Whipped Cream Difficulties

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.)

Since we have, in the past, noted cases where Austin Police Department (and Austin Fire Department) officers have won arbitrator’s rulings over disciplinary actions, simple fairness requires us to note this article in yesterday’s Statesman:

When Austin police officers and firefighters have disputed their punishment and taken their cases to outside arbitration, employees have lost that battle more frequently than not, an American-Statesman review of city records shows.

Certainly not the impression I had. However, if you read down a little more in the article…

Arbitrators have upheld 10 of the 23 police disciplinary cases that officers have appealed since Acevedo came to Austin in July 2007.

So if the arbitrators have upheld 10 of 23, that implies they haven’t upheld the remaining 13, right? So is it fair to say “employees have lost that battle more frequently than not”?

In fairness to the author of the article, he goes on to state:

• Arbitrators have overturned only a single police disciplinary case.

• Arbitrators have agreed that officers erred in five cases but reduced their punishment.

My impression is that he’s grouping those as “wins” for the employees. That accounts for six out of 13. What of the other seven?

• Department officials and officers independently have settled five cases, one is pending, and one officer withdrew his appeal.

I think the author is counting the five settlements as “wins” for the city, where I would count a settlement as a “win” for the employee. Reasonable people can differ on this, and I’m not sure there’s enough evidence in the article to resolve that difference. Let’s be fair and count a settlement as a “tie”. By that count, I make it 11-6-5 (counting the withdrawn appeal as a “win” for the city).

Also interesting:

• However, [Art] Acevedo [chief of police] and [Rhoda Mae] Kerr [fire chief] have lost each time they’ve tried to withhold promotions from those who had otherwise met criteria to move up a rank. Arbitrators found they lacked enough reason.