Deputy TASERs 61 year old with lukemia at traffic stop

From Disclosure News,

Deputy Hal Pargin, shown left at a county board meeting last summer, affected a traffic stop last night on one Dennis Thacker, 61, who is currently suffering leukemia. With Thacker were his grandson, Blaine Steber, 3, and a neighbor, Abby Organ, 12. They were going from a ballgame to McDonald’s in Lawrenceville and were eastbound on 250 when Pargin pulled Thacker over for speeding.

Thacker provided Pargin his license and Pargin was apparently totally aware that it was Thacker he was dealing with and not some wild crazyman.

However, Thacker didn’t have his insurance proof immediately available. He had reportedly gotten out of the vehicle and was talking to Pargin, telling him he’d go back to get his insurance cards. When he retrieved them from his vehicle and returned to Pargin, the deputy reportedly started yelling at Thacker to “get back in the car!” inexplicably. Witnesses say all Thacker was trying to do was offer Pargin his proof of insurance.

Instead of taking it, Pargin, without shouting that he was about to deploy his TASER (per department policy), simply TASERed the older man, who began shouting “No! Stop it!” and then fell to the ground.

Witnesses say Thacker was TASERed a total of four times, and apparently Pargin was able to reload the cartridges on the TASER gun, as it was reported witnesses pulled a total of eight barbs from the sickly man.

To make matters worse, once at the jail, his blood pressure had risen and he requested to be taken to the hospital, which was initially refused. The only reason Thacker managed to get to the hospital and be eventually released? The mother of the neighbor's child had connections to the County Board.


The positive thing here is that all of the TASERs have been confiscated by the sheriff and the incident is under investigation.

Pittsburg Police beat black honor student

"Their actions were correct and law-abiding by everything they received in their training," FOP Vice President Charles Hanlon said. "The demand by special interest groups that they be removed from the streets is an insult to their hard work."

This is the response by the Fraternal Order of the Police about the three officers that brutally beat an unarmed, 5'-7", 150lbs honors student in Pittsburg. Oh, and he was also black, and the officers were white.

From CNN:

Police, in a criminal complaint on the incident, say "closed fist strikes" were used by the undercover police officers, but only to subdue the teenager as he tried to get away.

Terez Miles said her son, Jordan Miles, who is black, thought his life was in jeopardy when three white men jumped out of a car on the night of January 11 as he walked not far from his home.

"My son tried to run thinking his life was in jeopardy," Terez Miles said. "He made three steps before he slipped and fell." After that, she said, the police used a stun gun and beat him, pulling out a chunk of his hair.

...

The officers "delivered 2-3 closed fist strikes to Miles' head/face with still no effect," and then a "knee strike to Miles' head causing him to momentarily stop resisting," so that he could be handcuffed, the document says.

...

The complaint says the police officers believed Miles was engaged in criminal activity and possibly armed with a "large heavy object." The object turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Miles was charged with aggravated assault, loitering, resisting arrest and escape.

The officers have been taken off of plainclothes duty and are back in uniform, but no other disciplinary action has been taken as of yet.

Details on the community reaction on trueslant.

NY Police Confuse Candy for Crack, Hold Two Men for a Week

Found this today on officer.com.

New York police are refusing to apologize to two men arrested for drug possession and held for a week over what turned out to be a bag of candy.

Neal Wallerstein, a lawyer for Jose Pena, 48, and Cesar Rodriguez, 33, said the men stopped at a bodega before going to a party the night of Jan. 15 and police outside the store asked to search their van when the men emerged, the New York Post reported Monday.

"I said 'Go search.' I even opened the door," Rodriguez said.

He said police discovered a Hello Kitty sandwich bag full of white powder in the vehicle and handcuffed the men despite their protests that the powder was Coco Candy, a popular coconut-flavored confection.

The men were charged with possession of crack cocaine and taken to jail. Pena was held for three days, but Rodriguez spent five days in jail before police completed testing on the candy and dropped the charges.

Wallerstein said police should have realized the error more quickly.

"That's the reason why they have a field-test kit," he said.

The police department said it has no official comment on the case.

A few more details, including a $2M lawsuit, can be found here.

Not all in Uniform are Heroes

This is a blog where I hope to catalog abuses of those in uniform, or those connected to those in uniform. This will mean a majority of the posts will be links to stories of police misconduct and abuses by soldiers, but I hope to also touch on our criminal justice system and military spending.

This blog was inspired in part by an extremely depressing OpenLeft post called This Is Why We Torture, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety. In it, the author argues that torture is normalized in our society not only against the nondescript evildoer in Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, but against in our own country against protesters, the poor, the mentally ill, and numerous others. We as a society place a great deal of trust on those who wear uniforms, and not all of those that put on the uniform deserve it. I do not believe this to be a case of "a few bad apples," but a systemic problem.

However, anecdotes speak louder than statistics, so anecdotes you will get.