On May 7, 2014, Anthony Ferrier was viciously beaten by a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police detective inside a subway station in Boston, and the entire incident was captured by one of the agency’s surveillance cameras—but the public wouldn’t know the truth for nearly a year.
Los Angeles police released surveillance video from the moments before they shot and killed an 18-year-old man Saturday, showing him wielding a gun.
However, the video does not capture the actual shooting of Carnell Snell, Jr., one of four police shooting deaths in Southern California within a week that sparked protests.
And the word on the street is that Snell ditched the gun as he was being chased.
A recent investigation by the environmental organization Greenpeace uncovered unpublished field trials by pesticide manufacturers which show that their products cause serious harm to honeybees at high levels. Senior scientists are now calling for the companies to stop hiding the results of their tests. [1]
The Amherst Police Department in Massachusetts has refused to comply with a public records request from PINAC that asked for the internal affairs records for two police officers who were named in a civil rights lawsuit this month.
The Department of Justice released a memo today announcing the end of federal contracts for all private prisons within the next five years.
Today, there are 14,000 federal inmates held in private prisons run by three corporations.
Last week, the Department of Justice released an inspector general’s report on private prisons that found for-profit detention centers to be substantially more dangerous for both the inmates and for the correctional officers, something it should have known all along.
After spending more than $2 million for body cams earlier this year, Chicago police say they have no recording of the shooting that left an unarmed teenager dead last week.
But an autopsy confirms he was shot in the back, which is probably why the camera worn by the officer who killed him was inexplicably not working.
But that didn’t stop the family of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal to file a wrongful death federal lawsuit earlier today.
A pair of women making a public records request inside a Los Angeles police station made officers fear for their lives because they were recording the interaction with a camera.
After all, expressed one officer, the camera could have been a gun.
“What kid of camera looks like a weapon?” asked one of the women.
“You ain’t been out there on these streets,” the cop responded, trying to pass himself off as a grizzled tough guy who comes under regular fire from cameras.
Arizona police officers were wearing body cameras when they shot and killed a man last week, claiming they were in fear for their lives.
However, they did not turn the cameras on until after they shot and killed Donald S. Myers.
Flagstaff police explained on its Facebook page that Corporal Michael Lavelle forgot to turn his camera on “due to the intensity of the moment.”
Nevertheless, the body camera he was wearing captures a 30-second buffer of footage before the camera was activated just in case the officers fails to turn it on.
Almost two weeks have passed since the shooting of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and police continue to stall the release of video from officer body cameras as well as the Triple S Food Mart surveillance cameras, the latter which they seized without a warrant.
North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory just signed into law an act making police body camera video an official state secret. Naturally, following the events of last week, civil rights and transparency advocates are in an uproar.
