The Blue Line

Los Angeles police officers killed an unarmed man inside a city jail in 2012, claiming he was “violent and combative,” which required several cops to pounce on him, including one who placed him in a chokehold until he stopped breathing.
The incident led to the city of Los Angeles paying a $2.85 million settlement to the family of Rachel Howard in 2015, the 56-year-old man who had been arrested for driving while intoxicated before he was killed.

Former Miami Police Chief John F. Timoney, who once kept the entire Miami Police Department from firing their service weapons for 22 months, has succumbed to Stage 4 Lung Cancer. He was 68 years old.
Chief Timoney wasn’t a miracle worker, nor a saint, but he was the rare police administrator who managed to visibly decrease police firearms discharges by an entire major city police department as crime levels dropped under his watch in Miami as well as during his earlier tenure in Philadelphia

It was an apparent case of favoritism.
A Texas cop was not arrested Friday even though his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit when he swerved into an oncoming lane, slammed his SUV head-on into a Corvette and rolled over the top of it, killing the man inside.
Brian Manring, 36, the father of a 8-year-old daughter, was pronounced dead at the scene.

An Arizona police officer pulled over a drunk driver who turned out to be a cop and went through with the arrest anyway.
Not that Mesa Police Lieutenant Rick Van Galder didn’t try to use his badge to talk his way out of the arrest.
But the Gilbert police officers refused to give Van Galder the Blue Courtesy that he expected. At least at first.
As a result, Van Galder became belligerent and condescending. A man with a whopping .306 blood alcohol content. Almost four times the legal limit of .08.

An Ohio man facing criminal charges for making a satire Facebook page mocking the Parma Police Department got the last laugh last week after he was acquitted by a jury that unanimously decided the page did not violate the state’s felony disrupting public services law.

An Ohio cop was caught on video punching a handcuffed woman in the face.
The video is horrible quality but some YouTube viewers believe it shows her spitting on the cop.
Other viewers believe it shows the cop using an open hand to strike her, which they define as not a punch.
But the cop struck her hard enough to cause her to fall down. And it looks as if he balls his hand into a fist before striking her.
What the video doesn’t show is any of the officers wiping spit from their faces.

Body cam video proves three Kentucky cops told tall tales in their narrative on August 4 when they said non-violent 57-year-old Army Veteran Darnell Wicker came at them with a knife and refused their commands to put it down, which made two of them fear for their lives and shoot him several times, killing him.
The knife was actually a handsaw Wicker used for his job as a landscaper, according to USAToday.

Albuquerque police officer Jeremy Dear – whose body camera was unplugged when he killed a woman in 2014 – claimed he was in fear for his life because she had pointed a gun at him.
Now newly surfaced evidence shows Mary Hawkes’ fingerprints or DNA was never on the gun, which Albuquerque police knew all along.
But they had justified the shooting because they said they had traced the gun to a man who once exchanged Facebook messages with the woman.

The Punta Gorda police officer who shot and killed a 73-year-old woman during a citizen academy role playing session Tuesday has been identified as Lee Coel – the same cop who allowed his police dog to maul a man for riding his bicycle at night without lights in a video that went viral two months ago.

UPDATE: The cop has been identified as Lee Coel, the same cop who allowed his dog to maul a man for riding his bicycle without lights.
Original Story
He was a highly trained officer, or so she thought, when 73-year-old Mary Knowlton followed his lead during the Punta Gorda Citizen’s Academy in Southwest Florida Tuesday night.