The Blue Line

The NYPD unlawfully arrests Shawn Randall Thomas at least a few times a year for recording and refusing to provide identification, including for using a vaporizer last year.
He’s never been convicted for a any of those crimes.
The New York man was arrested last week in the subway yet again, after a transit cop approached him, demanding his identification under the controversial “Stop and Frisk” law, but without articulating any reasonable suspicion that Thomas had committed an actual crime.

Arizona police officer Philip “Mitch” Brailsford, a bespectacled Ramboesque nerd of a cop, was one of six Mesa police officers who had their guns drawn on Daniel Shaver after they ordered him out of his hotel room last January.
Show us your hands, they first shouted. Place your hands behind your head, they then ordered. Place your hands on the floor and come crawling to use, they then commanded.
Shaver, a 26-year-old man who only moments earlier was showing his pellet gun to a couple of new acquaintances he had met in the hotel, began crawling towards the cops.

A New York woman who had been arrested for driving under the influence ended up brutally attacked by several sheriff’s deputies, a surveillance video clearly shows.
But that did not stop a jury from finding her guilty of assaulting the deputies.
Nevertheless, Jennifer Merrow is suing the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, despite the fact that a conviction makes it much harder to win that lawsuit.
But as her attorney says, the video speaks for itself.

A pair of California deputies who were caught on camera viciously beating a suspect with their batons after chasing him for several miles were charged with multiple felonies Tuesday.

Fearing citizens with cameras, police in the United States have resorted to shielding themselves from the public, resulting in a sharp spike in murders throughout the country.
That is what FBI Director James Comey calls the “Ferguson effect.”
Never mind the fact that had witnesses recorded the police shooting death of Michael Brown, we would have seen exactly what had taken place that day in Ferguson, Missouri during the summer of 2014, which was one of several catalysts that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

An Illinois man was arrested on felony eavesdropping charges after informing police he was recording them in his own home over the weekend.
New Lenox police claim Daniel Murphy made this announcement while “surreptitiously recording” them, which is legal jargon for secretly recording
Nevertheless, the arrest of the 25-year-old man raises legal questions about the state’s new and improved eavesdropping law, which replaced the previous Draconian law that was ruled unconstitutional in 2014 after numerous citizens were arrested for recording police in the line of duty.

A Washington police officer who is responsible for training other officers was caught on video physically abusing a 15-year-old girl, then claiming she had attacked him.
The charges never stuck and now Tacoma police officer Jared Williams is being sued.
Williams was in full uniform and working an off-duty security job at Tacoma Mall when he spotted two teenagers riding their bicycles through the parking lot on May 24, 2015.

A Florida man was ticketed $113 for the crime of stepping into a quiet, residential street from a sidewalk to avoid walking through a pile of debris.
It was an apparent case of profiling considering Joshua McKnight is a local police accountability activist who records police in public, shows up to city review panels and files complaints against officers for not wearing their name tags.
One of the two Fort Myers police officers who stopped him has arrested him before on a questionable charge that was later dismissed.

An Oregon pet sitter was walking two dogs when one of them decided to defecate on the grassy berm in front of a house, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.
Juli Norman, 59, said she had already picked up the dog’s feces and placed them in a bag when a man came bursting out the door, yelling at her for allowing the dog to do its business in front of his house.
He even pointed to a sign he had planted in the grass asking to “please be respectful,” showing images of dogs peeing and defecating with a red slash through it.

Illinois cops pulled a car over for speeding, then dragged a man out of the back seat because he would not stop recording.
Dolton police then forced Steven S. Sinnot facedown on the street and handcuffed him, telling him, he should “learn how to listen.”
“I just had my hands where he could see them,” Sinnott says as he was being dragged out as you can see in the video below.
“I didn’t move or nothing. I don’t consent to no search,” he continues.
“Shut the fuck up!” said the cop named Doiley who dragged him out.