Cops get house arrest for beating up disabled pensioner

“This behaviour we expect from gang members on the street, not the police. The idea that someone who committed a crime like this would be allowed to ever possess a handgun, let alone be sent into volatile situations requiring judgment and restraint while armed is simply out of the question.”

So said Justice Elliott Allen on Tuesday as he sentenced Toronto Police Const. Edward Ing and Const. John Cruz to 12 months of house arrest and prohibited them from carrying weapons for 10 years after they were found guilty of assault causing bodily harm in the beating of a 60 year old disabled pensioner.

Richard Moore was walking by the two constables questioning a drunk when, according to Const. Cruz, Moore said : "You’re the rich man’s army. Why don’t you take on some real gangsters."

So Ing and Cruz chased him home and gave him a dislocated shoulder, fractured ribs, a broken finger, a gash on his scalp requiring stitches, and abrasions to his abdomen, hip, and shoulder that Justice Allen described as "consistent with being struck constantly."
Then they arrested him for being drunk in public, charges that did not stick when Moore tested zero for alcohol because he has not had a drink in ten years.

The judge also rejected the officers’ testimony that they were trying to protect Moore from wandering out into traffic on Gerrard St. E.

At about this point I'm guessing you're remembering the Ottawa Police claimed they stripped Stacy Bonds for her own safety because she was at risk of suicide.

Back to Ing and Cruz and their Rare guilty verdict

The outcome is notable because such accusations rarely hold up in court, said Paul Bailey, former president of the York Regional Police Association.

He estimated that 95 per cent of accusations of assault against on-duty police officers do not end in guilty verdicts.

“The vast majority of officers are either found not guilty or the charges are stayed or withdrawn,” said Bailey, a past administrator with the Police Association of Ontario.

Moore's lawyer Barry Swadron said he doubts the charges would have been laid at all if he hadn’t written directly to the SIU director.

Ing and Cruz will not begin their house arrest sentences until they have exhausted the appeal process they have now started - which will probably take at least a year or so. In the meantime they have returned to their jobs on the force.
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G20 : Maclean's does The Onion

It's been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn't it?
Inside - a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.
Outside - 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee's prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean's bravely decides to go for The Onion approach. Some highlights from Lock them up :

anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone ... arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements. ... The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

The Onion couldn't have done a better job.

Artificial Leg Ripped Off By Police

NIAGARA AT LARGE has an outrageous report:

Thorold, Ontario Amputee Has His Artificial Leg Ripped Off By Police And Is Slammed In Makeshift Cell During G20 Summit.

We have gaga gestapo.

Taser tales . . .

THE DAILY MAIL ONLINE has a report, well, ya gotta wonder — 'Don't taze my granny!' American police accused of using a Taser on an 86-year-old, bed-ridden grandmother. Really. And this was after asphyxiating the poor old woman.

Lonnie Tinsley called the emergency services to his home in El Reno, Oklahoma, when he became concerned that his grandma Lona Vernon had failed to take her medication.

But instead of a medical technician, he claims at least a dozen armed police officers answered his call.

In order to ensure 'officer safety', one of his men 'stepped on her oxygen hose until she began to suffer oxygen deprivation'.

Another of the officers then shot her with a taser, but the connection wasn’t solid.

A second fired his taser, 'striking her to the left of the midline of her upper chest, and applied high voltage, causing burns to her chest, extreme pain', and unconsciousness.

Vancouver police beat up a guy; media coverage blows

Vancouver's finest responded to a domestic dispute call by going to the wrong suite at 2am and beating the crap out of the guy who answered the door. They were in plain clothes. Yao Wei Wu does not speak English. He said he did not resist because the men had guns.

"Mr. Wu was taken to hospital where he was treated for bruises to his head, waist and knees and fractured bones around his left eye."

Vancouver Police chief Jim Chu has personally apologized to the 44 year old man. There will be an investigation.

It's horrible I know. But I wanted to point out the media headlines.

MetroNews : VPD arrest wrong man on domestic dispute call

CTV : Vancouver police apologize for arresting wrong man

Van Sun : Vancouver police apologize for wrongful arrest

NaPo : Vancouver man injured during mistaken arrest

Notice anything about those headlines? What they all imply is that it's the wrongful arrest that's the problem, not the fact the Vancouver Police beat someone up regardless of whether they thought he was the right guy or not.

CBC : Vancouver police apologize after man beaten

Thank you, CBC. And to commenters below the story, mostly all 300 of whom seem to get it.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting to find out if anything will be done about the off-duty cops who beat up a newsie a whole year ago.

Update : This is cause for a wee bit of hope ... VPD actually admits first response was to spin it :

VPD spokesperson Jana McGuinness stated yesterday that the man, who was not involved in any crime and was mistaken for someone else by police, “resisted by striking out at the police and trying to slam the door.”

Today, VPD Chief Jim Chu stepped back from those allegations, saying, “I want to make it perfectly clear this morning that we do not stand by that statement.”

Update : 14-year-old girl zapped in jail cell

for picking at paint on the wall. See post below.

Ban stun gun use on young people, Ontario child advocate urges
Ontario Child Advocate Irwin Elman :

"When I saw the tape, we had a young person who was peeling paint off the wall of a police holding cell with her fingernail and she was quiet and on a cot," he said. "And our estimation, the use of a Taser was not proportional to the need to protect, I guess, the paint on the wall."

"We're asking for a moratorium on the use of Tasers on children and youth, certainly in our province, until there's established, full research about their use on children and youth," he said.

Ontario rejects call for banning taser use on minors
Community Safety Minister Rick Bartolucci :

"... police officers should be able to use all the tools in their arsenal when dealing with a dangerous situation.

And he says age should not be a factor in deciding how to deal with an individual.
"That police officer should have all the tools necessary to ensure that he or she chooses a course of action that protects the individual, protects the public and protects the police officer — regardless of age," Mr. Bartolucci said.

Well that's just crap.
The "dangerous situation" was a 14-year-old girl lying on a cot in a police cell.
You're protecting paint here, Rick.
Paint, and the right to use a TASER™ on children for pain compliance.

According to a recent RCMP audit, 90 minors were shocked by stun guns between 2001-2008.

Cross-posted at Creekside

14-year-old mentally challenged girl in jail cell TASER™ed

for peeling paint off the wall.
Her father is suing the Ontario Provincial Police on her behalf.

"Ontario's provincial advocate for children and youth, Irwin Elman, who has reviewed a videotape of the incident and the OPP's internal investigation, said he can't understand why police needed to stun the girl, who was lying on a cot when the two officers entered her cell and allegedly zapped her."

"I can tell you from what I saw there was no harm to herself or to any other person. It's not proportional to use a Taser... . It's a 14-year-old child in a cell, not harming herself or anybody else," said Elman, Ontario's independent children's advocate."

"The lawsuit, filed Jan. 23 at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Kenora, says the officers entered the cell without warning, "violently" pulled the girl to the ground and applied the Taser to her right upper thigh for three to five seconds."

"A doctor who examined the girl in the hours after the incident reportedly observed twin burn marks on her thigh."

"OPP spokesman Insp. Dave Ross said yesterday the force was not contesting that the girl had been Tasered, but that the OPP's professional standards bureau completed an investigation in December 2008 and cleared officers of any wrongdoing.

You're shocked and surprised at the results of the OPP professional standards bureau investigation I'm sure.
Did I mention she is First Nations?

Cross-posted at Creekside

Underwriting police brutality in BC

Lifting the arms of a handcuffed man up behind his back while tripping him facefirst onto a concrete cell-block floor causing skull fracture and permanent brain damage is "more force than was necessary" but not "police brutality", concluded Robert Hutchison, retired B.C. Supreme Court Justice acting as adjudicator for the B.C. Police Complaint Commission, "reluctantly" yesterday.

The police constable, Greg Smith, has since been suspended with pay after being arrested last month over allegations of uttering threats in connection with an unrelated domestic dispute.

The victim, Thomas McKay, was a Camosun College student arrested for public drunkenness after celebrating the end of his exams. He was incapable of attending the hearing.
The incident occurred in April 2004.

2004? Why is the BCPCC just getting to this now?

The Victoria Police Dept twice tried to dismiss McKay's complaints as unsubstantiated.
An earlier examination of the case by the Deputy Chief of the Victoria Police Department Bill Naughton in 2006 and again in 2007, which included the same police video tape of Const. Greg Smith sweeping McKay's feet out from under him while raising his handcuffed wrists behind his back, concluded that allegations of abuse against Const. Smith were not warranted, so no disciplinary measures were necessary.

The City of Victoria, however, reached an out-of-court settlement last year for an undisclosed amount in a civil lawsuit filed by McKay’s family. The settlement binds him to confidentiality.

Meanwhile, Willow Kinloch, who was awarded $60,000 in her police brutality claim against the Victoria Police when she was 15, has been informed that the police plan to appeal the jury's decision in her case.

We pay for the police, we pay for the investigations into police conduct, we pay for the higher ups to absolve them, we pay for the hearings, we pay for the settlements to victims, we pay for the police appeals to the settlements, and ultimately we pay for the growing lack of public trust in the police.
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Cross-posted at Creekside

Vancouver area cops : "We don't like brown people", allegedly

Last night's TV news coverage of the three off-duty Vancouver area cops arrested for robbery and assault of a newspaper delivery man early Wednesday morning featured the snippet that police were investigating the possibility that the three cops had perhaps been slipped some kind of drug.

Really?
What kind of drug causes three innocent police officers to allegedly rob a newsie and kick him repeatedly in the head while allegedly yelling, "We don't like brown people" ?
What kind of drug would make them allegedly threaten him with a TASER™ and other appalled bystanders with violence after allegedly commandeering a corvette for their alleged convenience?
And the police who allegedly told the victim not to talk to the media? Were they also slipped a drug?

Feel free to add as many more "allegedly's" as you think the situation requires, given that there were witnesses to the beating, including the taxi driver who witnessed the entire event and the municipal workers who attempted to stop it with shovels.

B.C.'s Attorney General Wally Oppal on Friday asked the public to "keep an open mind."
Vancouver Chief Const. Jim Chu says "the public should have confidence in the police investigation":

"For the sake of preserving the public's respect and belief in the integrity of that process, I believe it is important to reassure them on this matter."

Statistics released by the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner in November showed that 106 municipal police officers were guilty of misconduct between Oct. 1, 2006, and Oct. 1, 2008. That's about, um, one per week.

Previous Vancouver Police Chief Jamie Graham was found guilty of discreditable conduct for failing to cooperate in an RCMP investigation into allegations of police brutality. He "retired" in August 2007 and came back out of retirement to become Chief of Police of Victoria on Jan 1st this year.

Cross-posted at Creekside