Two police officers in Asheville, North Carolina, violently arrested a beloved local 63 year-old janitor after receiving a false report from the local Subaru dealership that one of their cars was being used without authorization. Louis Searles, the janitor, sees the officers looking at a car outside the building where he works. He had observed the woman who was driving the vehicle, so he walked up to the officers and told then where the woman was (in a local business called “Thrive,” which is in the building where he works as a janitor. Instead of going and locating that woman, they decided to violently arrest the janitor.
Derrick House was returning home from a trip to Costco, headed to make dinner with his family. An unmarked car comes speeding up from behind him, suddenly blocking him in. Cops jump out and start pointing their pistols at him, threatening to shoot him in the face. What did he do wrong? Apparently he was just a black male driving a Volkswagen. Even though it was the wrong make, color (and license plate number) the cops figured it was close enough.
Deputies in Onondaga County, New York bravely captured the wrong dangerous 11 Year Old, handcuffing her in front of her friends, who filmed the incident. Sheriff Toby Shelley said the deputies had received a description of a girl who allegedly ran from a stolen car just half an hour before. Turns out, it was the wrong person. Sheriff Shelley explained that handcuffing the innocent 11 Year Old was completely appropriate.
What was supposed to be a joyous Christmas celebration turned into a nightmare for Jennifer Heath Box, when Broward County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies arrested her and threw her in jail for three days—all because they refused to check their paperwork to make sure they had the right person. Because of indifference of police and jail personnel, Jennifer missed Christmas with her family and, most importantly, missed seeing her son before he deployed overseas with the United States Marines. Fortunately, the Institute for Justice is on the case…
Derrick Williams was fast asleep in the apartment he had been living in for about a month (which was leased by a friend/Uncle) when he heard a commotion outside his bedroom. It was the Chesterfield County (Virginia) Police Department, who had just opened the front door and sent in a police K9 to find him and violently attack him. But it was a mistake. He had done nothing wrong. His friend/Uncle’s ex-girlfriend had come by earlier to collect some belongings, saw him asleep in the apartment, and called 911, believing he was an intruder of some sort. Instead of realizing that Derrick was not an intruder, they just went full send with their attack K9, to bite first, and ask questions later. Now a lawsuit has been filed. But the cops are asking for qualified immunity, claiming they did nothing wrong.
George Henderson spent 29 years serving in the military with 6 overseas deployments. He retired in 2018 after his head injuries and PTSD began to worsen. He was then diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, which led to him going missing on December 6. The State of Tennessee issued a Silver Alert. Mr. Henderson was located a day later, 10 miles away, in nearby Guthrie, Kentucky. Unfortunately, when that happened, a Guthrie police officer punched him unconscious. They have circled their law enforcement wagons, claim no wrongdoing, and apparently continue to prosecute this American hero.
Dallas Campbell walked into the police department in Hazard, Kentucky a free man, doing his best to keep a notoriously untrustworthy police agency (at least that’s what I learned watching the “Dukes of Hazard”) honest. Unfortunately, he left in handcuffs, the victim of a false arrest. But he had a small YouTube channel, and 12 days after he posted the video of his arrest, the Hazard Police Chief was fired.
A special agent with the Lake County Narcotics Agency has resigned following an internal investigation into an incident of alleged unlawful detention at a Medina County Township bar in April. Daniel Lajack, 48, submitted his immediate resignation on Dec. 2, just weeks after being notified of potential disciplinary action for his involvement in a controversial encounter with a legal immigrant. Lajack also served as a federal task force officer for the Drug Enforcement Agency, before being removed shortly after the April incident became public.
Yet again, police officers pulled over an innocent driver, subjecting the individual to the so-called “felony stop” or “high risk stop,” which is the process wherein they treat an innocent American citizen as if they were a terrorist serial killer, forcing the person to get out of their car, walk backwards, and so on, all occurring at the barrel of a loaded gun. This time the victim was a teenage girl in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
The taxpayers shouldered the burden of the $250,000 settlement for the obvious police misconduct that occurred. However the police department has “no comment” for the community that employs them. And the city itself doesn’t even bother to say “no comment.”
Here’s the blog post where I last ranted about the unconstitutionality of these “high risk stops” based solely on computer (or human) mistakes about a car being stolen, along with some links to prior videos I’ve done involving similar situations. Therein I list numerous instances of this occurring to innocent people across the country, including Aurora, Colorado, Raymore, Missouri, Fairfax, Virginia, Norwalk, Connecticut, as well as Lehi, Utah (which is what the blog post and video from that post was about).
It all boils down to this: without more, police officers should not be aiming firearms at people. Reasonableness is the key. Aiming guns based on clerical entries and government policy is rarely going to be reasonable. Doing so should be based on actual perceived threats presented by the persons with whom they’re dealing. Here, the officers actions of handcuffing the teen at gunpoint could not have been reasonable, and thus they would most likely be found to be unconstitutional by the courts (which is why they settled).
In the small town of Leitchfield, Kentucky, something amazing happened. A man’s house caught on fire (“far”) and emergency responders showed up. Instead of the fire department, the police department was first on the scene. Instead of helping in some constructive way, they ordered the homeowners, who were attempting to put out the fire, out of the house. When they refused, the officers beat and tased them. Then, when the government put the case before a grand jury, in an attempt to indict the homeowner, the grand jury said no, and instead indicted the police officer. The officer’s lawyer said he’d never heard of that happening before…
