Another case of death by police beatings, this time in Bakersfield California, has the community in an outrage! On May 8th, Kern Country officers beat an inebriated David Silva for so long and so hard that the man eventually passed out and later died from baton hits to his head.

Various witness accounts recall that the officers were violently beating the man as he lay in the street and continued to beat him even after he went silent and seemed unresponsive. His bleeding body was then left in the street for a rather prolonged period of time until the ambulance came, but by then any CPR that the paramedics attempted was redundant, because Silva was already dead.

A 911 call from a distressed witness, Selena, said that officers were beating a man to death.“There’s a man laying on the floor, and your police officers beat the (expletive) out of him and killed him,” said Selena, according to reports. She also insists that the man did nothing to deserve such harsh treatment.

A young man, Ruben Ceballos, was woken from his sleep by the screams and loud noises of the police beating Silva. When he looked outside to see what was happening, Ceballos also claimed that the police officers were brutally beating on the man and after several minutes, the beaten man stopped screaming and seemed unresponsive. Ceballos, too, says that the Silva did nothing to provoke such aggression from the officers.

http://www.policebrutality.info/2013/05/officers-beat-man-to-death-harass-witnesses-and-take-evidence.html

The Tuscaloosa Police officer who shot a family’s pet earlier this month has filed a lawsuit against a neighbor, claiming that she made untrue statements about the situation.

TPD Officer Mike Azwell is asking for $10,000 from Deborah Bosch, who lives next door to his mother in the Eastern Hills subdivision in Tuscaloosa County. Bosch is not the owner of the dog that was killed, but she did call Tuscaloosa Police and made statements about the incident, according to the suit filed in Tuscaloosa County District Court Friday afternoon.

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The owners of the dog that was killed placed fliers around the neighborhood looking for their eight-year-old chocolate Labrador, Sonic. A neighbor called and said that he had been shot.

Owner Rebecca James said Tuesday that the white dog that was with Sonic is a Boxer that lives nearby. She said that she has never witnessed either of the two dogs act aggressively.

http://crime.blogs.tuscaloosanews.com/16558/tpd-officer-who-shot-dog-files-lawsuit-seeking-10000-from-neighbor/?tc=ar

Police shoot therapy dog as they raid wrong address looking for man with expired vehicle registration

LEANDER, TX — Leander Police went to the home of James and Renata Simmons acting on a warrant for unpaid vehicle registration on June 17, 2013. The warrant, however, was for a completely different town – Cedar Park, TX, and was for a person named Bradly Neal Simpson, someone the Simmons family, who have lived at this address for the past nine years, have never even heard of.

Officers walking around the rear of the property saw Vinny, a German Shepherd therapy dog, running free within his fence along with another German Shepherd. Police fired at Vinny, firing 3 times with one bullet hitting him in the back of his neck.



http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/police-shoot-therapy-dog-as-they-raid-wrong-home-looking-for-man-with-expired-vehicle-registration/#prettyPhoto

“We are aware that there were witnesses that the police never interviewed, there have been witnesses that have been harassed after speaking to the media and there are other citizens stepping forward about the mental state of Erick Gelhaus.

http://sfbayview.com/2013/national-day-of-protest-saturday-for-andy-lopez-13-murdered-by-santa-rosa-deputy-sheriff/

The old standard was a substantive due process four part test which was to determine if the use of force “shocked the conscience”: “(1) the need for the application of force; (2) the relationship between that need and the amount of force that was used; (3) the extent of the injury inflicted; and (4) ‘[w]hether the force was applied in a good faith effort to maintain and restore discipline or maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm.’”

That seems pretty straightforward from a public perspective, because it is a I-know-it-when-I-see-it criteria. The court in Graham v. Connor found that an objective standard based on Fourth Amendment seizure jurisprudence was more applicable to police use of force, since the civilians was essentially being seized, and thus ruled:

“Today we make explicit what was implicit in Garner’s analysis, and hold that all claims that law enforcement officers have used excessive force — deadly or not — in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other ‘seizure’ of a free citizen should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and its ‘reasonableness’ standard, rather than under a ‘substantive due process’ approach.”

https://medium.com/p/74a4da37a0ae

Here's a recipe for disaster: Take a young man (or woman), raise him on a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence, train him well in military tactics but allow him to be illiterate about the Constitution, and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who are in fact his masters and employers.

Once you have fully indoctrinated this young man (or woman) on the idea that the police belong to a brotherhood of sorts, with its own honor code and rule of law, then place this person in situations where he will encounter individuals who knowingly or unknowingly challenge his authority, where he may, justifiably or not, feel threatened, and where he will have to decide between firing a weapon or, the more difficult option, adequately investigating a situation in order to better assess the danger and risk posed to himself and others, and then act on it by defusing the tension or de-escalating the violence.

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I'm not the only one concerned, either. Indeed, I've been contacted by many older cops equally alarmed by the attitudes and behaviors of younger police today, the foot soldiers in the emerging police state. Yet as I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this is what happens when you go from a representative democracy in which all members are subject to the rule of law to a hierarchical one in which there is one set of laws for the rulers and another, far more stringent set, for the ruled.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Licensed-to-Kill-The-Grow-by-John-Whitehead-Police-Abuse-Of-Power_Police-Brutality_Police-State-130916-302.html

A whole cottage industry has sprung up of police experts and training specialists, such as the Force Science Institute, who educate departments and officers throughout the country that waiting for the gun to come out is too late. As Professor Ross argues, logically, there will have to be a nexus between the officer’s stated belief as to what occurred and his actions in response, but in my view that nexus can get awfully shaky but still withstands official scrutiny.

But Ross comes from the camp which stands solidly behind Graham v. Connor.He is not alone in mindset when he suggests that department policies and training “should direct an officer to respond to the pre-assault threat cues of an assault without waiting for the actual assault to commence.” That’s right — shoot to kill because you think you will be assaulted at some point in the near future.

Thus we have a condition where the law allows use of deadly force on nothing but the perception that its use is justified and a condition where that belief is proven with nothing more than the statements of the involved officer. In some cases, such as this weekend in North Carolina, it is abundantly clear that the officer was not being reasonable; but that is the rare exception. Proving that an officer is not telling the truth if he chooses to lie is even more of a challenge.

https://medium.com/p/74a4da37a0ae

Law enforcement officers in Harris County have shot 65 unarmed people since 1999, killing 17. These incidents represent more than a third of all local police shootings, but experts call them the most preventable.

After two unarmed teenagers were shot and killed in separate incidents last year, the Houston Chronicle analyzed 189 shootings by officers from 18 local law enforcement agencies in the past 5 1/2 years.

Officers' actions were ruled justified in nearly all of the shootings examined. A shooting can be legally acceptable if an officer believes someone's life is in danger.

But only half of those shot by police carried a gun or a knife. Another 7 percent held another object, such as a screwdriver, a piece of lumber or a pipe.
http://www.chron.com/news/article/One-in-three-police-shootings-involve-unarmed-1651275.php