To Protect and to Serve II

#13,478
#13,478
NurseGoodVol said:
So correct me if I’m wrong but an arrest warrant is not a warrant for property search.
Click to expand...

I'm here to correct you, sort of...

In Georgia, an arrest warrant also serves as a search warrant for the address listed on the arrest warrant. So, if we have a warrant for John Jones at 123 Any Street, and we go to 123 Any Street to arrest him, then the arrest warrant gives us authority to enter the residence to search for him.

But if we go to his Mom's house next door at 125 Any Street, we have no right for non-consensual entry and search. Note that there are exceptions. If we know him by sight, and saw him run into Mom's house, then yes, we can enter. But I prefer to set a perimeter and get a search warrant for Mom's house. That's just me. At that point I'm probably going to use the guys in tactical pajamas, so it's best to check all the boxes in case it goes bad.

Again, this is Georgia. It's likely that other states have different rules.
 
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#13,479
#13,479
On another note, Saturday will be my last shift with Patrol Division. After the 1st of the year, I'm moving over to the retirement home, also known as Civil Division. I'll serve papers on weekends. I'll still answer calls as needed; write a ticket or two on the Interstate when I'm done with papers; and be available if they need me for a major call-out.

But for those of you who worry that I might pull you over for no reason; throw dope in your car; hide a gun on your person; accuse you of being someone else; bust your window out with an ASP; pepper spray you, tase you; handcuff you; and then post the video on some RoidRage Facebook Cop Channel...relax. Worst case, I hand you my ticket book and ask you to fill it out since I can't read small print anymore.

My Tahoe has 264,000 miles on it and tops out at around 130 downhill with a tailwind. At that speed, it's like being on a drunk bull at Amateur Rodeo Night. If you're faster, just run. If we can't get a Charger on you, we'll likely quit at the state line.

21 years is enough. I ain't Tom Brady.

Y'all be safe out there.

:cool:
 
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#13,480
#13,480
GreyWolf1129 said:
On another note, Saturday will be my last shift with Patrol Division. After the 1st of the year, I'm moving over to the retirement home, also known as Civil Division. I'll serve papers on weekends. I'll still answer calls as needed; write a ticket or two on the Interstate when I'm done with papers; and be available if they need me for a major call-out.

But for those of you who worry that I might pull you over for no reason; throw dope in your car; hide a gun on your person; accuse you of being someone else; bust your window out with an ASP; pepper spray you, tase you; handcuff you; and then post the video on some RoidRage Facebook Cop Channel...relax. Worst case, I hand you my ticket book and ask you to fill it out since I can't read small print anymore.

My Tahoe has 264,000 miles on it and tops out at around 130 downhill with a tailwind. At that speed, it's like being on a drunk bull at Amateur Rodeo Night. If you're faster, just run. If we can't get a Charger on you, we'll likely quit at the state line.

21 years is enough. I ain't Tom Brady.

Y'all be safe out there.

:cool:
Click to expand...
Good luck in being put out to pasture. I'm just curious about your long list of allegations you listed that I highlighted. If those don't happen, why would you list them?
 
#13,481
#13,481
GreyWolf1129 said:
I'm here to correct you, sort of...

In Georgia, an arrest warrant also serves as a search warrant for the address listed on the arrest warrant. So, if we have a warrant for John Jones at 123 Any Street, and we go to 123 Any Street to arrest him, then the arrest warrant gives us authority to enter the residence to search for him.

But if we go to his Mom's house next door at 125 Any Street, we have no right for non-consensual entry and search. Note that there are exceptions. If we know him by sight, and saw him run into Mom's house, then yes, we can enter. But I prefer to set a perimeter and get a search warrant for Mom's house. That's just me. At that point I'm probably going to use the guys in tactical pajamas, so it's best to check all the boxes in case it goes bad.

Again, this is Georgia. It's likely that other states have different rules.
Click to expand...
Tactical PJ's got me laughing. Congrat's on your move. Maybe they'll let you go down to the jail and rough some drunks up in the holding cells on Saturdays if you get bored. Again, Congrats on semi retirement.
 
#13,485
#13,485
This 21k-word bombshell article is probably more than just about anybody here wants to read, so I'll post excerpts:

The sergeant, who I’ll call “Wanda,” checked her cellphone. Overnight, she had received a series of text messages from her colleagues at LRPD. The first was from then-Assistant Chief Alice Fulk, sent just before midnight. “Angie, Debbie, shorty, Linda and Marilyn,” Fulk’s text read, “it’s my understanding that u all hve heard inappropriate sexual remarks made by the chief.”

Wanda was floored. Fulk was referring to Keith Humphrey, who had become the city’s chief of police the prior year. “I had no idea what she was talking about,” Wanda said. “I never told anyone that Chief Humphrey had said anything inappropriate to me — because he hadn’t.”

One lieutenant, a close friend of Fulk’s, pressed especially hard. “You need to get on this lawsuit train” — that was the lieutenant’s message, Wanda recalled. “She kept pointing out that since I’m Black, it was really important that I join them because it would look bad if it was just a bunch of white women accusing him. It didn’t matter that I had nothing to accuse him of.”

Alarmed, Wanda wrote up a memo. “I’m well-versed with the protocol of making a Harassment Complaint,” the memo read. “I feel that it was inappropriate to attempt to persuade me to file a complaint, when I do not have a complaint against Chief Humphrey.”

Wanda gave the memo to her captain, who passed it up the chain of command. When she later discovered the memo never reached Humphrey, she took it to the chief herself.

Wanda also filed her own HR complaint, detailing how she had been pressured to accuse Humphrey. HR didn’t respond.

A Reformist Black Police Chief Faces an Uprising of the Old Guard
 
#13,486
#13,486
"We made sure promotions were based on written tests, interviews, and job performance — objective criteria that could be scored and ranked.” He encountered resistance. “When you’re a Black chief of a mostly white department and you start promoting based on performance instead of connections or clout, you’re redefining what’s considered normal. So what I looked at as equity, some white officers saw as a system that wasn’t giving them the promotions they were accustomed to getting by default,” he said. “That’s the funny thing about it: When you change a discriminatory system, the people who were benefiting from it accuse you of being racist.”
 
#13,489
#13,489
One of the first outward-facing policies Scott and Humphrey implemented were restrictions on the use of “no-knock” raids. In 2018, my own reporting found that the LRPD had been conducting such raids based on unchecked tips from unreliable informants, aided by judges who routinely signed off on illegal warrants, and had been waging the raids in an extraordinarily violent manner. Under the new policy, the police chief must review all unannounced raids, and they can only be authorized under limited conditions. The number of no-knock raids in the city subsequently dropped from 57 in 2018 to seven in 2019. Humphrey said he’s signed just three since taking office.

Scott next persuaded the Board of Directors to approve a citizens’ review board to look into shootings and citizen complaints. He also won approval to purchase body cameras for LRPD officers. And in May 2020, he announced a thorough, top-down review of the department by an independent body.

These outward-facing reforms were met with plenty of opposition from the union. It was Humphrey’s more mundane internal reforms, though, that sparked far more anger, both from high-ranking officers and from the FOP.

So in May 2020, Humphrey instituted an anti-nepotism policy, barring direct relatives from serving in the same chain of command. The FOP immediately filed a complaint. According to Humphrey, some members of his command staff also objected privately, especially those who’d had immediate family working below them, either at the time or over the course of their careers.
 
#13,491
#13,491
SINCE THE LATE 1970s, Little Rock has had two police unions. One, the FOP, is official and mostly white; the other, the Little Rock Black Police Officers Association, is unofficial and mostly Black. Only the FOP is authorized to collectively bargain with the city. Many Black officers said the BPOA is necessary because not only does the FOP fail to represent their interests, it also often works against them.

The mere existence of a separate union for Black police officers rubs many in Little Rock the wrong way. White officers, some city officials, and many white residents see the Black union as unnecessary, a stubborn refusal to move beyond the city’s ugly racial history. Black officers said that sentiment reveals a misunderstanding of why the union exists: It isn’t to win special rights for Black officers, they said. It’s to demand they be treated equally.

GILBERT SAID WHEN he started on the force, Black officers knew that the FOP had little to offer them. Because it was the only union authorized to bargain with the city, though, he joined and hoped for the best. He left in 1993, after an incident at an FOP-sponsored Halloween party that older Black officers still talk about today. A white officer came to the party in blackface, an Afro, and bib overalls, carrying a watermelon. His date came dressed as a piece of fried chicken. The incident made national news.

The FOP reaction still rankles Black officers who were around back then. The union backed the white officer’s lawsuit to overturn his 30-day suspension without pay. The punishment was ultimately upheld in court, but the FOP used its own cash — drawn from union dues — to reimburse the officer for the salary he lost during his suspension, according to Gilbert and others who were on the board of BPOA and opposed FOP support for the suspended officer.
 
#13,493
#13,493
“I’D BEEN TO Little Rock several times for conferences and assessments,” said Lawrence Johnson, the city’s first Black police chief. “It seemed like a pretty progressive place, especially when it came to race. It didn’t take long to realize that what I saw was just a lot of window dressing.”

Johnson said he quickly learned that while the city officials who hired him may have been ready for change, the power structure that actually ran the city was a different story.

At the time he took over, Johnson said, the police chief position in Little Rock had mostly been reduced to a figurehead. “The FOP had immense power over policy and personnel decisions, and its leaders weren’t about to relinquish it,” he said. “On my first day — my very first day — Tommy Hudson, the president of the FOP, told me that if I just let my assistant chiefs make all the important decisions for me, we’d all get along just fine. I told him, ‘I’m sorry, but that isn’t why I was hired.’ It all just got more hostile from there.” (Hudson did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)
 
#13,494
#13,494
Black officers who worked at LRPD at the time said there had long been criticism that the system by which the department determined promotions skipped over Black officers in favor of the FOP’s preferred candidates. “Human Resources used this mysterious formula to weigh the scores — one that always seemed to select for white officers,” said Gilbert. “We asked them over and over again to explain the formula. They told us we wouldn’t understand it.”

“Any time a Black officer did better than a white officer on the written portion, they’d end up ranked lower after the interview portion,” said Carlos Corbin, a retired assistant chief who was promoted by Johnson. “And the few times a Black officer finished ahead, the FOP would go to court to try to get the rankings revoked.”
 
#13,495
#13,495
If the public campaign against Johnson seemed nasty, he and other Black officers from the era said the union also waged an informal campaign that was even more malicious. If a big conference was in town, they said the FOP would send officers in street clothes to the Little Rock airport to tell arriving passengers the city wasn’t safe under Johnson’s leadership.

According to several officers, the FOP leadership also started a rumor that Johnson was having an affair with a white woman, whom he allegedly kept in a hotel room on the west side of the city. Johnson said the rumor was nonsense, as did Earnest Whitten, who served as Johnson’s adjutant lieutenant at the time and is now at the Pulaski County sheriff’s office. “If he was having an affair, I would have known about it,” Whitten said. “But that’s how it works in the South, right? You want to bring a Black man down, you tell people he’s sleeping with white women.”

Johnson was hired in 2000 with a five-year contract. When the contract expired in 2005, both he and the city chose not to renew. “I promised my wife we’d give it five years and then reassess,” he said. “I’ll just say this: We were both ready to leave.”
 
#13,496
#13,496
IN 2005, JOHNSON was replaced by Stuart Thomas, a longtime LRPD officer with strong backing from the FOP. According to Gilbert’s testimony in a deposition a few years ago, Thomas told a group of senior officers that he planned to reinstitute “the good ole boy system” and that he was “taking our police department back.” He immediately began rolling back Johnson’s reforms.

It was under Thomas that the department hired Josh Hastings, the officer who had attended a KKK meeting. Hastings accumulated a jaw-dropping disciplinary record before he was fired in 2012 after killing the Black teenager. Internal Affairs also determined he lied about the circumstances of the shooting. He was later tried twice on criminal charges, with both trials resulting in a hung jury

Black officers said the Thomas era reinvigorated the culture of impunity white officers had long enjoyed before Lawrence Johnson. In the discovery process for the lawsuit related to the teenager killed by Hastings, civil rights attorney Mike Laux, who has brought a number of cases against the LRPD and currently represents Humphrey, found numerous incidents in which white officers had used the N-word. A few admitted as much under oath, and at least two officers accused of using the word were permitted to retire with benefits rather than submit to an investigation.
 
#13,497
#13,497
Black officers have a phrase for their Black colleagues who seem to take the FOP’s side. “Going along to get along,” said one Black sergeant still with the department, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. “You can be Black and get by if you steer clear of the FOP. You can do pretty well if you help them promote their people, keep quiet about any brutality or racism you see on the street, look the other way when white officers get promoted over more qualified Black officers, all of that. But once you start acting Black, they’ll turn on you on a dime.”

“Take a guy like Lt. Gilbert,” said J.C. White, a Black lieutenant. “He tried to warn this department about Starks. He tried to warn them about Hastings. He’s been right all along. He should be a chief somewhere. And what did they do? They blocked him in. They stopped his advancement.”
 
#13,498
#13,498
Black officers said the way complaints are handled creates a sort of false balance between race-related incidents, in which efforts to correct entrenched discrimination are cast as reverse discrimination.

In 2016, for example, a white officer was investigated for posting racist content on Facebook. The officer responded by scouring the pages of Black officers for offensive language. He found a comment left on the page of J.C. White about President Barack Obama that said, “Every time they call him a Muslim replace that word with ****** that’s what they really mean.” White was disciplined for the comment, which had been left by someone else.

Another Black officer was disciplined in 2017 for another Facebook-related incident. He had filed a complaint with the BPOA about a white recruit who used the N-word on Facebook. In response, the white recruit then pointed out that the Black recruit who had reported the post to the department also used the word, though that use was more colloquial. The FOP defended the white recruit — but not the Black one. Both were fired.

Buckner, then the chief, also suspended White for reporting the first incident to the BPOA instead of going through his chain of command. “You go through the chain of command and nothing happens,” White said. “So you go outside of it, and they discipline you. First time in my career I’d been suspended.”

Black officers have also been subjected to complaints for merely noticing or objecting to racist comments within the department. Andre Dyer, then a lieutenant, once refused to take a trip with a group of white officers because some of them had previously made racist comments in front of him, which he had at the time tolerated without filing a complaint. A white officer then filed a complaint to the FOP about Dyer, claiming reverse discrimination for his declining to accompany them on the trip.
 
#13,499
#13,499
But if I’d talk about racism or civil rights, the white males in the department would get offended and file reverse discrimination complaints against me.” The retired high-ranking Black officer was once investigated for reverse discrimination for describing an all-white division within the department as “lily white.” According to officers there at the time, it was indeed all white.

Despite the FOP’s history of supporting reverse discrimination complaints from white officers, several Black officers interviewed for this story laughed when asked about the FOP backing a discrimination complaint from a Black officer. They said they couldn’t think of a single instance.
 
#13,500
#13,500
“When you had police chiefs in Little Rock who didn’t give a damn, officers got away with pretty much anything,” said Mike Laux, the civil rights attorney and Humphrey’s lawyer. “So, when you then get a chief who wants to hold bad officers accountable, the union can point to an incident where an officer of a different race or gender did something similar and got away with it. And they can say that to punish them for the same offense would be discriminatory. It becomes this race to the bottom for bad behavior.”

It’s against this backdrop of litigation that the lawsuits against Humphrey began to hit, one after another. Some of the allegations involve “he said, she said” disputes that can be difficult to fact-check. For those that can be verified — checked against internal records, witnesses, or interviews with the parties involved — most collapse under scrutiny.
 
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