Two police officers, 26-year-old Timothy Loehmann and 46-year-old Frank Garmback, responded after receiving a police dispatch call describing a "young black male" brandishing a gun at people in a city park.[1][2] A caller reported that a juvenile, was pointing "a pistol" at random people in the Cudell Recreation Center, and stated twice that the gun was "probably fake".

---

In the aftermath of the shooting, it was reported that Loehmann, in his previous job as a policeman in Independence, Ohio, had been deemed an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty.

---

A surveillance video without audio of the shooting was released by police on November 26 after pressure from the public and Rice's family.[15] It showed Rice pacing around the park, occasionally extending his right arm with what appears to be a gun in his hand, talking on a cellphone, and sitting at a picnic table in a gazebo. The video shows the officers' patrol car pulling up beside the gazebo. Rice then appears to move his right hand toward his waist, prompting Loehmann, to get out of the patrol car and shoot him from a distance of less than ten feet, within two seconds.[9][10][16] Neither Loehmann or Garmback administered first aid to Rice after the shooting.[17] Almost four minutes later, a police detective and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the latter of whom was working a bank robbery detail nearby, arrived on the scene and treated Rice. Another three minutes later, paramedics arrived and took Rice to MetroHealth Medical Center.

---

Loehmann, who was identified as having fired the shots that killed Rice, joined Cleveland's police force in March 2014. Previously he had spent five months in 2012 with the police department in Independence, Ohio, about 13 miles south of Cleveland, four of which were spent in the police academy.

In a memo to Independence's human resources manager, released by the city in the aftermath of the shooting, deputy police chief Jim Polak wrote that Loehmann had resigned rather than face certain termination due to concerns that he lacked the emotional stability to be a police officer. Polak said that Loehmann was unable to "basic functions as instructed". He specifically cited a "dangerous loss of composure" that occurred in a weapons training exercise, during which Leohmann's weapons handling was "dismal" and he became visibly "distracted and weepy" as a result of relationship problems. The memo concluded, "Individually, these events would not be considered major situations, but when taken together they show a pattern of a lack of maturity, indiscretion and not following instructions, I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies." It was subsequently revealed that Cleveland police officials never reviewed Loehmann's file in Independence prior to hiring him.

---

Garmback, who was driving the police cruiser, has been a police officer in the city of Cleveland since 2008. In 2014, Cleveland paid US$100,000 to settle an excessive force lawsuit brought against him by a local woman after Garmback, according to the lawsuit, "rushed and placed her in a chokehold, tackled her to the ground, twisted her wrist and began hitting her body" with "such reckless, wanton and willful excessive use of force proximately caused bodily injury". The woman had called the police to report a car blocking her driveway.[24] The settlement does not appear in Garmback's personnel file.

Report abuse

A stunning police dashboard camera video helped exonerate an innocent New Jersey man — and led to the indictments of two Bloomfield cops who wrongly accused the man and allegedly beat him during the 2012 incident.

Before prosecutors were given a dashcam video from a second patrol car, Marcus Jeter faced charges of eluding police, resisting arrest and aggravated assault on an officer.

Cops were originally called to the 30-year-old DJ’s home for a domestic violence situation. Butneither Jeter nor his girlfriend were arrested and Jeter left the home shortly after police visited, WABC-TV reported.

Officers followed his SUV and pulled him over on the Garden State Parkway.

“When they were behind me with their lights on, I pulled right over,” Jeter told the TV station, refuting the notion he eluded officers. “No, I wasn’t trying to escape.”

Dashcam video shows that tension at the stop quickly escalated. Two officers jump out of the patrol car and order Jeter out of the car at gunpoint. One is holding a pistol at the man while a second holds a shotgun at his side.

A second tape, of a backup officer responding from the other side of the highway, shows the patrol car swerve across oncoming traffic and running into the front of Jeter’s SUV, causing him to hit his head on the steering wheel.

Neither that video nor the fact the officer struck Jeter’s SUV with his patrol car was ever mentioned in any police report of the incident.

“Get out the car!” one officer yells as he uses a baton to smash the driver’s side window. “Get out!”

Jeter says he was scared he’d be shot if he exited the car. Instead, he says — and the video supports this claim — he sat where he was with his hands in the air as the officers broke the window, unlocked his door and worked to get his seatbelt off to arrest him.

“The next thing I know, as he’s coming around the car, the glass gets busted and all the glass goes in my face,” Jeter told WABC. “My hands are up. As soon as he opens the door, one of the officers just reached in and punched me in the face. As he’s trying to take my seatbelt off, he’s elbowing me in my jaw. And I’m like ‘Ahhh!’ and he’s like ‘Stop trying to take my gun! Stop resisting arrest!’”

“As soon as he say that, I’m thinking something’s going to go wrong.”

In the video, the officers rip the innocent man from his car and throw him on the ground, working to get his hands behind his back.

“Stop resisting! Stop trying to take my f------ gun! Just put your hands behind your back, a--hole,” one officer yells.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” a muffled Jeter can be heard saying as his face is smashed into the cement.

“Shut the f--- up!” an officer barks back.

The officers continue to berate Jeter as he pleads with them several times, saying “I did nothing wrong!”

The officers pin him up against the patrol car before starting to read his Miranda rights. As they throw Jeter in the back of the car, another officer takes a swing at his head.

“I was going to be doing jail,” Jeter told WABC of his June 2012 arrest. "The first plea [offer] was 5 years.”

As soon as prosecutors saw the second tape, which contains audio and shows the officer drive into Jeter’s car, all charges were dropped.

An internal investigation into the incident found the officers did nothing wrong. But they were suspended without pay in April 2013 and indicted on Jan 31.

Report abuse

In response to a botched drug raid that gravely injured a toddler last May, a Georgia state legislator has introduced a bill that would impose new restrictions on warrants that allow police to enter homes unannounced. Bou Bou's Law—which Sen. Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta) named for Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh, the 19-month-old boy who was nearly killed by a flash-bang grenade tossed into his crib—would allow "no knock" warrants only in cases where the police can show "probable cause that if an officer were to knock and announce identity and purpose before entry, such act of knocking and announcing would likely pose a significant and imminent danger to human life or imminent danger of evidence being destroyed." That rule is stricter than the standard the Supreme Court has said is required by the Fourth Amendment: "reasonable suspicion" that knocking and announcing "would be dangerous or futile" or "would inhibit the effective investigation of the crime."

According to Carrie Mills, a retired Atlanta cop who "considers herself an expert on search warrants," the change proposed by Fort would be reckless. "If we knock and announced, all evidence is going to be destroyed," she told WTOC, the CBS station in Savannah. "You have to draw the line between your right as a citizen to privacy and a community's right to live in a crime-free environment. You can't have them both."

---

The no-knock raid that injured Bou Bou, which was carried out by a Habersham County SWAT team, was aimed at his cousin, Wanis Thonetheva, a small-time meth dealer who no longer lived in the house where the boy was staying with his parents and sisters. It is certain that if people like Mills did not use violence to shut down such entrepreneurs, Bou Bou would not have been burned and mutilated by an errant "distraction device," he would not have to undergo a series of surgeries that will continue into adulthood, and his family would not be stuck with $1.6 million in medical expenses. That outcome also might have been avoided if police, who said they had no idea children were present in the home, had done even the most rudimentary surveillance before knocking down the door.

Report abuse

About six blocks from the store, an Iberia Parish deputy responding to the fight saw White and Lewis walking and stopped them, according to a state police news release.

"Upon responding to the area, deputies located White and discovered he was in possession of illegal narcotics. White was taken into custody, handcuffed behind his back and transported to the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office for processing," the release said.

According to the service report from the sheriff's office, Cpl. Justin Ortis received no description of the men involved in the fight. He was told only that they were black, "and one of the males mentioned having a gun," the report said.

When he stopped White, the service report states, White consented to a pat-down, and Ortis found marijuana in his pocket. After reading White his rights, he searched White more thoroughly and found "suspected powder cocaine and a packet of cigarillos. ... White stated the marijuana and cocaine belonged to him and the cigarillos were used to smoke the marijuana."

Crump was especially suspicious of this aspect of the report and asked, "If you pat someone down and you can feel a small package of marijuana, wouldn't you feel a gun?"

White's cooperation apparently dissipated en route to the station, according to the state police news release. Once at the station, he refused to exit the patrol car.

"As the deputy requested assistance from other deputies, White produced a handgun and fired one round, striking himself in the back," the release states, adding that White was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

---

The bullet entered the right side of White's chest, perforating his lung and heart, before exiting near his left armpit, according to the autopsy report.

Report abuse

A Lima, Ohio jury has acquitted police officer Joseph Chavalia of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son during a drug raid last January. Wilson was unarmed.

During the raid, one of Chavalia's fellow officers shot and killed the two dogs owned by Wilson's boyfriend and the target of the raid, Anthony Terry. Chavalia testified that he mistook his fellow officer's shots at the dogs for hostile gunfire coming from the bedroom where Wilson was standing with her child. Chavalia then fired blindly into the bedroom.

The jury concluded that Chavalia reasonably feared for his life when he heard the gunshots. I guess they were then willing to overlook Chavalia's mistaking an unarmed woman holding a baby for an armed drug dealer, and the fact that he fired blindly into a room without first identifying what he was shooting at. It's too bad that that same sort of deference isn't given to the people on the receiving end of these raids when they too understandably confuse the police officers who wake them from sleep and invade their homes for criminal intruders.

This case illustrates the low margin for error in these raids, and why they're a bad idea even when the police do hit the correct house. Anthony Terry may be a bad man. But these sorts of tactics are too volatile and too dangerous to be using on anyone except for those people who pose an immediate risk to the public. Even the smallest mistakes can lead to unnecessary casualties.

It also shows how layer upon layer of flawed arguments can allow something as unjustifiable as the shooting death of an unarmed woman and the near-killing of her infant son to be dismissed as mere collateral damage. The initial argument is that we need to prohibit drugs to protect people from the harm they cause. That's followed by the argument that we need to use aggressive, paramilitary raids to apprehend drug dealers, because they might dispose of evidence or shoot cops were drug warrants to be served by less confrontational means. That's followed by the argument that we have to forgive cops who kill innocent people in these raids because the raids themselves are incredibly volatile and dangerous. Never mind that the police created the danger and volatility in the first place.

Report abuse

Prentiss, Mississippi on the night of December 26, 2001. Police carried out a no-knock raid on the home of Cory Maye during a raid on his neighbor Jamie Smith, a known drug dealer who lived on the other side of Maye’s duplex. Upon hearing a crash at his back door, Maye rushed to grab his .380 caliber pistol, unaware that the intruders were police. Maye fired 3 shots into Officer Ron Jones, killing him with a final fatal shot. About a gram of marijuana was found. In 2004, Cory Maye was sentenced to death by lethal injection. However, after 2 retrials and 10 years in prison, Maye signed a plea agreement pleading guilty to manslaughter and was released in 2011.

---

January 17, 2008 in Chesapeake, Virginia. 28-year-old Ryan Frederick heads to bed at 8:00 pm to be ready for his morning shift just to be immediately awoken by crashes at his front door. Frederick grabs his pistol, looks out of his room, and sees unknown intruders smashing in his door. In defense of himself and his home, he fired his gun at the front door, striking and killing Officer Jarrod Shivers. It should be noted that 3 days prior to the police raid, Frederick’s home had in fact been invaded. It would later be revealed that the intruder was actually a police informant that broke in and searched his home for probable cause for a raid. In February 2009, he was sentenced to the maximum 10 years in prison for manslaughter.

---

49-year-old Marvin Louis Guy. In the early hours of May 9th, 2014, police executed a no-knock raid on Guy’s home. Upon their forced entry, they were greeted with gunfire from Guy, resulting in the death of Officer Charles Dinwiddie. A warrant for the raid was issued after a police informant claimed to have seen cocaine being trafficked through Guy’s apartment. After the raid, only a glass pipe was found and nothing to suggest he was trafficking drugs. Marvin Guy is awaiting trial but is facing charges for capital murder which is punishable by death.

---

December 19th, 2014, 9 Burleson County Sheriff’s Department raided the home of Henry Magee and his pregnant girlfriend in. Magee believed that his home was being robbed, so to protect himself and his girlfriend, Magee grabbed his gun and opened fire on the unidentified intruders, resulting in the death of Adam Sowders.
The SWAT raid was executed based on information from yet another police informant. Officers believed they would find a major marijuana grow operation consisting of over a dozen six-foot plants and several firearms, including one that had been stolen from the department. Instead, they found 2 6-inch plants, under an ounce of marijuana, and 4 guns all legally owned by Magee.

Report abuse

Late last month, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the death of the Kathryn Johnston, the 92-year-old Atlanta woman killed by police during a November 2006 drug raid on her home.

---

A subsequent investigation revealed that the entire chain of events up to and shortly after Johnston's death were beset with lies, planted evidence, and cover-up on the part of the narcotics cops. They fabricated an imaginary informant to get the search warrant for Ms. Johnston's home. They planted evidence on a convicted felon, arrested him, then let him off in exchange for his tip—which he made up from whole cloth—that they'd find drugs in Ms. Johnston's house.

---

More investigation revealed that this kind of behavior wasn't aberrant, but common among narcotics officers in the Atlanta Police Department. Police Chief Richard Pennington eventually dismissed or reassigned the entire narcotics division of the APD.

What came out at the hearings investigating Kathryn Johnston's death was even more disturbing.

In one eye-popping exchange, two congressmen—one Democrat and one Republican—confronted Wayne Murphy, the assistant director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence about the way the FBI uses drug informants. Rep. Dan Lundgren, R-Calif., and Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., told Murphy they were troubled by reports that the FBI had looked the other way while some of its drug informants participated in violent crimes, and that the agency then failed to notify local authorities, leaving many of those crimes unsolved.

Lundgren and Delahunt said they were also troubled by reports that in order to protect the identity of its informants, the FBI had withheld exculpatory evidence from criminal trials, resulting in innocent people going to prison.

---

Shortly after the Johnston hearings concluded, another informant scandal emerged.

Jarrell Bray, a longtime informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration's Cleveland field office, admitted that with the cooperation of DEA agent Lee Lucas, he had repeatedly lied in court to secure the convictions of innocent people. Bray said he and Lucas fabricated evidence, falsely accused people who had done nothing wrong, then concocted bogus testimony to secure their convictions.

Bray's admission could result in dozens of overturned convictions.

There's nothing new about any of this. The problems with the use and abuse of drug informants have been known for years. Policymakers have just decided it's more important to keep up a brave front in the drug war than admit to the shortcomings. Bogus testimony from drug informants has led to wrongful arrest and/or incarceration of innocent people in Dallas, Texas; Hearne, Texas; St. Louis, Missouri; and Church Point, La.; to list just a handful of the more egregious examples.

In fact, more than 12 years ago, the National Law Journal ran a three-part series on the issue of drug informants. The magazine reviewed more than a thousand search warrants in four cities. It found widespread abuse with respect to the use of informants, and issued an urgent warning that "there is little or no oversight of the informant system," and that as a result, "the nation's system of justice is in danger."

Not much has changed.

Report abuse

Bleiweiss, 34, the former Broward Sheriff's deputy accused of intimidating undocumented immigrants into performing sex acts with him, cut a deal sending him to prison for just five years, without having the stain of a sex-offender status following him the rest of his life.

The deal was entered Thursday morning. Bleiweiss pleaded guilty to 14 counts of armed false imprisonment, 15 counts of battery and four counts of stalking. He will also serve 10 years of probation and have to undergo a psycho-sexual evaluation, Broward Circuit Judge Michael Robinson ordered.

---

In all, he faced more than 70 charges, many accusing him of sexual battery. A conviction on all charges in any one of the cases [there were 20! -mith] would have sent him to prison for decades, if not life.

Report abuse

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

---

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.

Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.

Shackling for prolonged periods.

Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.

Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

---

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

---

One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.

“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”

---

On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be heroin intoxication.

---

Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.

“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.

Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.

---

Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.

“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”

Report abuse

He is a 57 year old disabled veteran with NO prior criminal record. In the video on his Facebook page you will see the result of an 18 hour siege by Nassau and Jacksonville SWAT teams. Why were they there? His ex-girlfriend claimed from Kentucky that he was suicidal. Nassau responded and he told them he was fine. They asked him to come out and he had the gall to exercise his constitutional rights and say NO. They had no reason to stay, but they did. When he still wouldn't come out (The police admit that he had an absolute right not to come out) they called in the "pros from Dover" the SWAT team from JSO. JSO showed up with their 4 semis full of equipment and 18 men. They too agree that he had committed no crime, but they too insisted he come out. They evacuated the Campground in whites motorhome had been parked for 6 years and blared sirens all night in an attempt to get him to come out.

By this time Mr. Desmond was scared to death to come out as he had read and heard about the JSO policy of "shoot first and ask questions later". Ultimately, they knocked a hole in the side of his motorhome supposedly to put in a phone to talk with him. They had cut off his electricity and his cellphone had died. Why they just could't have put the phone on his steps rather than knocking a 2 foot square hole in the side of the motorhome still baffles me.

The operator of the CIV that knocked the hole lied and said that Mr. Desmond pointed a gun"in his direction" and despite the fact he was behind 2 inches of solid steel and bulletproof glass, he was afraid.

They then went and got a warrant for his arrest for "Aggravated Assault on a Police Officer" It is interesting that despite the fact that 4 snipers with high powered rifles and scopes and 8 other officers in close proximity looking through the windshield and side windows, NO OTHER OFFICER saw Mr. Desmond point a gun in anyone's direction. But, they had to allege that Mr. Desmond had committed a crime in order to force him out.

Well, they got the warrant based on a lie and returned and decided to gas him out. On the door to Mr. Desmond's Motorhome was a sign that said "No smoking Oxygen in use." You see, Mr. Desmond suffers from COPD which is a serious condition that makes it difficult for him to breathe,. His neighbor, who took the video of the barbaric way they "took him down" had told them of his condition. Obviously, they didn't care.

Instead of putting the tear gas in the hole they had already knocked in the side of the motorhome, they knocked out another window and gassed him. The video is when he comes out, helpless and gasping for air. But, he was such a danger that they shot him twice with the 40 caliber gun with the "sponge round" He still has scars from the so-called "sponge rounds". If that wasn't enough they immediately based him. I can hear his screams in my dreams.

So, based on the actions of NCSO and especially JSO Swat, Mr. Desmond has been in jail with a $100,000.00 bond for a crime he did not commit. He has lost everything. His motorhome is ruined. Social Security has cut off his benefits while he is in jail awaiting trial. He is dead broke and even after I prove hi to be innocent at trial (God willing) he has nothing.

To make matters worse, he had just had all but 4 of his teeth pulled and was scheduled to get fitted for dentures the week after his arrest. The boom of the CIV hit him in the mouth after it came through the side of his motorhome and knocked out 3 of the 4 teeth he had left. He has been in jail for nearly a year with only one tooth his head. Nassau County would not even take him to get the dentures had already paid for. Can you imagine not having any teeth to eat with. Keep in mind, Nassau County has not provided him with a special diet due to not having but one tooth. Oh no, he only gets the "delicious" food everyone else gets.

How much do I believe in William Desmond? I am defending him for free. A word most lawyers, including myself, almost never use. I have actually spent a couple of thousand dollars out of my own pocket on transcript, subpoenas, investigator, photographs, etc.

Please share Mr. Desmond's story, after all, but for the grace of God this could happen to any of us. If any of you are in the vicinity of the Nassau County jail and you can find it in your heart, put a little money into his commissary account. It just might help him pass the remaining 60 days until his trial.

His trial is now scheduled for March 15, 2015. Ironically, that is the one year anniversary of his brutal and wrongful arrest.If you are interested in attending an interesting trial and lending moral support to a really nice man, the trial will be at the Yulee courthouse n/k/a the Robert M. Foster Justice Center near the FSJC campus off of SR 200 just off of I-95 near Yulee.

Please, if you can't do anything else, please keep William "Willie" Desmond in your prayers. Willie is a religious man, however, he is having difficulty in seeing God's plan in all of this.

Report abuse