A 19-year-old woman was legally filming an arrest—her first amendment right—when she was attacked by a police officer and arrested.
The post WATCH: Raging Cop Attacks Woman, Beats Her Because She Was Filming Him appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Newark, OH – The video footage is gruesome, and the photos of the resulting injuries are horrific—a former teacher has now filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Newark and the police officer who unleashed an attack dog on her, and she is claiming she was not breaking any laws, and posed no threat to police at the time.
Ashley Zuress, 31, was the passenger in a vehicle that was pulled over for a traffic violation in March 2016. When the driver, her boyfriend Jeffrey Grooms, got out of the vehicle and fled the scene, she said police said nothing to her about staying where she was. Because she was not the one responsible for the violation, she climbed into the driver’s seat and began to drive away.
According to the lawsuit, as reported by the Newark Advocate, after Zuress left the scene, she was pulled over by police who told her to get out of the car and walk backwards to them. While it is not clear what Grooms’ status was, or if he had been apprehended by police, Officers Dave Burris and April Fleming appear to be the ones involved in the original traffic stop, who then went after Zuress.
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“Ms. Zuress turned to face away from (Officer) who then ordered her to walk backwards toward him,” the lawsuit stated. “Ms. Zuress did not immediately walk towards (Officer), rather she twisted her body around, asked why she was being pulled over and stated that she wanted to go home.”
The officers claimed Zuress was not complying, and they responded by bringing a K9 officer to her car and letting the dog bite her arm repeatedly, as she was taken to the ground. While the officers’ dash cam does not appear to have captured the entire scene on video, it did capture the audio of Zuress’ reaction as she was mauled by the attack dog.
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“Approximately one second after (Officer) threatened Ms. Zuress with use of the ‘dog,’ Defendant Burris moved from his position behind Ike to Ms. Zuress’ Jeep,” the lawsuit said. “From that vantage point, Defendant Burris could clearly see that Ms. Zuress was unarmed and making no threatening moves.”
As a result of the arrest, Zuress was charged with two crimes—misdemeanor counts of obstructing official business and failure to comply. The Newark Advocate reported that she pled guilty to both counts, by way of a plea deal, and she was sentenced to a suspended 30-day jail sentence. But that pales in comparison to the physical damage Zuress suffered.
The lawsuit alleged that the officers used excessive force by taking Zuress “forcibly and painfully to the ground where [the attack dog] continued to bite Ms. Zuress’ arm while Defendant Burris and other officers forcefully placed [her] in handcuffs.”
Zuress required medical attention after the arrest, and she was treated for deep cuts that resulted in more than a dozen staples. She now suffers from permanent nerve damage, scaring, and limited mobility.
“I felt like from that video, everything in my life was over. I have an ugly scar on my arm that can’t go away. It can’t be fixed,” Zuress told the local ABC affiliate, noting that she also lost her job as a teacher at a Columbus charter school after the incident.
As The Free Thought Project has reported, police officers have a habit of releasing their K9 officers on suspects who clearly pose no threat of violence to the officers. In one recent account, a man was mauled by an attack dog while surrendering, after he was approached by police over an alleged parole violation. Even after video footage was released that showed the man on his knees, with his hands behind his head when police released the attack dog, the man was only awarded $17,000—all of which was paid for by taxpayers.
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Watch the Dash Cam footage below:
We"ve written frequently of late about the pension crisis in Kentucky where pensioners are facing potentially catastrophic benefit cuts as their politicians finally admit that they"ve been sold a fantasy for decades (see: Pension Consultant Offers Dire Outlook For Kentucky: Freeze Pension And Slash Benefits Or Else).
Unfortunately, Kentucky is not unique as there is a never-ending stream of similar pension failures popping up daily all around the country. The latest such example comes to us from Ohio as the Dayton Daily News notes that the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) has been forced to consider COLA cuts for its 1 million pensioners in order to keep the fund solvent.
Ohio’s biggest public pension system is considering cutting the cost of living allowances for its 1-million members as a way to shore up the long-term finances of the fund.
Ohio Public Employees Retirement System trustees on Wednesday discussed options that could affect all current and future retirees, including tying the cost of living allowance to inflation and capping it and delaying the onset of the COLA for new retirees.
No decision has been made and trustees will discuss the options again in October. So far, some 72,000 members responded to an OPERS survey about possible changes. OPERS spokesman Todd Hutchins said 70 percent of retirees responding to the survey report that they prefer that the COLA be capped, rather than frozen.
So how bad is OPERS? Per the latest valuation, Ohio taxpayers are on the hook for a roughly $20 billion underfunding. Ironically, the fund ended 2016 with the highest underfunding in it"s history, after being nearly fully funded in 2007, despite a 275% surge in the S&P off the lows in 2009. Perhaps someone can explain to us how these pensions stand a chance of ever again being fully funded if they can"t even manage to improve their balance sheet during one of the biggest equity bubbles in history?
Be that as it may, like all pensions the OPERS underfunding is only as good as the garbage assumptions used to calculate it. As the following table shows, a mere 1% reduction in OPERS" discount rate would result in a $12 billion increase in the fund"s net liability.
Ironically, even OPERS" own financial report pegs its "Weighted Average Long-Term Expected Real Rate of Return" at just 5.66%.
Not surprisingly, OPERS is just one of many Ohio public pensions currently facing cuts.
OPERS is the latest of the five public pensions systems in Ohio to consider benefit cuts.
The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio in April voted to indefinitely suspend the COLA for retired teachers. Trustees said they weren’t certain that the cut would be enough to shore up the finances of the $72-billion fund.
Ohio Police & Fire Pension Fund is expected to hire a consultant to help restructure its health care benefits. OP&F announced in May it would switch in January 2019 to issuing stipends to each retiree, who can then use the money to purchase coverage.
School Employees Retirement System, which covers janitors, bus drivers and cafeteria workers, is taking steps to link its cost of living allowance to inflation, cap it at 2.5 percent, and delay its onset for new retirees.
Meanwhile, by protesting earlier this week Ohio employees demonstrated that they"re still in the "Shock and Denial" phase of dealing with the news that their pensions were always just a clever little fairy tale told to earn their votes. Luckily, "Anger and Bargaining" is only 2 steps away in the 7-step process...
Police in Ohio are blaming a lack of resources for the fact that unsolved homicide cases greatly outnumber the cases that are solved, yet they seem to have the resources to arrest thousands of suspected cannabis users.
The failed War on Drugs is alive and well in the state of Ohio where an average of over 20,000 people are arrested on charges of cannabis possession each year. While the Drug Policy Alliance reported that around 30,494 people are arrested for drug-related offenses annually, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws noted that the majority, or around an average of 20,453 arrests, are for cannabis possession and sales.
While Ohio legalized cannabis for medicinal use in 2016, it has taken over one year for regulators to finally start “to formalize how and where pot will be grown and available to medical patients,” which means that patients will just now start to see a difference.
However, despite the fact that they seem to have plenty of resources when it comes to arresting and detaining nonviolent offenders, police in Ohio are blaming a lack of resources for the fact that the number of homicide cases they solve continues to decline.
According to a report from The Columbus Dispatch, while over 80 people have been murdered in Columbus, Ohio, in 2017, police have made arrests in just 22 cases, with five cases being solved through “exceptional clearance” which occurs when the killing was self-defense, or the suspect dies. This puts the city at a 34 percent clearance rate for the year.
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“It does appear homicide clearances are becoming rarer,” Thomas Hargrove, chairman of the Murder Accountability Project, told the Dispatch. “I’m afraid Columbus is joining a number of cities where most murders go unsolved.”
The homicide clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of homicides that are cleared—or have suspects that are charged—by the number of homicides that are recorded. While the national average for homicide clearance rate was over 90 percent in the 1960s, it declined to around 64 percent in 2015.
Detectives cited in the report from the Dispatch listed “a lack of cooperation from witnesses in communities, a double-digit spike in homicides, which has only taxed limited resources, and the turnaround time at the lab” as reasons from the declining clearance rate.
Hargrove insisted that “more homicides will be solved when there are more resources, mainly detectives,” and said that cities such as Columbus has struggled financially, and the detectives they do have, are spread too thin as it is.
While there has been a recent increase in the murder rate in Ohio, the overall question remains: How did police in the United States go from solving over 90 percent of homicides in the 1960s to around 60 percent today, with cities like Columbus solving as little as 30 percent of homicides? It was not a change in resources—it was the introduction of the Drug War.
Former President Richard Nixon declared the official start of the “War on Drugs” in June 1971:
“America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever they are in the world. It will be government wide, pulling together the nine different fragmented areas within the government in which this problem is now being handled, and it will be nationwide in terms of a new educational program that we trust will result from the discussions that we have had.”
However, the trend in Ohio has been a trend reflected in many states across the country—the war on drugs has turned into a war on cannabis. The majority of the individuals arrested on drug charges have been arrested for possessing a plant that at least 86 percent of Americans support legalizing in some form.
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“Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime,” an ACLU and Human Rights Watch report found last year. “More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year.”
In fact, police make more arrests for marijuana possession alone than for all violent crimes combined.
Aside from caring more about arresting people for a plant than catching a murderer, cops also make arrests disproportionately among race. According to the report, in spite of whites and blacks using drugs at the same rates, black adults are arrested 250% more than their white counterpart for drug posession.
As people literally take to the streets to oppose systemic racism, unfortunately, most of them aren’t pushing for the one solution that would have the biggest effect on stifling it—end the drug war.
The Free Thought Project has provided in-depth coverage of stories that show the true power of cannabis, such as a groundbreaking study published last month, which found that cannabis can stop HIV from becoming AIDS; a study that confirmed that the majority of cannabis users give up prescription opiate medications; and a study that confirmed that cannabis has a “significant” effect on killing cancer cells.
As states like Ohio find that the number of unsolved homicide cases greatly outnumber the cases that are solved, it makes you wonder—what more could they accomplish if they were able to use their resources to track down violent murder suspects, instead of wasting them on nonviolent individuals who are found in possession of a plant?
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Portsmouth, OH — As the Free Thought Project previously reported, an intense video uploaded to Facebook this week is beginning to go viral as it shows a Portsmouth police officer choking an EMT. However, on Friday, body camera footage from an officer on scene was also released.
The original video, which was taken Saturday night outside of a Portsmouth bar, shows what happens when a police officer has his authority questioned. Originally, the police department claimed that the video doesn’t show everything that happened. However, multiple eye-witnesses have come forward and have told their versions — they are all the same. And now, we have the body camera footage to back it up as well.
According to police and witnesses, a fight had broken out in front of a bar in downtown Portsmouth last Saturday night. Police and EMS responded and the EMT began treating a man who’d been bleeding and knocked unconscious.
As the newly released body camera footage shows, the victim of the alleged fight was laid out on the curb, unconscious and bleeding from the head.
While the EMT and firefighters were prepping the man for a trip in the ambulance, the man regained consciousness and was naturally startled.
“He just woke up from being knocked out, and he’s got guys all around him grabbing a hold of him,” Trevor Conley, one of many witnesses said. “You’re going to freak out.”
Instead of calming the man down, as the EMT and other first responders were trying to do, Portsmouth Police Sergeant Joel Robinson rushed over and began tasering the man. At this point, acting out of concern for the man’s life, the EMT questioned Robinson’s choice to taser a man who was bleeding and unconscious and tried to prevent it. However, he was swiftly met with police violence of his own for daring to touch the officer on the shoulder.
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The EMT told Robinson that he cannot taser the guy as he has a massive wound to the back of his head.
Josh Journey, another witness, explained, “Then after that, he grabbed the EMT, took him across the street, and I saw him have his hand on his throat all the way across the road and had him up against that cruiser.”
“When the EMT was telling him ‘you can’t do that, you can’t do that, he’s got head trauma,’ he grabbed him up here,” Chad Bennett said, who also witnessed the incident first hand, as he gestured around his neck.
At this point, Journey says that’s when he started recording. Journey’s video is clear and shows the officer holding the EMT by his throat against the police cruiser — allegedly for the act of questioning his authority.
But this cop’s anger wasn’t over yet. After he attacked the EMT, he turned his attention to the people who just documented the attack.
“He saw us with our phones out,” Journey said. “That’s when he came across the street at us and was pretty hostile.”
In an apparent fit of rage, the officer verbally berates the witnesses, threatens them all with jail, and attempted to confiscate their phones. However, he was unsuccessful.
“I think they realized that they’d messed up,” Journey said.
“He could’ve handled it a little better,” Conley said. “I know the situation was crazy.”
In a press conference on Thursday, Portsmouth Police Chief Robert Ware noted that the officer’s actions were justified and Robinson would not receive any punishment.
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“Oftentimes we look at video in a vacuum,” Ware said. “We take what we see in one angle and we form an opinion based on that angle. Sometimes, subconsciously we add our own filler to figure out what happened.”
Police claim that Robinson only grabbed the paramedic under the arm and never put his hand around his throat. However, it is entirely clear, even from far away, on the body camera footage, that Robinson had his hand around the EMT’s neck.
On Friday, the Portsmouth Daily-Times put out a ridiculous cover piece for the police almost making it seem like Robinson was some hero.
Robinson, who knew the crowd was closing in on him, did not know who touched him and responded by hooking his arm and pushing him back. Robinson eventually guided the paramedic across the street and, according to Ware, pushed the paramedic’s clavicle. It was that action that appeared on the short video to be grabbing of the throat, but that does not appear in the full video.
However, as you can clearly see in the video above, that is a lie.
Akron, OH — Filming the police is entirely legal, in every state. However, all too often, we will see police officers overstep their authority and arrest, attack, and assault innocent people for the constitutionally protected act of documenting their behavior in public. Although the Free Thought Project has covered many such cases in the past, we’ve never seen police release a K9 on a person filming — until now.
Ohio state troopers were at the home of Dannie Oliver Monday night, to arrest his cousin. Upset at the way police treated him, as he was entirely innocent, Oliver took to Facebook live to document the actions of the police.
While it was unclear as to why his cousin was being arrested, it appeared that he had just pulled up to Oliver’s home and was followed there by police. As his cousin is getting taken away, he asked Oliver to call his mother to tell her about the arrest. He then asks Oliver to get his driver’s license for him and turn off his car that was still running with the door open.
As Oliver attempts to reach into his cousin’s car — while filming — the cop goes on a power trip.
“Listen, get out of the car!” the cop yelled.
“I’m trying to get his ID for him,” Oliver responded.
“I don’t care, get inside your house,” the trooper said as he physically accosted Oliver for no reason.
“Hey, hold up, you ain’t gotta grab me, dog,” Oliver said.
“You’re about to go to jail! It’s called obstruction of official business!” barks the cop.
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“But you just heard him ask me to get it, so why didn’t you tell me not to get it?” Oliver asked.
After being roughed up by the cop, Oliver begins walking back to his house, at which time the cops apparently had enough of being filmed. So, they released the K9 on this innocent man.
The attack was streamed live to Oliver’s friends and family on Facebook as they watched in horror.
“The fucking dog is attacking me!” Oliver yelled. “Aghh, aghh, my leg! My fucking leg! Get the dog!”
“Stop fighting my dog!” one of the cops yelled — as if Oliver could somehow remain entirely still as he’s being torn apart by a police dog.
“I’m not fighting your dog!” Oliver responded. “He got my fucking leg! He biting my leg off!”
“I was going in the house, so why you released the dog on me?” Oliver asked, to which he received no response.
In the middle of Oliver’s strife, the cops begin cuffing him, “My leg is fucking killing me!”
“Man, you really had to release the dog on me? You’ve seen me going to my door.”
The video then turns off. It is unclear as to what happened next. However, Oliver hasn’t made any updates to his Facebook page since making the video Monday night.
The Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Connor that excessive force must be analyzed under the Fourth Amendments’ objective reasonableness test. The application of this test requires an analysis of the totality of the circumstances, including these factors to determine if the seizure is reasonable:
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1. The severity of the crime at issue;
2. Whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement officers or others;
3. And whether the suspect is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight
The reasonableness of an officer’s use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
When applying these factors to Oliver’s case, these cops had absolutely no reason to release the K9 on him. He had not committed a crime, he posed no threat to the officers, and he was complying with their arbitrary orders.
The police deployment of the K9 in this instance is nothing short of criminal and these officers need to be held accountable.
The Free Thought Project reached out to the Ohio State Highway patrol in regards to this matter, but we’ve yet to receive a response.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit
