Search Results: police violence (114)

Marvin Booker, who was killed at the hands of Denver Police while in jail.

More than three years after the filing of an excessive-force lawsuit on behalf of Marvin Booker, who died in Denver jail, the Denver City Council voted last night to pay Booker’s family $6 million.
This incident is hardly an isolated one. The original suit documents a slew of local law-enforcement brutality complaints, with the vast majority of them ending in settlements. There are so many cases, in fact, that it’s going to take two posts to share them all. Denver Westword first fifteen, featuring photos and text from the complaint.

Julian Harris, a rookie officer in the Dallas Police Department’s South Central Patrol Division, was arrested Thursday morning after police were called to meet with an injured woman at Dallas’ Charlton Methodist Hospital. DPD detectives say that a fight between Harris and the woman at Harris’ Dallas apartment escalated into violence that left the woman hospitalized with serious injuries.
Harris was booked into Dallas County Jail just after 11 a.m. for aggravated assault. An emergency protective order was also issued to keep him away from the woman. In May, just nine weeks after Harris graduated from the police academy, he and another officer were praised for helping rescue a group of hooky-playing boys from a flooding creek.
The Dallas Observer has more.

 

The Stoner Blog

 

Worth Repeating
 
By Ron Marczyk, RN
 
Alcoholism and suicide kill more police officers than on the job violence!
Could substituting marijuana for alcohol use greatly decrease rates of burnout, alcoholism, suicide, depression and divorce, domestic violence and PTSD among the nation’s police officers? Police have on average life expectancies 10 years less than the average person; they also kill themselves at higher rates than the average American.
Marijuana is an exit drug for alcohol abuse and is also “an anti-suicide medicine.”
So why not allow police officers to use the safest recreational drug known to science?

Graphic: Chico Police Officers’ Association

​Members of the Chico Police Officers’ Association have revealed themselves to be some real grandstanding hot-doggers. These “public servants,” the lowest-paid of whom makes $70,000 a year straight out of your taxpayer pocket, are refusing to do their jobs.

Did you know police officers got to pick which laws they enforce? Did you know these big-bellied buffoons in blue, if they personally disapprove of a law, feel entitled to ignore the damn thing? Hell, maybe we should have all gone into law enforcement, if it’s that cushy a gig.

These drama queens, apparently trying to make some sort of point but mostly just ending up with “we’re a bunch of unprofessional ass-bags,” have sent a letter to Chico, California City Councilman Mark Sorensen stating that under federal law, they cannot be involved in any part of the city’s recent commercial growing and marijuana selling ordinance.

Photo: AE
Police fire percussion stun bombs and rubber bullets at the Marcha da Maconha protesters, São Paulo, Brazil, May 21, 2011

Prohibited from holding a “March for Marijuana,” cannabis advocates in Brazil’s largest city had agreed with police to protest instead in defense of freedom of expression. But minutes after allowing the march, the Military Police brutally attacked the unarmed demonstrators with stun bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets.
About 1,000 people showed up for the rally Saturday in São Paulo’s financial heart. Television images showed riot troops charging toward the protesters when they tried to march down the busy Paulista Avenue. 

Protesters, journalists covering the event, drivers who happened to be traveling in the opposite direction of the march and people who were simply walking down the street at the time became victims of police violence, reports Ricardo Galhardo at Último Segundo.

Henrique Carneiro, a professor of history at the University of São Paulo who was taking part in the march, was injured after being hit in the head with a percussion stun bomb and had to be taken to the hospital.

Photo: LEAP
The late Corporal Ed Toatley, left, with former narcotics officer Neill Franklin, now of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

​Peace Officers Memorial Day is this week, and some cops are saying we need to legalize drugs to stop police from dying in the failed “Drug War.”

Too many law enforcers are killed in the line of duty enforcing a senseless and unwinnable War On Drugs, according to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which is calling for the legalization and regulation of all drugs.
They’re telling stories about their fallen friends and colleagues to back up their case.
“When one of my best friends was killed doing an undercover drug purchase, it opened my eyes to the fact that not only are these drug laws ineffective, but they lead to brave and dedicated law enforcers losing their lives,” said Neill Franklin, a 34-year veteran of the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department, now LEAP’s executive director.

Photo: AFP
Marisol Valles, 20, was the only person in town willing to serve as police chief. Now she is reportedly fleeing to the U.S.

​​The 20-year-old college student who was called “Mexico’s bravest woman” after she was named police chief of a small Mexican town when nobody else would take the job has reportedly fled and is seeking asylum in the United States.

Marisol Valles “received death threats from a criminal group that wanted to force her to work for them,” a relative told AFP on Thursday. However, an official from the town of Praxedis, which is just across the border from Fort Hancock, Texas, denied that their young police chief was leaving town.
Town Secretary Andres Morales told the El Paso Times that Valles had asked for some personal days off to tend to her child, but is expected to be back at work on Monday, reports CBS News. As for the reports of Valles seeking asylum in the U.S., “Right now, those are rumors,” Morales said. (Note to the credulous: this could be a cover story to throw off her would-be assassins.)

Photo: AFP
Erika Gandara, the last police officer in Guadalupe, Mexico, has been kidnapped and her house set afire.

​Gunmen have kidnapped a 28-year-old woman who was the last police officer in the town of Guadalupe, Mexico, close to the violent northern border city Ciudad Juarez, according to Mexican officials.

About 10 unidentified gunmen last Thursday set fire to the home of Erika Gandara and torched both cars parked outside for good measure before abducting her, witnesses told the state of Chihuahua prosecutor’s office, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
All of Gandara’s colleagues on the Guadalupe police force had already either resigned and fled, or were killed by drug cartels.
Guadalupe, population 9,000, is located about 60 kilometers southeast of Ciudad Juarez, in an area frequently used by smugglers to transport drugs into the United States.

Photo: Tomas Bravo/Reuters
Bullet-riddled patrol trucks and a pockmarked building are the aftermath of an attack at a police station in Los Ramones, about 43 miles from Monterrey, Mexico.

​Every cop in a small northern Mexican town quit Tuesday after gunmen heavily sprayed their brand new police headquarters Monday night.

All 14 members of the Los Ramones police force reportedly resigned, according to MSNBC. Nobody was answering the phone at the office of Mayor Santos Salinas, The Associated Press reported.
Gunmen fired more than 1,000 rounds at the building’s facade, reports Noroeste. Six grenades, three of which detonated, were also thrown at the building, according to the the newspaper.

Photo: Borderland Beat
Trust me, you don’t wanna be police chief of Guadalupe.

​A 20-year-old female student majoring in criminology has been named police chief of a violence-torn northern Mexican border town — because nobody else wanted the job.

Marisol Valles became director of municipal public security of Guadalupe on October 18 “since she was the only person to accept the position,” according to the mayor’s office, reports AFP. Guadalupe is home to about 10,000 people.
Valles is studying criminology in Mexico’s most violent city, Ciudad Juarez, about 37 miles west of Guadalupe. Three years of ongoing turf battles between rival drug gangs have claimed 6,500 lives in Juarez alone.
Much of Chihuahua, the Mexican state within which Guadalupe is located, has suffered from the drug cartel-related violence. The mayor of Guadalupe was murdered in June and police officers and security agents have been killed, with some of them being beheaded.
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