by some of the strictest secrecy laws in the country, California residents don’t really know who is carrying a gun and patrolling their streets.)