Whipped Cream Difficulties

Jeff Ward hosts a popular talk show in the afternoons on one of our AM radio stations. I was a pretty regular listener to Mr. Ward’s show for a while (until the AM radio in my car stopped working).

Jeff Ward was also arrested Thursday night and charged with DWI.

Mr. Ward allegedly failed a field sobriety test. It’s not clear if he had blood drawn or was given a breath test, like the 37 people who were arrested on Friday or Saturday night during “no refusal” weekend.

But here’s what makes the story blog worthy, in my opinion. Today, the Travis County DA announced he’s dropping the charges against Jeff Ward.

“Based on their internal review, APD expressed concerns about significant weaknesses in the arrest, specifically whether probable cause existed to file a DWI charge,” Escamilla said in a statement today. “After our review of the evidence, including the officer’s in-car video, we confirmed to APD that there was not sufficient evidence to support a DWI charge. Therefore, the Travis County attorneys office will take no further action.”

Either the APD falsely arrested an innocent citizen, they arrested a citizen who was guilty but botched the arrest so badly that the DA didn’t feel like the case was prosecutable, or they dropped a DWI charge against a prominent local citizen for political reasons. There’s no way to spin this so it looks good.

Edited to add 6/14: Second day coverage in the Statesman.

Interesting points:

• He failed a field sobriety test, but refused to take a Breathalyzer. The no-refusal weekend started Friday according to previous Statesman coverage.
• He called Police Chief Acevedo at least twice; once during the arrest, and once from jail.
• Mr. Ward says he had the standard “two beers” (police will tell you that everyone ever arrested for drunk driving had “two beers”) over a four hour period, and was originally stopped for doing 10 MPH over the speed limit.

I don’t know why, but stories about cops committing particularly horrific crimes make me even more angry than I have any rational justification for. I’ve mentioned Antoinette Frank several times before; she’s a perfect example of the kind of thing I’m talking about, and I hope they get around to sticking a needle in her arm soon. I’m hoping for the same thing for the cops involved in the Danziger Bridge shootings, too.

But let’s move away from New Orleans for a moment. Let’s move to the north, and start with the DC area.

Richmond Phillips had a problem. He was accused of fathering a child with a 20-year old woman, and was scheduled to be in court last Tuesday for a hearing on paternity and child support. Phillips worked vice for the DC police, and he already had a wife and a 12-year old daughter.

What to do, what to do? Well, if you’re Phillips, you meet your baby mama in the park the day before the hearing, shoot her in the head, hide the body, load your baby up into baby mama’s car, drive the car away, abandon it, and leave your baby inside.

When an officer found the car Thursday, after the scorching midweek heat, the baby was dead. As police awaited autopsy results Friday, they said she might have died from the extreme heat in the car. Her body showed no clear signs of trauma. The car has tinted windows, one official said, so passersby were unlikely to notice the baby inside.

Let me repeat that. He killed the mother, and left a one-year old baby to die in a hot car.

I checked. Maryland does still have the death penalty, though it appears to be used rather sparingly (five executions since 1976, and five current death row inmates). Of course, Phillips is entitled to the presumption of innocence (though it seems like they already have a strong circumstantial case against him), but let’s hope the prosecutors don’t let this chicken shit asshole plea bargain down to life without parole.

There’s another recent incident that I’ve been meaning to note. Over the Memorial Day weekend, a sheriff’s deputy in Franklin County, Virginia, shot and killed his ex-wife, then led other police officers on an hour-long chase that climaxed in a shootout on I-81. This actually would not have come to my attention except that the shootout and resulting investigation backed up traffic for miles on the interstate: Sebastian from Snowflakes in Hell got caught up in the mess and blogged about it.

In addition to the cop gone bad angle, Franklin County is in the area around Roanoke, Lynchburg, and Bedford; my family has lived in that general area from time to time, so there’s a local angle to the story for us. The other interesting aspect to this story is the role of the rogue deputy’s department in the whole affair. Here’s the original Roanoke.com story on the shooting. Jake at Curses! Foiled Again! has been linking to the followup coverage: the sheriff’s phone call to the local police, holes in the timeline, and Jake’s first post, pointing out that the shooter had previous disciplinary issues but was still on the job.

According to today’s reporting, the sheriff apparently told a dispatcher “not to mention anything” about the deputy’s threats to kill his ex-wife. It’s looking more and more like the sheriff knew his guy was rogue, but thought he could calm the situation down and avoid public embarrassment. It’s also looking more and more like the embarrassment of having one of your guys taken off the street doesn’t compare to the embarrassment of having your guy shoot several people, and having the local citizens demand your resignation.

This by way of FARK: I’m breaking with policy because…it’s just so mind-croggling.

Since 2006, Alvarado’s supervisors at the Northside Independent School District Police Department had reprimanded or counseled him on at least 12 occasions — six for not following orders. In other cases, Alvarado failed to show up for assignments, and his bosses appeared to suspect him of lying.

Alvarado was suspended at least four times, and his supervisors warned of impending termination four times — once even recommending it.

Four suspensions. Six incidents of insubordination.

In two separate cases, Alvarado was suspended for collecting evidence that disappeared, including an MP3 player and fingerprint cards.

Where is this going? Back in November, Officer Alvarado once again disregarded the orders of a supervisor and went chasing after a suspect: a 14-year old boy who punched a classmate in the face. Officer Alvarado ended up shooting the unarmed 14-year old.

The San Antonio Police Department has ruled the case a justified shooting. The Bexar County district attorney’s office still is investigating.

And there are parts of his story that don’t add up:

“The suspect bull rushed his way out of the shed and lunged right at me,” Alvarado wrote. “The suspect was literally inches away from me, and I feared for my safety.”

Tracing the bullet’s path into the boy’s chest as it ricocheted off the pancreas, colon, right liver and left kidney and exited the stomach, an autopsy report notes a lack of gunpowder on Lopez’s bloodstained T-shirt.

“There is no evidence of close range firing of the wound,” the report concludes.

The long-awaited Statesman profile of Maurice Pierce finally ran on Sunday.

My feeling is that the Statesman glosses over a few things. Yes, Pierce may not have been guilty of the murders, but what was a 16-year-old doing carrying a pistol at the mall?

And why did Pierce react so violently to traffic stops? He was arrested in 2006 for not paying three minor traffic tickets issued in 2003, he punched someone in a traffic altercation in 2007 (and was fined $200 on a disorderly conduct charge), he got into an altercation with a cop in Plano after being pulled over for doing 70 in a 40 (this led to charges of aggravated assault on a public servant and evading arrest), and the final incident that led to his death started as a traffic stop for running a stop sign.

“Maurice stated that he hates cops and that he did not want to go to prison,” the report said.

With the possible exception of the Plano incident, which Pierce escalated, nothing on his rap sheet would have led to prison.

So what was his major malfunction?

We have been covering the ongoing struggle between Officer Leonardo Quintana and the Austin Police Department: the APD kept firing Officer Quintana, and Officer Quintana kept being reinstated by arbitrators.

The verdict is now in on Officer Quintana’s latest appeal. Officer Quintana is now ex-Officer Quintana.

The Steven Seagal cockfighting bust story raised some obvious questions, such as what was he doing on a raid in Arizona when he’s a deputy chief in Louisana.

Seagal’s explanation was that he was “on loan” from Louisiana. This raises some more interesting questions, such as: does the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office frequently loan out reserve deputies to other departments? Especially other departments a thousand miles away?

By way of Balko, we learn of another explanation: Seagal isn’t with JPSO any longer.

Indeed, according to Sheriff Normand, who once played host to Seagal’s A&E reality series Steven Seagal: Lawman, the tough-guy Akido master resigned rather than face an internal affairs investigation by the JPSO into allegations of sex trafficking and sexual assault raised in a 2010 lawsuit by an ex-employee.

Granted, this is one of the New Times alternative weekly papers, so I’d take much of the article with a grain of salt. (Especially the parts about the more salacious allegations against Seagal: remember, anybody can allege anything they want in a lawsuit, and the complaint quoted in the article was dropped.) But the statements in the article about Seagal’s status with JPSO are direct on-the-record quotes from named sources, so I give those a lot of credibility.

There’s a rather interesting article in today’s NYT about an incident in the town of Massapequa Park, which has a high concentration of active duty and retired police officers in its population.

Basically, the police got a call about a man threatening people with knives.

In short order, more than a dozen police officers — even that count is murky — converged that Saturday evening in Massapequa Park on one house, making for an overpopulated scene that was difficult to control, with officers who did not know one another, their guns out.

By the time things were over, the guy with the knives had been shot dead. And an officer with the transit police shot and killed a plainclothes Nassau County police officer.

Also in the NYT, the Miami PD has shot and killed seven people in eight months. All seven were black. All of the officers involved were Hispanic. Some folks have a problem with this.

Community leaders also expressed outrage that a 12-year veteran of the city’s gang unit, Ricardo Martinez, shot and killed two men within nine days last August. Officer Martinez returned to his job six days after fatally shooting one man, then shot and killed another three days later. Before the shootings, he was under investigation for allegedly selling seized phones.

Not from the NYT: the Fort Worth city council approved a $400,000 settlement with Chad Gibson.

You may not remember Mr. Gibson’s name, but the case got a fair amount of attention at the time. In brief, Fort Worth PD and TABC investigators decided to “inspect” the Rainbow Lounge, which is described as a “gay bar”.  Somehow, during the process of “inspection”, Mr. Gibson received a serious head injury.

The bar inspection by Fort Worth police and commission agents sparked protests and complaints of police brutality. But investigations by police and the commission concluded that no excessive force was used. An agent had said that Gibson fell and hit his head while handcuffed outside the club.

Still, the commission fired two agents and their supervisor, citing policy violations, and Fort Worth Police Chief Jeff Halstead gave three officers one- to three-day suspensions.

Edited to add: Okay, I’ll throw this one in, too, since the previous three links were kind of negative. Ten bicyclists riding in Central Park were ticketed on Tuesday morning for exceeding the speed limit. (The cyclists were doing 25 MPH at a time when cars are not allowed on the roads. The posted speed limit for cars is 25 MPH, but bicycles are subject to a lower 15 MPH speed limit.)

The punchline? The police have withdrawn all the tickets and are apologizing in person to city residents.

Edited to add 2: Oh, this is just awesome. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (yes, that’s Joe Arpaio’s outfit) raided a guy’s home and arrested him…for cockfighting.

But that’s not the best part of the story. Would you believe MCSO used a tank in the raid?

But that’s not the best part of the story, either. Would you believe Steven Seagal was along for the raid?

[Robert] Campus [attorney for the guy who was arrested -DB] said he believes the entire scene was basically a stage, to help actor Steven Seagal’s TV show, “Lawman.”

That’s interesting. My understanding was that Seagal was a reserve deputy with the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s department in Louisiana, and “Lawman” was supposed to portray his work with that department. I’m a little unclear as to whether Seagal is still a reserve deputy, since there was some controversy (and the show was suspended for a time) over the lawsuit against Seagal. (That lawsuit has been dropped.) I know “Lawman” has picked up again, but is it not set in Jefferson Parish now? Is Seagal traveling around the country from department to department? Or did he pick up another gig with MCSO? Anybody know? Is anybody willing to admit in public that they watch “Lawman”?

(I’ll confess: Mike the Musicologist recorded a few episodes for me, and a group of us watched the first one. That’s as far as I’ve gone; I haven’t seen any of the second season.)

(Hattip: Say Uncle.)