Homestead Police Department (HPD), in South Florida, has myriad problems respecting the First Amendment. I went to HPD this week to serve some officers in a civil rights suit, the story was covered earlier. While entering I discovered that HPD still has not learned that photography is not a crime.
The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.
I was taking photos of a sign outside the Homestead city council meeting in South Florida this month when a police officer named John Edward Frank informed me that I was forbidden from taking his photo – even though I had no interest in photographing him in the first place.
So I started video recording him instead.
What else did he expect considering I was wearing my Photography is Not a Crime t-shirt?
Donald Trump loves to brag about the number of people he has sued over the years, but he doesn’t say much about his losing legal battle with disgruntled former students of Trump University.
In an odd turn of events, a 16-year-old was charged with a DUI in Washington after a Spokane police officer ran a red light, crashed into the teenager and then blamed him for the accident.
Officer Seth Killian, who has been awarded countless accolades throughout his law enforcement career, was distracted and ran a red light on December 8 crashing into the teenager’s vehicle.
He even admitted to being at fault in the moments after the crash.
“I screwed up, man,” a distraught Killian is heard telling another officer in a conversation captured on his body cam.
Less than a year into the job, a Delaware cop was arrested for making terrorist threats against a citizen, who was only trying to help another citizen file a complaint against police.
“I’m going to call my boys and have them come and lock you up,” Wilmington police officer Julian Michel told the victim, threatening to arrest him for disorderly conduct.
“I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” Michel threatened, pointing at the victim. “I’m going to shoot you.”
So last week, a video of a frisky cop mistaking a man’s penis for a deadly weapon had gone viral on Imgur, a short video with no audio that generated laughs, comments and compliments, but revealed no background.
The bizarre footage showed a shirtless, shoeless man being heavily patted down – groin area and all – as his hands are behind his back.
An award-winning Florida sheriff’s deputy was suspended for treating nearly a dozen inmates inhumanely while transporting them in a van last year.
However, it was just over two years ago that St. Lucie County sheriff’s deputy Johnny Hubbard received a departmental award along with several other deputies, describing them as “extremely professional and extraordinary individuals” who deserve to be “recognized for their day-to-day dedication to their duties.”
More than a year after he and his wife were fired from an Indiana sheriff’s office for a scandal involving $250,000 that went missing, the former deputy was arrested for having used his patrol car to protect a massive drug operation while he was still employed.
And that comes just more than a year after Jason Wood and his wife, Teresa, were arrested for possession of synthetic drugs, specifically Spice, a synthetic type of marijuana that was made illegal in 2012 after it was proven to be much more dangerous than natural marijuana.
An award-winning lieutenant of the Ohio State Highway Patrol was arrested Sunday for allegedly stalking the wife of a fellow colleague.
William Elschlager, Ohio State Highway Patrol Marietta Post Leader, was charged with one charge of menacing by stalking – a fourth degree felony in that state. He was also charged with one count of abduction – a third degree felony in Ohio, according to WTAP.
