Free Republic

A rash of animal shootings by police officers nationwide has law-enforcement agencies running for cover amid growing public outrage that could force state legislatures to require greater accountability from men and women in uniform. Police in Utah shot a family’s dog while searching for a lost boy, prompting hundreds of pet owners to protest June 28 in front of the Salt Lake City Police Department headquarters. They carried signs demanding “justice for Geist,” a 110-pound Weimaraner shot by a city cop within the dog’s fenced-in back yard. The “missing” boy was later found sleeping in his home. State police in...

Law enforcement agencies across the globe are taking a page out of the hacker's handbook, using targets' own phones and computers to spy on them with methods traditionally associated with cybercriminals, two computer security groups said Tuesday. Drawing on a cache of leaked documents and months of forensic work, two reports about the private Italian firm Hacking Team expose a global network of malicious software implants operated by police and spy agencies in dozens of countries. "This in many ways is the police surveillance of the now and the future," said Morgan Marquis-Boire, a security researcher with Citizen Lab and...

A cellphone video emerged this weekend of a California cop appearing to brutally beat a woman for no discernible reason on the side of a highway. CBS Los Angeles reports that the video, filmed on Tuesday evening, depicts a California Highway Patrol officer angrily crossing the La Brea Freeway, yanking a barefooted woman down, and punching her “more than 11 times in the face.” As of now, the CHP says that it is investigating the incident, but said in a statement that “since there is an ongoing investigation, it would be premature to comment on this specific video segment without...

More in contemporary policing practice keeping you and yours safe and sound, out of Mason County, West Virginia, reported in the Charleston Daily Mail:It starts with a bunch of police cars chasing a suspect in a car down a not-much-traveled rural road. A family dog goes to investigate when eight police officers and their dog in tactical gear emerge from the woods near the Sweat family home. Then: [Ginger Sweat's] 6-year-old Basset hound/beagle mix, Willy Pete, left the porch and made his way toward the troopers. The dog, she said, suffered from arthritis in his back legs and was not...

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments -------------- Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies.

On Mother’s Day Tommy Yancy, father of two, was pulled over for not having a front license plate. What transpired beyond that point is not totally clear, but his injuries resulted in his death. Yancy, 32, was a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. There has been almost zero media coverage of the incident. A local publication, Imperial Valley Press, offers only a sidenote about his family raising money for his memorial and this: The 32-year-old Yancy died following an altercation with law enforcement during a traffic stop May 11 in Imperial. The circumstances around the death and the traffic...

Bystanders file suit after being detained by Aurora police looking for suspect

HAMPTON, Va. (WAVY) – A Hampton police officer shot an aggressive dog Friday while responding to a call about a stolen moped. According to the Hampton Police Division, the officer responded to the 1200 block of Pansy Street around 9 p.m. The person who called about the moped was walking with his unleashed dog toward the officer. Police said that’s when the dog aggressively charged at the officer, who feared for his safety and shot the dog once in the upper body. The medium-sized mixed breed dog was taken to a local animal hospital for treatment. The officer was not...

~On the other hand, tea-wise, the Johnson County Sheriff's Department is taking it to a whole other level. Two years ago, at 7.30 one April morning, a sleepy Bob Harte staggered to the front door of his home in Leawood, Kansas to answer a knock and found a fully-armed SWAT team outside preparing to use the battering ram. They shoved him to the floor, surrounded him with pointing rifles, and the whole rigmarole began... On the other hand, at least the Hartes and their kids are still alive. I've written often about the increasing tendency of American cops to police...

Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch. They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office...

<p>EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. (AP) — A southwestern Illinois state trooper is facing a felony aggravated battery charge after authorities say he strip-searched a man along the side of a road during a traffic stop.</p> <p>The (Belleville) News-Democrat reports 32-year-old Cory Alberson was released on $20,000 bail on Monday after he pleaded not guilty.</p>

In 21st-century America, the most innocent of activities could have a SWAT team busting down your door. Reason profiles the Harte family, who were the victims of a SWAT home invasion after police raided their garbage cans (h/t Ben Domench). An unreliable field test falsely identified Addie Harte’s trashed teabags as marijuana, and SWAT leapt into action. The Hartes didn’t just suffer the trauma of the raid—they had to spend $25,000 just to find out why they were targeted.

Hours after hundreds protested the Albuquerque Police Department’s use of force Tuesday evening, officers opened fire on a man near Central and Coors. The man died at the hospital, police said Wednesday morning. He becomes the 23rd man since 2010 shot and killed by Albuquerque Police, which is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for its use of force Neighbors at the scene of Tuesday’s shooting were shocked and outraged. They said officers shot the man while he was unarmed and talking on a cellphone. A video shot by a neighbor appears to show a man in a...

Gun owners beware. Squirt gun owners, that includes you. If a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team SUSPECTS you of crime, you may receive a late-night visit from an armed SWAT team. That’s right, an armed and militant SWAT team could trot right through your front door as you slumber this summer. No-knock warrants are increasingly used by military-style police units, like SWAT teams for drug raids. Unfortunately, SWAT teams can obtain these warrants too easily from judges and consequently do not always perform sufficient due diligence. As a result, tens of thousands of decent, law-abiding American citizens are surprised...

Briefly, here's the story from the owner's neighbor. A Walton County Sheriff's deputy shot my friends dog last night while the dog was in his own yard. The officer said he shot him because "he had that look". This was one of the sweetest dogs ever...a big clumsy pup that would lick your face off. Yes he was a blue nose pit bull but he was a PUPPY who loves to play and chew stuff up! The dog actually belonged to Taylor, a 5 year old little girl...now COMPLETELY broken hearted, not to mention confused because a policeman, someone she...

SALISBURY — A 92-year-old retired minister has filed a civil complaint against a Salisbury Police officer claiming the officer used unreasonable force in tackling him and breaking two bones. The Rev. J.W. Loy Jr., who had been a resident at the Salisbury Gardens assisted-living facility at the time, was hospitalized for four days after the April 4, 2013, incident. “This isn’t about anybody but my daddy and a police officer who stepped over the line,” said Loy’s daughter, Shari Keller. Filed Feb. 26 in Rowan County Superior Court, Loy’s suit names Police Officer Chris Hamm and the city of Salisbury...

Florida police officers are accused of using a cellphone tracking and monitoring device without court permission, saying the device was on loan and they signed a confidentiality agreement with the manufacturer.

DURHAM, N.C. — A 20-year-old sophomore communications major at North Carolina Central University, Lewis James Little sat in the Durham County jail for a month last year after he did what he says he thought was the right thing. He and several friends had been visiting the home of a childhood friend on Melbourne Street in east Durham on the night of June 21, 2013, when, he says, they discovered 25-year-old Michael Lee dead in the middle of the road. "I called the police – when none of the other guys were even thinking about it – trying to do...

“In the military mind set, the “drug war” has moved from metaphor to real life, with American streets as the “front,” American citizens as the “enemy” and law enforcement officers as the warriors. At the direction of Congress, the Pentagon has spent the past 20 years providing military hardware free of charge to police departments throughout the nation, all for the stated purpose of fighting the War on Drugs. Billions of dollars worth of “surplus” military grade equipment has been transferred, literally enabling law enforcement in towns both large and small to serve warrants, control crowds and “keep the peace”...

A six-month-long investigation in central California culminated this week with the arrests of five members of the King City Police Department, the former police chief and the owner of a local towing company. According to the Monterey County district attorney, for at least three-and-a-half years the city's top police officers participated in a scheme that took advantage of poor area Hispanics by essentially stealing their cars for profit. Investigators say King City police ordered hundreds of vehicles to be impounded — most often those driven by Hispanic immigrants — and then either kept the cars for themselves or re-sold them...