Los Angeles Sheriff"s deputies were seen dumping a mentally ill man on the side of the road who was in the midst of a severe mental breakdown.
The post Video Shows Cops ‘Dumping’ Severely Distrubed Mentally Ill Man on the Side of the Road appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Lakewood, CA — On July 6, 2015, Susan Berry was worried about her son’s behavior. He came home after being fired from his job at the pizza parlor and had been getting no sleep. So, his mother and his brother, a police officer, called authorities to receive a medical evaluation. Instead of medical evaluation, however, her son John Berry, 33, received a pack of assassins.
According to the LA Times, last week, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $3.3-million settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Berry’s mother and other family members, who alleged that deputies used excessive force against Berry.
John Berry suffers from schizophrenia and, according to his family, he was clearly off his medication. When police arrived, he attempted to get into his car and drive away. Instead of de-escalating the situation by allowing the entirely innocent man to drive away, officers began escalating violence.
Berry had done nothing wrong. He was only attempting to get away from what he likely perceived as a nightmarish threat when he was met with pepper spray, tasers, and baton blows.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies claim that Berry rammed them with his car. However, his vehicle was clearly free of front end damage that would have resulted from ramming a car.
According to deputies, the tasers, pepper spray, and baton strikes weren’t working, which is likely due to the fact that Berry suffers from schizophrenia. When Berry attempted to put his car in reverse, multiple deputies pulled out their guns.
Deputies proceeded to unleash a fury of bullets into Berry’s front windshield. He was struck 18 times out of the 50-plus rounds fired at him — and he died on the scene.
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“We agonize because we try to understand, and there’s no possible way to understand what happened,” Susan Berry said.
Last year, prosecutors declined to file any charges against the deputies — Anthony Johnson, Michael Bitolas, Roberto Solorio and Eric Saavedra — saying they acted in “lawful self-defense and in defense of others” when they extrajudicially murdered Berry — on video.
“I just wish they had better training. He didn’t hurt anybody. He didn’t do anything that day,” sister Melissa Berry said.
Even if Berry did pin one of the officers behind his car, the lack of training and subsequent violent escalation by police against a mentally ill man was undoubtedly the cause of it. If Berry presented such a significant threat of running over officers, why was there an officer in such a vulnerable position?
This case is merely another indicator of police departments grossly lacking the training to deal with the mentally ill.
As the Times notes, LA county spent nearly $51 million in settlements last fiscal year to resolve legal claims against the Sheriff’s Department. From 2011 to 2016, 74% of the department’s excessive force payouts, which totaled nearly $89 million, stemmed from shootings.
California law states law enforcement must be trained to interact with mentally disabled people.
UNDER PENAL CODE 13515.25,
(A) BY JULY 1, 2006, THE COMMISSION ON PEACE OFFICER STANDARDS AND TRAINING SHALL ESTABLISH AND KEEP UPDATED A CONTINUING EDUCATION CLASSROOM TRAINING COURSE RELATING TO LAW ENFORCEMENT INTERACTION WITH MENTALLY DISABLED PERSONS.
This has obviously not yet happened.
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The officers’ actions were so unscrupulous that even a fellow cop, Chris Berry, John Berry’s brother called them out this week. “This is not how you treat the mentally ill,” Chris Berry, 39, said Thursday.
“They absolutely escalated the situation,” said Berry, who works as a federal police officer at a veteran’s psychiatric facility in Long Beach and witnessed the entire incident. “They treated him like he was a suspect and they were gonna take him into custody.”
In December, the department began a 32-hour training course that teaches cops how to de-escalate situations in order to avoid the tragic outcome like Berry’s. So far, only 518 of the 17,694 employees of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department have taken the course.
Calling 911 in Los Angeles for help with a mentally ill relative or friend is still a crap shoot — even if you get one of the 518 cops who went through the training — and should only be used as a last possible resort.
Full video below. WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT
Los Angeles, CA — It’s often been said — so much so it’s now become cliche’ — there are only a few bad apples in the police force. Well, if that’s true, this next story serves to illustrate the entire apple tree is corrupt. Los Angeles county is the most populated county in the U.S., with over 10,000,000 citizens calling LA their home and on Friday, their former sheriff was sentenced to three years in prison for three different felonies for his role in a corruption cover-up.
What blows the bad apple argument entirely out of the water here is the fact that former Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca — was the National Sheriff of the Year — the highest honor of the National Sheriff’s Association.
According to the LA Times, Baca was ordered Friday to surrender to federal prison officials by July 25, although he is expected to ask to remain free on bail while he pursues an appeal. No decision has been made on where he will serve his sentence. His defense attorney requested that he be assigned to a camp in Taft, Calif., or barring that, a camp in Oregon.
“Mr. Baca’s fall from such heights is tragic for so many reasons,” U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson said in rendering his decision, adding that Baca’s criminal conduct is “so at odds with the public image he carefully crafted.”
Given his status as such a high ranking police officer, Baca may very well be allowed to stay out on bail while he appeals — a luxury not often afforded to those who don’t wear badges.
Baca’s attorney Nathan Hochman urged the judge to alleviate prison time because Baca was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s last year. It was for this reason the prosecution sought only a short sentence.
The 74-year-old former sheriff was convicted by a jury last month consisting of eight men and four women, after two weeks of testimony and evidence presented.
The former sheriff was charged and found guilty for his role in obstructing justice. In 2011, the FBI was investigating reports of inmate abuse and cover-ups within the LA County Jail known as the “Men’s Central Jail.”
As the Daily News reported, “prosecutors set out to prove that Baca led efforts to thwart the investigation by hiding an inmate-turned-informant named Anthony Brown within the jail system, so the FBI could no longer interview him.” Yes, Baca took a whistleblower prisoner — essentially disappearing him — by moving him around the numerous city detention facilities so the FBI could not interview him.
Prosecutors also accused the former sheriff of allowing “two sheriff’s sergeants to threaten the lead FBI agent with arrest in front of her home,” the same FBI agent who was attempting to interview Mr. Brown.
Baca’s guilty verdict and subsequent sentence, possibly the highest-profile conviction of its kind, may stand as evidence in a larger trial going on in the court of public opinion as to whether or not the United States has a systemic problem of corruption. After all, what happens in LA may be happening throughout the country.
Baca makes the 10th person convicted in the abuse and cover-up investigation which has now endured for nearly six years.
Brown has told the press he has no regrets about his decision to become an informant for the FBI. The convicted armed robber, who’ll never get out of jail (still serving over 400 years in prison), was asked to snitch on the abuses taking place at the Men’s jail.
“The episode was life-changing for Brown. His cover as an informant was blown in August of 2011 when jail guards found Brown’s contraband cellphone stashed in a bag of Dorito’s during a routine search,” writes ABC News 7.
The phone was a given to Brown by the FBI, who were also on speed dial, in the event he was able to gather any leads in jailer abuses against inmates. “Brown’s phone calls from jail were traced by LASD investigators to a civil rights squad of the FBI – a squad that investigates potential corruption in local law enforcement,” according to the report.
The scandal could have stopped there, but LAPD decided they’d obstruct justice and attempt to prevent the FBI from making contact with Brown. “Soon after, Brown’s name was changed in the LASD computer system, he was moved repeatedly, and discouraged from further cooperating with the FBI,” writes the LA news affiliate.
Brown told Eyewitness News, “The whole ordeal of assisting the FBI was a living hell…I knew at any time I could be killed — disappear without a trace — if the LASD deputies found out I was assisting the FBI by reporting corrupt deputies.”
Now the former sheriff of one of the nation’s largest police forces is headed to prison — hopefully. And it all could have been prevented if the police had allowed the FBI to do their jobs and root out those bad apples. So much for that theory!
Los Angeles, CA — Domestic violence, bribery, theft, excessive force, brutality — these are just a few of the crimes committed by active duty sheriff’s deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In total, there are 300 deputies with a history of misconduct who Sheriff Jim McDonnell thinks the public should know about. However, thanks to a protectionist court system and a powerful police union, the crimes of these cops may remain secret.
Having taken over one of the most corrupt sheriff’s departments in the country, McDonnell appears to be taking steps to increase transparency and foster public trust. But these steps are being met with heavy resistance along the way.
In 2014, McDonnell inherited a department in chaos.
In April of last year, former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Undersheriff Paul Tanaka was convicted in connection with a sweeping, federal civil rights investigation of corruption and deputy-on-inmate abuse inside the jail system.
Tanaka, along with former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, and dozens of other deputies were exposed in a horrific abuse scandal that shocked LA County. In fact, Baca’s crimes were proven so grave in a civil suit, that he was found personally liable for $100,000, which he is to pay the victim directly out of his own pocket.
After seeing the breeding ground for corruption that McDonnell took over, it is no surprise his move to increase transparency is being met with such resistance. The years of corruption that fostered under Baca did not happen in a vacuum. It was allowed to grow out of control by a union and system that helped cover it up.
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To promote a more transparent and fair system of justice, McDonnell wanted to turn over the names and crimes of hundreds of problem cops to prosecutors, who can then add them to a database that tracks problem cops. This information can then be disclosed to defendants who may have been unjustly targeted by these cops.
After all, if a cop has been caught stealing from the department, beating an innocent person, or accepting bribes — their honesty on the stand should certainly come under question — especially considering the fact that their tainted testimony could decide whether or not an innocent person gets thrown in a cage.
However, according to the LA Times, the union that represents rank-and-file deputies strongly opposes providing the names to prosecutors and has taken the department to court. The Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS) argues that the disclosure would violate state laws protecting officer personnel files and draw unfair scrutiny on deputies whose mistakes might have happened long ago.
Shortly after the Union noted their opposition, an appeals court sided with them by blocking the sheriff from sending the list of problem cops to the DA.
To be clear here, this list would not be a matter of public record, although it undoubtedly should be. It would only come up when the officer is set to testify against someone they accused of a crime.
As the Times points out, departments in at least a dozen counties, such as San Francisco and Sacramento, regularly send prosecutors the names of problem officers. Some, including agencies in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura have done so for well over a decade.
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This process only helps to further the cause of transparency — but not in LA.
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme court ruled, in Brady vs. Maryland, prosecutors must turn over exculpatory, or favorable evidence to the defense to lessen the instance of faulty convictions. However, if this precedent in LA takes hold, the rights of the accused will suffer a dangerous blow.
Jerry Coleman, a special assistant district attorney in San Francisco County who teaches prosecutorial ethics at the University of San Francisco School of Law, told the Times that the ripple effects of such a failure can spread well beyond the courtroom.
“They affect not just our relations with police but our relations with victims, and the integrity of the criminal justice system entirely, and the public’s sense of honesty in the proceedings,” he said.
As for the court’s reasoning for keeping the criminal records of police officers secret — it could “create a negative stigma for the deputy.”
“The disclosure of a deputy’s name in conjunction with this list will create a negative stigma for the deputy,” Superior Court Judge James Chalfant wrote in his decision last month.
If the cop is accused of beating a handcuffed suspect, shouldn’t his ‘stigma’ be ‘negative’, especially given the fact that he was obviously allowed to keep his badge and gun?
“We’re not trying to hide anything that’s gone on in the past. The fact of the matter is, nobody wants to be wrongly accused of anything. That applies to everyone else in the world, so it should apply to deputies too,” ALADS’ president, Det. Ron Hernandez said.
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However, if these officers were wrongly accused, then their records should not have any marks on them.
To highlight the glaring double standard of cops and the people they police, consider what happens after a police-involved shooting. Immediately after a cop shoots someone, their previous criminal record is not only released but it is published by news outlets in an attempt to assassinate the victim’s character and publicly and without due process exonerate the officer.
At least in the case of prosecutors maintaining the list, these matters would be resolved in a courtroom instead of the comment sections of local news affiliates.
Just as police accountability attempts to take a half step forward, the blue wall of protection comes crashing down and sets it two steps back.
Los Angeles, CA — As the Free Thought Project has reported extensively, police officers, even when found at fault for their abusive actions, are almost never held personally liable. It is the taxpayers who foot the bill. However, a new trend in accountability seems to be on the rise, and will be massively more effective at curbing police brutality than any system in place right now.
The most recent case of a police officer being held personally liable comes out of Los Angeles in which former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca must decide within a week whether to pay $100,000 in damages stemming from a civil lawsuit involving an inmate abuse case or face liens on his assets, an attorney for the inmate said Friday, according to the LA Times.
The damages are from a 2013 judgment against Baca, three other deputies, and a captain. In that case, inmate Tyler Willis proved to a jury that he was punched and kicked repeatedly, shot with a Taser multiple times and struck “numerous times” in the ankle with a heavy metal flashlight, causing fractures and head injuries.
After a brief trial, the jury returned a verdict in Willis’ favor and held Baca personally liable. However, Baca, with the power of the police union, fought the ruling for the last 4 years, calling the idea of a police officer being held personally liable a “huge mistake.”
We disagree.
When police officers actually fear the loss of their own money they may think twice before savagely beating a handcuffed woman or breaking into the wrong house and killing the innocent owner.
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In spite of never winning an appeal, Baca has refused to pay and now Willis’ attorney is going one step further.
“Baca has to pay up or we will proceed to collect in debtors court,” Samuel Paz, an attorney for Willis said. “If necessary we will go forward with proceedings to identify his assets and place liens to collect on the debt.”
For those that are unfamiliar with the former sheriff, he was forced to resign in 2014 amid a massive scandal involving the horrendous abuse of inmates in his jail. While Baca quietly retired and skated out on punishment, more than two dozen of his underlings were convicted on criminal charges for their role in the abuse. Baca claims he had no idea that dozens of his employees were carrying out the abuse right under his nose for more than a decade.
Baca wasn’t the only officer held personally responsible in the 2013 lawsuit either. Anthony Vasquez, Mark Farino and Pedro Guerrero, and Daniel Cruz were found to be “malicious, oppressive or [act] in reckless disregard” of Willis’ rights.
Last week, all four of the officers agreed to pay $65,000 — their portion of the $165,000 lawsuit. However, Baca has continued to refuse.
It seems that Baca, who is currently drawing a $328,000 annual pension for the rest of his life — in spite of being a terrible cop — is holding out for the county to use taxpayer money.
However, in court documents, the county has noted that they have no intention of paying for Baca’s abuse.
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This is the second such case in only weeks, in which cops are being forced to come out of pocket after being found at fault in a lawsuit. Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputy Adam Lin’s case was a bit more extreme than Baca’s, however.
In 2013, Lin spotted 19-year-old Dontrell Stephens in a “high-crime area” — the man’s own low-income neighborhood — riding a bicycle in a manner the deputy found suspicious.
Lin stopped the youth, who dismounted the bike with a cell phone in his hand and slowly approached the officer. Just outside the range of dash cam video, the officer shot Stephens four times — claiming he was in fear for his life — but footage and evidence clearly showed the claim to be baseless.
Three of the bullets remain lodged in Stephens’ body, according to the Sun Sentinel — two in his arm and one in his spine, which left him paralyzed and dependent on a wheelchair for mobility.
Stephens won a massive $22.4 million settlement and U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Seltzer ruled that Lin should foot at least a portion of the bill. Last month, nearly everything this officer owned was seized to pay back Stephens — including everything from his furniture to his clothing.
Lin will most assuredly think twice before shooting another unarmed teen.
As for Baca, however, it appears he’s yet to learn his lesson and will have to be forced by the court to pay.
Imagine, for a moment, the result of all police officers being held personally liable for their actions. In nearly every other profession on the planet, if someone hurts someone else while on the job, they are held liable — personally. Why can’t cops carry personal liability insurance just like doctors?
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As instances of police brutality and police killings continue to be exposed, there is no doubt that the US is in dire need of reform. The simple requirement for police to be insured for personal liability is an easy fix — especially to remove repeat offenders from the force.
All too often, when a tragic death, such as Tamir Rice, occurs, months later, we find out that the officer should have never been given a badge and a gun in the first place because of their past. However, insurance companies, who can’t fleece the taxpayers to pay for problem cops, would have to come out of pocket to pay for them and would make sure that these officers are uninsurable.
If the officer becomes uninsurable, the officer becomes unhirable — simple as that.
There are likely many cops out there right now who an insurance company would not cover due to their track records. A requirement for personal liability insurance would, quite literally, weed out problem officers — almost overnight.
