This writer has called for every single one of those proposals over the last decade-plus, on these very pages. Let us finally stop talking about it and get it done.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness called for the death penal­ty a while back. Before the words could leave his mouth, the pon­tif­i­cat­ing crim­i­nal sup­port­ing vul­tures were already on him, pick­ing apart the car­cass of his words.
For many, this may have come as a sur­prise, but for me, it was par for the course. I was already wide awake to the real­i­ty that there are fac­tions in our coun­try that cel­e­brate the gun cul­ture and the macabre prospect of the wan­ton killing of our fel­low citizens.
There has always been a sub­set with­in the Jamaican body politic that feels itself insu­lat­ed from the real­i­ties of hav­ing their lives snuffed out at a momen­t’s notice. That sub­set, main­ly from the Mona incu­ba­tor, inter­prets its posi­tion in acad­e­mia as a god-giv­en right to dic­tate to the rest of us how we should secure our country.
Tragically, for the ordi­nary Jamaican, not cor­rupt­ed and cor­rod­ed by the Mona incu­ba­tor, the gun­men are a real­i­ty they know and under­stand all too well. The aver­age Jamaican is forced to live with the pon­tif­i­ca­tion and grand­stand­ing that influ­ence the poli­cies and laws that emanate from them.

The Jamaican Prime Minister him­self, a prod­uct of the Mona incu­ba­tor, also har­bored the world­view that most Jamaicans fed up with crime and vio­lence under­stand well. However, Andrew Holness was forced to face the real­i­ty that talk­ing out of the side of one’s mouth while look­ing on from the out­side is dif­fer­ent than governing.
What pass­es for media on the island man­aged to pull itself away momen­tar­i­ly from glo­ri­fy­ing the dance­hall mur­der cul­ture to label the Prime Minister’s call for the death penal­ty an act of frustration.
It may have been an act of frus­tra­tion, truth­ful­ly. After all, the Prime min­is­ter is no dum­my. He under­stands that Jamaica is bound by the British Privy Council’s mora­to­ri­um on the death penal­ty in 1998.
As a nation, we are sub­ject to that mora­to­ri­um because the lead­er­ship com­pris­ing the two polit­i­cal par­ties still has their col­lec­tive noses up under Charles’ ass.
It fol­lows, there­fore, that if Jamaica is to estab­lish clear lines of demar­ca­tion on the issue of crime, it must do a cou­ple of things. (a) Decouple itself from the shack­les that bind our coun­try to the for­mer slave-own­ing col­o­niz­ers. (b) Establish a strong leg­isla­tive frame­work of laws that makes mur­der­ers and vio­lent offend­ers wish that we had the death penal­ty.
I believe decou­pling from Britain and estab­lish­ing the afore­men­tioned leg­isla­tive frame­work are needed.
I would argue that the death penal­ty is final, and because we do not have the fool­proof sys­tem to estab­lish guilt beyond doubt, we should prob­a­bly keep the mora­to­ri­um on the death penalty.
Many peo­ple to whom I have spo­ken on this sub­ject in the dias­po­ra want the death penal­ty pre­cise­ly because of the love affair many peo­ple have with crim­i­nals, even those con­vict­ed of heinous murders.
They feel that the death penal­ty ends that once and for all. Though frus­trat­ed with the lack of progress on this issue, this writer does not share those views.

The gov­ern­ing Administration can no longer afford to dither on this sub­ject. The vot­ing pub­lic gave the Jamaica Labor Party a huge man­date to secure the coun­try. There is this mis­con­cep­tion that Jamaicans love crim­i­nal­i­ty. I have always dis­agreed with this point of view. I do under­stand that the crim­i­nal sup­port­ers are high pro­file. I under­stand that they have loud bull­horns and are influ­en­tial. But I also know, as a for­mer police offi­cer, that the peo­ple who gave me infor­ma­tion hate crim­i­nals. I know that the major­i­ty of the peo­ple in the dias­po­ra (those not engaged in send­ing back guns and mon­ey to fur­ther crim­i­nal behav­ior, hate the crime on our island. 
Everywhere I go in Jamaica, I use the con­ver­sa­tions I have with the peo­ple as a sound­ing board on the issue of crime and vio­lence. What I hear from the peo­ple is what I heard over three decades ago: they do [not] want crime and vio­lence in their country.
The silent major­i­ty of the Jamaican peo­ple believed the Prime Minister would be seri­ous when he said peo­ple would be able to sleep with their win­dows open if they gave him the man­date to lead. I hard­ly believe they expect­ed that it would be like wav­ing a mag­ic wand and crime would dis­ap­pear. The present sit­u­a­tion did not devel­op overnight; it will not dis­ap­pear overnight. The expec­ta­tion was that the gov­ern­ment would be res­olute once giv­en the man­date to lead.
The Government can­not lay this at the feet of the oppo­si­tion par­ty. We know that with­in that polit­i­cal par­ty are con­vict­ed crim­i­nals with law degrees and oth­ers who would be in prison but for the fail­ures of law enforce­ment. That is not to say there aren’t crim­i­nals in both polit­i­cal parties.
We know that the oppo­si­tion par­ty’s reluc­tance to let go of the issue of crime as a polit­i­cal foot­ball has ren­dered it use­less and worth­less. The Government must lead based on the man­date it was given.

In a recent address, the PM laid out a series of no-non­sense leg­isla­tive mea­sures com­men­su­rate with some that this writer has demand­ed for many years on these same pages as a mat­ter of record. I applaud the recog­ni­tion by the PM. 
Notwithstanding, words are just words; we need leg­isla­tive action from this government.
There will be howls com­ing from the oppo­si­tion par­ty; there will be howls com­ing from the Mona incu­ba­tor; there will be howls com­ing from the for­eign-fund­ed crim­i­nal rights orga­ni­za­tions that have tak­en root in our coun­try. I call on the Prime Minister to ignore those mon­grel dogs and pass his announced leg­isla­tive agenda.
Jamaica is march­ing into devel­oped nation sta­tus; the sin­gle largest issue hold­ing us back is the issue of crime. Those fund­ing the crim­i­nal rights agen­da in our coun­try want to see us fail.
It is in their inter­est to scare their nation­als away from com­ing to Jamaica because if we are unable to con­trol crime, we will per­pet­u­al­ly be a beggar/​bor­row­er nation behold­en to them.
It is time for Jamaican lead­ers to under­stand what is at play here. Their state depart­ments and home office quick­ly issue trav­el advi­sories on Jamaica aimed at dam­ag­ing our nation’s econ­o­my. Thankfully, the cit­i­zens of those coun­tries are not their gov­ern­ments, and as such, peo­ple con­tin­ue to flood our shores to expe­ri­ence for them­selves the beau­ty and joy of brand Jamaica.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

The most sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to the law­less­ness in our coun­try is an obstruc­tion­ist judi­cia­ry that har­bors the belief that it should be left to oper­ate out­side of the con­trol of the peo­ple’s elect­ed representatives.
The Judges of the Supreme Court are appoint­ed by the President under clause (2) of Article 124 of the Constitution. The President con­sults with Supreme Court and High Court judges to make informed appointments.
The judi­cia­ry of Jamaica is based on the judi­cia­ry of the United Kingdom.
The courts are orga­nized at four lev­els, with addi­tion­al pro­vi­sions for appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. The Court of Appeal is the high­est appel­late court.
It is impor­tant to cast aside the shack­les of British Colonial attach­ments. We must draft, dis­cuss, and rat­i­fy a new Constitution with Jamaicans hav­ing the final say in our sys­tem of Justice.
Having said that, I am ful­ly con­ver­sant with the propen­si­ty of Jamaican author­i­ties to default to cor­rup­tion. Therefore, the new Constitution must have guardrails and safe­guards to ensure that no one picks up the phone to call a col­league to influ­ence the out­come of a mat­ter before the courts. Guardrails must ensure that the chat­ter at their lit­tle coun­try clubs does not influ­ence jus­tice in our coun­try as much as possible.

It is past time that Jamaica shed this yoke of Colonial resid­u­al­ism and forge ahead on the strength of our own ener­gies and intel­lect. Allowing a bunch of unelect­ed bureau­crats to deter­mine how jus­tice is admin­is­tered is tan­ta­mount to liv­ing under a king and his decrees.
We must strong­ly tell Charles we no longer want to buy what he sells. It is quite okay for the British to cast aside cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment; their cit­i­zens do not have access to guns. Consequently, some of their cops can opt not to car­ry guns. Jamaica has no such lux­u­ry. Our small nation is flood­ed with ille­gal firearms, and there is no short­age of mind­less poten­tial mur­der­ers who are will­ing to use them to show pow­er. The state can­not con­tin­ue to be def­er­en­tial and sub­mis­sive to the crim­i­nals oper­at­ing in our country.
There is no short­age of poten­tial to get this run-away crime and law­less­ness under con­trol. There was no short­age of poten­tial dur­ing the 1980s when we made them flee to oth­er countries.
The prob­lem lies in a cor­rupt leg­isla­tive body that lacks the intesti­nal for­ti­tude to pass appro­pri­ate leg­is­la­tion that puts crim­i­nals in prison and keeps them there.
The judges argue that they grant bail to mur­der­ers because it is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al not to. Let us then change the con­sti­tu­tion and remove that excuse from them.
Let us ensure that the peo­ple who will­ful­ly mur­der oth­ers are put away for life. Let us stop fos­ter­ing the non­sense that they deserve short sen­tences, as some on the judi­cia­ry believe, so they should be let off lightly.
Finally, let us ensure that judges get no say in sen­tenc­ing dan­ger­ous killers; let us enshrine it in law that mur­der­ers are put away with no pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole.
Hardly any­one forces any­one to com­mit mur­der, but if it hap­pens, there are mit­i­gat­ing built-ins in the laws to pro­tect those offenders.
It is time to stop the cha­rade and seri­ous­ly send a mes­sage to these bleached-out face killers that they will play by our rules, not the oth­er way around. We owe it to our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren. We owe it to the sur­vival of our nation…

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

If you know the name Isat Buchanan, you also know what he is. Writing about the twice-con­vict­ed drug couri­er turned lawyer/​lecturer in Jamaica high­lights the cor­rup­tion in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem more so than the despi­ca­ble imbe­cil­ic traits in this individual.
Built in the Isat Buchanan sto­ry are the per­ti­nent ques­tions that the Jamaican author­i­ties must answer.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​3​5​2​873 – 2/
(1) How could a drug con­vict have his crim­i­nal record purged/​expunged, allow­ing him to trav­el to the United States? Who san­i­tized Isat Buchanan’s crim­i­nal record and why?
(2) After com­mit­ting the same felony in the United States and spend­ing almost a decade in prison, then deport­ed to the Island, how could the GLC allow Isat Buchanan to prac­tice law?
(3)His dis­hon­or­able behav­ior shamed the GLC to hand down a two-year sus­pen­sion and a mon­e­tary fine to Buchanan for con­duct the body char­ac­ter­ized as“offensive, pro­fane, vul­gar, foul, and obscene.”
Buchanan, on a pod­cast, quot­ed from a record­ing done by Vybz Kartel in which he instructs the DPP to com­mit a sex­u­al act. He described the jus­tice min­is­ter as “a con­sti­tu­tion­al pedophile” who “fin­ger fucks the con­sti­tu­tion.” Buchanan who was chair­man of the People’s National Party’s Human Rights Commission resigned after his out­ra­geous comments.

Buchanan’s dis­parag­ing com­ments about the Director Of Public Prosecution (DPP) and Justice Minister are beneath the dig­ni­ty of an offi­cer of the court. Isat Buchanan is the lead lawyer rep­re­sent­ing con­vict­ed mur­der­er Adija Palmer, pop­u­lar­ly known as Vybz Kartel, on appeal before the British Privy Council. How appro­pri­ate. This shamed the GLC into action as it wiped the shit of shame from its col­lec­tive face.
This writer thought that even though the GLC bent the rules for its own rea­sons to allow Isat Buchanan to the bar, its lat­est action in sanc­tion­ing him removes some of the stench of com­plic­i­ty, cor­rup­tion, and ignominy from the body.
I fool­ish­ly for­got that the entire sys­tem is a shit­stem, a cesspool of back-rub­bing and nepotism.
I for­got the court sys­tem, and that was stu­pid of me.
Even though Buchanan’s attor­ney, Valerie Neita Robertson, argued her client was gen­uine­ly con­trite and had learned his les­son, she appealed the deci­sion of the GLC, and why not? The court sys­tem is a back-scratch­ing club for the wealthy and well-connected.
The Appeals court grant­ed the stay.
This writer wish­es to reg­is­ter again why I oppose Jamaica becom­ing a Caribbean Court of Justice member.
There is not enough char­ac­ter with­in the Caribbean legal sys­tem for us to trust that deci­sions com­ing from that body will con­form strict­ly to our con­sti­tu­tion and laws.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​i​s​a​t​-​b​u​c​h​a​n​a​n​-​d​i​s​h​-​c​l​o​t​h​-​t​o​-​t​a​b​l​e​-​c​o​v​e​r​-​p​r​o​v​e​d​-​h​e​-​i​s​-​d​i​s​h​-​c​l​o​t​h​-​f​i​n​a​l​l​y​-​s​u​s​p​e​n​d​ed/

Those of you who fol­low my work also know that Buchanan broad-brushed the police depart­ment as dunces who did not under­stand the Constitution. Of course, like any con­vict­ed crim­i­nal inca­pable of tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty, he tried to back­track, argu­ing that his com­ments were tak­en out of con­text. But the head of the Police Officer’s Association was not about to allow him to get away with it.
“Any police offi­cer can become a lawyer if he so choos­es, but Isat Buchanan can­not become a police offi­cer with his crim­i­nal record,” said the head of the POA, SSP Wayne Cameron.
But if you thought Buchanan’s back­track­ing was pathet­ic, it paled to his excuse for despi­ca­ble behav­ior toward the DPP.
In his response sum­ma­ry to the GLC, Buchanan argued that the show he was on caters to a cer­tain class of Jamaicans, the major­i­ty of whom are une­d­u­cat­ed peo­ple, and if he is not ani­mat­ed and not using pro­fan­i­ty, he can­not bring the point home to these persons.
These are the state­ments of a sub­ject who believes he is the smartest per­son in what­ev­er room he is in. He is a nar­cis­sist, a liar, and a very dan­ger­ous per­son. Buchanan’s com­ments against police offi­cers being not smart or edu­cat­ed enough dis­par­aged the thou­sands of Jamaicans who are risk­ing their lives against the vicious killers he loves and represents.
His com­ments against lis­ten­ers of the pod­cast he was on dis­par­age the entire Jamaica.
Unfortunately, like the legions sup­port­ing him and his client, the Norman Manley Law School-edu­cat­ed Buchanan can­not under­stand this.
This guy rep­re­sents the worst of our coun­ty. No one should be delu­sion­al about the fact that he may have earned an under­grad­u­ate degree and lat­er a law degree. The true test of a man is his char­ac­ter. Isat Buchanan was nowhere around when those virtues were being hand­ed out. A dish rag can nev­er be a table­cloth; this may be a les­son lost to the GLC.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

By Akela Lacy

Including the newly revealed $30 million, the NYPD paid out more than $80 million in misconduct cases so far in 2023

THE NEW YORK Police Department has been mak­ing head­lines for the huge set­tle­ments paid out by the city in mis­con­duct cas­es. In the first half of 2023, New York City paid more than $50 mil­lion in law­suits alleg­ing mis­con­duct by mem­bers of the NYPD. 

That fig­ure is on track to exceed $100 mil­lion by the end of the year — but even that total doesn’t cap­ture how much the city has to spend in cas­es where its cops are accused of every­thing from caus­ing car acci­dents to beat­ing inno­cent people.

The $100 mil­lion fig­ure does not include law­suits set­tled by the city pri­or to lit­i­ga­tion, which reached $30 mil­lion in the first nine months of this year, accord­ing to data obtained from the office of the New York City Comptroller through a pub­lic records request. Pre-lit­i­ga­tion set­tle­ments from July 2022 through September of this year totaled $50 mil­lion — mean­ing the city’s pay­outs in such suits since July 2022, includ­ing those set­tled after lit­i­ga­tion, rose to a total of around $280 million.

“It says some­thing that it’s just such a high amount even before peo­ple get to file in civ­il court,” said Jennvine Wong, staff attor­ney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, which pro­vides pub­lic defense in New York City. ”And all it does is it helps obscure police misconduct.”

The infor­ma­tion about pre-lit­i­ga­tion set­tle­ments pro­vid­ed to The Intercept through a pub­lic records request includ­ed set­tle­ments rang­ing from $1.8 mil­lion to $119. The comptroller’s office did not have imme­di­ate­ly avail­able data on the amount paid in pre-lit­i­ga­tion set­tle­ments pri­or to July 2022. 

In response to ques­tions, an NYPD spokesper­son point­ed to a comp­trol­ler report that showed an 11 per­cent decrease in claims from 2021 to 2022, and a 52 per­cent drop in claims filed with the comp­trol­ler against the NYPD since 2013.

“The NYPD care­ful­ly ana­lyzes this infor­ma­tion as well as trends in lit­i­ga­tion against the Department,” said an NYPD spokesper­son who did not pro­vide their name. “When it comes to lit­i­ga­tion data, the NYPD is see­ing sim­i­lar suc­cess in the declin­ing num­bers. There has been a near­ly 20% reduc­tion in police action fil­ings against the NYPD from 2021 to 2022, and a near­ly 65% reduc­tion since 2013.”

The report notes that while the num­ber of tort claims filed against the NYPD declined from 2021 to 2022, the amount of pay­outs increased by 14 per­cent, from $208.1 mil­lion to $237.2 million.

Earlier this year, The Intercept report­edthat a new NYPD web­site ded­i­cat­ed to “trans­paren­cy” around police mis­con­duct and pay­outs leaves out cops accused of wrong­do­ing and only cov­ers a frac­tion of the mil­lions the city pays out in such cas­es. The web­site only includes those cas­es where there are find­ings of guilt, even as the police pay out mil­lions of dol­lars pre­cise­ly to avoid con­vic­tions and oth­er find­ings of wrongdoing. 

Some of the police offi­cers left out of the trans­paren­cy data­base have been named in mul­ti­ple mis­con­duct law­suits. In some of the cas­es, rather than receiv­ing pub­lic scruti­ny through the data­base, the NYPD cops have received pro­mo­tions.

In the land of the free, you can­not make this shit up. How intrin­si­cal­ly cor­rupt the police depart­ments are. No, these things are not hap­pen­ing in Russia, China, Or Iran; they are hap­pen­ing in America.

A Hawaii dri­ver who was false­ly arrest­ed for drunk dri­ving in November says a police offi­cer told him to deny fur­ther exam­i­na­tion at a Pearl City police sta­tion. According to Hawaii News Now, the offi­cer gave Ammon Fepuleai that advice under the pre­tense of sav­ing him time while being booked for the arrest, which proved to be false and end­ed with pros­e­cu­tors drop­ping the case for lack of evidence.

The U.S. is record­ing alarm­ing­ly high cas­es of false DUI arrests; for the last few years, police depart­ments nation­wide have con­duct­ed more “empha­sis patrols” to curb drunk dri­ving. But these DUI check­points are often fed­er­al­ly-fund­ed, and the over­time hours they pro­vide are paid for by state and fed­er­al agen­cies rather than the police depart­ments car­ry­ing out the patrols

HNN inves­ti­gat­ed the case, com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion from Fepuleai’s arrest doc­u­ments as well as video and audio footage from the officer’s body cam, which the patrol­man turned off at one point — a vio­la­tion of the Honolulu Police Department’s arrest procedures.

What is most strik­ing about the inci­dent is how rote the DUI stop goes, and how blithe­ly police dis­missed evi­dence they col­lect­ed, which sug­gest­ed Fepuleai was, indeed, not drunk. It’s almost as if the police knew he was telling the truth, but arrest­ed and processed him any­way just to raise their arrest stats. Per HNN

And sim­i­lar police behav­ior has been record­ed in oth­er places, such as Fort Collins, Colorado. An inves­ti­ga­tion car­ried out by the Coloradoan found that an offi­cer tasked with catch­ing drunk dri­vers near­ly dou­bled his arrests year-over-year from 50 DUI arrests in 202^o, to 90 in 2021, then 190 in 2022.

After a series of law­suits for wrong­ful arrests, the offi­cer resigned before the depart­ment could fire him for improp­er con­duct — which is encour­aged both implic­it­ly and explic­it­ly by the fund­ing tied to these DUI patrols.

Defence attor­neys rep­re­sent­ing three Washington police offi­cers on tri­al for the mur­der of a Black man have accused the vic­tim of “cre­at­ing his own death.” Tacoma offi­cers Matthew Collins, 40 and Christopher Burbank, 38 are fac­ing sec­ond-degree mur­der and manslaugh­ter charges in con­nec­tion with the 3 March 2020 death of Manuel Ellis. A third offi­cer, 34-year-old Timothy Rankine, is charged with manslaugh­ter in the case. Throughout the nine weeks of tri­al, jurors have heard from pros­e­cu­tors that the offi­cers knocked Ellis to the ground, punched and choked him and shot him with a taser until he died. Before he was killed, Ellis whis­pered to the offi­cers: “Can’t breathe, sir.” Closing argu­ments start­ed on Monday, with the state argu­ing that Ellis would be alive today if the offi­cers had done what most peo­ple would do if some­one was strug­gling to breathe. 

Special pros­e­cu­tor Patty Eakes said on Tuesday that the offi­cers had “cho­sen to treat [Ellis] like an ani­mal, in the most dehu­man­iz­ing posi­tion you can imag­ine.” The defen­dants’ attor­neys have since made con­tro­ver­sial char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing Ellis’ death, direct­ly blam­ing him for being “para­noid” and ulti­mate­ly “[caus­ing] his own death.” “This is a sit­u­a­tion where he cre­at­ed his own death,” defense attor­ney Wayne Fricke claimed dur­ing clos­ing argu­ments on Wednesday, per CBS News. “It was his behav­ior that forced the offi­cers to use force against him because he cre­at­ed a sit­u­a­tion that required them to act.”

Ellis’ cause and man­ner of death were ruled a homi­cide caused by lack of oxy­gen due to phys­i­cal restraint. Ellis was on his stom­ach, with both his legs and arms tied and his body pressed against the con­crete while the offi­cers rest­ed their weight on him, The News Tribune reports. However, the defence has focused on metham­phet­a­mine lev­els present in Ellis’ body at the time of his death and an enlarged heart not­ed in the autop­sy report. The defence has said that Ellis was the aggres­sor and that he attacked the offi­cers with “super-human strength” and even­tu­al­ly died of a drug over­dose and a dam­aged heart. Witness tes­ti­mo­ny and video pre­sent­ed at the tri­al sug­gest oth­er­wise. Three wit­ness­es said they saw the offi­cers sit­ting in their patrol car as Ellis approached and walked to the pas­sen­ger side. When Ellis turned to leave, Burbank threw open the door and knocked Ellis to the ground, accord­ing to the wit­ness­es. Prosecutors also played video record­ed by the wit­ness­es for the jury.

Mr Burbank and Mr Collins gave their offi­cial state­ments before they knew there was audio and video of the encounter, Ms Eakes said. They claimed Ellis attacked them vio­lent­ly and relent­less­ly and didn’t say a coher­ent word. “But you know that’s not true,” Ms Eakes told the jury. “He did speak after he was pinned to the ground. He said he couldn’t breathe, sir, polite­ly and nice­ly.” When Mr Rankine showed up and pinned Ellis to the ground, even though he was in hand­cuffs, Ellis said he couldn’t breathe three more times. Mr Rankine respond­ed by say­ing, “If you’re talk­ing to me you can breathe just fine.” 

After that, they put hob­bles on Ellis’ ankles and con­nect­ed them to his hand­cuffs. The sec­ond-degree mur­der charges filed against Mr Burbank and Mr Collins, also called “felony mur­der,” mean a felony was being com­mit­ted and some­one died. In this case, the pros­e­cu­tion argues the offi­cers com­mit­ted the felony of unlaw­ful impris­on­ment or assault. Ms Eakes told the jury that they don’t need to unan­i­mous­ly agree on which felony was com­mit­ted to find the two offi­cers guilty, only that Ellis died dur­ing the com­mis­sion of a felony. They also have the option of manslaugh­ter, which is the charge Mr Rankine faces. Closing argu­ments con­tin­ued on Wednesday. The pros­e­cu­tion is now expect­ed to present a rebuttal.

The Associated Press con­tributed to this report

A Mississippi grand jury has declined to indict a police offi­cer who respond­ed to a call, and shot and wound­ed an unarmed 11-year-old boy inside the home.

The grand jury found that Indianola Police Sgt. Greg Capers did not engage in crim­i­nal con­duct when he shot Aderrien Murry in the chest on May 20 while respond­ing to a domes­tic dis­pute. Murry was hos­pi­tal­ized for five days with a col­lapsed lung, lac­er­at­ed liv­er and frac­tured ribs from the gun­shot wound in his chest.

The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, who pre­sent­ed the case to a Sunflower County grand jury, announced the deci­sion Thursday. In a writ­ten state­ment, Carlos Moore, Murry’s attor­ney, said the fam­i­ly would seek account­abil­i­ty through a fed­er­al civ­il lawsuit.

“While the grand jury has spo­ken, we firm­ly believe that there are unan­swered ques­tions and that the shoot­ing of Aderrien Murry was not jus­ti­fied,” Moore said. “We are com­mit­ted to seek­ing jus­tice for Aderrien and his family.”

Reached by phone Thursday, Michael Carr, Capers’ attor­ney, said the offi­cer had suf­fered per­son­al­ly and finan­cial­ly due to the case and that the grand jury made the right decision.

“Sgt. Capers is relieved at the result, and he is glad that the cit­i­zens of Sunflower County reached the fair and cor­rect result,” Carr said. “He is look­ing for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to serve the cit­i­zens of Sunflower County and the city of Indianola.”

The Indianola Board of Aldermen vot­ed in June to place Capers on unpaid admin­is­tra­tive leave. Capers can­not return to work and get paid unless the Board votes to take him off leave, Carr said.

Indianola is a town of about 9,300 res­i­dents in the rur­al Mississippi Delta, about 95 miles (153 kilo­me­ters) north­west of Jackson.

On the May evening of the shoot­ing, Nakala Murry asked her son to call the police around 4 a.m. when the father of one of her oth­er chil­dren showed up at her home, Moore said. Two offi­cers went to the home, and one kicked the front door before Nakala Murry opened it. She told them the man they called about had left, and that three chil­dren were inside the home, Moore said.

According to Nakala Murry, Capers yelled into the home and ordered any­one inside to come out with their hands up, Moore said. He said Aderrien Murry walked into the liv­ing room with noth­ing in his hands, and Capers shot him in the chest.

The Murry fam­i­ly has filed a fed­er­al law­suit against Indianola, the police chief and Capers. The law­suit, which seeks at least $5 mil­lion, says Indianola failed to prop­er­ly train the offi­cer and that Capers used exces­sive force.

With the grand jury’s deci­sion, the Attorney General’s Office said no fur­ther crim­i­nal action at the state lev­el would be tak­en against Capers. _​_​_​This sto­ry has been cor­rect­ed to show that the grand jury found that Capers did not engage in crim­i­nal con­duct, not that he had engaged in crim­i­nal conduct.

_​_​_​

The Jamaica Constabulary Force once had as its Core func­tion three things: (1) The Prevention And Detection Of Crime, The Preservation Of Peace And Good Order, and (3) The Protection Of Life And Property.
Long ago, when I served, those were the oper­at­ing tenets… I must admit it has been many years since I depart­ed, and the Force has gone through many changes even though the fun­da­men­tal need for police remains under the umbrel­la of those three foun­da­tion­al principles.
If the police depart­ment becomes good at those three prin­ci­ples, the nation’s vio­lent crime rate will decrease despite the many atten­dant con­trib­u­tors to crime.

The Jamaica Constabulary Force has nev­er been good at any­thing, least of all har­ness­ing the skills of the peo­ple with­in the depart­ment to ben­e­fit the ser­vice. It has nev­er been good at con­ti­nu­ity; it has been par­tic­u­lar­ly derelict in deal­ing with crime and could rea­son­ably be accused of rest­ing on its lau­rels, await­ing good outcomes.
The best thing that has hap­pened to the JCF has been the tal­ent­ed, brave offi­cers who have been a part of the agency from its incep­tion. The worst thing to hap­pen to the JCF has been the inep­ti­tude of the lead­er­ship since its inception.
I am not naïve to the ever-present and oblig­a­tory dark shad­ow that has hov­ered over the force that has expo­nen­tial­ly hin­dered the force from car­ry­ing out its man­date. This dark shad­ow of polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence has been both by co-mis­sion and omis­sion. Direct inter­fer­ence, on the one hand, and refusal to pass ade­quate laws to aid in the reduc­tion of crime have been the crimes of both polit­i­cal par­ties in our country.
The police depart­ment must oper­ate under the rule of the con­sti­tu­tion with respect for all rights, but the police [must]have a free hand to enforce the laws impar­tial­ly with­out favor, mal­ice, or ill will.

The Jamaica Constabulary Force has nev­er had the option of oper­at­ing with­out the ever-present dark shad­ow of polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence. Within Jamaican soci­ety, there is a pletho­ra of ticky-ticky fish who har­bor the notion that the laws do not apply to them. The list includes politi­cians, judges, lawyers, pub­lic sec­tor work­ers, their friends and fam­i­ly, and ever damn Tom, Dick, and Harry who knows some­body who knows somebody.
Ultimately, there is hard­ly any­one left for the police to arrest. This has not gone unno­ticed by the pow­er­less who don’t know any­one who knows any­one. And so, our lit­tle island has become a crim­i­nal-free-for-all, a par­adise for crim­i­nals, police includ­ed in the mix.
Having said that, the police depart­ment can do a much bet­ter job than it has done, all things con­sid­ered. After all, much of what the police are tasked with doing has been done before, and there is a wealth of infor­ma­tion on how to do the job more effectively.
It has got­ten so bad for the coun­try because of the inep­ti­tude of the JCF that mur­der­ers now video­tape them­selves bury­ing the corpses of the peo­ple they kill and then do voice record­ings explain­ing the why, what, and how of their actions.
The JCF was nev­er an agency that was ever ahead of the crim­i­nal net­works in our coun­try, main­ly because the crim­i­nal net­works have always had polit­i­cal cov­er and poor police leadership.
Successes of the police over the decades have nev­er been a con­se­quence of top-down lead­er­ship and poli­cies but a result of indi­vid­ual offi­cers who laid it all on the line for the coun­try’s good.
It made sense, there­fore, that the heads of the crim­i­nal net­works that the nation was rid of were made pos­si­ble by The American Government and the hard work of the Rank and file of the JCF. I chal­lenge any­one to point me to a major crime syn­di­cate head being chopped off by the Jamaican Government or the High Command of the Police Department.
In fact, the Jamaican Government has stead­fast­ly stood in the way of both the hard-work­ing police offi­cers and the American’s effort to root out known crime syn­di­cate heads.

We are in 2023, about to step into a new year, and the most basic steps nec­es­sary in law enforce­ment are still not being pur­sued by the JCF hier­ar­chy. The nation’s roads are race tracks for taxi dri­vers, minibusses, and pri­vate motorists who over­take long traf­fic lines around cor­ners, down­hill, uphill, and on the side­walks at break­neck speeds with­out police crackdown.
The Government and the Police com­mis­sion­er have all but ced­ed the streets to the law­less dri­vers. Driving on Jamaican roads is the equiv­a­lent of play­ing Russian Roulette. Every year, hun­dreds are killed in traf­fic crash­es that the pathet­ic media calls traf­fic acci­dents. Accidents are caused by cir­cum­stances out­side the vic­tim’s con­trol. Crashes are caused by direct action or inac­tion of offend­ers, result­ing in the end result. Speeding, and oth­er breach­es of the Road Traffic Act. Last year, 2022, 488 Jamaicans per­ished on the Island’s roads and high­ways large­ly because of the actions of moron­ic Jackasses who breach the road traf­fic laws with­out con­se­quence. Where are the traf­fic cops?
As of November 27^th, 2023, a total of 373 lives were extin­guished on the nation’s roads. This unnec­es­sary loss of life and the trau­ma is a con­se­quence of exces­sive speeds, over­tak­ing around cor­ners, dri­ving too fast on wet roads, and dri­ving motor­cy­cles at high speeds with­out hel­mets are the main rea­sons why we are hav­ing these fatal col­li­sions,’ on ACP of police told the press. Still no reme­di­al action of note oth­er than beg­ging dri­vers to stop.
The same strat­e­gy is employed as it relates to vio­lent crimes. The police have been rel­e­gat­ed to beg­ging crim­i­nals to stop.
Reminds me of Nancy Reagan’s strat­e­gy for drug users, ‘just say no’.
Laughable.

I am mind­ful of the con­cerns of some of my for­mer col­leagues, who will chas­tize me for being so hard on the police when of course, there are oth­er play­ers that are seri­ous­ly dri­ving the nation’s crime rate, notably the com­mu­nist judges who seem to have sworn an oath to destroy the coun­try. From the high­est perch to the low­est court these com­mu­nists that emerged from the Norman Manley Law School are dead set on ensur­ing that dan­ger­ous mur­der­ers are returned to the streets.
More to say about that.…..

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mikebeckles.com.Check mike out on Youtube @ Mikebeckles

Power in the hands of fools is always a dan­ger­ous thing. Almost unchecked pow­er in the hands of fools who can­not think and are gid­dy about using pow­er is even more dan­ger­ous. Add qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty (gov­ern­ment carte blanch pro­tec­tion) to the two sce­nar­ios, and you get American policing.
The most dis­gust­ing of all is that when they make stu­pid deci­sions because they have the pow­er and pro­tec­tion to do what­ev­er they want to cit­i­zens, they claim it is their policy.
Truthfully, it is gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy to have its agents do what­ev­er they want to the aver­age cit­i­zen, includ­ing death, so that it can retain [con­trol].
This kind of unchecked pow­er and unre­strained immu­ni­ty is then unleashed against the poor­est and most vul­ner­a­ble Americans. This group is usu­al­ly Black.
In the same breath, on the rare occa­sion that the robot­ic androids step out of line and do the same to a white woman, and her fragili­ty is dis­turbed, the rules change.…..At least for the high­est court.
One of the endur­ing incon­sis­ten­cies in American legal think­ing on polic­ing is that younger peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly younger peo­ple of col­or, are unde­serv­ing of the same pro­tec­tions under the laws as old­er, frail­er cit­i­zens. Every cit­i­zen is enti­tled to the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly pro­tect­ed doc­trine of inno­cent until found guilty. Therefore, police have no legal author­i­ty to sum­mar­i­ly and arbi­trar­i­ly deter­mine some­one’s inno­cence or guilt even before a traf­fic stop is com­plet­ed based on how they look or the col­or of their skin.
But doing so is stan­dard polic­ing prac­tice in America. It is time for qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty to go.
(Editor)

Elise Brown was a lit­tle over five feet tall and weighed 117 pounds when she was ordered out of her blue Oldsmobile by police in California in 2019. She was also 83 years old. The offi­cers who pulled Brown over thought the car she was dri­ving had been stolen – mis­tak­en­ly, it turns out – and, fol­low­ing their pro­to­col, they drew their hand­guns, hand­cuffed Brown, and forced her to her knees. A fed­er­al appeals court this year ruled that Brown could sue the police for exces­sive force, waiv­ing a legal doc­trine known as qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty that pro­tects police from lia­bil­i­ty for civ­il rights vio­la­tions in many cir­cum­stances. On Monday, the Supreme Court let that low­er court rul­ing stand, keep­ing Brown’s law­suit alive.
At a time when the nation is grap­pling with fatal police con­fronta­tions, the Supreme Court has most­ly balked at law­suits ques­tion­ing the legal immu­ni­ty extend­ed to offi­cers. Police orga­ni­za­tions have long coun­tered that offi­cers need immu­ni­ty in cas­es when they must defend them­selves, and split-sec­ond deci­sions can lead to unfore­seen tragedy. The Chino Police Department offi­cers argue they were fol­low­ing pro­to­cols: traf­fic stops for poten­tial­ly stolen vehi­cles are “high-risk” under city and state stan­dards, they said. Brown was required to kneel for no more than twen­ty sec­onds and was in hand­cuffs for approx­i­mate­ly three min­utes, they said.

The offi­cers “deployed firearms in states of readi­ness con­sis­tent with their respon­si­bil­i­ties on the scene of a high-risk stop,” the police told the Supreme Court. Brown, police said, appeared to “be in her 50s or ear­ly 60s” and “appeared not to need any accom­mo­da­tion due to health or frailty.” Brown sued in 2020, claim­ing the police used exces­sive force and unrea­son­ably detained her. “Ms. Brown was ter­ri­fied, humil­i­at­ed, and emo­tion­al­ly trau­ma­tized,” her lawyer told the Supreme Court. “That con­duct was not rea­son­able; it was extra­or­di­nar­i­ly dan­ger­ous and flat­ly incon­sis­tent with the Fourth Amendment’s pro­hi­bi­tion on exces­sive force.”

The vio­lence you see in the actions of these state agents is pro­tect­ed and made pos­si­ble by the high­est courts and paid for with your tax dollars.

An Alabama police offi­cer is on leave after a video post­ed on social media showed her curs­ing at and using a stun gun on a man who was hand­cuffed and cry­ing. The video begins with a hand­cuffed man lying in the street as an offi­cer with the Reform Police Department tells him to stand up. The offi­cer then walks the man over to a car, the footage shows. “Stay still,” the offi­cer says as she push­es him against the hood of the car and holds her stun gun to his back. “I ain’t doing s — , bro,” the man responds. “I got a gun right there.” As the offi­cer removes the gun from the man’s pants, she laughs and says, “oh yeah!” “What you say­ing ‘oh, yeah’ for?” the man asks. The offi­cer responds by using her stun gun on the man, the video shows. “Shut the f— up,” she says.

The man starts cry­ing. “OK, OK, OK,” he repeats. “Oh my God.” “You want it again?” the offi­cer asks as the man con­tin­ues to cry. “Shut the f— up. You was big and bad, shut your b — - a– up.” The video then ends. It’s unclear what hap­pened before or after the 45-sec­ond clip post­ed to Facebook, and the Reform Police Department has shared very lit­tle infor­ma­tion about the Dec. 2 inci­dent. In a brief state­ment, police Chief Richard Black and Reform Mayor Melody Davis said they were aware of the video, and the depart­ment is “in the process of turn­ing over all mate­ri­als relat­ed to this arrest to the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation.” “In accor­dance with City Policy, the offi­cer involved has been placed on admin­is­tra­tive leave while the inves­ti­ga­tion is con­duct­ed,” the state­ment said. Further ques­tions about the inci­dent were direct­ed to the State Bureau of Investigation. NBC affil­i­ate WVTM of Birmingham, Alabama, iden­ti­fied the man as Micah Washington, 24, of Tuscaloosa. His girl­friend, Jalexis Rice, said the offi­cer pulled up as Washington and two oth­er peo­ple were chang­ing a tire on their car. Rice said the video made her upset.

“When I seen it, I couldn’t do noth­ing but cry,” she told the news sta­tion. “I couldn’t do noth­ing but cry.” Online jail records show that Washington was charged with resist­ing arrest, obstruct­ing gov­ern­men­tal oper­a­tions, pos­ses­sion of mar­i­jua­na, drug traf­fick­ing, and an ex-felon being in pos­ses­sion of a firearm. He is being held at the Pickens County jail on a $505,000 bond, accord­ing to jail records. On Monday night, Washington’s loved ones and mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty gath­ered near the city hall to protest the arrest and demand account­abil­i­ty, accord­ing to WVTM. Black and Davis said they have request­ed a thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion into the incident.

RANKIN COUNTY, Miss. — For near­ly two decades, a loose band of sheriff’s deputies roamed impov­er­ished neigh­bor­hoods across a cen­tral Mississippi coun­ty, met­ing out their own ver­sion of justice.

Narcotics detec­tives and patrol offi­cers, some who called them­selves the Goon Squad, barged into homes in the mid­dle of the night, accus­ing peo­ple inside of deal­ing drugs. Then they hand­cuffed or held them at gun­point and tor­tured them into con­fess­ing or pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion, accord­ing to dozens of peo­ple who say they endured or wit­nessed the assaults.

They described vio­lence that some­times went on for hours and seemed intend­ed to strike ter­ror into the deputies’ targets.

Sign up for The Morning newslet­ter from the New York Times

In the pur­suit of drug arrests, deputies of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department shocked Robert Jones with a Taser in 2018 while he lay sub­merged in a flood­ed ditch, then rammed a stick down his throat until he vom­it­ed blood, he said.

During a raid the same year, deputies choked Mitchell Hobson with a lamp cord and water­board­ed him to sim­u­late drown­ing, he said, then beat him until the walls were spat­tered with his blood. That raid took place at the home of Rick Loveday, a sheriff’s deputy in a neigh­bor­ing coun­ty, who said he was dragged half-naked from his bed at gun­point, before deputies jabbed a flash­light threat­en­ing­ly at his but­tocks and then pum­meled him relentlessly.

The string of vio­lence might have con­tin­ued unchecked if not for one near-fatal raid in January.

According to a Justice Department inves­ti­ga­tion, deputies broke into the home of two Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, shocked them with Tasers and threat­ened to rape them. Deputy Hunter Elward shoved the bar­rel of a gun into Jenkins’ mouth, not real­iz­ing a bul­let was in the cham­ber, and pulled the trig­ger. Jenkins was griev­ous­ly injured, the inci­dent was thrust into the nation­al spot­light, and in August five deputies and a police offi­cer plead­ed guilty to crim­i­nal charges.

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey said in a news con­fer­ence this sum­mer that he was stunned to learn of the “hor­ren­dous crimes” com­mit­ted by his deputies. “Never in my life did I think it would hap­pen in this department.”

But an inves­ti­ga­tion by The New York Times and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today reveals a his­to­ry of bla­tant and bru­tal inci­dents stretch­ing back to at least 2004.

Reporters exam­ined hun­dreds of pages of court records and sheriff’s office reports and inter­viewed more than 50 peo­ple who say they wit­nessed or expe­ri­enced tor­ture at the hands of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. What emerged was a pat­tern of vio­lence that was nei­ther con­fined to a small group of deputies nor hid­den from depart­ment leaders.

Many of those who said they expe­ri­enced vio­lence filed law­suits or for­mal com­plaints, detail­ing their encoun­ters with the depart­ment. A few said they had con­tact­ed Bailey direct­ly, only to be ignored.

The Times and Mississippi Today iden­ti­fied 20 deputies who were present at one or more of the inci­dents — many assigned to nar­cotics or the night patrol — but also sev­er­al high-rank­ing offi­cials: a for­mer under­sh­er­iff, for­mer detec­tives and a for­mer deputy who is now a local police chief.

Brett McAlpin, for­mer chief inves­ti­ga­tor for the depart­ment, was involved in at least 13 of the arrests and was repeat­ed­ly described by wit­ness­es as lead­ing the raids. He was named in at least four law­suits and six com­plaints going back to 2004. Even so, Bailey named him inves­ti­ga­tor of the year in 2013. This year, he plead­ed guilty to crim­i­nal charges for his role in the January raid.

Taken togeth­er, the report­ing shows how Rankin deputies were allowed to oper­ate with impuni­ty, while rack­ing up arrests for rel­a­tive­ly minor drug infrac­tions and leav­ing entire neigh­bor­hoods in fear of vio­lent raids.

Among the dozens of alle­ga­tions reviewed, the Times and Mississippi Today were able to cor­rob­o­rate 17 inci­dents involv­ing 22 vic­tims based on wit­ness inter­views, med­ical records, pho­tographs of injuries and oth­er documents.

In near­ly half the cas­es, Taser logs obtained from the depart­ment through a pub­lic records request helped cor­rob­o­rate the alle­ga­tions. Electronically record­ed dates and times of Taser trig­gers lined up with wit­ness accounts and sug­gest­ed that deputies repeat­ed­ly shocked peo­ple for longer than is con­sid­ered safe.

The Taser logs also sug­gest that the scope of the vio­lence may extend much further.

At least 32 times over the past decade, Rankin deputies fired their Tasers more than five times in under an hour, acti­vat­ing them for at least 30 sec­onds in total — dou­ble the rec­om­mend­ed lim­it. Experts in Taser use who reviewed the logs called these inci­dents high­ly suspicious.

“This is not typ­i­cal Taser use,” said Seth Stoughton, fac­ul­ty direc­tor of the Excellence in Policing & Public Safety pro­gram at the University of South Carolina. “There’s just no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for that.”

It is impos­si­ble to tell from the logs alone whether a series of shocks were aimed at one tar­get, and whether they all made con­tact. Incident reports by the deputies offer lit­tle clar­i­ty, because in near­ly every case they failed to men­tion that a Taser was used at all.

Over the past year, the Times and Mississippi Today have inves­ti­gat­ed how pow­er­ful sher­iffs in rur­al Mississippi have dodged account­abil­i­ty in the face of mis­con­duct alle­ga­tions. The report­ing exposed numer­ous sex­u­al abuse accu­sa­tions against two sher­iffs in coun­ties near Rankin, along with evi­dence that Bailey obtained sub­poe­nas to sur­veil his girlfriend’s phone calls.

Bailey has faced increased scruti­ny since the Justice Department began to inves­ti­gate his deputies’ con­duct this year, and the NAACP and local activist groups have called for his res­ig­na­tion. After 12 years as sher­iff, he was reelect­ed in November when he ran unopposed.

The deputies accused of being involved in vio­lent arrests declined to com­ment or did not respond to repeat­ed requests for interviews.

It is not always clear what actions indi­vid­ual deputies took dur­ing the inci­dents. Witnesses often did not know their names and many of the deputies did not wear uni­forms or name tags dur­ing the raids.

Jason Dare, a lawyer for the depart­ment, declined to com­ment on the Times and Mississippi Today’s findings.

During a brief phone inter­view Sunday, Bailey repeat­ed­ly declined to com­ment. Told that sev­er­al high-rank­ing deputies were involved in arrests that had sparked accu­sa­tions of bru­tal treat­ment, he said, “I have 240 employ­ees, there’s no way I can be with them each and every day.”

On Tuesday, the depart­ment announced that it had updat­ed its inter­nal poli­cies and that deputies would receive train­ing on fed­er­al civ­il rights laws.

A state­ment from the depart­ment that referred to the January assault with­out acknowl­edg­ing a broad­er pat­tern said, “Even though the pri­or actions were abnor­mal and extreme, we will make every effort to ensure that they do not occur in the future.”

New Problems, Old Tactics 

For most of its his­to­ry, Rankin County was a rur­al area dom­i­nat­ed by farm­land and forests.

That began to change when white flight reached the cap­i­tal city of Jackson in the 1960s and Rankin’s fields gave way to sub­di­vi­sions and strip malls.

But tucked among the state­ly homes and man­i­cured lawns, some of the county’s most impov­er­ished res­i­dents live in run-down trail­ers and makeshift shacks, a few with­out run­ning water or electricity.

These neigh­bor­hoods were hit hard in the ear­ly 2000s as meth — cheap, high­ly addic­tive and easy to man­u­fac­ture in iso­lat­ed places — spread across rur­al America like wildfire.

Local sher­iffs, even in small depart­ments, set up spe­cial nar­cotics units and joined state and fed­er­al task forces in the war on drugs. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department respond­ed by tar­get­ing low-income com­mu­ni­ties and polic­ing them relentlessly.

In an area called Robinhood, res­i­dents said home raids became rou­tine and it felt as if they couldn’t go to the cor­ner store with­out being stopped and searched.

“Once they start pick­ing on you,” said a for­mer res­i­dent, Matasha Harris, “they will not leave you alone.”

Though Rankin deputies appear to have tar­get­ed peo­ple based on sus­pect­ed drug use, not race — most of their accusers were white — their tac­tics could have been pulled from the Jim Crow era, when sher­iffs and their deputies harassed and beat Black Southerners and civ­il rights activists.

During that peri­od, deputies coerced false con­fes­sions, some­times using cat­tle prods or “the water cure”: pour­ing water into sus­pects’ nos­trils until they complied.

Priscilla Perkins, co-pres­i­dent of the John & Vera Mae Perkins Foundation, a non­prof­it based in Jackson that pro­motes racial rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, said the Goon Squad’s acts remind­ed her of the reign of ter­ror against civ­il rights activists that often involved law enforce­ment officers.

“It’s the hid­den shame of Mississippi and America,” she said. “People are still try­ing to cov­er it up.”

Among the offi­cers of that era accused of beat­ing Black res­i­dents was Lloyd Jones, a state troop­er who would become sher­iff in near­by Simpson County.

A Justice Department inves­ti­ga­tion long after his death found that he had bragged to a col­league about fatal­ly shoot­ing a Black man, Benjamin Brown, in the back dur­ing a 1967 stand­off between police offi­cers and civ­il rights protesters.

In 1970, Jones par­tic­i­pat­ed in the beat­ing of the Rev. John Perkins in the Rankin County jail, which cul­mi­nat­ed with a deputy jab­bing a fork up his nose, accord­ing to the pas­tor and wit­ness­es who tes­ti­fied against the officers.

As sher­iff, he gave Bryan Bailey his first job in law enforcement.

“He is on my life’s wall of grat­i­tude and had a huge impact on who I am,” Bailey wrote on Facebook in 2015. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him or recall some­thing that he taught me.”

Bailey called him a men­tor. But years before, Simpson County res­i­dents had begun call­ing him some­thing else: “Goon” Jones.

Scope of Abuse 

It’s unclear when Rankin County deputies adopt­ed their nick­name, but last year, they ordered com­mem­o­ra­tive coins embla­zoned with car­toon­ish gang­sters and the words “Lt. Middleton’s Goon Squad.” Lt. Jeffrey Middleton was the squad’s super­vi­sor. He is among the five deputies who plead­ed guilty to crim­i­nal charges stem­ming from the January raid on Parker and Jenkins.

A Justice Department inves­ti­ga­tion this year found that Rankin County deputies chose the name Goon Squad “because of their will­ing­ness to use exces­sive force and not report it.”

The inves­ti­ga­tion found that McAlpin, along with a nar­cotics detec­tive, Christian Dedmon, and Goon Squad mem­bers burst into Parker’s home, tor­tured and humil­i­at­ed the men while demand­ing to know where drugs were, and then dis­posed of the evidence.

Across the 17 cas­es for which reporters found cor­rob­o­rat­ing wit­ness­es and evi­dence, accusers described sim­i­lar tac­tics by deputies, almost always over small drug busts.

Deputies held peo­ple down while punch­ing and kick­ing them or shocked them repeat­ed­ly with Tasers. They shoved gun bar­rels into people’s mouths. Three peo­ple said deputies had water­board­ed them until they thought they would suf­fo­cate. Five said deputies had told them to move out of the county.

Many of the tar­gets teetered on the edge of home­less­ness and were caught with a few grams of meth or with only drug para­pher­na­lia — a glass pipe or used syringe. Several peo­ple sat in jail for days or weeks only to have their charges dropped.

The largest bust among the inci­dents exam­ined was for a $420 hero­in sale.

In 2018, a con­fi­den­tial infor­mant arranged an $80 meth deal at Jerry Manning’s home. Manning, who denies being part of the sale, said he heard deputies burst into his trail­er and scream his name.

When he went to inves­ti­gate, deputies pinned him to the floor. They said they want­ed to test their new Tasers on him to see which hurt more, he said.

“They got me in my pri­vate parts, they got me in my head,” Manning said. “They kept tas­ing and tas­ing and tasing.”

Taser logs indi­cate that two of the nine deputies involved that night, James Rayborn and Cody Grogan, togeth­er trig­gered their Tasers at least 15 times dur­ing the 2 1/​2‑hour raid.

As the deputies ran­sacked his home look­ing for drugs, Manning said, they wrapped a pair of jeans around his head and punched him repeat­ed­ly in the face before using a blow­torch to melt a met­al nut­crack­er han­dle onto his bare leg as he screamed. On McAlpin’s orders, Manning said, a deputy then forced him to sit, pulled a belt around his neck and yanked it upward, chok­ing him until he believed he would suffocate.

Three oth­er men in the trail­er that night described vio­lent attacks. Garry Curro, 64, an Air Force vet­er­an, said deputies hand­cuffed, beat and shocked him. Adam Porter says McAlpin threw him into a glass mir­ror, then took Porter’s pock­etknife and sliced his pants to rib­bons, demand­ing to know where the drugs were. Manning’s room­mate, James Lynch, said McAlpin dragged a blow­torch flame across his feet while inter­ro­gat­ing him.

People’s accounts of the raids shared strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties, beyond the pat­terns in the violence.

At least 12 of the 17 cas­es began as Manning’s did, with a sus­pect being set up by a con­fi­den­tial infor­mant, some­one the deputies had per­suad­ed to stage a drug buy while they wait­ed nearby.

In six cas­es, peo­ple said deputies threat­ened to con­tin­ue assault­ing them until they dis­closed either the name of a drug deal­er or the loca­tion of drugs. Five peo­ple said the deputies ran­sacked their kitchens and destroyed their food or used it to humil­i­ate them — smash­ing a cake into a man’s face before arrest­ing him, dump­ing flour and rice onto a kitchen floor, pour­ing milk into a fresh­ly cooked din­ner. Every Black accuser said deputies had hurled racial slurs at them.

Most of the tar­gets were men in their 30s or 40s with a his­to­ry of drug use. But in 2009, McAlpin knocked out 19-year-old Christopher Hillhouse’s tooth with a Maglite, he and his moth­er say. The next year, deputies beat and shocked Dustin Hale, then 17, until he uri­nat­ed on him­self while his girl­friend watched, he said. When his moth­er and grand­moth­er went to the coun­ty jail to pick him up, they said, they hard­ly rec­og­nized him through the bruis­es and swelling.

The sto­ry of Jeremy Travis Paige, who was tar­get­ed in 2018, fits a typ­i­cal pat­tern described by the accusers.

Paige, a 41-year-old with sev­er­al arrests, was pulling up to his home in a work­ing-class neigh­bor­hood out­side Jackson when he real­ized deputies were there wait­ing for him, he said.

He drove away, hop­ing they wouldn’t notice. But McAlpin chased him and pulled him over, then deputies beat him uncon­scious in the inter­sec­tion, Paige alleged in a law­suit against the county.

The suit claimed that he regained con­scious­ness as the deputies dragged him, hand­cuffed, into his home. McAlpin and anoth­er deputy then pum­meled him in the liv­ing room for near­ly an hour, accord­ing to Paige and a wit­ness who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, fear­ing ret­ri­bu­tion from the deputies.

In inter­views, Paige said the deputies pulled him into his roommate’s bed­room and sat him upright on the bed, where he felt some­one press a knee into his back and stretch a wash­cloth across his mouth. Then, he said, deputies poured gal­lon after gal­lon of water over his face. As he strug­gled to breathe, he said, one of them pressed a lit cig­a­rette into his thigh.

All the while, they shocked his groin inter­mit­tent­ly with Tasers, Paige said. Taser logs show that one of the four deputies who report­ed being at the scene trig­gered his Taser dur­ing the arrest.

Three peo­ple, includ­ing Paige, said they had been shocked not only with gun-shaped Tasers — the type issued by the depart­ment — but also with small, rec­tan­gu­lar ones, sug­gest­ing that some deputies used per­son­al stun guns that were not being tracked.

“They had the dev­il in them,” Paige said. “I thought they was going to kill me.”

Deputies ordered him to send Facebook mes­sages to friends ask­ing to buy drugs. He struck out, and the deputies took him to jail.

Before leav­ing, they stuffed the blood- and water-soaked bed­ding in trash bags and removed them from the house, Paige said.

The next day, when Paige was in jail, his son Trace vis­it­ed the house. He found evi­dence of the vio­lence, he said, includ­ing a bent bed frame where his father had been held down by deputies and a pud­dle of blood on the floor.

Pictures tak­en by Paige’s room­mate show the bed stripped of linens and blood spat­tered on the wall.

McAlpin wrote in his report that deputies restrained Paige after he tried to kick them dur­ing the arrest, but the detec­tive did not men­tion the use of Tasers or oth­er force that might explain the blood.

During Paige’s tri­al for drug sale charges, McAlpin tes­ti­fied that deputies might have injured Paige when they pulled him out of his car, because he was resist­ing. He denied hurt­ing Paige in his home.

Paige was sen­tenced to five years in prison. When he sued the sheriff’s depart­ment, no lawyer would take his case and he resort­ed to rep­re­sent­ing him­self. He wrote a let­ter to the judge explain­ing that he had only a sev­enth grade education.

“I don’t know how to present big words or any­thing like that,” he wrote. “But I do know the truth.”

After he missed sev­er­al court dead­lines, the judge dis­missed his case.

Who Knew

Over the years, more than a dozen peo­ple have direct­ly con­front­ed Bailey and his com­mand staff about the deputies’ bru­tal meth­ods, accord­ing to court records and inter­views with accusers and their families.

At least five peo­ple have sued the depart­ment alleg­ing beat­ings, chok­ings and oth­er abus­es by deputies asso­ci­at­ed with the Goon Squad.

The depart­ment set­tled two of those cas­es. Two oth­ers, includ­ing Paige’s, were dis­missed over pro­ce­dur­al errors by accusers rep­re­sent­ing themselves.

But the mount­ing alle­ga­tions sig­naled that some­thing was pro­found­ly wrong in the nar­cotics unit of Bailey’s department.

McAlpin, the department’s for­mer chief inves­ti­ga­tor who led most of the raids reviewed by reporters, was involved in at least four arrests that prompt­ed law­suits, court records show.

According to one suit that was set­tled, McAlpin kicked 19-year-old Brett Gerhart in the face and pressed a pis­tol to his tem­ple in 2010 dur­ing a mis­tak­en raid at the wrong address. In a 2012 case, tossed out because of missed court dead­lines, Gary Michael Frith claimed that he had been beat­en and choked in the back of a squad car dur­ing a drug bust; records show that McAlpin was one of the arrest­ing officers.

McAlpin also fig­ured promi­nent­ly in com­plaints lodged with the depart­ment. Seven peo­ple told reporters they had mailed let­ters, filed for­mal com­plaints or called the sher­iff per­son­al­ly to tell him about the abuse they experienced.

Joshua Rushing said he wrote sev­er­al let­ters to the depart­ment in 2020, after McAlpin and Dedmon drove him to an iso­lat­ed dead-end road and shocked and beat him. He said he nev­er heard back.

Nicole Brock said that when she went to the sheriff’s office to sub­mit a for­mal com­plaint against McAlpin for ran­sack­ing her car dur­ing a search, he tore up the form, threw it in the garbage and arrest­ed her for a syringe he had found dur­ing the car search.

Brock said she left sev­er­al mes­sages on Bailey’s office phone to report the deputy’s behav­ior, but he nev­er returned her calls.

Dare, the depart­ment lawyer, declined to pro­vide copies of com­plaints, say­ing they were con­sid­ered per­son­nel records pro­tect­ed by state law. When asked to con­firm the exis­tence of the sev­en com­plaints described by accusers, he said he could not imme­di­ate­ly pro­vide it.

Chuck Wexler, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Police Executive Research Forum, said this long list of com­plaints and law­suits should have prompt­ed inves­ti­ga­tions by the sheriff.

“If you’re get­ting mul­ti­ple com­plaints about the same offi­cers, from dif­fer­ent sources, that’s a red flag,” he said. “If you don’t do any­thing about it, you’re in denial.”

Despite the alle­ga­tions against him, McAlpin con­tin­ued to rise through the ranks of the depart­ment, win­ning Investigator of the Year and even­tu­al­ly being pro­mot­ed to the top inves­ti­ga­tor position.

Until this year, the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department did not have any­one assigned full time to han­dle com­plaints. Instead, super­vi­sors were respon­si­ble for inves­ti­gat­ing the deputies they over­saw, accord­ing to four for­mer employ­ees who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because they feared ret­ri­bu­tion from the department.

Among those super­vi­sors were McAlpin and Middleton, who both plead­ed guilty in August for their roles in the assault of Jenkins and Parker.

On Tuesday, Bailey announced that the depart­ment would allow res­i­dents to file com­plaints against deputies on the department’s website.

Beyond the law­suits and com­plaints, there were oth­er obvi­ous signs of the vio­lence, includ­ing injuries that would have been vis­i­ble to jail work­ers and court offi­cials who saw the injured short­ly after their encounters.

Hospital records show that Hobson was treat­ed for a gash over his eye after a 2018 raid in which he says deputies water­board­ed him and punched him repeat­ed­ly. His face is ban­daged in his jail book­ing photo.

Robert Jones, the man who said deputies rammed a stick down his throat, arrived at the jail with a swollen and mud-streaked face after deputies beat him and threw him into a ditch.

Many of the mug shots from the Rankin County jail fea­ture ban­daged faces, swollen cheeks and black eyes asso­ci­at­ed with drug-relat­ed arrests.

But the most glar­ing evi­dence of the vio­lence inflict­ed by deputies has been col­lect­ing in the department’s com­put­er files for more than two decades.

The Taser Logs 

Every time a Taser is fired, the device keeps a record of it. In Rankin County, deputies upload this data to a com­put­er, com­pil­ing detailed depart­men­twide logs that allow super­vi­sors to mon­i­tor deputy Taser use.

The data, reviewed by the Times and Mississippi Today, con­tained tens of thou­sands of Taser trig­gers stretch­ing back 24 years.

The logs sup­port­ed the accounts of nine peo­ple who described being shocked by deputies while hand­cuffed or held down. In all but three of these cas­es, the deputies did not report their Taser use, vio­lat­ing depart­ment policy.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever come across an agency in which it would be accept­able for an offi­cer to deploy a Taser and not report it in some way,” said Ashley Heiberger, a retired offi­cer and an expert in police use of force.

After sev­er­al stud­ies link­ing pro­longed Taser expo­sure to severe med­ical prob­lems and even death, the Police Executive Research Forum devel­oped nation­al guide­lines advis­ing against shock­ing a per­son for more than 15 sec­onds dur­ing an encounter.

The logs con­tain dozens of instances of Tasers being fired for at least dou­ble the rec­om­mend­ed time lim­it over the course of an hour. In April 2016, a device assigned to a deputy who par­tic­i­pat­ed in Goon Squad raids was trig­gered nine times in four min­utes, deliv­er­ing 31 sec­onds of current.

Several experts in police use of force said the logs showed abnor­mal Taser use that was hard to explain. Seth Stoughton, from the University of South Carolina, said the fre­quen­cy of the deputies’ Taser trig­gers sug­gest­ed they were not using the weapons for their intend­ed pur­pose: to quick­ly sub­due a com­bat­ive person.

“It just doesn’t sug­gest that the Taser is actu­al­ly being used to induce com­pli­ance,” he said.

By com­par­ing the logs to depart­ment records, reporters iden­ti­fied four peo­ple who claim they were at the receiv­ing end of Taser shocks record­ed in the data.

In 2016, Deputy James Rayborn fired his Taser for 20 sec­onds over the course of 20 min­utes dur­ing a raid of Samuel Carter’s home.

Carter, 64, an Army vet­er­an, had had pre­vi­ous run-ins with Rankin sheriff’s deputies over alleged drug use. On the night of the raid, he said, deputies dragged him to his bed­room, shocked him and demand­ed that he open a safe where they expect­ed to find drugs and cash.

Instead, deputies found a tub of cake frost­ing he had stashed in the safe to hide from house­guests with a sweet tooth.

Carter said they became enraged and shocked him again until his leg began to bleed.

Down the hall, Christopher Holloway, a 26-year-old who had been help­ing Carter main­tain his prop­er­ty, was beat­en and shocked until he defe­cat­ed on him­self, he said. Then they dragged him out­side and threat­ened to push him, hand­cuffed, into Carter’s pool.

Holloway and Carter were charged with para­pher­na­lia and drug pos­ses­sion — Holloway for mar­i­jua­na, Carter for sev­er­al grams of methamphetamine.

Like many peo­ple tar­get­ed by Rankin deputies, Carter said the first raid was just the begin­ning. Three months lat­er, deputies arrest­ed him again, this time for drink­ing in front of his home, Carter said. He was arrest­ed four more times over the next year, depart­ment records show, most­ly for drug or para­pher­na­lia possession.

Ballooning legal fees left Carter unable to pay his bills.

“They had the pow­er,” he said. “And they used it.”

‘I Lost My Life’ 

The Goon Squad has left a long trail of shat­tered lives in its wake. Some peo­ple who said they were bru­tal­ized are jolt­ed awake by night­mares after their encoun­ters with deputies. Four said they fled the coun­ty for good. Several are serv­ing lengthy prison terms.

In 2015, Ron Shinstock was strug­gling with a metham­phet­a­mine addic­tion, even as he raised a fam­i­ly with his wife and ran a mechan­ic shop with his brother.

Everything changed, he said, after McAlpin led a vio­lent raid of his home, hold­ing his chil­dren at gun­point and forc­ing him to strip naked in his back­yard. The arrest led to a 40-year prison sen­tence for a $260 meth sale with­in 1,500 feet of a church.

Shinstock’s wife left him. He is sched­uled to be released in 2056, two months before his 82^nd birthday.

“I lost my fam­i­ly, I lost my home,” Shinstock said. “I lost my life.”

Andrea Dettore, a for­mer res­i­dent of Rankin County, wit­nessed deputies bru­tal­ize three peo­ple in two inci­dents. She said she was there in 2018 when the Goon Squad attacked Loveday, the for­mer deputy, and Hobson.

During a raid on her own home in January, she said, she heard deputies beat her friend, Robert Grozier, behind a closed door, and saw a deputy, Christian Dedmon, shove a sex toy into his mouth, threat­en­ing to shock him with a Taser if he spat it out.

Dettore and Grozier were each fined sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars, and she has since left Rankin County. Hobson sat in jail for six months before his charges were dropped, and Loveday lost his job as a sheriff’s deputy. Court records show he was nev­er con­vict­ed of a crime.

After McAlpin arrest­ed Loveday and accused him of con­sort­ing with drug deal­ers, he ordered him to leave town. Loveday fled the state, fear­ing he would be tar­get­ed again. He couldn’t for­get that night.

“If they did that to me, how many oth­er peo­ple have they done it to?” he wondered.

Before he left Mississippi, Loveday said, he called Bailey per­son­al­ly to warn him about his deputies’ behavior.

But Bailey wouldn’t lis­ten, he said. He called Loveday a dirty cop and accused him of secret­ly record­ing the call.

Then, Loveday said, “He hung up on me.”

FROM: The New York Times Company

A woman who was shocked in the back with a Taser while lying on the ground in Pueblo, Colorado, last year is suing the police offi­cer who stunned her and the city’s police chief, accus­ing the police depart­ment of fail­ing to report exces­sive force by the offi­cer to state regulators.

The fed­er­al law­suit filed Sunday by Cristy Gonzales, who was sus­pect­ed of steal­ing a vehi­cle, says the police depart­ment found Cpl. Bennie Villanueva used exces­sive force against Gonzales and anoth­er per­son sev­er­al weeks lat­er. However, it says the agency with­held the infor­ma­tion from a state board which over­sees who is qual­i­fied to serve in law enforce­ment. If it had been report­ed, Villanueva would have lost his cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to work as a police offi­cer for at least a year, the law­suit said. Gonzales was sus­pect­ed of steal­ing a truck in February 2022, and did­n’t stop for Villanueva, accord­ing to a police inves­ti­ga­tion. Eventually the vehi­cle ran out of gas, accord­ing to the lawsuit.
After she got out of the truck, Villanueva pulled up and ordered her to get onto the ground, accord­ing to body cam­era footage released by Gonzales’ lawyer. After anoth­er offi­cer grabbed one of her arms, she got down on her knees and then appeared to be pushed to the ground, when Villanueva deployed his Taser into her back.

According to the law­suit, Gonzales was hit with two probes in the small of her back near her spine. It says she con­tin­ues to have numb­ness and dif­fi­cul­ty using her right hand since the Taser was used on her. Telephone mes­sages left for Pueblo police Chief Chris Noeller and the city’s police union were not returned Monday. Villanueva could not be locat­ed for com­ment. After see­ing the video of Gonzales’ arrest, the assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney pros­e­cut­ing the vehi­cle theft filed an exces­sive force com­plaint, prompt­ing an inter­nal police inves­ti­ga­tion, accord­ing to the law­suit. After the inves­ti­ga­tion, Noeller issued a let­ter of rep­ri­mand against Villanueva for his con­duct in the Gonzales case as well as for vio­lat­ing depart­ment poli­cies in two oth­er cas­es. In the let­ter, pro­vid­ed by Gonzales’ lawyer, Kevin Mehr, Noeller said Villanueva appeared to use the Taser on Gonzales “for no appar­ent rea­son.” However, he also said that the use of the Taser appeared to be “a result of your reac­tion to a high­ly stress­ful call for ser­vice after hav­ing been away from patrol duty work for sev­er­al years.” In a sec­ond case, Noeller said Villanueva deployed his Taser on a sus­pect a sec­ond time appar­ent­ly acci­den­tal­ly while attempt­ing to issue a “warn­ing arc” to get the sus­pect to com­ply. In a third case cit­ed in the let­ter, Villanueva threat­ened to use a Taser on a sus­pect in cus­tody who was not coop­er­at­ing with med­ical per­son­nel but he did not end up deploy­ing it.

Each year, police depart­ments are required to report to Colorado’s Peace Officer Standards and Training board whether their offi­cers have had any “dis­qual­i­fy­ing inci­dents”, includ­ing a find­ing of exces­sive force, that would dis­qual­i­fy them from being cer­ti­fied to work as police offi­cers in the state, accord­ing to the law­suit. It claims the Pueblo Police Department did not report any such inci­dents for any of its offi­cers in 2022. “The Pueblo Police Department lied to the POST board, just plain and sim­ple,” Mehr said.

Former Minneapolis police offi­cer Derek Chauvin, who was con­vict­ed of killing George Floyd, was stabbed in prison on Friday and is seri­ous­ly injured, the Associated Press report­ed, cit­ing an unnamed source. The Bureau of Prisons con­firmed to the AP that an inmate was assault­ed at FCI Tucson around 12:30 p.m., though the agency did not name the inmate. The BOP also said prison employ­ees per­formed “life-sav­ing mea­sures” and that the inmate was tak­en to a hos­pi­tal. The Bureau of Prisons did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to Business Insider’s request for com­ment on Friday evening.

Chauvin was con­vict­ed in Minnesota in 2021 of mur­der and manslaugh­ter in the death of George Floyd, and sen­tenced to 22.5 years in prison. Floyd died after Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine min­utes dur­ing a 2020 arrest that sparked nation­wide out­rage and wide­spread racial-injus­tice protests. Chauvin also lat­er plead­ed guilty to fed­er­al charges of vio­lat­ing Floyd’s civ­il rights. He was sen­tenced to 21 years and trans­ferred to a fed­er­al prison in Tucson, Arizona. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear Chauvin’s appeal of his Minnesota conviction.

My friend was livid yes­ter­day about the sen­tences hand­ed down in the tri­al of dou­ble mur­der­er Richard Brown, who con­fessed to the killing of Phillip Paulwell’s 10-month-old child and her moth­er, Toshyna Patterson. My friend does not feel that the sen­tence fits the crime; I concur.
The depraved beast had the gall to pen a let­ter to the court claim­ing he was sor­ry for the heinous act he was a part of com­mit­ting with the sole intent of exploit­ing the well-known irra­tional lenien­cy with which the courts mete out sentences.
It worked!!!
Thirty (30) years is absolute­ly not any­one’s idea of a deci­sive sen­tence for a man who, with depraved indif­fer­ence, mur­dered a young moth­er and her 10-month-old infant child.
If you thought the thir­ty-year sen­tence was a slap in the face of our coun­try and the griev­ing fam­i­ly, Richard Brown was addi­tion­al­ly sen­tenced to one year and ten (10) months impris­on­ment at hard labor for the kid­nap­ping of the moth­er and baby.
On the kid­nap­ping alone, he should have been giv­en a life sen­tence, not to men­tion the dou­ble murder.

The sor­did tale of the mur­der of the young 27-year-old moth­er and her infant child has been all over the media like a soap opera. It involved an American National who hap­pened to be a mem­ber of that coun­try’s armed ser­vices, a pow­er­ful Jamaican politi­cian, jeal­ousy, hatred, and young men and women eas­i­ly lured into crime by the specter of easy money.
And so Toshyna Patterson and her infant child became the vic­tims of jeal­ousy and depraved minds who are quite will­ing to ‘kill and col­lect, drink and forget.”
For almost two decades, this writer has writ­ten hun­dreds of arti­cles speak­ing to the lack of real sen­tenc­ing in Jamaica, a phe­nom­e­non that has helped expo­nen­tial­ly to embold­en the nation’s heart­less killers.
Additionally, the fact that US Navy Culinary Specialist Seaman Leoda Bradshaw, who also has an eight-year-old daugh­ter with Paulwell and has been charged in the mat­ter, thought she would get away with con­tract­ing mur­der for hire and sim­ply walk away speaks to how they view Jamaica’s jus­tice system…
But who can blame them for think­ing the Police are dumb or that the judges are in love with mur­der­ers? Brown’s accom­plice, Roshane Miller, was sen­tenced to sev­en-and-a-half years in prison for two counts of acces­so­ry before the fact of mur­der for his role in the crimes. Additionally, he was sen­tenced to two years and ten months impris­on­ment at hard labor for con­spir­a­cy to kid­nap and one year and 10 months at hard labor for mis­prison of a felony. The sen­tences are to run con­cur­rent­ly.

This is jus­tice Jamaican style, and please don’t get me start­ed on the high-priced lawyers that these mon­sters are able to hire when they are caught. Jamaica sim­ply can­not con­tin­ue this way, but this is a won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty for the PNP’s Phillip Paulwell to cham­pi­on leg­is­la­tion in the House to add teeth to crimes exact­ly like these. Paulwell, tongue in cheek, issued a state­ment about being sad at the events. We don’t need Paulwell and the PNP to be sad; we need them to help with leg­is­la­tion with teeth. Stop sup­port­ing crim­i­nals by block­ing tough leg­is­la­tion that would send strong mes­sages that we will no longer tol­er­ate these acts of criminality.
Talk is cheap; this is the oppor­tu­ni­ty for Pualwell to step up or shut up; talk is cheap.
We need manda­to­ry min­i­mum sen­tences of life with­out parole for crimes of depraved indif­fer­ence like this one. We do not need judges hand­ing down sen­tences of ⁷¹⁄₂ years for con­spir­a­cy to mur­der, which in actu­al­i­ty is mur­der. We do not need judges hand­ing down sen­tences of two years and ten months impris­on­ment at hard labor for con­spir­a­cy to kid­nap and one year and ten months at hard labor for mis­prison of a felony.
This is a damn disgrace.….

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

Our world is del­i­cate­ly bal­anced on prin­ci­ples; there is no one star­ing down and keep­ing score. Our plan­et is set up on the sim­ple con­cept of ‘what you sow, that you shall reap.’ Those who dis­agree fail to under­stand that the cre­ator’s time com­plete­ly dif­fers from our human con­cept of time. But I digress.(mb)

FBI agents seized elec­tron­ic devices from New York City Mayor Eric Adams ear­li­er this week, days after a raid on the home of his chief cam­paign fundrais­er, accord­ing to an attor­ney for the may­or’s campaign. 
Federal author­i­ties are con­duct­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether his 2021 may­oral cam­paign con­spired with a Brooklyn con­struc­tion com­pa­ny and the Turkish gov­ern­ment to fun­nel for­eign mon­ey into the cam­paign through a straw donor scheme, the New York Times has report­ed. Boyd Johnson, an attor­ney for Adams’ cam­paign, con­firmed on Friday that Adams had pro­vid­ed the FBI with elec­tron­ic devices after agents approached the may­or fol­low­ing an event on Monday night.
Johnson said the FBI request­ed the devices after Adams informed inves­ti­ga­tors of impro­pri­ety by an uniden­ti­fied individual.

“After learn­ing of the fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion, it was dis­cov­ered that an indi­vid­ual had recent­ly act­ed improp­er­ly. In the spir­it of trans­paren­cy and coöper­a­tion, this behav­ior was imme­di­ate­ly and proac­tive­ly report­ed to inves­ti­ga­tors,” Johnson said in a state­ment. “The may­or has not been accused of any wrong­do­ing and con­tin­ues to coöper­ate with the inves­ti­ga­tion,” the state­ment said. The FBI declined to com­ment. The devices seized from the may­or — at least two cell­phones and an iPad — were returned with­in a mat­ter of days, the Times said. Johnson did not pro­vide details about the type or quan­ti­ty of devices seized. FBI agents had searched the home of Adams’ chief elec­tion cam­paign fundrais­er, Brianna Suggs, on Nov. 2, and she was ques­tioned by pub­lic cor­rup­tion inves­ti­ga­tors, city offi­cials and local media said.
Law enforce­ment offi­cials have inves­ti­gat­ed sev­er­al oth­er asso­ciates of Adams in recent months. 
In July, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the indict­ment of six peo­ple he said had used a straw donor scheme to ille­gal­ly gen­er­ate pub­lic match­ing funds for Adams’ 2021 elec­tion cam­paign. All six men have plead­ed not guilty.

Adams, who was not accused of any wrong­do­ing in the indict­ments, has said he and his cam­paign team had no knowl­edge of or involve­ment in the alleged scheme. Adams’ 2025 elec­tion cam­paign has paid Suggs’s con­sult­ing firm, Suggs Solutions, about $98,000 so far, pub­lic records show. Suggs has worked for Adams since start­ing out in 2017 as an intern in his office when he was the Brooklyn bor­ough pres­i­dent, accord­ing to her pro­file on the LinkedIn social media net­work. While rais­ing dona­tions for Adams’ elec­tion cam­paign, Suggs had also been paid to lob­by his admin­is­tra­tion on behalf of a Manhattan prop­er­ty own­er seek­ing an exten­sion on his lease of a shop­ping com­plex in a city-owned build­ing, the New York Daily News report­ed in April.
Adams, a Democrat, had trav­eled to Washington on Nov. 2 for meet­ings with U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials about the city’s shel­ter cri­sis for asy­lum seek­ers and oth­er recent­ly arrived migrants but abrupt­ly can­celed those meet­ings to return to New York. (Credit Reuters)

Policing and Judging for prof­it have become a norm in America; some­where in there is also pros­e­cut­ing for prof­it. The rapa­cious arti­fi­cial need cre­at­ed by states and munic­i­pal­i­ties to extract rev­enue from cit­i­zens to fund the police state has made dri­ving down a high­way or street a per­ilous adven­ture for motorists.
Unmitigated and unchecked pow­ers placed into the hands of police offi­cers add to the dan­gers motorists face mere­ly dri­ving down the street.
The desire of states and munic­i­pal­i­ties to main­tain con­trol of the cit­i­zen­ry and to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly extract rev­enue to fund the police state, cou­pled with the over-mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the police, has left many ask­ing if they are already liv­ing in a police state.
Whether or not it is a police state is above my pay grade. It is suf­fi­cient to say that we are in a dystopi­an night­mare where the very cit­i­zens who are at risk active­ly cheer on police gun­ning down oth­er cit­i­zens to pro­vide a so-called safe environment.
Who is safe when the police are empow­ered to sum­mar­i­ly slaugh­ter inno­cent cit­i­zens who may or may not have trans­gressed against road traf­fic laws?

The notion of many who believed that they will not fall to police bul­lets because of the col­or of their skin, their slav­ish obe­di­ence to the rov­ing assas­sins, or both is high­ly misguided.
The dan­gers posed by the police stretch far out­side the nar­row con­fines of the gun vio­lence they engage in, with hard­ly any con­se­quence. The immoral laws cre­at­ed to give them faux jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to breach the Fourth Amendment right of cit­i­zens; laws that they use to tar­get com­mu­ni­ties they hate have cre­at­ed a widen­ing chasm between them and those bru­tal­ized communities.
Every stop in cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties, just or unjust, becomes a dan­ger­ous expe­ri­ence for all involved.
Pretextual sea­sons for stop­ping motorists include bro­ken tail­lights, tint too dark, unable-to-see license plates, and a litany of oth­er fraud­u­lent claims by cops. The motorist hit a yel­low line and swerved. In most cas­es, the charges are con­coct­ed to search the motorist’s vehi­cle and to see if the dri­ver has a warrant.
This is where many who are for the police state argue that these uncon­sti­tu­tion­al breach­es yield results. What are those results? The results, they argue, are that police can find nar­cotics; usu­al­ly, the motorist had a lit­tle mar­i­jua­na or a cig­ar not ful­ly con­sumed in the vehi­cle. These are called pre­tex­tu­al stops.
For starters, they do not make any­one safer. Rigorous stud­ies have shown that pre­text stops pro­duce evi­dence of non-traf­fic crimes at very low rates and have no effect on crime rates. These same stud­ies con­firm that when cops are allowed to be led by their gut instincts and oth­er unchecked heuris­tics, peo­ple of col­or are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect­ed. Racial dis­par­i­ties in who gets pulled over erode trust in the police and deep­en the per­cep­tion that police use race as a proxy for criminality.

On that basis, police are giv­en unchecked pow­ers to vio­late the rights of cit­i­zens, usu­al­ly with the bless­ings of their high­er-ups and local prosecutors.
In one case, a cop con­tact­ed a local pros­e­cu­tor whom he called by his first name. The cop want­ed to vio­late a cit­i­zen’s right, but the man stood his ground and would not relent to the ille­gal violation.
The pros­e­cu­tor cor­rupt­ly told the cop to fol­low the motorist as long as it took to find a pre­tex­tu­al rea­son for pulling the motorist over.
Nothing can jus­ti­fy that kind of cor­rup­tion in the process of law enforce­ment; the cop did not sus­pect the motorist to be a want­ed mur­der­er; he mere­ly want­ed to flex author­i­ty he did not have. The local pros­e­cu­tor he was bud­dies with was a will­ing par­tic­i­pant in the scheme. The cor­rup­tion usu­al­ly runs from the top down.
The anger and resent­ment this type of polic­ing cre­ates makes it dif­fi­cult for the police to enforce the laws. It ren­ders legit­i­mate enforce­ment a dan­ger­ous endeav­or that gives rise to a sick and con­vo­lut­ed need for more police, more arma­ments, and more aggres­sion from police. Where it stops is any­body’s guess.
The dan­gers these stu­pid laws pose to the dri­ving pub­lic can­not be overem­pha­sized, but extract­ing every pen­ny in tax­a­tion states and munic­i­pal­i­ties can is paramount.

As I have said in pre­vi­ous arti­cles, the prob­lem is not the police mak­ing; state and local leg­is­la­tures have cre­at­ed this mess they can­not and do not intend to dis­en­tan­gle them­selves from.
For exam­ple, what harm is done if a motorist does not stop imme­di­ate­ly when a cop ini­ti­ates his lights? Many motorists who, for good rea­sons, do [not] trust the police not to mur­der them on a traf­fic stop have every right to slow down, ini­ti­ate their haz­ard lights, and slow­ly dri­ve to a well-lit area before stopping.
Doing that sim­ple, sane thing in many states will get you mur­dered by the police you were scared would kill you in the first place. Florida is chief among those states. The motorist must pull over imme­di­ate­ly because the police need to know that you obey them imme­di­ate­ly, fuck your con­cern for your safe­ty or that of the motor­ing pub­lic. Local moron­ic politi­cians with their heads up the ass­es of the police unions have made that state a death trap for the trav­el­ing public.
There is an estab­lished under­stand­ing that there is no well-inten­tioned law that the police can­not turn into a nightmare.
Giving police these unfet­tered pow­ers to do as they please has been used with dis­as­trous con­se­quences for the public.
Cops, in their quest to exert pow­er, pull motorists over on nar­row wind­ing roads even at night, pre­sent­ing grave dan­ger to the dri­ving pub­lic. The lives of the cit­i­zens do not mat­ter as long as the cop gets to show who is the boss and the state or munic­i­pal­i­ty acqui­esces because the fines keep flow­ing into their coffers.
In New York and oth­er States, so-called,*move over* laws make it dou­bly dan­ger­ous, as motorists must move out of the lane where there is police action. 

So when that much pow­er is placed into the hands of the least edu­cat­ed, usu­al­ly most nar­cis­sis­tic, low self-esteem peo­ple, the results are trag­ic — hand­cuff­ing a per­son and plac­ing them in the back of a vehi­cle and leav­ing the vehi­cle on an active train track.
Any cit­i­zen who com­mits an act like that would be appro­pri­ate­ly charged with attempt­ed mur­der. A cop does it, and there is no con­se­quence.….….. the sad real­i­ty is that the life of indi­vid­u­als, par­tic­u­lar­ly those of col­or, is of no con­cern to the leg­is­la­tors who empow­ers the police.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

About this time last year, pho­tos were leaked of a Colorado Springs Police Officer smil­ing a lit­tle too hard while show­ing his blood­ied knuck­les after vio­lent­ly arrest­ing a Black man. He and his col­leagues escaped pun­ish­ment from the police bru­tal­i­ty alle­ga­tions but the DOJ is ask­ing to spin the block with their own probe.

On October 9, 2022, Gadson was pulled over by Officer Matthew Anderson for dri­ving under the speed lim­it and hav­ing no license plate dis­played. However, the body cam­era footage shows Gadson’s vehi­cle parked and the offi­cer men­tion­ing noth­ing about the dri­ving speed. At the time of the traf­fic stop, Gadson was unhoused and suf­fer­ing PTSD from serv­ing in the Army. Authorities said the respond­ing offi­cers had sus­pi­cions of Gadson being under the influ­ence and that he refused to exit the vehi­cle when asked.

Read from the DOJ’s letter:

News of the traf­fic stop spread quick­ly after images of Gadson lying blood­ied on the ground cir­cu­lat­ed the media as well as one offi­cer smil­ing while show­ing off his blood­ied knuck­les. His attor­neys said Gadson suf­fered eye injuries, a rup­tured eardrum and chest wall con­tu­sions, via KOAA. The DOJ’s inquiry comes over a year after an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion cleared the offi­cers of any wrongdoing.

“By refer­ring this case for crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, the Department of Justice is putting these offi­cers on notice,” said attor­ney Kevin Mehr. “The CSPD may not take bru­tal­i­ty seri­ous­ly, but the DOJ does.”

From the root.