First officer is convicted of murder since Washington state law eased prosecution of police

via Reddit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17056255

An officer in upstate New York shot and killed a teen fleeing while pointing a replica gun, police said Saturday.

Nowacki was listed as a member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government extremist group that played a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He has a series of complaints against him, including excessive use of force, personnel violations, and allegations of misconduct, such as making racist remarks to South Side activists that stem from 2007 which he was minimally scolded for, records show.

In 2020, Nowacki was reprimanded for making a series of Facebook posts during the pandemic that criticized the police command staff, mocked an online dashboard that tracks public sentiment toward the department and showed him wearing a cloth mask, according to the Sun-Times and WBEZ investigation.

The Sun-Times reported last month the officer and eight others with ties to the Oath Keepers will avoid punishment. Neighbors and activists have repeatedly called for Nowacki to be fired.

Linas told the crowd she wasn’t aware of the allegations or the investigation into the officer until it was brought up at the meeting. She said some of the officer’s social media posts were concerning, but the process of firing an officer is overseen by the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Chicago Police Board.

Video of his arrest obtained by our Target 7 team shows the officer repeatedly punching the man until he’s covered in blood.

It happened March 30, 2022, when former deputy James Wright arrested Joshua Barricks for skateboarding on a highway and public intoxication.

Barricks’ attorney explained the alleged crimes don’t fit the beating that followed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/23880779

Julian Lewis didn’t pull over for the Georgia State Patrol cruiser flashing its blue lights behind him on a rural highway. He still didn’t stop after pointing a hand out the window and turning onto a darkened dirt road as the trooper sounded his siren.

Five minutes into a pursuit that began over a broken taillight, the 60-year-old Black man was dead — shot in the forehead by the white trooper who fired a single bullet mere seconds after forcing Lewis to crash into a ditch. Trooper Jake Thompson insisted he pulled the trigger as Lewis revved the engine of his Nissan Sentra and jerked his steering wheel as if trying to mow him down.

“I had to shoot this man,” Thompson can be heard telling a supervisor on video recorded by his dash-mounted camera at the shooting scene in rural Screven County, midway between Savannah and Augusta. “And I’m just scared.”

But new investigative details obtained by The Associated Press and the never-before-released dashcam video of the August 2020 shooting have raised fresh questions about how the trooper avoided prosecution with nothing more than a signed promise never to work in law enforcement again. Use-of-force experts who reviewed the footage for AP said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.

The investigators also asked Hair for permission to check his uniforms for semen.

“I don’t know my rights. Do I have to?” the former officer asked. “I don’t think I want to do that.”

I plead the right to no blacklight searches!

"The arrest, she was informed, was for a peaceful sit-in she had attended at the Toronto office of Awz Ventures three months earlier, in January.

Suzanne is not the protester’s real name, and The Breach has agreed to keep her anonymous for fear of professional retribution.

Awz, an investment fund led by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is behind a facial recognition tech being used by the Israeli military to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza."...

And the appeal.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/23-10425/23-10425-2024-06-05.html

Sylvan Plowright filed a lawsuit against Miami-Dade County, its police chief, and two of its police officers after one of the officers, Sergio Cordova, fatally shot Plowright’s dog, Niles, during an investigation. The district court dismissed Plowright’s complaint, concluding that Cordova was entitled to qualified immunity because he did not violate any clearly established right when he shot Niles.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit disagreed with the lower court's decision. The court held that the use of deadly force against a domestic animal constitutes a seizure of its owner’s property subject to the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement. The court found that under the facts alleged in the complaint, no reasonable officer in Cordova’s position could have believed that Niles posed an imminent danger, and therefore, his decision to shoot Niles falls short of that requirement. The court reversed the dismissal of Plowright’s § 1983 claim against Cordova and remanded for further proceedings. The court also reversed the dismissal of Plowright’s claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress against Cordova. However, the court affirmed the dismissal of Plowright’s intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress claim against a second officer, as well as his claims against the county and its police chief.

https://lindatirado.substack.com/p/story-thirty-nine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Tirado

https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/05/26/minneapolis-settles-lawsuit-with-linda-tirado-journalist-blinded-in-one-eye-during-may-2020-unrest/

"Pursuant to Ohio law, Plaintiffs drafted their amendment and summary, collected their one thousand qualified supporting signatures, and filed it with the Ohio Attorney General, David Yost. On at least six occasions, Yost declined to certify Plaintiffs’ summary."

Tellingly, the AG’s office invoked sovereign immunity as another option to escape this lawsuit and the proposed injunction. Sovereign immunity is one of several immunities the ballot measure hopes to eradicate. If the AG detected any irony when raising this immunity, it certainly didn’t stop him from invoking it.

In a rare instance of too much transparency, an Ohio police department released the precise movements of a particular vehicle in response to a public records request.

Seven uniformed law enforcement officers, most of them in NYPD gear, cursing, jumping over the store counter and charging at a shopkeeper after he asked them for a court order.

“Asking for a court order is not an obstruction of justice,” Zissou said, adding that the shopkeeper was asserting his constitutional rights. “This is restarting the war on drugs under the guise of a civil process.”