Case file describes the moments before police officer fatally shot newlywed firefighter in downtown KC

By DONNA McGUIRE

As he lay bleeding on a downtown Kansas City street, newlywed Anthony Bruno mouthed “Don’t let me die” to a bystander who had rolled him on his back to check two gunshot wounds.



On the pavement nearby, Police Officer Donald Hubbard felt himself drifting in and out of consciousness. Blood dripped from his broken and battered face. He tried to get up but fell back.

The bystander, who happened to be a critical care nurse in a hospital trauma unit, could not find Bruno’s pulse. She asked Hubbard to apply pressure to Bruno’s wounds while she began chest compressions. Hubbard crawled to her as sirens sounded in the distance, according to documents released Tuesday by police.

Soon an arriving police officer asked what direction the gunman had fled.

Hubbard looked up.

“I shot him,” he said.

Multiple witnesses described elements of that scene to investigators trying to piece together what led to an off-duty Kansas City police officer fatally shooting an off-duty Kansas City firefighter who had been celebrating his November wedding in the early hours of Dec. 1.

Detectives interviewed witnesses, studied two cellphone videos shot by bystanders and obtained surveillance videos from area businesses. They also took photos of a taxicab driver allegedly assaulted by Bruno moments before Hubbard’s attempted arrest of Bruno devolved into a fatal struggle.

As they do in all fatal shootings involving police, Jackson County prosecutors presented the investigators’ report to a Jackson County grand jury. The jurors voted “no true bill” on Feb. 14, ending the case without charges.

That also closed the case and allowed media to request copies of the case file, which included the videos.

The Star is posting one of those videos online, showing the final confrontation between Bruno and Hubbard, because it was key evidence considered by the grand jury. Some profanities from onlookers were edited out, as were scenes after the shooting showing Bruno. Viewer discretion is advised, as the video contains graphic scenes, including intense fighting and sounds of gunshots.

Over and over in the inch-thick case file, witnesses stories largely match one another.

Anthony Bruno, 26, and Stephanie Bruno, 29, were dressed in wedding attire as they celebrated their Nov. 16 nuptials. About 2 a.m. on Dec. 1, they had taken a cab from a restaurant to the Kansas City Marriott Downtown with Anthony’s cousin, who had been drinking heavily at the restaurant and had fallen asleep there.

The Brunos had imbibed as well, but neither was drunk, Stephanie later told police.

They wanted the cabdriver to take Anthony Bruno’s cousin home, but an argument began on how much that would cost — the meter kept running as they discussed it — and whether the cabdriver could leave the cousin on the street instead of taking him home.

Stephanie Bruno told police the cabdriver kept increasing the fare, used a derogatory word toward her and threw money back in her face.

“That’s when my husband got out of the taxi and began hitting the taxicab driver,” Stephanie Bruno told police.

She yelled at her husband to stop, she said. He quit and walked away. She stayed with Anthony’s cousin, as three men were approaching the taxi to protect the driver. The three men nearly started another fight, she said.

“The Marriott security and I both tried to keep that from turning into an altercation. The security guard after that basically told me KCPD had been called and to just stay there. So I stayed there.”

Hubbard, who was working security for the Marriott while wearing his Police Department uniform, saw the group arguing and saw Anthony Bruno leaving the area. He headed east after him.

They met up on Baltimore Avenue, between 12th and 13th streets. Hubbard said he tried to arrest Bruno, who resisted and tried to run.

“Throughout my entire contact with the suspect, I gave him numerous verbal commands to give me his hands and to stop resisting,” Hubbard told detectives later. “In my attempts to place handcuffs on the suspect, he continued to resist and we eventually went to the ground.”

At one point, Hubbard put Bruno in a neck restraint and thought Bruno had given up. But then Bruno began resisting again, trying to stand while holding onto Hubbard.

“That’s when I noticed two people filming nearby,” Hubbard recounted. “I told these individuals that I was by myself and pleaded for them to call for help.”

Bruno told Hubbard he shouldn’t have hit him, Hubbard said.

“He then somehow flipped me over onto my back and the subject began punching me on the left side of my face and head,” Hubbard told detectives. “He was on top of me and I was in an extremely vulnerable position and I was exhausted from the struggle with the suspect.

“I don’t know how many times he struck me, but I started to black out and saw lines across my eyes. He continued to strike me and I started to lose consciousness and I believed the suspect was not going to stop hitting me until he killed me.

“I feared for my life and I drew my weapon, fired two shots center mass.”

A couple walking nearby included the nurse. They didn’t see the start of the confrontation.

“But at the very end, the cop was underneath the civilian and had his head smashed very hard against the cement by the civilian,” the nurse later told detectives. “I did not see any other circumstance than to shoot him. I mean he had to do something because he was gonna get a head bleed from the traumatic brain injury.”

On the cellphone video released by police, the witnesses can be heard yelling at Bruno to stop hitting the officer.

Two gunshots stopped the action. Bullets hit Bruno in the chest, according to the autopsy. One hit the heart, diaphragm and liver.

The nurse, Hubbard and other officers helped with CPR until a Fire Department medic crew arrived. Bruno was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Hubbard was taken to a hospital as well. His injuries included a broken eye socket, a fractured cheekbone, a cut above his left eye that required two stitches and loss of feeling in the left side of his face.

He has returned to work, police said Tuesday.

Oregon Police Push State Law-Violating ID Scanners On Nightclub And Bar Owners

Oregon seems to be turning into a bastion of privacy, much to the chagrin of various law enforcement agencies. As we recently covered, a district court ruled that the DEA's warrantless access of its drug prescription database (achieved through "administrative subpoenas" that require no judicial approval or probable cause) was unconstitutional. In Oregon, at least, it appears our nation's foremost drug warriors will need to comply with the Fourth Amendment.

Now, there's a pushback against another warrantless collection of data by local police departments. Techdirt reader zip sends in this Williamette Week story detailing the ID scanners police are actively pushing on bar and club owners, supposedly in an effort to cut down on underage drinking.

Multnomah County and Portland police this week suspended a new program that supplied data-gathering ID scanners to Old Town bars after WW raised questions about whether it was legal.

The state-funded program allowed Portland police to equip downtown bars and clubs in recent weeks with high-tech ID scanners that captured patrons’ names, ages and photos for upload to a central database, which police could then access.

The data collected is stored for 90 days and is compiled from the many scanners being utilized across the city. The scanners themselves are manufactured by Servall Data Systems out of Alberta, Canada. (Servall Data Systems also has access to the data.) Law enforcement agencies are given access to the collected data at any time requested (no subpoena or warrant needed) according to Servall's spokesperson.

A grant given to a local charity by the state of Oregon helped fund the purchase of these scanners, which were then pushed on local business owners by police departments. Unsurprisingly, some club owners balked at tracking their customers.

A few club owners turned down the free scanners. One owner says he added surveillance cameras when police asked. “I happily installed those. But this was going too far,” the club owner says. “It felt invasive.”

Not that every club owner feels the same. Some have purchased the scanners with their own funds, in part because it's another step they can take to protect their liquor licenses.

The company cites drops in crime in other cities in defense of the scanners. That the scanners have a deterrent quality and that they make crime investigation easier are hardly disputable. But the problem is the warrantless access to collected data, and more specifically in this case, the fact that this sort of data harvesting by businesses violates Oregon state law.

“It really is an illuminating example of where our privacy laws are, and our disconnect in a modern digital world,” says Becky Straus, lobbyist for ACLU Oregon.

Straus is referring to a 2009 Oregon law that limits companies’ legal ability to collect, store or share information from ID scanners. Straus says she was unaware Portland bars were collecting such data, or that police could grab it.

“We had wondered, when we wandered around Old Town, whether bars were complying with the swiping law,” she says.

That bar owners may have been unaware that their data collection violated state law isn't all that surprising. It's not really as much of a day-to-day part of their business as staying within the confines of their liquor licenses and complying with food safety laws. But, as Willamette Week discovered when it began investigating these scanners, many of those who should have been aware of this law had no idea they were actively encouraging business owners to break it.

Neither Portland police nor the city attorney was aware of the 2009 law until WW raised the question. “We‘re glad when someone brings this up. We want to do what’s best to protect public safety and protect people’s rights,” Multnomah County spokesman David Austin tells WW.

Austin said the county is meeting with state and local law enforcement in the coming week to determine how to move forward .

The spokesman for the Portland police department claims it's not the department's problem if these laws are violated.

He says the police don’t own the scanners, and so aren’t responsible for how they were used.

“It’s an issue between the bars and the company,” he says. “We recommend a lot of things to people, but it’s up to the individual to make sure it’s compliant.”

I'm not sure what part of that statement is more callously irresponsible, the fact that the PD will "recommend" actions and technology without ensuring it complies with applicable laws, or the fact that the PD recommends a data harvesting device but ultimately doesn't care how it gets used. The police have carte blanche access to the collected data, so its involvement bears the same weight as the supplier and the businesses utilizing the scanners. Considering it has this access, it would seem its responsibility to ensure compliance with applicable laws would be greater, especially since it's in the law enforcement business.

This also downplays the department's active promotion of the scanners, which led some business owners to feel the devices were mandatory, or at the very least, "strongly encouraged" by an entity holding the power to strip them of their liquor licenses. Here are some quotes from the story that show the department's involvement in pushing the devices its spokesman claims it's not responsible for.

“We tried to say ‘no’ at the very beginning, and police strongly encouraged that we should do it,” says Mike Reed, general manager of the Boiler Room and Jones Bar…

“If we don’t use it, they know,” a downtown bouncer tells WW…

Some Portland bar employees say the scanners keep police and the Oregon Liquor Control Commission happy...

As it stands right now, the county is going to "look into" the legality of the scanners. The police department seems to have washed its hands of the whole thing, claiming it's barely involved. The scanner company, which also has access to the data, seems to think there's nothing wrong with tracking people's nighttime activities and turning this data over to law enforcement any time they ask. And finally, we have business owners tracking their customers because it's been heavily implied that failing to do so may become a source of friction between the bar/nightclub and the police department.

Anyone could make the argument that what you do in public has no expectation of privacy. But this isn't in any way comparable to what police would have to do to achieve the same sort of surveillance level if the scanners weren't in use -- i.e. trailing hundreds of people around all night and noting which businesses they enter.

When technology turns the laborious into the routine, there needs to be checks in place to prevent abuse or, at the very least, provided some sort of friction between what the police can collect and what they can actually access. There also needs to be care taken to prevent collection of data simply because its possible, rather than being actually instrumental to crime prevention and investigation. But most importantly, those deploying these devices (by which I mean the police and the state that provided the grant to purchase the scanners) need to be aware of the laws governing their use, something no one quoted here seemed to know. (And, in the case of the police department, the person quoted not only didn't know, but didn't care, either.)

The state of Oregon has taken care to ensure data isn't collected or misused, but those looking for more data haven't bothered to perform due diligence before deploying devices that turn business owners into lawbreakers, and all in the name of the one of the most arbitrary of crimes, underage drinking.

10 Prison Security Techniques Being Implemented on the American People

Has our country become one giant correctional institution?

by Marlon Brock

Americans are not typically aware of how their federal and state prison systems work. What we think we know, we learned from watching television. When I took my first walk through at FCI (Federal Correctional Institution) El Reno Oklahoma as a new employee, I was surprised at how non-Hollywood real prison life is. Frankly, all I knew about prison life was what I saw on television or at the movies. Not even close.

As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP), it began to dawn on me that the security practices we used in the prison system were being implemented outside those walls. “Free worlders” is prison slang for the non-incarcerated who reside in the “free world.” In this article I am going to compare a number of practices used in federal prisons to those being used today in the “free world.”

You might find that our country may be one giant correctional institution.

Cameras & Movement Tracking

In federal prisons, cameras are everywhere. The reason, of course, is to help maintain security and keep track of prisoners. Inmates know that if they break any rules or policies, they can be readily identified if the event occurred in view of a camera. The cameras remind the inmates that they do not have any freedom or privacy, and that they live under total control.

Unfortunately, the “free world” is now subject to the widespread use of video surveillance and movement tracking. This goes beyond cameras, which have become virtually ubiquitous now. The federal government has been handing out grants to create sophisticated surveillance grids in cities across the country.

These surveillance grids frequently include license plate readers — some with the ability to log 1,200 license plates per hour, logging timestamps and location data — giving the government a way to track people and analyze their movement patterns. Some cities post license plate readers to log every single vehicle that enters or leaves its boundaries. Many cities have turned their police cars into roving data collectors by outfitting them with mobile license plate scanners. A man from California discovered that he had been photographed 112 times over the course of a couple years — from just one police cruiser mounted with a license plate scanner! The local databases of movement data are integrated with the federal government through its fusion centers located all over the country.

The government also has the ability to use facial-recognition software in conjunction with its surveillance grid to instantly identify individuals by comparing their photograph to biometric databases created using BMV photographs. Facial recognition cameras can be set up to accurately identify a person against a database of millions of images in less than one second. The government can then potentially log their locations and using the data for any purpose it wants.

As the usage of these technologies grows, the “authorities” will practically know where you are at any time. The British have the greatest level of electronic surveillance in the world. Their movements are said to be recorded 3,000 times a week. The United States is not that far behind. In some ways, with the numerous NSA spying programs, the USA leads the world in destroying personal privacy. Today’s youngest generation will grow up never knowing what privacy is.

Drug Testing

The federal prison inmate drug abuse monitoring program has been going on for decades since the capability was invented. At any time, a prisoner can be tested for intoxicants using urine, sweat, saliva, and hair samples taken by force. After years of perfecting the process on inmates, it was introduced to the American public.

On September 15, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12564, establishing the goal of a Drug-Free Federal Workplace. Additionally, in 2010, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) finalized a new rule that allows federal agencies to use sweat, saliva and hair in federal drug testing programs that only tested urine. Since then, many private businesses and corporations had to begin testing their employees in order to keep or obtain federal contracts. Under federal guidelines for employee testing, if a person takes medicine that was not prescribed to him, he has committed a federal drug abuse offense and may be fired. Children in public schools are also subjected to involuntary random drug testing.

The inmates were the guinea pigs for a program now being regularly employed on Americans. This process conditions Americans to be accustomed to regularly submitting bodily fluid samples to the government, lessening their resistance to data collection and intrusion in other areas.

Metal Detection & Weapon Confiscation

In prison, detection and confiscation of weapons is a necessity. Prisoners cannot be allowed the freedom to possess objects that could potentially be used to cause harm to others. The security of the facility relies on the prisoners remaining disarmed.

With that said, not even prisons can be guaranteed to be weapon free. Inmates are clever, and can fashion any piece of metal into a makeshift weapon. They are also prolific smugglers. To mitigate this risk, prisoners and visitors are put through metal detector checkpoints to keep them disarmed. Any metallic contraband is confiscated.

Treating prisoners this way is one thing. In a prison setting, security trumps liberty. The liberties of the inmates have been curtailed through due process on an individual basis. But these prison tactics have crept out into the “free world.” Now, virtually all government buildings use metal detectors to screen incoming visitors and even their own personnel. This establishes a climate of fear of weapons and a false sense of security among those within such “weapon free zones.” If a prison can’t proclaim to be weapon free, how can any place outside of prison make such arrogant and naive claims?

Crowd Control

Helmets, face shields, batons, knee guards, tear gas, wedge formations, line formations, half steps, full steps, pinning tactics — all of these phrases are associated with prison crowd control. As I look at today’s police and how they attempt crowd control it reminds me of my days in federal prison as the Hostage Negotiation Team (HNT) leader. The HNT worked closely with the Special Operations and Response Team (SORT) on both monthly local training and annual training at Fort Gruber in Muskogee Oklahoma. SORT membership is selective and highly practiced. The teams must be familiar with hand signals and verbal commands, as well as certain maneuvers that are often referred to as “stomp and drag.” These tactics are designed to help quell disturbances — the FBOP word for “riot” — by forcing inmates in the direction that SORT wants them to move. This training takes place monthly for SORT members and annually for the rest of the FBOP staff.

The next time you see police engaged in crowd control on television you are watching what was perfected by prisons official through years of practice and real life action. I participated in five disturbances. After observing law enforcement agencies dress up in intimidating riot suits and mimic the behavior of SORT, it is clear that police are using prison tactics to intimidate and control civilian protesters.

Checkpoints & Random Pat Searches

In federal prison, all inmates are subject to an immediate pat search by any staff member, anywhere, at any time. If the inmate refuses, he or she is “arrested,” which entails being cuffed and escorted to administrative segregation — otherwise known as the jail within the jail. The pat search is used to detect contraband. All inmates returning from industrial work programs in medium and low security institutions are pat searched and metal detected before being allowed to return to their dorm. Additionally, inmates in medium and low security institutions are pat searched when they leave food service or the “chow hall.” In high and maximum security institutions, inmates are pat searched every time they move. Movement in these institutions is highly controlled.

Compare this to police roadblocks and checkpoints used to perform warrantless searches for contraband. When a person is stopped by city, county, or state police, they are visually inspected, asked questions concerning their activities, and may be asked to submit to a vehicle or personal search. At federal roadblocks, a subject can be directed to a secondary search area at the discretion of the observing officer. There, the person can be searched for contraband regardless of any objections, just like in a federal prison. There are dozens of federal roadblocks on roads in the southwestern United States, many of them permanent and located up to 100 miles away from the border.

It isn’t just drivers being put through such intrusion. There is also the matter of “stop and frisk” searches which are taking place in several areas of the country. These intrusive stops involve the stopping of a pedestrian for any reason, followed by being subjected to a police officer’s questioning and a warrantless search of their pockets, purses, bags, and property — just like a prisoner.

Mail Surveillance

Every piece of mail sent to an inmate in federal prison is opened, searched, and may be read depending on the dictates from the institutions intelligence office. In medium and high security institutions, all mail is delivered to the unit officer unsealed so that it can be read before being delivered to the mail room. Inmate mail is controlled and may be copied if it is determined that there is possible criminal activity being discussed either blatantly or in code. If something is detected it may be rejected and returned to the inmate if it violates policy. Two examples of “rejected correspondence” are an inmate’s attempt to conduct unapproved business, or writing another inmate without permission.

Recent revelations have made it clear that Americans’ mail is being surveilled as well. The New York Times reported on how the United States Postal Service uses a “Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program” to create a permanent record of who is corresponding with each other via snail mail. The program — secretly established in 2001 and not revealed for over a decade — assists the government in implementing blanket surveillance of every single resident of the United States. Each piece of physical mail is photographed and stored in a database. Law enforcement has unfettered access to this data without even the requirement of obtaining a warrant. About 160 billion pieces of mail end up being recorded per year.

Telephone Monitoring

For decades the FBOP has possessed the capability to monitor outgoing telephone calls. However, their system required staff to sit and listen to the calls which took staff away from direct supervision of inmates. In the early 2000s, a new system was put in place that allowed any and every phone in an institution to be immediately monitored and the call recorded.

Just like in a federal prison, the NSA has the capability to track and monitor anyone’s phone conversations without recourse. The agency can monitor text messages. They can collect locations, times, and a log of every phone number that has been dialed by any phone in the United States. The government can set up fake base stations to intercept phone calls. They can hack the applications on a person’s smart phone and spy on their usage. The NSA can even crack cellphone encryption.

Unlike the inmates who have no choice in the matter of telephone monitoring, the American people have been told about the spying but have decided not to do anything about it.

Lockdowns

When a correctional institution has its daily operations disturbed, often times it results in a lockdown. Lockdowns usually occur after a disturbance, weather concerns, inmate escapes, rumors of a disturbance about to occur, rumored escape attempts, and institution wide searches are some reasons to lockdown.

The most notable “free world” lockdown in recent memory occurred in Boston, Massachusetts. This lockdown mirrors a federal prison lockdown that is called when the entire institution is to be searched. That is exactly what occurred in Boston. In April 2013 the Boston suburb of Watertown was locked down to the point where no one could enter or leave the town, while 9,000 law enforcement personnel and military took part in searching just about every backpack, vehicle, and home that they could get away with.

Some of the searches were voluntary, but many were not. As SWAT teams performed systematic house-to-house searches, videos were captured of families being ripped from their home without a warrant so the police could help themselves to the inside of their homes. What resulted had the look of prisoners being removed from their cells by a SORT unit. Watch for yourself:

Police perform house-to-house raids in Watertown MA
Systematic House-to-House Raids in Locked-Down Watertown, Mass.

The Watertown lockdown was practice for future declarations of martial law. Those tactics had been used and perfected in our prison systems for years. Now the “free world” is getting the prison treatment with little objection from the public. The lockdown was not necessary and served mostly to measure the public’s reaction and to establish a sense of fear and intimidation. I think it worked.

Snitching

The last thing I want to mention is what I call the “Moscow Law.” While growing up during the cold war, I was taught that in the USSR, people were expected to watch their neighbors, strangers, and even family and friends, and report any suspicious activity to the local police. We in America have that law. Read it below. Did you know it exists?

 Title 18 U.S.C. § 4:  Misprision of felony: Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

In prison, there are “snitches” everywhere. Believe me, they are not just the inmates, they are also staff. Programs like Infragard are attempting to do the same thing in the “free world” as it is in the imprisoned world. Once these programs get started, they are almost impossible to stop. What are we paying our law enforcement to do? Protect us or detect us? You decide.

Policy and program statements from the Bureau of Prisons are available at: http://www.bop.gov/

Support the Right to Repair in South Dakota (and Everywhere Else)

South Dakota has put forth new legislation to support to a simple principle: if you own something, you ought to be allowed to fix it. The new bill, SB 136, would require manufacturers of electronics and appliances that contain embedded software to make available to consumers and independent repair shops the information and parts they need to repair those devices, and fully disclose any contract provision standing in the way of full repair and reuse.

That seems like a pretty uncontroversial goal, but lots of major manufacturers that purport to "sell" you all kinds of products are doing their level best to make sure that if your product breaks, only they (or someone they authorize) can repair it. They do this in all kinds of ways—by tying your purchase (or update) to an expensive repair contract; burying sneaky clauses into license agreements (remember, you might buy a device, but if it contains software to make it more functional you probably only "rent" that software); treating repair information (like diagnostic codes) as proprietary; or refusing to sell repair parts to "unauthorized" independent shops (and then calling in the feds to prosecute shops that sell those parts anyway).

That's bad for consumers and for the environment—how often have many of us tossed a device into the trash, or recycled it, because repairing it was too expensive? If that device contains electronics, that casual decision added to the e-waste that is slowly poisoning the planet.

South Dakota isn't the first state to step in to defend its residents' right to repair. In Massachusetts, legislators and voters passed legislation requiring automakers to provide affordable access to all tools, software and information used to repair late model cars and heavy duty vehicles. That legislation will go into effect in 2015.

SB 136 in South Dakota isn't perfect—we'd love to see an additional requirement that the information be freely accessible and online, for example—but it's an important step in the right direction.

The bill will be debated in the Commerce committee today, and will move on to a larger vote later this week. If you live in South Dakota, contact your state senator today and tell him or her to support SB 136.

Defend Your Right to Repair!

The Over-Policing of America

Police Overkill Has Entered the DNA of Social Policy

If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where "the War on Crime” and “the War on Drugs” are no longer metaphors but bland understatements. There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war. (All of this is ably reported on journalist Radley Balko’s blog and in his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.) But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It’s also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

It starts in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police personnel. What not long ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior -- doodling on a desk, farting in class, a kindergartener’s tantrum -- can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school, or even booked at the local precinct. Such “criminals” can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate. (Turned out he didn’t do it.)

Though it's a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality State has imposed felony charges on schoolchildren for “crimes” like throwing peanuts on a bus. Wearing the wrong color belt to school got one child handcuffed to a railing for several hours. All of this goes under the rubric of “zero-tolerance” discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally imported into schools.

Despite a long-term drop in youth crime, the carceral style of education remains in style. Metal detectors -- a horrible way for any child to start the day -- are installed in ever more schools, even those with sterling disciplinary records, despite the demonstrable fact that such scanners provide no guarantee against shootings and stabbings.

Every school shooting, whether in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, or Littleton, Colorado, only leads to more police in schools and more arms as well. It’s the one thing the National Rifle Association and Democratic senators can agree on. There are plenty of successful ways to run an orderly school without criminalizing the classroom, but politicians and much of the media don’t seem to want to know about them. The “school-to-prison pipeline,” a jargon term coined by activists, is entering the vernacular.

Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go

Even as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing -- you will be sent the bill later.

Air travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as nothing more than “security theater.” As for staying at home, it carries its own risks as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found out when a Cambridge police officer mistook him for a burglar and hauled him away -- a case that is hardly unique.

Overcriminalization at Work

Office and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors, but criminal law has found its way into the white-collar workplace, too. Just ask Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin state employee targeted by a federal prosecutor for the “crime” of incorrectly processing a travel agency’s bid for state business. She spent four months in a federal prison before being sprung by a federal court. Or Judy Wilkinson, hauled away in handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop. Or George Norris, sentenced to 17 months in prison for selling orchids without the proper paperwork to an undercover federal agent.

Increasingly, basic economic transactions are being policed under the purview of criminal law. In Arkansas, for instance, Human Rights Watch reports that a new law funnels delinquent (or allegedly delinquent) rental tenants directly to the criminal courts, where failure to pay up can result in quick arrest and incarceration, even though debtor’s prison as an institution was supposed to have ended in the nineteenth century.

And the mood is spreading. Take the asset bubble collapse of 2008 and the rising cries of progressives for the criminal prosecution of Wall Street perpetrators, as if a fundamentally sound financial system had been abused by a small number of criminals who were running free after the debacle. Instead of pushing a debate about how to restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in their focus on individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians. A few high-profile prosecutions for insider trading (which had nothing to do with the last crash) have, of course, not changed Wall Street one bit.

Criminalizing Immigration

The past decade has also seen immigration policy ingested by criminal law. According to another Human Rights Watch report -- their U.S. division is increasingly busy -- federal criminal prosecutions of immigrants for illegal entry have surged from 3,000 in 2002 to 48,000 last year. This novel application of police and prosecutors has broken up families and fueled the expansion of for-profit detention centers, even as it has failed to show any stronger deterrent effect on immigration than the civil law system that preceded it. Thanks to Arizona’s SB 1070 bill, police in that state are now licensed to stop and check the papers of anyone suspected of being undocumented -- that is, who looks Latino.

Meanwhile, significant parts of the US-Mexico border are now militarized (as increasingly is the Canadian border), including what seem to resemble free-fire zones. And if anyone were to leave bottled water for migrants illegally crossing the desert and in danger of death from dehydration, that good Samaritan should expect to face criminal charges, too. Intensified policing with aggressive targets for arrests and deportations are guaranteed to be a part of any future bipartisan deal on immigration reform.

Digital Over-Policing

As for the Internet, for a time it was terra nova and so relatively free of a steroidal law enforcement presence. Not anymore. The late Aaron Swartz, a young Internet genius and activist affiliated with Harvard University, was caught downloading masses of scholarly articles (all publicly subsidized) from an open network on the MIT campus. Swartz was federally prosecuted under the capacious Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for violating a “terms and services agreement” -- a transgression that anyone who has ever disabled a cookie on his or her laptop has also, technically, committed. Swartz committed suicide earlier this year while facing a possible 50-year sentence and up to a million dollars in fines.

Since the summer, thanks to whistleblowing contractor Edward Snowden, we have learned a great deal about the way the NSA stops and frisks our (and apparently everyone else’s) digital communications, both email and telephonic. The security benefits of such indiscriminate policing are far from clear, despite the government’s emphatic but inconsistent assurances otherwise. What comes into sharper focus with every volley of new revelations is the emerging digital infrastructure of what can only be called a police state.

Sex Police

Sex is another zone of police overkill in our post-Puritan land. Getting put on a sex offender registry is alarmingly easy -- as has been done to children as young as 11 for “playing doctor” with a relative, again according to Human Rights Watch. But getting taken off the registry later is extraordinarily difficult. Across the nation, sex offender registries have expanded massively, especially in California, where one in every 380 adults is now a registered sex offender, creating a new pariah class with severe obstacles to employment, housing, or any kind of community life. The proper penalty for, say, an 18-year-old who has sex with a 14-year-old can be debated, but should that 18-year-old's life really be ruined forever?

Equality Before the Cops?

It will surprise no one that Americans are not all treated equally by the police. Law enforcement picks on kids more than adults, the queer more than straight, Muslims more than Methodists -- Muslims a lot more than Methodists -- antiwar activists more than the apolitical. Above all, our punitive state targets the poor more than the wealthy and Blacks and Latinos more than white people.

A case in point: after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, a police presence, including surveillance cameras and metal detectors, was ratcheted up at schools around the country, particularly in urban areas with largely working-class black and Latino student bodies. It was all to “protect” the kids, of course. At Columbine itself, however, no metal detector was installed and no heavy police presence intruded. The reason was simple. At that school in the Colorado suburb of Littleton, the mostly well-heeled white families did not want their kids treated like potential felons, and they had the status and political power to get their way. But communities without such clout are less able to push back against the encroachments of police power.

Even Our Prisons Are Over-Policed

The over-criminalization of American life empties out into our vast, overcrowded prison system, which is itself over-policed. The ultimate form of punitive control (and torture) is long-term solitary confinement, in which 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners are encased at any given moment. Is this really necessary? Solitary is no longer reserved for the worst or the worst or most dangerous prisoners but can be inflicted on ones who wear Rastafari dreadlocks, have a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War in their cell, or are in any way suspected, no matter how tenuous the grounds, of gang affiliations.

Not every developed nation does things this way. Some 30 years ago, Great Britain shifted from isolating prisoners to, whenever possible, giving them greater responsibility and autonomy -- with less violent results. But don’t even bring the subject up here. It will fall on deaf ears.

Extreme policing is exacerbated by extreme sentencing. For instance, more than 3,000 Americans have been sentenced to life terms without chance of parole for nonviolent offenses. These are mostly but not exclusively drug offenses, including life for a pound of cocaine that a boyfriend stashed in the attic; selling LSD at a Grateful Dead concert; and shoplifting three belts from a department store.

Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world, triple that of the now-defunct East Germany. The incarceration rate for African American men is about five times higher than that of the Soviet Union at the peak of the gulag.

The Destruction of Families

Prison may seem the logical finale for this litany of over-criminalization, but the story doesn’t actually end with those inmates. As prisons warehouse ever more Americans, often hundreds of miles from their local communities, family bonds weaken and disintegrate. In addition, once a parent goes into the criminal justice system, his or her family tends to end up on the radar screens of state agencies. “Being under surveillance by law enforcement makes a family much more vulnerable to Child Protective Services,” says Professor Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law school. An incarcerated parent, especially an incarcerated mother, means a much stronger likelihood that children will be sent into foster care, where, according to one recent study, they will be twice as likely as war veterans to suffer from PTSD.

In New York State, the Administration for Child Services and the juvenile justice system recently merged, effectively putting thousands of children in a heavily policed, penalty-based environment until they age out. “Being in foster care makes you much more vulnerable to being picked up by the juvenile justice system,” says Roberts. “If you’re in a group home and you get in a fight, that could easily become a police matter.” In every respect, the creeping over-criminalization of everyday life exerts a corrosive effect on American families.

Do We Live in a Police State?

The term “police state” was once brushed off by mainstream intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids. Not so much anymore. Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system, the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with greater frequency and intensity. “You’re probably a (federal) criminal” is the accusatory title of a widely read essay co-authored by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. A Republican appointee, Kozinski surveys the morass of criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for law enforcement. Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has written an entire book about how an average American professional could easily commit three felonies in a single day without knowing it.

The daily overkill of police power in the U.S. goes a long way toward explaining why more Americans aren’t outraged by the “excesses” of the war on terror, which, as one law professor has argued, are just our everyday domestic penal habits exported to more exotic venues. It is no less true that the growth of domestic police power is, in this positive feedback loop, the partial result of our distant foreign wars seeping back into the homeland (the “imperial boomerang” that Hannah Arendt warned against).

Many who have long railed against our country’s everyday police overkill have reacted to the revelations of NSA surveillance with detectable exasperation: of course we are over-policed! Some have even responded with peevish resentment: Why so much sympathy for this Snowden kid when the daily grind of our justice system destroys so many lives without comment or scandal? After all, in New York, the police department’s “stop and frisk” tactic, which targets African American and Latino working-class youth for routinized street searches, was until recently uncontroversial among the political and opinion-making class. If “the gloves came off” after September 11, 2001, many Americans were surprised to learn they had ever been on to begin with.

A hammer is necessary to any toolkit. But you don’t use a hammer to turn a screw, chop a tomato, or brush your teeth. And yet the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our domestic order. The result is not peace, justice, or prosperity but rather a state that harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom.

Claims About Snowden's 'Harms' Based On Two Assumptions Unlikely To Be True

There have been multiple attempts lately by the likes of James Clapper and Mike Rogers to insist that the Snowden leaks have created massive "damage" to the US and have put people at risk. Over at the Daily Beast, Eli Lake looks into those accusations and notes that they're based on two assumptions, neither of which are likely to be true:

But the DIA assessment is based on two important assumptions. First, it assumes that Snowden’s master file includes data from every network he ever scanned. Second, it assumes that this file is already in or will end up in the hands of America’s adversaries. If these assumptions turn out to be true, then the alarm raised in the last week will be warranted. The key word here is “if.”

On the first assumption, that he took every piece of data he ever touched, that's almost certainly not true. Snowden himself has detailed a few times how he carefully went through the documents to make sure that what he was sharing was limited and not too broad. In fact, in his very first interview he stated:

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

And on the second question, Snowden's also made it fairly clear that he no longer has the documents and even US officials appear to be of the opinion that he never gave them to any foreign government. While there is the possibility that foreign agents have been able to get them from various reporters who have portions of the collection, there's still the first issue about what documents are actually included in all of this.

Either way, just the fact that officials are going around insisting that there's been tremendous harm based on two rather questionable assumptions shows just how far they're willing to go to fear monger about the whole situation when there's still been no actual evidence of any harm anywhere as a result of these leaks.

Master Sergeant Arrested for Disobeying Unconstitutional Orders, Found “Guilty”

BELL COUNTY — BREAKING: Active duty Army Master Sergeant C.J. Grisham has been found “guilty” after a cop stopped him for carrying firearm and illegally detained him, even though Grisham was licensed to carry it.

The police accused Grisham of “rudely displaying” his weapon. Officer Ermis can be seen in the video grabbing at Grisham’s firearm and holding Grisham face down on the hood of the police vehicle.

CJ Grisham described the incident as follows:

“This past weekend while on a 10-mile hike with my 15-year old son to complete requirements for his eagle scout rank, I was illegally detained, stripped of my weapons, and arrested when I refused to voluntarily surrender them. I am a licensed CHL holder in multiple states, an active duty Master Sergeant and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. My only charge was “resisting arrest” though I was never placed under arrest until I was charged with resisting it. Confused? Me too. We were hiking down back country roads away from homes and businesses outside Temple, Texas, when the police claim they were responding to a call about a man walking down the road with a gun, something that is legal in the state of Texas.”

Grisham uploaded the video footage which went viral:

Video of the original incident:



The jury ultimately found Grisham guilty for “interfering with police duties,” according to reports.

On his facebook page, Open Carry Texas, Grisham states: ”I WILL be appealing the finding. This was a kangaroo court from the beginning. – CJ”

Mother Devastated after Cop Fatally Shoots Her Soldier Son

NEW YORK — Noel Polanco was a soldier who wanted to protect his country.

That all changed one night as he was driving home.


Noel dreamed of serving his country. He never thought he would be executed by a cop.

Officer Hassan Hamdy pulled Noel over at a traffic stop.

The officer claimed that Noel had been driving “recklessly.”

Noel never expected what would happen next.

He was shot in the chest and killed by officer Hamdy, who claims that Noel was “reaching” under the seat.

Officer Hamdy pointed his gun through the open passenger window of Noel’s vehicle and opened fire, executing Noel in his car.

Noel was unarmed and posed no actual threat to the officer.

Some claim that the officer has issues with being “trigger-happy.”

Heart-broken by the loss of her son, Cecilia Reyes sought justice.

The city gave her 2.5 million dollars as compensation.

But that will never bring back Noel, and it does not bring justice to officer Hamdy, she said last week.

“I want this officer fired,” she said.

“He doesn’t belong in the street. He doesn’t belong with a gun. He doesn’t belong walking those streets and hurting another family like he did to mine.”

Officer Hamdy fired his weapon and shot Noel after he saw Noel “reaching” under his seat, according to reports.

A court found that officer Hamdy “did not intentionally” violate Noel’s rights after taking his life. He was cleared of wrongdoing.

“He has a problem and he needs to be off those streets. He’s too dangerous. I’m sorry, that’s how I feel,” said the mother.

He has still been paid since the fatal shooting, and is now assigned to an “Emergency Service Unit.”

California police use taser on deaf man trying to communicate with them via sign language

By Scott Kaufman

Four police officers in Hawthorne, California used a taser on a man who was attempting to tell them that he was deaf via sign language.

The Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness is filing a lawsuit on behalf of Jonathan Meister, who was charged with assault as a result of the incident. According to the lawsuit, Meister was retrieving boxes he had left at a friend’s house when police, alerted by a neighbor to a possible burglary, arrived.

Officers Jeffrey Salmon, Jeffrey Tysl, Erica Bristow, and Mark Hultgren allegedly ordered Meister to stop loading the boxes into his car, but Meister could not hear the order. One of the officers then grabbed Meister by the hand, who responded by attempting to use American Sign Language to communicate with the officer.

The officers interpreted his sudden movements as resistance, so they “struck Meister with fists and feet, and forcibly took him to the ground.” Once he was on the ground, one of the officers allegedly shot him twice with a taser. Another officer then delivered a “drive stun” to Meister’s abdomen.

They continued to beat Meister until he was unconscious, then escorted him to the hospital, where he was charged with assaulting the officers. The charge was later dropped.

Meister is suing the police for violating his civil rights under the American with Disabilities Act. “[T]his incident occurred,” the lawsuit states, “in substantial part because the HPD does not provide its officers the training and resources to serve people who are deaf or hard of hearing.”

The Hawthorne Police Department (HPD) failed “to provide effective communication to deaf and hard of hearing individuals, including himself, who come into contact and interact with the HPD, thereby discriminating against them.”

AIDS Denial Crazies Go All DMCA On Videos Educating People of Their Craziness

We've made the argument before that it's about time we all took a hard look at copyright law and the DMCA, since both are regularly used as censorship tools. There are those that believe that this happens infrequently, but that just simply isn't true. It's used to censor criticism, to censor other people's original creation, and to censor negative reviews. It's a problem and no amount of pretending otherwise is going to wash.

But the problem really gets my blood boiling when the censorship in question is censoring scientific knowledge and criticism. All the more so when the criticism is aimed at a group of people that are quite likely actively putting anyone listening to them seriously in danger. Take, for instance, the story that jameshogg writes in about, in which well-known scientific debunker Myles Power is having a series of videos he produced debunking a documentary called House of Numbers DMCA'd by the producers of the documentary.

In case you can't watch the video, here's the skinny on the situation. House of Numbers is a documentary that essentially makes the claim that HIV and AIDS isn't really, you know, a thing. It's part of a conspiracy theory that's been traveling around for some time that AIDS isn't what doctors say it is, that anti-viral medication doesn't effect whatever the disease actually is, and so on. In other words, it's a big bucket of crazy that, unfortunately, some unsuspecting people take seriously, quite possibly putting themselves in harm's way if they take the message of the film to heart. Myles Power is a scientist who creates videos debunking this kind of thing. He, if I may say so, should be appointment YouTubing if you have any interest in science versus popular myths. He created a series of videos showing both why the claims in House of Numbers are bullshit, as well as the tactics the filmmakers employed in order to pretend people said what they actually hadn't. All of this, of course, falls squarely in the realm of fair use. That didn't stop several people who either produced or were featured in the documentary from filing DMCA claims against him and getting the videos removed.

The first DMCA filed against me was from Liam Scheff who starred in part 5 of my video series. Liam believes that my videos are not protected under fair use because they are not made for educational purposes, but instead for propaganda. Over the last week, Liam has been constantly posting on my Facebook and has called me a retard, a cunt, a little bitch and, of course, a paid shill. Yet at the same time believes that I have been slandering him. What is also bizarre is that even though Liam has made it clear of his intentions to drag me through the courts, at the same time he does not think I am a real person but part of Myles Power inc. Liam later went on to remove his DMCA, but by filing it in the first place he has left himself open to legal action.

As soon as part 5 was restored, it was taken immediately down by Martin Penny and the people at Knowledge Matters, who then decided to file 2 more DMCA takedowns against part 1 and 2. I want to take this time to remind people that there are multiple copies of House of Numbers uploaded to YouTube. If Martin Penny and the people at Knowledge Matters truly thought I was infringing copyright, then why are they not going after people who uploaded the entire movie? It is very clear that these people are trying to silence my criticism. For those who don’t know, Martin Penny is the Executive Producer of House of Numbers and a multimillionaire from Leeds who used to be the CEO of GHD. What’s interesting is that Martin is now a chairman at OHS Ltd – one of the leading health, safety and environmental consultancies who have worked for the NHS.

This is censorship in its purist form, and it's using the law to get away with it. There may be legal repercussions to be had for some of this, but how often do we actually see those attempting to ignore fair use and censor speech get punished? It's all the more egregious given that what they're attempting to censor is the debunking of a conspiracy myth that has the very real potential to hurt people. Anyone with a modicum of interest in science and the dialectic method would welcome such a conversation, not attempt to stifle it under the guise of copyright law.

Meanwhile, as Power notes, the person doing the censoring is the chairman of a consulting group that is advising the National Health Service in England. A censoring AIDS denier is advising the NHS. Let that sink in for a moment. Then, ask yourself it it's about time we took a hard look at whether the DMCA is doing more harm than good.

Man tased, put on trial after police kicked down his door without warrant

COTATI, CA — A couple and their roommate were terrorized when police officers broke down their front door and tased a husband in response to a noise complaint. Despite the shocking video that captured the incident, the police were cleared for breaking into the home and assaulting the 3 occupants, and instead one of the victims was put on trial.

The incident took place on May 10th, 2013, when a neighbor called the police because of allegedly hearing “yelling and sobbing” coming from the residence next-door. Police were sent to investigate at 3:48 p.m.

The residents, James Wood, 33, and his wife Jennifer, 29, admittedly had a loud argument in the backyard, but did not become violent and did not know that a nosy neighbor had phoned the police. They reportedly argued about whether to spend their tax refund money on fixing their car or buying a new one.

The couple’s roommate, James Helton, 32, was inside putting the Woods’ 2-year-old daughter down for a nap when the Cotati Police arrived, with guns already drawn. Helton summoned his roommates and the three began talking to the police through a window.

“We had our hands up against the glass. We were more than happy to talk through the glass, or he can have dispatch call our cellphones,” Helton later explained. “(An officer) became agitated and said, ‘No you’re going to do what I tell you to do.’ “

“We don’t live in a police state, sir.”

“I asked several times, ‘What am I being accused of?’” Wood told KPIX 5. “And when they didn’t answer, I asked, ‘do you have a search warrant?’ And they said, ‘No, we don’t need one.’ And I was like, ‘you’re not getting in here. I am not opening that door.’”

Attempts to cite the 4th Amendment and peacefully exercise their rights were met with threats. Fearing for their safety, a cell-phone camera was produced to document the situation. The police quickly re-holstered their handguns.

“There’s no domestic violence,” the three residents echoed in unison, explaining they would not open the door without a warrant.

“Why are you guys not coming out?” demanded Officer Andrew Lyssand, eying the family through the glass.

“Because we don’t live in a police state, sir,” Wood responded.

Intent on proving him wrong, the officers prepared to breach the door. The negotiation had ended as quickly as it began.

As the video continued recording, the door was kicked in and officers immediately entered with tasers drawn; the favorite pain and compliance tool of the police.

“You have no right to be in here!” Wood reacted.

Jennifer could be seen on video with her hands already in the air. “Do not touch her! You are assaulting her!” said her husband, as police grabbed her.

“Aaaahhhh! Help!! Help!!” cried Jennifer Wood, just before the camera shorted out from the electric current traveling through the cameraman. The video abruptly ends.

A total of 96 seconds elapsed from the time the camera turned on until it cut out due to the attacks by police.

Each of the three were cited for obstructing law enforcement. James Wood was tased 5 times because he allegedly resisted Officer Eric Bilcich.

“They could plainly see I was not in distress,” Jennifer Wood explained. “I honestly did not want them inside my home.”

“I was afraid we might get shot,” James Wood recalled. “The only thing I could think of is, ‘I need to document this right now.’ “

Jennifer added: “The officer later tried to get me to say my husband abused me. But I told him, ‘the only one that hurt me was you.’”

A ‘Proud’ Moment For Cotati?

Cotati officials predictably defended the actions of the officers. A press release stated that forced entry and tasing of everyone was “justified.” Officers were “forced to kick the door open,” police stated, adding that not kicking down the door “would be a neglect of duty.”

“The fact that a jury of American citizens could not agree that such a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment meant the entry into my client’s home was unlawful, shows how far this country has disintegrated. There is little hope for salvage.”

Police Chief Michael Parish said this break-in and assault was exemplary police work. “My officers were very professional and very calm, and I’m proud of their performance,” he said to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

Judge Peter Ottenweller backed the actions of the state, claiming that violent entry was justified to ensure safety of the occupants.

James Wood was eventually taken to trial. On January 28th, the jury hung in a 6-6 split. Despite the disturbing video evidence and the hindsight knowledge that nothing except loud voices had caused this violent situation, half the jury was content with imprisoning the defendant.

“The fact that a jury of American citizens could not agree that such a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment meant the entry into my client’s home was unlawful, shows how far this country has disintegrated,” noted defense attorney Benjaman Adams in an interview with Police State USA. “There is little hope for salvage.”

It is unclear whether Wood will be retried for “resisting” the aggressors.

What does it say about police when they are willing to escalate calm situations into violence so readily? What does it say about their superiors when they endorse this behavior? The police chief, the prosecutor, the judge, and even half the jury were OK with what they saw in the video. This systemic tolerance of government aggression and violation of rights demonstrates the depressing fact that a police state may come not from the denial of the will of the majority — but instead from its fulfillment.

Michael Pena Pleads Guilty To Rape Charge

By JENNIFER PELTZ

NEW YORK -- A former police officer admitted Thursday that he raped a schoolteacher he grabbed off the street on her way to work, pleading guilty to rape charges that had stymied jurors who convicted him of other high-level sex crimes in the same attack.

Already sentenced to 75 years to life in prison on his March conviction, Michael Pena is to be sentenced next month to at least 10 years for the rape charges. The sentences are set to overlap, but in the event Pena prevails in appealing his 75-year-plus term, he would still be left to serve 10 years to life for the rape.

During his trial, Pena had admitted sexually attacking the 25-year-old woman but steadfastly denied having intercourse with her, a requirement for a rape conviction. She broke down in tears when the jurors deadlocked on the rape charges, though they had convicted him of predatory sexual assault, a top-level felony that involves wielding a weapon during certain sex crimes.

But on Thursday, Pena, 28, softly said "guilty" and admitted that he had forcible intercourse with the woman.

His lawyer said Pena decided to plead guilty to rape to spare the woman's family and his own any further ordeal.

"His priority is not to put his family through any more pain," said the lawyer, Ephraim Savitt. "There's more than one family going through anguish right now."

Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers said he was accepting the plea deal "to spare the complaining witness the task and the obligation of coming forth to testify in a rape trial" again.

"Michael Pena took responsibility for his violent criminal actions and will serve up to life in prison," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement. " ... It is my hope this resolution brings a brave young teacher a measure of justice and closure."

In trial this spring, the woman testified that a drunken, off-duty Pena accosted her on a street last August, forced her into an Upper Manhattan apartment building courtyard and raped her at gunpoint, threatening to shoot her in the face if she resisted.

She was heading to her first day at a new teaching job. He was wrapping up a drunken night of trying to pick up women, according to evidence at the trial.

"My life has been shattered – my sense of security, my sense of safety, any and all independence," she said when he was sentenced in May to 75 years to life.

Pena told a judge then that he has "no explanation for what happened that day. ... I will just have that guilt for the rest of my life."

Savitt said Pena plans to appeal the 75-year-plus term as excessive.

Pena joined the New York Police Department in 2008. Suspended after his arrest, he was fired shortly after the partial verdict.

Good Samaritan Backfire or How I Ended Up in Solitary After Calling 911 for Help

I live in a new gilded age in a golden city. But sometimes the cracks show, even here. The façade crumbles and you find yourself naked, in solitary confinement, in a wretched, feces-stained prison.

How? As a result of my efforts to help injured bicyclists by calling 911, I was, in short order: separated from my friend, violently tackled, arrested, taken to county jail, stripped and left in a solitary cell. I am writing this story because, if it could happen to me, it could happen to you, and I feel the need to do something to help prevent this brutality from propagating.

I moved to San Francisco 9 years ago for graduate school at UCSF and currently run a company that brings transparency to the food industry and employs 12 people. It may appear to be self-serving for me to say so, but I am a rational and peaceful person whom no reasonable being would deem a threat.

South of Market, San Francisco — after midnight July 25th, 2013

My friend Ben Woosley and I were hanging out at Driftwood Bar on Folsom Street. We were talking work; we had three drinks over the course of three hours. We left the bar at 12:45am and walked towards my house, a block away.

The accident had happened just seconds before…

The bicycle had flipped forward and lay unattended in the street. The girl’s foot was bare and mangled, her chin bleeding. There was blood on her jacket, a puddle of it on the ground. Her name was Rebecca. “Where am I?” she kept asking. She was lucky to have been wearing a helmet. Josh, who had been giving her a ride on his handlebars, was wincing and bracing his shoulder.

Neither of them had working cell phones. When they asked me to, I immediately dialed 911. According to the record, it was 12:49am.

While I relayed the situation to the operator, Ben and the first bystander were helping Rebecca elevate her foot. Ben held her hand and supported her body on the ground. Rebecca borrowed his phone to call her friends and family.

You can hear my complete call. At the time I didn’t realize that both Rebecca and Josh were on the bike (since only one was wearing a helmet). Towards the end of the call, I’m half paying attention to the operator as I’m also signaling to the arriving police.
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Forgive the formatting, but I can’t customize Medium’s embedding style. I’d like to make it a minimal play button. https://soundcloud.com/peretzp/911-call/s-X2Ukr

Four minutes had passed when I spotted a fire truck and several police cars in the distance and stepped into the street to wave them over. “They arrived,” I told the 911 operator. She thanked me and told me to expect an ambulance to follow.

I identified myself as the caller to the half dozen police who poured out of squad cars and stepped back onto the sidewalk in front of Radius restaurant.

Sgt. Espinoza, short, stout, grey and assertive, asked Ben and me whether we had witnessed the accident. We said that we hadn’t, but arrived shortly thereafter. I was standing 15 feet from the scene beside Officer Kaur, a stocky female of South Asian complexion. She turned to me and abruptly said that I was not needed as a witness and should leave immediately. I told her we were headed home, just across the way, when my friend and I encountered the accident; and that I’d recently broken my elbow in a similar bike accident here and deeply cared about the outcome.

The firemen were examining Rebecca and Josh. Ben was still supporting Rebecca’s back when Sgt. Espinoza and Officer Gabriel grabbed him from behind without warning, putting him in an arm lock and jerked him backwards over the pavement. They told him sternly that he had to leave now that trained medical professionals had arrived, implying that he was interfering and justifying their violent actions. The officers dragged him across the sidewalk, propping him against the building. Rebecca was still holding Ben’s cellphone when she lost his support. “Where are they taking him?” she asked perplexedly.

It all happened within 5 minutes of the police’s arrival. The sirens and emergency vehicles, the sudden arrival of over half a dozen uniformed personnel, two of whom had grabbed my friend, transformed an intimate street scene into something chaotic. Officer Kaur shouted at me to cross the street. It was very sudden and I was, admittedly, in shock. I stammered that I intended to head home, but that my friend was over there. I pointed at Ben against the wall, and said I’d like to take him home with me.

Arrested

Without warning, I was shoved from behind by Officer Gerrans and then collectively tackled by Officers Gerrans, Kaur and Andreotti. As they took me to the ground, one of the officers kneed me in the right temple. On the pavement, I begged them to watch out for my recently broken right elbow. Knees on my back and neck pinned me to the ground. I was cuffed and left face down.

I was not told that I was under arrest, what the charges were, nor read my rights. I rolled over onto my back so that I could see the arresting officers and ask them their intentions.

Officer Kaur pulled me up so that I was in a sitting position, and then stepped onto my handcuffed hands, grinding them into the pavement. I was so suddenly transported to a distant reality, that I was still coming to terms with its operating principles. “Is this protocol?” I inquired and instinctively wriggled my hands from under her boots. Officer Kaur had full control of me physically. Again, she stomped her boots on my hands, demanded that I “keep [my] hands on the ground,” pushed me back face down, and walked away.

I could again see officers alongside Ben. He was propped with his back on the building but not cuffed.

When Officer Kaur walked away, I spoke with the remaining officers. I told Officers Andreotti and Gerrans that I appreciated their prompt arrival and respected their jobs. I mentioned that I’ve had only positive interactions with the SFPD until that point. I said that, strange as it may seem, I accept my current lot and await the course of justice to set the record straight.

We had a cordial conversation. They noticed I was shivering and propped me on the door of Radius restaurant. Then they asked me what I do for a living. I said that I write software that helps restaurants source food and indicated that the restaurant behind me uses our product.

What they said brought to light a fundamental rift between the residents of San Francisco and the police:

“Ah, you’re one of those billionaire wannabees in this neighborhood.”

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate

Rich SOMA, poor SOMA. My instinct was to make this distinction go away, to show them I know our neighborhood is more complicated than that. To connect on human terms. I told them that it was an early stage startup; I’m doing this because I feel it’s a way to make the world around me better, to bring people joy through better food. I live here, right on this block, in a loving home with 16 roommates. I love this community. I asked them where they lived. And they responded in unison: “Far away! We can’t afford to live here.”
 

They exposed a growing tear in our city’s social fabric. A class conflict brought on by rising housing prices and economic disparity, resulting in a commuter policing class that resents the residents they’re meant to protect and serve.

As I sat cuffed and propped against the wall, another officer came over and reprimanded me for obstructing police work. If this were indeed the case, I said, I would agree. But I hadn’t interfered with the medical response, nor could I have. I was 15 feet away from Rebecca and Josh when I was tackled. I had good intentions, I said. I had called 911 and was following the operator’s instructions to remain on the scene until the ambulance arrived. That was all.

The small talk continued. They said I had nothing to worry about. I had done the right thing. I’d probably be taken to the police station around the corner and released. I asked whether I should communicate this to Ben or other friends, in case I needed help getting bailed out. They said that this process should be quick, quicker than my friends’ ability to help, and that I’d be out in no time.

I took them at their word. Then they took me to county jail, where I spent 12 hours, mostly in solitary confinement.

Transport to JailOfficer Durkin, in the foreground, is telling Ben that he cannot take this photo.

Officer Kaur and her partner Officer Durkin loaded me into the back of a caged van. It drove a short distance. When the van stopped, Officer Kaur shined her flashlight in my face and asked me whether I was “going to be a problem.” There were lots of people who’d be happy to “take care” of me inside if I was, she said.

Left alone in the van, I pulled out my cellphone with my cuffed hands and texted my roommates that I was under arrest. The timestamp of these texts is 1:27am, 38 minutes after I first placed the 911 call.

When she returned, Officer Kaur had a deputy with her. Shining a flashlight in my eyes, she pointed out that he was big and strong.

“This is the guy,” she told the deputy. “I think he’s going to be a problem. Are you going to be a problem?”

It felt aggressive, almost goading.

I tried to ignore her tone and addressed him directly: “Hello, sir.”

He said, “Oh yeah, he’s going to be a problem.”

San Francisco County Jail, 7th and Bryant

San Francisco County Jail is less than 500 yards from my home. They fingerprinted and photographed me, stripped my shoes and vest, and placed me in cellblock 1SB with three other characters in various states of drug or alcohol induced inebriation. There was a phone, but it only called numbers in the 415 area code. In this era of cellphones, I can remember several of my roommates’ numbers. None of them began with 415.

The thick Plexiglas door of the cell was covered with stickers of bail bonds agencies with 415 area codes. These are the same agencies that occupy most storefronts on Bryant Street between 6th and 7th street. Most of the glass surfaces within the jail proudly display these phone numbers.

I was still under the impression that I’d be in jail for a brief interlude. I made small talk with my cellmates. A couple of hours passed. I started to wonder whether the circumstances had somehow changed. I began to ask the passing deputies questions. “Sir, how long should I expect to be here?”

They answered dismissively.

“As long as it takes.”

“We’ll keep you here as long as we want to.”

“Sober up.”

If sobriety was the issue, I volunteered to take a Breathalyzer test. They laughed. “You’re in jail.”

Given the circumstances of my arrest and what the officers initially told me about the expected timing of release, I became dissatisfied with the lack of information. I wasn’t going to get any straight response from the deputies. I asked to see a doctor.

Request to see a doctor

From the vantage point of the cell, I could see a few people in lab coats. I was physically hurt; my right temple was bruised and throbbing. When I began writing this account 36 hours after being released, I was still having trouble opening my mouth wide or chewing food without pain. My neck was sore from the officers’ knees. My arms bruised from being tackled, my wrists sore from Officer Kaur’s stomping, my broken elbow held together by metal pins reinjured.

I told commanding deputy, Terry, that I would like to see a doctor.

“You’d like a lot of things, but this is a jail,” he said.

“Actually, I just want one thing. I’d like to see a doctor.”

“There is nothing wrong with you.”

“I’m not feeling well, and I’d like to see a doctor.”

He said there were no doctors currently on staff, and I told him that I was willing to wait for one. Deputy Terry said I had already seen a doctor, when I was booked. “He was the one that asked you whether you were on any prescribed medications.” I hadn’t realized.

In retrospect, asking to speak to a doctor was perhaps a mistake. I mean, in retrospect it was unambiguously a mistaken means of getting clear information and accelerating my release. Thinking that there was someone I could speak with on the night shift in San Francisco County Jail, who would respond to my questions, and give me honest answers, was an insane delusion. But in the middle of those events, without time to reflect, it was the circumstances around me that seemed insane.

My Story

By nature, I’m a trusting person, and in most situations this has served me well.

I moved to San Francisco to attend UCSF where I received a PhD in Biophysics. I learned about our city’s complex demographics during my time working as a census enumerator in the Tenderloin. I have volunteered as a disaster relief responder for the American Red Cross and have been on several emergency scenes in San Francisco in this capacity. I’m all too familiar with the density of crime in our neighborhood, having experienced car break-ins, bike theft, and vandalism repeatedly.

I served our government as a contractor in Afghanistan and have received basic medical training. Given the opportunity, I try to pick up general life skills to help me and others in critical situations.

But on this night, stopping to help out got me thrown in jail and asking for any sort of a reasoned conversation about why only made things worse.

I acknowledge now, and part of me acknowledged it then, that the county jail staff is not trained to deal with reason or conversation from the inmates in their custody.

Psychology teaches us that human behavior is conditioned by the environment in which we spend our time. Plenty of inmates were cursing at deputies and driving them crazy. Heck, they were driving me crazy. Prisons are grotesque and hellish places. California and its counties keep 181,050 humans locked up in them.

As someone who addressed the staff as “Sir”, spoke slowly and deliberately, and constructed logical arguments, I was a more complicated problem than the typical swearing and insults they were used to hearing. The responses of the jailers, though terse and unpleasant, were true, “you are in jail, deal with it.”

I had no right to expect special treatment and, taking this logic to the bitterest end, this meant I couldn’t even expect to be treated like a rational human.

If I’d made no inquiries of when I was going to be let out, nor asked for medical attention, nor tried to communicate with the guards as equals, I would probably have gotten out sooner. And I certainly wouldn’t have been taken to the “safety cell.”

How I Felt

Standing in the cell for four hours, I knew that the sensible course of action would have been to keep my mouth shut and keep to myself. Once within the system, resistance is futile. I couldn’t help but recall a wise criminal lawyer’s (and friend’s) remarks: “Extricate yourself from the system, don’t try to vindicate yourself within it.”

But with my temple throbbing, I still insisted on seeing a doctor. When Deputy Terry walked away muttering, “I have had enough of you,” I banged on the door repeatedly and screamed, “I want to see a doctor. I WANT TO SEE A DOCTOR.”

My actions seemed to strike a nerve, and when Deputy Terry returned, he was accompanied by cadre of friends. It was ominous.

“So you want to see a doctor?” They may well have said in chorus.

They ordered me to approach the cell door with my back, and when it opened, to step out with hands extended behind me. Suddenly, I was back in handcuffs and being led down a hallway, away from the lab coats, to the right, and down another hallway.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You worried or something? You wanted to see a doctor, so you’ll see a doctor alright.”

A heavy steel door was opened in front of me. The room was padded, sparse even by the Spartan standards of my previous cell.

Solitary Confinement — Safety Cell

I was led into a corner.

“First we have to get you ready,” one of the deputies said. His arm undid the button of my pants, which at first I thought was a cruel joke, and then he yanked them down to my ankles.

They pushed me forward against the wall. I stumbled in my handcuffs and pant shackles.

“Step out of your pants,” they ordered. And as soon as I did: “Step out of your socks!”

Naked from the waist down, someone said, “Take off your shirt.” It was topologically impossible, given the cuffs. One of the deputies said, “I’ll do it.” I was uncuffed, my shirt was stripped with force, getting caught on my neck, tugging my head backwards, then up, then off.

The night shift deputies were cruel. They responded to questions in the tone of schoolyard bullies—tauntingly. They giggled as they slammed the door behind me. “You’ll see the doctor alright.”

On the floor lay a straight jacket made from the material used to pad furniture when it is being moved, and a second piece of the same fabric that I later used to cover the dirty floor in an attempt to sleep.

There were no knobs or protrusions in the room, just soft corners. The toilet was a hole in the ground, no toilet paper. The hole dropped down a few feet where it was intersected by a grate of prison bars. The flushing happened automatically, periodically, though I never felt the urge. Even one’s feces left prison upon evacuation, presumably to leave the subject without anything to play with.

I say this, because while the room was dirty, it was not as dirty as the next two cells I experienced the following day, which were smeared with feces and peanut butter. Approximately every 6 hours, a pushcart made its way around the prison with regulation peanut butter sandwiches. Only a fraction were consumed. Many were used for wall decoration or splattered against the ceiling.
I couldn’t bear to eat, so I took my rations home as a souvenir. Aside from the milk, they still seemed edible a month later. This is their strength.

While the metal door was too thick for me to be heard if I did not scream, I could hear the muted screams of others across the jail. The din was anything but soothing.

When I asked for water, I was given enough (a couple Dixie cups’ worth) to barely keep my throat lubricated.

I was cold. The two pieces of fabric were not enough to spread on the filthy ground and also cover my naked body. I tried to sleep but it proved fruitless. Every 15 minutes, the metal peephole was creaked open, and I was expected to react, presumably to confirm that I was still alive. This was noted on a clipboard hanging beside the door.

Eventually, I found it most comfortable to stand by the cell door with the coarse fabric draped over my body. I looked out through a narrow slit of Plexiglas and tried to call attention from passers’ by. “Sir, Ma’am, could you please tell me… how long should I expect to be in here?”

A streak of being ignored was broken by a couple disheartening responses. “Usually we put people in there for 24 hours.”

Now I really felt like I was going crazy. Those weren’t the reassuring answers my inner optimist had hoped for. When I had told the arresting officers that I accepted my lot, this wasn’t the lot I was referring to. I didn’t expect a medal for fulfilling my civic duty, but I still felt like I had some fleeting right to something other than this. I banged on the metal door repeatedly until Deputy Terry showed up.

“Why am I in here?”

“You are crazy. You are a lunatic,” he pronounced.

“Do you know how I got here?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“This place—being in here—will make me crazy,” I pleaded.

“Good. That’s what you are and where you belong.” He spiraled his index finger by his muscular temple.

I tried to respond as he started walking way.

“Sir, might you consider for a moment that I am having a sane response to the conditions I’m being subjected? I was arrested by the very police I called to the scene of a medical emergency less than a block from my house, while heading home for the night.”

He stared at me bewildered, and never came near again.

The Day Shift

The difference between the night and day shift was exactly that: night and day.

The deputies who took the helm at 7am were more human. When I asked them the one simple question that occupied me for the past six hours, a deputy actually responded! He opened the metal peephole, leaned in, and whispered.

“Once you are in the safety cell, we can’t release you without a psychiatric evaluation. Those gals tend to arrive around 8am, though this depends if they’re needed in other jails first. When they do arrive, they’ll come to see you, and if you give them the right answers, wink wink, we’ll let you go.”

Doctor = Psychiatric Evaluation

Eventually I did get to see “the doctor,” though it took longer than my messenger indicated and we didn’t discuss my ailments. Chase conducted her evaluation through the same peephole that was used to hand me Dixie cups of water. I stood naked as I recounted my story.

“You don’t belong here,” she told me outright.

Chase said that once inside of the safety cell, the criteria for release were just this kind of evaluation. The criteria for being placed into a cell, she said, were more arbitrary.

She still had to ask:

“Are you having suicidal thoughts?”

“No.”

“Do you want to hurt someone?”

“No,” I cringed.

“I’ll go fill out the paperwork. The rest is not up to me… I’m sorry.”

Fingerprints, Round-trip to Sacramento

An hour and a half after my evaluation, my clothes were handed to me through a slit in the metal door. I was led to another holding cell and waited to be digitally fingerprinted.

It took several more hours to compare my fingerprints to the entire California criminal database. “They run this in Sacramento,” commanding deputy Johnson told me. “It can take as little as 15 minutes or as long as 24 hours. It’s out of our hands, though it always takes longer the first time… If you are arrested again, it will take less time, since you’ll already be in the system.”

I couldn’t tell if she meant to be ironic or comforting.

4th Cell, Citable Offense

There was a cautious air of excitement in the fourth cell they moved me to. Citation was billed as salvation. “You’re lucky, being cited,” my cellmates reassured me.

Inmates in orange clothes and ringing shackles across their wrists and ankles were now coursing through San Francisco’s #1 prisoner intake and processing facility. The deputies had a point. “We’re busy as you can see.”

“I’m lucky they didn’t beat me up this time,” one of my cellmates told me. “Man, I’m stupid. I can’t believe I stole six coffee bags from Starbucks in plain view of the officer. They ain’t even worth much. You can’t steal at the end of the month. They know you’re desperate from the 25th onward. And why did I hit up the same place again? They know me there already. Last time, I was lucky since the needle sore on my elbow was freaking gruesome. This time it’s healed too much. They don’t wanna deal with you if you’re looking nasty. Why can’t I learn not to steal at the end of the month?”

After 12 hours in jail, more than 6 of them in solitary confinement, the process of checking out was unremarkable. I signed a few papers. Retrieved my backpack. Confirmed the contents — laptop, wallet, phone, books and keys.

“The charges will be dropped if you show up on Tuesday. If you don’t show up, there will be a warrant for your arrest,” I was casually informed.

“Deputy, should I have been here in the first place?”

“No”

It was almost too good to hear. “Then why did I end up here?”

“You have to consider the source.” This phrase I remember verbatim.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, there are a lot of young cops on the street, trying to make a name for themselves.”

A sense of measure

I’m truly afraid that I’ll sound indignant and grouchy about being arrested. Normally it’s in my nature to accept the world as the strange place it is. This is not the worst experience of my life. It’s certainly not the most troubling thing to happen in San Francisco that evening.

One friend told me that I should chalk this up as another of life’s brutal lessons, that I should just be quiet, move on, and record this in my personal diary (if I must), and only return to these thoughts again if I am one day rich and powerful, when my decisions and donations can make a difference in the police force and civil affairs, and even then I might not really care. Stay coy until you are out of reach of the system, he emphasized. You think you’re clear now, but how many things went the way you expected?

Is there a weird middle ground, an uncanny valley, where you have no access to justice? Unless you’re severely beaten with cameras rolling or really have nothing to lose, your wiser friends will tell you to shut up and deal.

The following Tuesday, I approached a narrow Plexiglas slit in the courthouse window, and was handed a piece of paper with the word “dismissed”. The case was dropped from the docket before the charges were filed.

With passing time, the only consequence is a lingering memory that flares up some nights. Forgetting would be disrespectful to the officers who don’t accept this behavior as commonplace, and don’t want to be liable for actions of a minority of their peers. It would also be a fatalistic admission that such violence is acceptable.

It’s not. This should not have happened. I won’t pretend that I’m an angel. In fact, I pride myself on deconstructing systems and finding loopholes. And yet, under the circumstances, I feel comfortable saying that the police should have helped me get safely home.

Officer Kaur’s unnecessary escalation of a peaceful situation, culminating in the sadistic stomping on my cuffed hands is a severe professional failure that reflects poorly on the San Francisco Police Department. It does not surprise me that she and several of the other officers I encountered that night are currently in the middle of a lawsuit.

Conclusion

I painstakingly retrieved all possible documentation, including: the police report, transcript of radio chatter, audio of my 911 call, security footage from Radius restaurant (handed to me freely by the owner), Rebecca’s and Josh’s feedback, and collected photos from the incident and my injuries.

I presented all of this to the SF Office of Citizen Complaints. The filing party is not allowed to know the outcome due to the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights (POBAR) but may be notified if an internal investigation is initiated. Many months have passed since my complaint, and I have no sense of progress.

At this point, I’m left no choice but to present this case to the investigative court of public opinion, be it brave or foolish.

In the hope that it might help some other idealistic, nerdy people from following me down that rabbit hole, I conclude with several public service announcements:

• Don’t call 911. Obviously, there are exceptions, but the sad lesson is, there are fewer than you’d think.
• Call Lyft to take you to the hospital. (Worked well when I broke my elbow.)
• Take such incidents to trial, where justice isn’t veiled by the POBAR. It’s not a matter of litigious vindictiveness. It’s just the only available way. The SF Office of Citizen Complaints is not a valid alternative.
• Consider wearing a video camera at all times. It has been shown that when police wear cameras and are aware of being filmed, it moderates their behavior. As self reports of the need to use force decrease, so do complaints.