City Attorney

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.

NYPD cops brutally beat 19-year-old Jateik Reed for resisting arrest and carrying drugs in 2012. Drugs were never found and the case was dismissed in court. Reed then filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city.
Now New York City has settled the lawsuit with Reed, who is now 24, for the amount of $614,500, his lawyers announced earlier this month.

Chicago will pay a $3 million settlement to the family of a teenager shot and killed while fleeing police on a busy street, claiming he had a black object in his hand that made them fear for their lives.
The black object turned out to be an iPhone case.
And surveillance cameras do not show Cedric Chatman, 17, pointing the object at officers as he fled as police initially reported, although the videos are grainy.

After mistaking a deaf man for a thief, beating him, tasering him and choking him because he was unable to understand their commands, the Hawthorne Police Department in southwest Los Angeles has settled a lawsuit for $55,000. The settlement was approved by the City Council on Tuesday.
The deaf man identified as Jonathan Meister and co-plaintiff Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness Inc. will receive the settlement on the basis of civil rights violations under the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Former Chula Vista Police Officer David Mitchell will receive a $175,000 settlement from the city after he was fired for making complaints of racism from his superiors. The settlement was reached this week.
Mitchell was a lieutenant with the San Diego Police Department, a position he obtained after suing the department for racial discrimination in 2008 in a case that settled.
The California cop retired in 2014, then joined the ranks of the Chula Vista Police Department, just south of San Diego, the following year at the age of 61.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance this week dropped the manslaughter charge against the ex-con son of a well-connected NYPD family who was caught on video driving onto a sidewalk while texting before striking and killing an outspoken civil rights activist, then fleeing the scene on foot and evading police for more than two months, all while he was on parole after serving a three-year prison stint on drug charges.

In life, there are questions which – no matter how many times you ask – simply cannot be answered. Who shot JFK?? Did men really walk on the moon?? Is there a God??
But when the question involves your civil liberties and possibly being arrested for taking photographs, there should be a clear-cut answer.
Our question for today is direct: