Posts tagged brutality
Woman tasered for blocking McDonalds Drive-Thru
HOPE MILLS, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina deputies say they used a stun gun on a woman who blocked a McDonalds drive-thru for 20 minutes after employees refused to serve her because she broke in line.
Authorities say 37-year-old Evangeline Lucca bypassed the order screen and the line at the restaurant in Hope Mills, about 60 miles south of Raleigh, and pulled directly up to the pick-up window Friday afternoon.
Cumberland County deputies say employees refused to take her order and told her to go to the back of the line. She refused to move, and police were called.
Authorities say Lucca was shocked after she blocked the line for 20 minutes. Her 3-year-old daughter was taken into protective custody.
Lucca was charged with second-degree trespass. A phone listing for her couldn’t be found.
(Source: Guardian)
Ranger zaps off-leash dog walker with shock weapon
A Montana man walking two lapdogs off leash was hit with an electric-shock gun by a National Park Service ranger after allegedly giving a false name and trying to walk away, authorities said Monday.
The park ranger encountered Gary Hesterberg with his two small dogs Sunday afternoon at Rancho Corral de Tierra, which was recently incorporated into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, said Howard Levitt, a spokesman for the park service.
Hesterberg, who said he didn’t have identification with him, allegedly gave the ranger a false name, Levitt said.
The ranger, who wasn’t identified, asked Hesterberg to remain at the scene, Levitt said. He tried several times to leave, and finally the ranger “pursued him a little bit and she did deploy her” electric-shock weapon, Levitt said. “That did stop him.”
San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies and paramedics then arrived and Hesterberg gave his real name, the park spokesman said.
Hesterberg, whose age was not available, was arrested on suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order, having dogs off-leash and knowingly providing false information, Levitt said.
He was then released. He did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Witnesses said the use of a stun gun and the arrest seemed excessive for someone walking two small dogs off leash.
“It was really scary,” said Michelle Babcock, who said she had seen the incident as she and her husband were walking their two border collies. “I just felt so bad for him.”
Babcock said Hesterberg had repeatedly asked the ranger why he was being detained. She didn’t answer him, Babcock said.
“He just tried to walk away. She never gave him a reason,” Babcock said.
The ranger shot Hesterberg in the back with her shock weapon as he walked off, Babcock said.
“We were like in disbelief,” she said. “It didn’t make any sense.”
Rancho Corral de Tierra has long been an off-leash walking spot for local dog owners. In December, the area became part of the national park system, which requires that all dogs be on a leash, Levitt said.
The ranger was trying to educate residents of the rule, Levitt said.
The park service is investigating the incident, he said.
(Source: sfgate.com)
‘I’m a cop, I can do whatever I want ’ off-duty policeman shouts before ‘executing guy in bar’ over a game of darts
Detained: Off-duty cop deputy Dayle Long, 42, allegedly shot Vanettes
An off-duty police officer has been charged with executing a man in a sports bar - after an argument over a game of darts.
Riverside County sheriff’s deputy Dayle Long, 42, allegedly shot Samuel Vanettes, 36, three times, leaving him to die on the floor of the bar in Murrieta, California.
It is reported that Long, who had been drinking alone, struck up a conversation with Vanettes and his friends at Spelly’s Bar and Grille before the shooting.
An altercation allegedly broke out after the police officer told one of the friends ‘I’m better at darts than you are’, Chris Hull, 39, told Patch.com.
‘My buddy says, “Aw, you suck at darts”. (The man) says, “That’s why I’m a cop, I can do whatever I want to do”.’
Hull tsaid his friend asked; ‘Really, you can do anything?’
The police officer then pulled out his gun, Hull claimed and after the group repeatedly asked him to put it away he ‘pops three rounds into my friend Sam’.
The ten-year department veteran appeared at the Southwest Justice Center in French Valley in a red prison uniform, on Friday charged with murder.
Vanettes, a gas station cashier, was trying to keep the peace in the bar when he was gunned down, John Hall, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s office, according to Patch.com report.
Long and another man were in an argument when Vanettes had stepped in to break up the fight.
‘He came in to act as a peacemaker and ended up getting shot,’ Hall said.
He added that the victim was unarmed and showing no aggressive behavior.
According to a family member of the victim, who spoke to the LA Times, Vanettes was at the bar with his sister, her boyfriend and another friend when he started playing darts with Long.
‘They were getting along good,’ the relative said Vanettes sister had told.
‘When the cop started having more whiskey, he started getting belligerent.
‘He lifted his shirt up and showed his gun. Sam was standing by the dartboard.
‘He said, “You don’t want to do this; you’re a nice guy”. And he shot him. That’s what I’m told.’
If convicted, Long could face 50 years to life behind bars.
(Source: Daily Mail)
Police Tie Up 62yr Old Man Then Pepper Spray Him To Death
No doubt you’ve heard the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture of 62-year-old Nick Christie could be worth thousands of dollars when a jury sees it.
The photo shows the Ohio man restrained inside the Lee County Jail with his body covered in pepper spray.
“This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured,” says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.
The photo, which was obtained by FOX 13’s investigative unit, was taken in the final hours of Christie’s life.
The District 21 Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide because he had been restrained and sprayed with pepper sprayed by law enforcement officers. But to this day, nobody has ever been charged with a crime, and the Lee County State Attorney cleared the sheriff’s office of any wrong doing.
It’s been more than two and a half years and his wife still can’t accept what happened.
“I was shocked. This was something out of a horror movie,” says Joyce Christie. She said her husband was depressed and was showing signs of erratic behavior a few days before leaving for Florida.
She called authorities and pleaded with them to take her husband to a hospital and be given his medications. Instead, he was taken to jail for disorderly intoxication.
Her lawsuit alleges he was pepper sprayed 10 times over a 48-hour period, at times while in a restraint chair.
Tom DePolis spent more than 30 years in law enforcement at the Tampa Police Department and Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. He’s seen first-hand the effects of pepper spray and knows its limitations. He can see no reason for deputies to repeatedly pepper spray Nick Christie since he was already in custody.
“The purpose is to temporarily incapacitate someone — temporarily, that’s the key word, so you can restrain them,” says DePolis.
Monshay Gibbs was a deputy trainee at the jail at the time. In a video deposition, she testified that she thought the way Nick Christie was treated was excessive.
“He had a spit mask on and was naked,” she said on the video while under oath. Gibbs testified that Christie pleaded with guards to take off the spit mask because he couldn’t breathe.
He later died at the hospital. His heart failed from the shock of the pepper spray. The Lee County Sheriffs Office declined to comment on the story because of Joyce Christie’s wrongful death lawsuit, which is scheduled for trial the middle of next year.
(Source: youtube.com)
Police ‘killed deaf cyclist with stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop’
A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.
Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.
The caller told dispatchers that the man appeared drunk and that it looked like he had hurt himself.
Officers said they repeatedly told Mr Anthony to get off his bike, but when he didn’t respond, they shocked him.
The state Office of the Medical Examiner hasn’t yet determined a cause of death.
Family members claim Mr Anthony had hearing problems and suffered from seizures. Now they’re considering whether to file a lawsuit against the town.
His brother Michael said: ‘What did they tase him for? It’s hurting me. It’s really hurting me.’
Scotland Neck Mayor James Mills said he wouldn’t blame the family for suing.
‘There has been no information that this man was a threat to anybody,’ he said.
‘If I was a family member, I’m sure I’d be thinking the same way.’
Mills said he has tried to get information from the police department about what happened to Mr Anthony, but they have turned him away.
Police Chief Joe Williams says the officer is on administrative leave while the SBI conducts its investigation.
He declined to comment further
Mr Anthony’s niece, Porsha Anthony said: ‘I’m sad. I lost an uncle.
‘Hopefully it will be rectified so that not another family in Scotland Neck has to go through this’.
The State Bureau
Met police Tasered man carrying toy gun on train
Metropolitan police officers fired a Taser nine times at a man sitting on a train in the belief he was carrying a weapon in his briefcase.
The use of Tasers on a train comes as the commissioner of the Met police, Bernard Hogan-Howe, faces questions over his suggestion that more of his officers should be armed with the weapons.
Hogan-Howe said this week he wanted to see more Tasers in response cars and Scotland Yard has confirmed work is going on to review the availability of Tasers for its officers.
Hogan-Howe was challenged about his statement about Tasers by members of the Metropolitan Police Authority on Thursday.
In an at times rowdy exchange, MPA member Cindy Butts urged caution saying: “We will see ourselves sleepwalking into a style of policing we have fought long and hard to move away from.”
But Jennette Arnold said she supported the use of Tasers. “If a Taser had been used in the incident with Mark Duggan [who was shot dead by police in Tottenham, north London in August] that man would be alive today,” she said.
Justice Livingstone said he was Tasered four times to the chest and when that did not affect him, officers Tasered him three times to the back of the head and twice to his hand, as he sat on a train in Norwood Junction in south-east London last week.
When he was finally detained police found a toy gun inside his briefcase. Livingstone told the Guardian he had bought it earlier that day as a present for his son.
Police were called to the station after an emergency call from rail staff that there was a man on the platform waving what appeared to be a gun.
British Transport police, supported by firearms officers from the Met, arrived at the station and boarded the train.
BTP said Tasers were used by Met officers to restrain the man when he failed to comply with officers’ requests to remain seated. Scotland Yard said a Taser was fired several times after the suspect moved towards officers while shouting and refusing to move his hands from his pockets.
The Met police and British Transport Police said the suspect was in possession of an “imitation” firearm.
Livingstone, who said he had no history of mental health problems, had bought the toy gun earlier for his son’s birthday. “It was 99p,” he said.
The father of two said he had been sitting on the train when he first saw officers. “I was sitting near an elderly English man and I asked if I could read his FT. I was sitting reading the FT when these four officers rushed on to the carriage.
“Someone sitting by me raised his hands and said: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’ I saw everyone in the carriage leaving, and I picked up my briefcase and paper to get up to leave.
“The police shouted: ‘Sit down.’ So I sat down patiently. They said: ‘Open your briefcase,’ which I did. They saw the toy gun. Then a male police officer opened fire with a gun which jammed.
“So then they jumped at me and used the Taser four times at my chest. That did not have any effect, I felt no current. They then held me down, grabbed on to my head and pinned me down and shot me in the back of the head with the Taser three times and I felt the current.
“They tied my legs and took me off the train to the platform.”
Scotland Yard denied any other firearm had been used.
Livingstone said he was taken to a police station in Victoria where he claims officers made fun of what he was wearing – a long trench coat and black hat. He was stripped naked, he said, and refused access to a lawyer.
He was eventually sent to Bethlem Royal hospital in Beckenham where he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But on Wednesday, after he made an appeal to the mental health tribunal, he was released and is now at his home in south London.
Scotland Yard said attempts to physically restrain the man had failed so a Taser was deployed.
The spokesman said the man was Tasered a number of times but this seemed to have no effect. Eventually, officers were able to physically restrain the man and he was removed from the train and into BTP custody, the Met said.
BTP said its officers were called along with the Met to reports that a man was on the platform waving a gun.
Livingstone said he would be making a formal complaint about his treatment.
Police Hose Peaceful Protesters with Pepper Spray
The officer calmly pepper-sprays the protesters
A “chilling” video has surfaced online showing a police officer at a California university calmly pepper-spraying a line of sitting protesters.
The young men and women flinch and cover their faces but remain passive with their arms interlocked as onlookers shriek and scream out for the officer to stop.
The chancellor of the University of California described the video images as “chilling” and said she was forming a task force to investigate even as a faculty group called for her resignation because of the incident Friday.
“The use of the pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this,” Chancellor Linda Katehi said in a message posted on the school’s website on Saturday.
The protest was held in support of the overall Occupy Wall Street movement protesting economic inequality and in solidarity with protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, who were jabbed by police with batons on November 9.
The video images, which were circulated on YouTube and widely online, prompted immediate outrage among faculty and students, with the Davis Faculty Association saying in a letter on Saturday that Katehi should resign.
“The Chancellor’s role is to enable open and free inquiry, not to suppress it,” the faculty association said in its letter.
It called Katehi’s authorisation of police force a “gross failure of leadership”.
Katehi was expected to speak at a news conference later on Saturday.
Images of police evictions have served to galvanise support during the Occupy Wall Street movement, from the clash between protesters and police in Oakland last month that left an Iraq War veteran with serious injuries to more recent skirmishes in New York City, San Diego, Denver and Portland, Oregon.
The forcible Oakland protest eviction, the first of its kind on a large scale, marred the reputation of the city’s mayor and police department while rallying Occupy encampments nationwide beset with their own public safety and sanitation issues.
Police chiefs and mayors held conference calls to discuss containment strategies in the days after the October 25 Oakland eviction. The use of rubber bullets and tear gas dropped off, though police departments have turned to pepper spray when trying to quell large crowds.
Some of the most notorious instances went viral online, including the use of pepper spray on an 84-year-old activist in Seattle and a group of women in New York. Seattle’s mayor apologised to the activist, and the New York Police Department official shown using pepper spray on the group of women lost 10 vacation days after an internal review.
In the video of the UC Davis protest, the officer, a member of the UC Davis police force, displays a bottle before spraying its contents on the seated protesters in a sweeping motion while walking back and forth. Most of the protesters have their heads down, but at least one is hit in the face.
Some members of a crowd gathered at the scene scream and cry out. The crowd then chants, “Shame on You,” as the protesters on the ground are led away. The officers retreat minutes later with helmets on and batons drawn.
Ten people were arrested.
University spokeswoman Karen Nikos said nine people hit by pepper spray were treated at the scene. Another two were taken to hospitals and later released.
Nikos declined to release the identity of the officer in the video.
The video can be viewed at ninemsn
Woman claims laughing cops strip searched her
An Aboriginal woman who alleges she was strip searched by a number of male police officers says she was treated like a dog.
The Aboriginal Legal Service says it has lodged a complaint on behalf of Ranelle Porter, who says she was humiliated after being strip searched and forced to appear naked in front several laughing policemen in Kalgoorlie.
Under police protocols male officers are not permitted to conduct strip searches on women.
The Warburton woman was charged with failure to obey a move-on order in Kalgoorlie at the weekend and detained in the police lock-up.
Ms Porter says she feels violated.
“I’m still ashamed and still nervous,” she said.
“When I walk around I’m still thinking about my clothes being stripped in the cell, I’m still shaking,” she said.
Ms Porter says she feels like she was treated like an animal.
“Like a dog, taking the clothes make me ashamed and I was searching for my clothes to put on,” she said.
The complaint has been lodged with the Police Complaints Administration Centre and the Corruption and Crime Commission.
Police have confirmed they have received the complaint and will investigate the alleged incident.
(Source: Yahoo!)
