Whipped Cream Difficulties

Garden city of Washington state.

Brad Thoma was a sergeant with the Spokane Police Department up until 2009. That year, he was charged with driving while intoxicated and hit and run: apparently, he hit a pickup with his personal vehicle and fled the scene.

Thoma received “deferred adjudication” in the case, which basically meant that if he kept his nose clean for a certain amount of time, the charges would go away. As part of the agreement, he had to have an ignition interlock installed on any vehicles he drove, according to state law at the time. This would be awfully inconvenient to put on a police car, so Thoma was offered a non-driving desk job. He turned down that offer, so the Spokane PD fired his butt.

Now we’re in 2012. Thoma, of course, complained after he was fired, and the “Washington State Human Rights Commission” negotiated a settlement in which Thoma would be rehired as a detective and get $275,000 in back pay.

The Spokane City Council, in their infinite wisdom, rejected the settlement.

And Thoma is suing, claiming he was discriminated against due to his disability, namely alcoholism.

If you want to read the FARK discussion, I’d recommend hitting yourself repeatedly with a ball peen hammer until the urge goes away. If it doesn’t go away, the thread is here.

And, yes, I usually don’t cover stuff that is on FARK, but:

1. Mike the Musicologist sent it to me as blog fodder, and

b. It reminded me of another former Spokane police officer that I hadn’t checked on recently. So how’s Karl F. Thompson Jr. doing these days? (You remember former officer Thompson, don’t you? He beat Otto Zehm to death.)

Well…

• Former officer Thompson still hasn’t been sentenced. A date hasn’t been set yet.
• Former officer Thompson says that he’s “taken responsibility” for his actions, and is requesting a reduced sentence. Sentencing guidelines call for a sentence of between 27 and 33 months, but Thompson is requesting that his sentence be reduced to below that level. Originally, the prosecution was asking for a sentence of between six to eight years.
• Former officer Thompson is still seeking a new trial; this time, his attorneys are claiming that the expert testimony of a witness was “mischaracterized” by the prosecutors.
• “A special panel – including a former U.S. attorney, a retired state Supreme Court chief justice and others – is set to investigate the Spokane Police Department’s use-of-force training and practices next month in a review that will extend beyond the Zehm case.”

Here is a particularly noteworthy quote:

Although the state’s top police trainer concluded that the fatal 2006 confrontation with unarmed janitor Otto Zehm was indefensible, the department’s own instructors and the city’s legal advisers have insisted that Spokane police officers were justified and handled the encounter appropriately.

• The Zehm family has agreed to mediation with the city in their lawsuit.
• The city is considering the use of body cameras. I’m not sure how much good that would have done in this case; there was video evidence of what happened (that’s what hung Thompson). And one of the major issues (as I see it) is the city’s instance that everything that happened was proper and consistent with the Spokane PD’s operating procedures.
• Here’s a great example of karma coming back around:
  

  A Spokane police officer who says he feared for his life after being threatened by a felon was asked in court Wednesday about supportive comments he posted on a Facebook page in support of another convicted felon – former Officer Karl Thompson.

There are two things that amuse me about the NYPD’s secret “Newark, New Jersey Demographics Report”:

1. The number of “Identified Locations” that are fried chicken places. “Newark Fried Chicken”. “Kansas Fried Chicken”. “Utah Fried Chicken”. Utah Fried Chicken? “Detroit Fried Chicken and Pizza”: hey, mad props for diversification. “Chicken Holiday”? Not much of a holiday for the chicken after you cut it up and fry it, is it?
2. The NYPD managed to find the Dunkin Doughnuts (page 52). The jokes, they just write themselves.

Sorry, folks. I had to go to the eye doctor this morning, so I’m getting off to a slow start.

In the latest Scott Henson news (previously) APD has released the video. You can find it at the Statesman‘s site, where it autoplays. (Idiots.)

I haven’t watched it yet, primarily because I got the full monty from my eye doctor, including the drops in my eyes. My pupils are now the size of Rhode Island; thank ghu for those silly sunglasses like things. In addition, work has me in a full-on “Hulk smash!” mode. More later. Maybe.

I was busy much of the day yesterday (and chained to my desk doing schoolwork much of the day today) so this is the first chance I’ve had to blog the Statesman‘s followup to the Scott Henson story.

Basically, Chief Acevdeo showed a Statesman reporter video of the incident – video that hasn’t been released to the public – that he claims contradicts Henson’s story. As far as I can tell, the contradictions amount to:

• APD didn’t draw Tasers.
• APD disputes that Henson was “handcuffed roughly”.

I’m glad I waited, since Henson now has a response to Acevedo and the Statesman up at his own blog. In his response, Henson acknowledges the non-drawn Taser error, but disputes the handcuff issue.

Henson also makes another good point by way of an apology:

I was wrong to assume the deputy constable called in the cavalry. With 20/20 hindsight, having reviewed all the materials the chief showed me (which is more than the press has seen so far), she’s the one who did it right, investigating a serious allegation without needlessly scaring a child or applying more restrictive force than was necessary to contain the situation. She also told APD moments before they detained me that she’d spoken to the child, gave them her name, and said I was her Grandpa. My apologies for my original, false interpretation, both to the deputy and Constable Danny Brown’s shop.

To me, that’s sort of the key issue: why did nine APD officers stop, detain, and handcuff someone the deputy constable had already spoken to and cleared?

1. The Scott Henson incident (previously) gets coverage from the Statesman.
   

   “You have to investigate to determine if the grandfather is supposed to have the child,” Hipolito said. “To me, he’s making it into more of a racial thing.”

   That’s interesting. To me, he was making it more of a “why did it take 9 APD officers to sort this out, especially given my previous interaction with a deputy constable?” thing. But that’s just me.

2. APD also fired two more officers, and suspended two supervisors.

   Michelle Gish was fired for punching a woman (who was restrained on a gurney) for spitting on her. Jose Robledo was suspended for giving “false and inaccurate statements during the investigation” of the same incident. Sgt. Mark Breckenridge was suspended for 20 days for failing to “adequately investigate the use of force” in the same incident, and Cpl. Steve Jones was suspended for 10 days “because he witnessed the incident but did not submit his report about it until told to do so by a superior, and he approved reports related to the incident that were inaccurate or incomplete”.

   Gish and Robledo can appeal. I have seen reports elsewhere indicating that Breckenridge can’t, because suspensions over 15 days require the agreement of both the officer and the city. I’m not sure about Jones and his ability to appeal.

1. Sunday’s Knoxville News Sentinel ran a long piece on former judge Richard Baumgartner. Baumgartner presided over the high profile cases of Channon Christian/Christopher Newsom and Raynella Dossett Leath. He was also a bad guy: Baumgartner shook down his staff for OxyContin and other painkillers, became involved with a former defendant in his court (and had her procure drugs for him), and apparently engaged in even more misconduct (hidden in sealed TBI files). And Baumgartner’s erratic behavior went on from at least 2007 to 2011. Four years of an addict presiding over criminal trials. (Hattip: Insta.)
2. Also by way of Insta:
   

   A three-month Sun Sentinel investigation found almost 800 cops from a dozen agencies driving 90 to 130 mph on our highways.
   Many weren’t even on duty — they were commuting to and from work in their take-home patrol cars.

3. And from Balko, for a change-up: the story of Scott Henson, who was stopped and detained by nine Austin Police Department officers while walking his five year old granddaughter home. Henson is white: his granddaugher is black, and they were stopped by the APD immediately after a previous encounter with a deputy constable.
   So far, this is outrageous. Of course we only have one side of the story, but does Henson have any reason to lie about this? I hope he pursues this. I hope he forces a full investigation by an external third party, not APD. And if all of this is true, I hope people loose their badges and jobs over this. Including Chief Acevedo.

The final charge (criminal mischief) against former APD officer Leonardo Quintana was dropped Thursday.

As you may recall, Mr. Quintana was acquitted by juries on three other charges; he was also fired by the APD and reinstated by arbitrators several times before his most recent termination (which seems to have stuck).

Do you remember Leonardo Quintana? The APD officer who was fired multiple times by APD, and reinstated multiple times by an arbitrator, before APD finally managed to make a charge stick? Last time we touched base with former officer Quintana, he’d just been acquitted on domestic assault charges.

Yesterday, he was acquitted on two more charges: another domestic assault charge in an unrelated incident, and criminal trespass.

According to the Statesman, there’s still one more criminal mischief charge pending against Quintana. We’ll try to keep you updated on the disposition of that charge.

Our first thought was “Dead rats? Not dead gophers?”

Our second thought was, “Is the gopher even indigenous to Massachusetts?”

(Hattip. Dead gophers explained here.)

Despite his being wanted for a shooting in North Carolina, the man accused of killing a police officer in Brooklyn on Monday was twice released from jail in New York this fall because the authorities in North Carolina declined to have him extradited, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Tuesday.