NYPD Stopped 600,000 People in 2010: 85% were Black or Latino

From [HERE] The NYPD stopped 600,000 people last year, the highest number in the eight years those statistics have been kept.

The Daily News reports that police stopped 601,055, a 4 percent increase from 575,304 the previous year.

About 14 percent of those stopped last year were given summonses or arrested, the newspaper said. The other 86 percent were questioned.

Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union pointed to large disparities between whites and non-whites. Some 85 percent of those stopped last year were black and Latino men.

"Unfortunately, the pattern of stopping innocent New Yorkers continues," Lieberman said. "The pattern of stopping enormous numbers of overwhelmingly African-American and Latino men continues."

The NYPD did not immediately comment.

NYPD Stopped Latino Teen for Riding Bike on sidewalk - Beating by Police Caught on Video

 From [HERE] [SEE Video HERE] The NYPD is investigating a claim of excessive force by its officers while they were arresting a Bronx teen, authorities said yesterday. Jorge Cartagena Jr., 19, was approached by cops in a Westchester Square deli last Friday after the officers saw him riding his bicycle on the sidewalk, according to a report.

Surveillance video from the bodega shows the teen, Jorge Cartagena Jr., saying something to an unidentified officer. The cop then whirls around, grabs the teen, and throws him into the wall. The officer's partner then helps push the youth onto the ground, where he is cuffed and arrested. ."He was slamming my head against the floor over and over," Cartagena said."I'm so hurt. They're the police. They're suppose to be there to help us," Jorge Cartagena Jr. said.

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Supremes Set to Hear Case Against Ashcroft: Black Man Stripped Searched, Arrested and Detained for Two Weeks - for No reason

WASHINGTON — Abdullah al-Kidd was arrested at a Dulles Airport ticket counter in March 2003, led away in handcuffs and sent to three different jails across the country. He says he was strip searched and subjected to humiliating conditions. After two weeks, he was released and never charged with a crime.

Al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen who is African-American and Muslim, later sued then-attorney general John Ashcroft and other officials for violating his rights. In a case now before the Supreme Court, he claims his arrest wrongly flowed from aggressive Justice Department policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The dispute tests when top officials can be held responsible for a policy that violates someone's rights. It is one of the lingering controversies surrounding Bush administration actions after 9/11, pitting national security concerns against civil liberties.

"It's one of the more visible cases this term," says University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephanos Bibas, who has written a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of legal history and criminal procedure professors. Their brief sides with al-Kidd and urges the justices to look deeply at the rights of detained witnesses through the centuries.

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Civil Case Against Pittsburgh Police to go Forward: Unarmed Black Man Beaten by Plainclothes Officers

Mr. Miles was a student at Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts High School more than a year ago when, he has said, three officers chased and beat him in Homewood. 

Plainclothes officers stopped him on a street and arrested him after a struggle that they say revealed a soda bottle under his coat, not the gun they suspected. The three white officers who arrested him were reassigned.  Photos taken by Jordan Miles' mother show his face covered with raw, red bruises, his cheek and lip swollen, his right eye swollen shut. A bald spot marred the long black dreadlocks where the 18-year-old violist says police tore them from his head.  

"I feel that my son was racially profiled," Terez Miles said. "It's a rough neighborhood; it was after dark. ... They assumed he was up to no good because he's black. My son, he knows nothing about the streets at all. He's had a very sheltered life, he's very quiet, he doesn't know police officers sit in cars and stalk people like that."

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Judge rules NYPD must turn over reports on Police Shooting Incidents

In a decision made public today, State Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman ruled the cops must turn over two kinds of reports that are filed after every shooting incident involving a civilian to the New York Civil Liberties Union.

She ordered the NYPD to turn over data dating back to 1997, but said police can withhold certain identifying information in the documents and any recommendations contained in in the reports.Goodman's ruling orders the NYPD release two types of reports it creates after cops fire their weapons at civilians - an initial report that's filed 24 hours after the incident, and another more detailed report that's filed 90 days after a shooting.

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Miami Police Chief Agrees to Meet With Families of Black Men Killed by Police

Still No Answers in the Death of Travis McNeil. Unarmed Black Man Shot Dead by Police after Traffic Stop. [MORE] 

Following the shooting death of Travis McNeil last Friday (funeral was today), the local NAACP chapter called upon the Florida Attorney General to step in and U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson to contact the Justice Department.

The ACLU delivered an investigation request Tuesday to Miami's Civilian Investigative Panel, noting that New York City, with a population 20 times larger than Miami's, had only 10 such police-involved shootings in all of 2010. For its part, the police department says its own investigations in each fatality -- seven of them in just seven months -- are ongoing.

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Fired Lawrence (Mass) officer named in Numerous Police Brutality Suits against Latinos

From [HERE] LAWRENCE — Complaints against Kyle Wilcox, a Lawrence police officer fired for use of excessive force [HERE] , dominate the police brutality lawsuits filed against the city in U.S. District Court.

In addition to being fired, Wilcox was convicted in 2008 of beating Lawrence brothers Ruben and Moises Fernandez [HERE] when they were in Lawrence police custody. Wilcox was found guilty of two counts of assault and battery in the jury-waived trial in Worcester District Court.

Former Mayor Michael Sullivan fired Wilcox in July 2007 for his "willful maltreatment" of a Eusebio Alicea, then 19, of 306 Howard St., who later filed a federal brutality suit against Wilcox, the city, the Police Department and four other police officers.

In his suit, Alicea said he was both beaten by Wilcox, who was wearing "special metal-knuckled gloves," and that the officer, in a "malicious and sadistic" manner, used hot water to wash pepper spray out of Alicea's eyes after he was arrested on Jan. 6, 2007 in South Lawrence.

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LA County Jail Cannot Investigate Itself: ACLU Seeks Probe into Beating of Defenseless Black Man

 The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC) has called on the United States Attorney's Office to launch an independent criminal investigation into last month's brutal beating by two Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) deputies of an inmate at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, which is part of the Los Angeles County Jail system.

The Jan. 24 savage attack on James Parker, detained on a non-violent marijuana charge, was witnessed by ACLU/SC's Jails Project Coordinator Esther Lim, who is assigned to monitor all county jails, and another inmate.

 Both observed the two deputies beating Parker for about two minutes while he was lying on the ground limp, motionless and not resisting the deputies in any way. One of the deputies also repeatedly used a Taser against Parker.

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Witnesses: PG County (MD) Cop Beat and Fatally Shot Unresisting Latino Man

From [HERE] and [HERE] A Prince George's County police officer pepper-sprayed an unresisting man, hit him with his fists and his metal police baton, threw him down a flight of stairs, then fatally shot him, according to witnesses who testified Thursday at a civil trial against the officer. Moments later, the officer swore at the victim's crying wife, according to testimony and a 911 recording.

The account of the fatal encounter was provided in Circuit Court in Prince George's County by witnesses for the family of Manuel de Jesus Espina, 43, who was shot to death by Cpl. Steven Jackson on Aug. 16, 2008. Espina's relatives have filed a wrongful death suit against Jackson and the county.

Espina was shot inside a basement apartment in Langley Park. Moments after the shooting, Espina's wife, Estela, entered the apartment and wailed over her dying husband as she cried out in Spanish, "Why did you kill my husband?"

Jackson screamed, "Shut the [expletiv] up! [Expletive] you!" The exchange was captured on the recording of a 911 call made to police by a witness. The tape was played in court for the jury on Thursday.

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60 years later, Black Man Seeks Justice for Chicago Police Torture: Coerced Confession Led to 14 Years in Prison

Updated on Sunday, February 27, 2011 at 02:04AM by TheSpook

Nearly 60 years after he says he was forced by police to confess to a rape he never committed, Oscar Walden Jr. stood in a federal courtroom Tuesday as curious jurors gathered around him so he could show them scars from when a police officer bent his hand back, causing excruciating pain.

"Those two scars are still there," said Walden, 79, who buttoned his olive suit before drawing jurors over to study his middle and index fingers. "That's half a century old." In a remarkable trial playing out in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago, Walden, who is suing the city, recounted Tuesday how he says he was beaten and threatened into confessing that he raped a woman on Nov. 24, 1951, on the South Side.

Walden is one of many men pardoned by former Gov. George Ryan. But unlike others, his allegations go back so long ago that he is the only remaining witness to them. The seven officers who are alleged to have abused him are dead. So, too, is the rape victim. The police station where the abuse is alleged to have taken place in part doesn't even exist any longer.

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