Once I finished laughing at myself (I was thinking of the look on my face) I said “This is important. Did he say ‘some mines” or ‘some more mines’?” The interpreter turned to the farmer and then yelled up to me “He said some more mines. But you should be OK, if you stay on the path.”
The “path” was not as wide as my size 12 boots. Putting aside the thought “this would be a really stupid way to die”, I managed to make the last 35 meters or so up the cliff-side. Why did the farmer warn me? Because some tidewater Virginians had towed an old Soviet tractor that had gotten stuck in his village.
They see me rollin’, they hatin’, patrolling
Late 2004, I was the CJTF Eagle Civil Affairs Officer, and I was with a squad of Virginia Army National Guard as they visited Ashrafkhel, in Parwan Province, Afghanistan. One of the men in the village pointed out the small cliffs near the Panjshir River and said that some suspicious people had been up there a couple of nights ago. Half the squad swarmed up the two paths nearest where the man had pointed. Thinking I was clever, I took a path over to the north of where everyone else was going up, to keep an eye on things. Halfway up, I heard the interpreter yell up to me “He says the weather may have uncovered some (unintelligible) mines.”
So I was able to avoid stomping on old Taliban or Northern Alliance mines, join the Virginians and find evidence that someone had been tinkering with things that go boom.
Well, lookie here. Somebody done been naughty.
Why did these people help us? When we rolled in to town, they looked like most of the people in the area. Thinking things like “Now what?” “These guys, again?” “Oh boy, the circus is in town!” The squad leader asked the first man we spoke to “how is the tractor doing?” The man’s face lit up and he said something to the effect of “Oh, it is you guys! The ones who helped us!” The month before, this same squad had rolled through and used their HMMWVs to pull the village’s only tractor (an old Soviet model) out of a ditch. No doors kicked in, no searches, no swaggering around acting tough and such. Just some farm boys helping out other farmers. We had a nice chat about how the old tractor was now kaputt, but they were hoping to get a new one soon. That was the point when someone joined us and mentioned where the naughty folks had been hanging out.
Some number of hours later, when my sphincter had finally unclenched, I reported everything to the Ops Officer. I even had the insight to mention how this was a nice contrast to the company of Airborne guys that had caused quite a stir booting in doors and barging through houses in a village to the north, a while back. But it took reading various police misconduct stories to make the connection here at home.
Gaining trust, when you are seen as (or actually are) outsiders, armed and seemingly unaccountable to anyone, can be difficult. It takes restraint. When faced with intransigent, maybe even sullen and uncooperative people, it can be very be very difficult to not get impatient and resort to “tell me what I want to know/comply/obey!” It also takes time. If you roll up and say “trust me”, most people are going to reflexively go on guard.
The good will many police departments had years back, was earned over a long time. It probably arose, in part, from having the same beat cops around. They got to know you, and you got to see they were not just interested in hassling you, writing citations or getting in a bust right at the end of a shift for some sweet overtime.
To rebuild the trust lost by many departments (primarily during the Drug War) from property grabbing to door busting to stop and frisk, it will take restraint and time. We need cops who help a drunk get home from the bus stop or train station, call for a wrecker for a broken down car and waits until it shows up, stop in and talk to store owners, bar tenders and other people in the neighborhood and then amiably go on their way. Rather than act like an occupying army, pull a tractor out of a ditch.
A former Huntington police detective has been sued in federal court along with the city and supervisors for civil rights violations including sexual abuse. The complaint alleges too that the city has failed to supervise officers.
Representing the plaintiffs, attorney Tim Eves listed nearly 20 alleged instances of policies and procedures not followed, failure to exercise reasonable or slight care, and failure to follow standards by supervisors. Eves asserted that supervisors knew the officers had been the subject of prior investigations of excessive force, had prior disciplinary actions against him, and “was not qualified to safely investigate and/or meet with potential female victims.” The complaint alleges that the officer had “unlawfully stopped, arrested, and physically assaulted others while on duty,” including illegal search and seizure, unlawful restraint without due legal process, and invasive search without probable cause, and “offensive contact” of their persons.
The city attorney has spoken out (emphasis mine again):
Responding to documents in the Earle case related to the sexual abuse, attorneys for the city have stated that the incident occurred while the detective was OFF DUTY and working a part time job.
“It is generally alleged that this incident involved a non-consensual sexual contact by Officer N with two females,” the city’s response said. “However, and without disclosing the sordid details of this incident, it must be noted that Officer N possesses real and valid defenses to these allegations, including evidence of consent to any sexual interactions.”
Well, that’s different! He was off the clock. Although, he was on the clock when he beat that elderly woman to death a year before the alleged incidents in this case.
Either way, the taxpayers are going to likely be on the hook for any settlement or judgment that comes from it. Which is the real travesty here. Well, that and the alleged sexual assaults, beating deaths and the city’s dismissive treatment of their citizens.
Here is a case resembling the plot of Blazing Saddles – if Blazing Saddles were a serious legal drama. The case, based on the “right” to compel service from a private business, ended up denying the right to jury trial.
Just like this, but totally different
It started in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, where the sheriff and a couple of his buddies faced a dilemma: it was around noon, and they hadn’t had any booze. One of the sheriff’s finicky friends, named Finnegan, said there wasn’t any good booze in the French Quarter, so the party decided to try the Bank Coffeehouse on Royal Street. They couldn’t get service there, and the Sheriff, Charles St. Albin Sauvinet, believed he knew the reason. The proprietor of the Bank Coffeehouse, Joseph A. Walker, had allegedly discovered the mixed-race heritage of the white-looking Sauvinet and didn’t want to serve the Sheriff for fear of alienating racist white customers.
So Sauvinet sued Walker, accusing him of racial discrimination in violation of the constitution and laws of Louisiana.
The state of Louisiana had certainly changed from prewar tines, when white people were a dominant caste and most black people were considered property. In the middle was a class of gens de couleur – free people of color, partly black and partly white. It was probably the French influence, and a Gallican “we understand zees things” tolerance in sexual matters, but there was a quasi-official system where white men took black or mixed-race mistresses and tried to set up their children in life – without all the privileges of the whites but also without the all-out slavery and oppression meted out to blacks.
Charles Sauvinet was born into this community of gens de couleur, the son of a white father and black mother. Charles was provided with an extensive education, including learning several languages. This plus his white appearance gave him more than a foot in the white world. So when Louisiana seceded, Charles Sauvinet joined a Confederate military unit made up of free people of color from New Orleans – in which metropolis that community generally lived.
Sauvinet didn’t have the chance to do much fighting – at least not on the Confederate side. When Union troops occupied New Orleans in 1862, Sauvinet and other free people of color joined the Union side. Sauvinet was first a translator for the occupiers and then an officer of black troops. Sauvinet apparently passed for white, because he was well-treated at a time when only the white officers were allowed much authority or respect. Sauvinet also registered his children as white.
Henry C. Warmoth
After the war, former slaves joined with the free persons of color and “Radical” whites to form the state Republican Party. Two young white Northerner lawyers who had been in the Union army – Henry Clay Warmoth and Henry C. Dibble – became leaders in this party, in which Sauvinet was also active. Warmoth became governor of a Reconstructed Louisiana. Dibble, while remaining an active Republican, was appointed judge of a trial court which the Republican legislature had created to hear challenges to the Republican program of Reconstruction. Dibble’s role – which he fulfilled ably – was to reject Democratic suits against Reconstruction laws.
Sauvinet was elected as the civil sheriff in New Orleans. His job included serving and collecting rent from people in receivership, such as the landlord of the Bank Coffeehouse. It was while Sauvinet was collecting rent from Joseph A. Walker that the latter supposedly asked Sauvinet not to come to get served.
The case got to Judge Dibble’s court, where a jury weighed the evidence. Walker claimed that Sauvinet wasn’t even black, and had professed to be white. Sauvinet replied that he’d been treated as black when whites wanted to oppress him.
When the jury couldn’t agree on whether Walker had practiced illegal discrimination, Judge Dibble stepped in. A recent statute empowered the judge to give a verdict in a public-accommodation case if the jury couldn’t agree. Dibble, as it happened, knew Sauvinet, but this would certainly not have affected his impartiality. Dibble ruled against Walker and imposed $1,000 in damages, which was hardly loose change in those days.
The case ended up in the U. S. Supreme Court. Walker said he’d been deprived of his constitutional right to a trial by jury in civil cases – a right spelled out in the Seventh Amendment: “In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved…” This right was now part of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and of due process of law, claimed Walker. Suits for damages, like Sauvinet’s, were generally considered suits at common law.
Throughout Reconstruction, Louisiana politics was marred by often-deadly violence (on the part of white-supremacist Democrats) and fraud (on the part of Republicans). Elections were often disputed, leading to rival claimants for office and even rival legislative bodies.
In the 1872 elections, Warmoth led a faction of Louisiana Republicans into coalition with the Democrats, while other “regular” Republicans still opposed the Democrats and stood up for Reconstruction principles. Judge Dibble stood with the regular Republicans and sought to block some of the actions of the Warmoth/Democratic faction. Writing to Warmoth, Dibble justified his position and made a fairly revealing remark – “in every act where I can justly and properly exercise discretion I will be found with the [R]epublican party.”
In the mid-1870s, as Reconstruction was winding down, the Supreme Court ruled for Sauvinet, claiming that the states didn’t have to obey the Seventh Amendment. This was part of a series of decisions giving a narrow interpretation to the Fourteenth Amendment. These decisions tended to come from Louisiana cases, probably reflecting the politico-legal turmoil in that state.
Henry C. Dibble
Dibble’s term of office had come to an end in 1872, and the ex-judge moved out West, becoming a prominent attorney and California state legislator (sponsoring an antidiscrimination law), and writing a western.
The white-supremacist Louisiana Democrats took back the state from the Republicans and got rid of the public-accommodations laws. Their motive was pretty clearly racism rather than libertarianism, given that Louisiana’s Democratic government later supported forced segregation, not freedom of association. Sauvinet’s Supreme Court victory was fairly Pyrrhic: a short-lived triumph for equal accommodation was won at the expense of an important right of American citizenship, namely jury trial.
Sauvinet later killed himself when his son became mortally ill during one of New Orleans’ periodic epidemics, not really the kind of amusing ending Mel Brooks would have gone for.
Walker became head of an organization defending the right to do business on Sunday.
Law professor Paul D. Carrington praised the Walker decision a century later – “it would have been somewhat ironic in the name of due process of law to command the states to employ an institution [the civil jury] designed in part to introduce elements of non-rational emotionalism into the making of decisions purporting to enforce the law.” Yet in the very case Carrington praises, the presiding judge whose rationality and impartiality supposedly excelled the emotionalism of the jury was a zealous Republican partisan scarcely twenty-five years old. Judge Dibble commendably set his face against white supremacy, but he was hardly judicious or evenhanded.
Works Cited:
Paul D. Carrington, “The Seventh Amendment: Some Bicentennial Reflections,” 1990 University of Chicago Legal Forum 33-86 (1990).
Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.
Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Charles McClain, California Carpetbagger: The Career of Henry Dibble, 28 QLR 885 (2009),
Justin A. Nystrom, New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Michael A. Ross, “Obstructing reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the legal campaign against Louisiana’s Reconstruction Government,” Civil War History, September 2003, pp. 235-53, at 248.
Alternate Headline: David Simon Ought To Sue Somebody!
A David Simon, HBO, BBC 4 Production
I don’t even know where to begin. Should I start with the tens of thousands stolen from taxpayers in bogus overtime? The drug dealing? The $200,000 stolen from a safe in one incident? The cop that has killed two people in the line of duty in the last decade, with one of them resulting in a six-figure settlement? There are so many choices, I just can’t decide.
U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein
Well, neither could Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein, so he charged the seven officers with racketeering.
The accusations portray officers who stole from taxpayers through time fraud and from citizens they stopped or searched, with at least 10 victims robbed including some who had not committed crimes, officials said.
The overtime abuses alleged include one from an officer who claimed it while on vacation in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and another who was in the poker room of a casino and not on the job, according to details released by prosecutors.
That’s jacked up, right? But it probably passes for petty in a city whose police department is known for corruption. Alas, the story continues:
The alleged robberies included stealing $1,500 from a maintenance man who planned to use the cash for rent and a theft of about $200,000 from a safe and from bags seized at a search location, authorities said.
In another instance, one officer is accused of helping an associate in a drug conspiracy remove a GPS tracking device placed on the person’s car by the DEA.
Police Chief Kevin Davis
And there we are. Fortunately the new Police Chief seems to be as disgusted as you are, calling them “heinous” and the acts of “1930’s gangsters.” Not only that, but their actions have corrupted multiple federal cases, although the U.S. Attorney’s office didn’t say what exactly they were.
Now, this is probably the last thing Balmer needs in the wake of the Freddie Gray killing and riotous aftermath. Erosion of confidence in police has already reached a critical mass once. Something like this could set any progress they’ve made back quite a bit. Fortunately, the Chief seems to grasp some of the systemic problems, acknowledging that the overtime abuse “represents a pattern and practice that has undoubtedly existed in this department for many years.” Perhaps a conviction will make other time-stealing cops think twice before continuing. Only time, and a positive outcome in the case, will tell. But he also said something else that gives me a little hope:
Davis addressed the troubled department, saying, “Reform isn’t always a pretty thing to watch unfold, but it’s necessary in our journey toward a police department the city deserves.”
Encouraging.
The officers named in the indictment:
The seven officers charged under the racketeering statute all live in suburban Baltimore. They were identified as Momodu Bondeva Kenton Gondo, 34, of Owings Mills; Evodio Calles Hendrix, 32, of Randallstown; Daniel Thomas Hersl, 47, of Joppa; Wayne Earl Jenkins, 36, of Middle River; Jemell Lamar Rayam, 36, of Owings Mills; Marcus Roosevelt Taylor, 30, of Glen Burnie; and Maurice Kilpatrick Ward, 36, of Middle River.
Authorities said that Gondo, known as “GMoney,” also has been charged with joining a drug conspiracy. Five alleged members of that conspiracy were also charged Monday with drug offenses for allegedly selling heroin at a shopping center in Northeast Baltimore.
Good luck, Mr. Rosenstein and Mr. Davis. I know you’ve got your work cut out for you as you try to root out corruption and help the citizens of Baltimore get a police department they can not only be proud of, but that they can trust to not rob them blind.
The Chicago Independent Police Review Authority has been around since 2007. In that time, the city has paid out an estimated $500 million in excessive force claims.And in that time not a single police officer has been recommended for termination. Until now.
In an 8-0 vote, the Chicago Police Board voted at its monthly meeting to dismiss Officer Francisco “Frank” Perez for the 2011 shooting outside a Mexican restaurant in the East Ukrainian Village neighborhood. One board member, John O’Malley, did not vote because he’s new to the board.
About freaking time!
Yeah, I’m not surprised he’s wearing glasses either
The incident in question occurred in 2011 and involved the officer firing into a vehicle 16 times. The vehicle he fired into, a blue Chrysler 300, was allegedly mistaken by the officer for a red Mitsubishi Galant. His defense was that he could not distinguish between the two vehicles Fortunately video evidence disproved his claims that he thought he was firing at the red Mitsubishi.
Meanwhile, his attorney Daniel Herbert, described his client as a hero and dismissed the allegations against him as preposterous.
He was not terminated for lying to investigators and has the right to appeal his termination. In all likelihood, and based on the length of the investigation, his appeal will take long enough to earn him a taxpayer-funded retirement.
Robstown P.D. officer Michael Morin was arrest on November 6th after he was found slumped over his steering wheel on the road near the Staples and Everhart intersection. On Wednesday, we learned Morin has worked out a deal with the prosecutor’s office and he is taking part in a pre-trial diversion program. If he complies with that program, Morin will have the charge removed from his record.
Since we seem to have quite the weekend audience, some moar lynx to keep y’all commenting (please note, there may or may not be Saturday PM Links – buyer is not being given any warranty, express or implied by the use of the word “Morning”….*extended legalese*;
Chicago PD railroaded a group of 4 men (hard to imagine!!!!) – the last of them just got out of prison,
It isn’t just cops doing no-knock raids that get the wrong address,
You want to see journalism under attack – don’t watch a DC presser, read this,
California Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez introduced a bill to make California a “shall-issue” state.
“It is our Constitutional right to defend ourselves,” said sponsor Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, a
Trump is calling contractors to discuss height requirements for his wall as we speak.
Republican from Lake Elsinore. “Californians should not be subjugated to the personal beliefs of one individual who doesn’t believe in the Second Amendment. If a citizen passes the background check and completes the necessary safety training requirements, there should be no reason to deny them a CCW.”
