COPWATCH

RIP

that was some bullshit tho you never ever ever ever ever ever reach for anything ever around them assholes or you best believe they will smoke ya ass

wrong or right

that cop knows he effed up too but will get away with it the cops first step should have been to disarm which he obviously failed to instruct the victim

poor child had to witness that shit traumatized for life

angrythanamf.gif

in this world that was the exact right thing to do, imagine if she would have been recording the entire incident that way there would be substantiated proof of her recollection of said events

Removethemnow.com

Video Shows Unarmed Black Man Pleading With Arms Raised Before Getting Shot by Police

Texas deputy got drunk, firing shots at church, but escapes charges

A Texas cop isn’t facing charges for allegedly getting drunk, taking off half his clothes and firing shots at a church — all because he was mad about the police ambush in Dallas last month.

William Cox was fired from his job as a Somervell County sheriff’s deputy after he admitted to the boozy tantrum caught on camera on July 13, according to Fox affiliate KDFW.

That morning, Ovilla officers responded to a report of shots fired at an Ellis County church about 20 miles outside of Dallas.

When they showed up, they caught body cam footage of Cox, crying as he fires off a boozy tirade while wearing only shorts and sneakers.

In the shocking video, Cox tells a responding officer he shot up the church “cause my boys are getting killed in Dallas,” referencing the ambush during a rally that left five officers dead just six days earlier.

He continued his tipsy tirade, telling the cop that “the black c--n start killing my boys.”

The Ovilla cop cuffed Cox until a sheriff’s deputy showed up.

Cox copped to it all, telling police he was under a lot of stress and upset about the Dallas ambush when he decided to get sloshed, sit in the parking lot and fire his gun at the Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Officers found a .38-caliber revolver, his service gun and 28 bullet casings in his car.

The 27-year-old deputy was taken to the Ellis County Jail — where he once worked as a guard — and hit with a deadly conduct charge, according to the Dallas Morning News.

He was released the next day after the pastor decided not to press charges.

“He lost his career. He will never be back on the road as a law enforcement person,” Rev. Vernon Sansom told the Waxahachie Daily Light.

When the Dallas TV station filed an open records request for Cox’s mugshot, all they got back was a picture of a blank wall.

“The complainant dropped the charges,” Ellis County Sheriff Johnny Brown told the Waxahachie paper. "I have nothing to say about it."

Now, the Ellis County District Attorney Patrick Wilson is livid, calling the decision not to press charges “inexcusable.”

“I cannot understand how these facts escape the narrative of favoritism,” he said.

“How can I dispel that narrative when these facts completely support that?”

Wilson is conducting his own investigation into the incident.

Illinois Institutes Chilling New Mandate for Schools to Teach Children How to Submit to Police

The police state apparatus will now condition children to prostrate themselves before their masters as they are extorted during traffic stops. Illinois drivers education now includes instructions on how to properly allow police to generate revenue.

The bill signed into law on Friday by Governor Bruce Rauner authorizes a new curriculum for driver’s education classes which includes interacting with police. It will be instituted for the 2017-18 school year and become mandatory training at both private and public schools.

The guidelines, created by the secretary of state’s office, will instruct pupils on how to respond if they are pulled over by the police. It will condition them to not be afraid of being robbed on the roadside.

“I think it’s really timely, so that teenagers and young drivers don’t look at a police officer as a threat or a problem,” State Senator Julie Morrison (D-Deerfield), who sponsored the legislation, told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s just a part of driving, and if they respond in a responsible, correct way, it should never escalate.”

However, as anyone who’s ever seen those blue and red flashing lights in their rearview mirror knows, the last thing going through your head at that moment is “safety.” The officer pulling you over is most assuredly a “threat” and a “problem” as their job is to look for or otherwise create a crime so that you can be kidnapped or caged in order to generate revenue to pay their rising salaries.

In the latest figures from the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), police made more than two-million traffic stops in 2014. The rate of traffic stops for minorities is far higher than their white counterpart. Will that be taught in the class?

A study in 2013 released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois found that Chicago Police were far more likely to stop African Americans during traffic stops than white residents, as reported by RT. They also found that African-American and Latino motorists were far more likely than whites to be searched during traffic stops, yet white motorists were far more likely to be caught with contraband. The study used data from the IDOT.

In 2013, the Chicago Police Department conducted a total of 100,676 traffic stops. Of those, 46 percent were of African-American drivers. Since they comprise only 32 percent of the city’s population, the data revealed that blacks were stopped at a rate 42 percent more often than indicated by their population. In comparison, 32 percent of the Chicago population is white, but the traffic stop rate for whites was 27 percent, according to the report.

The very idea of teaching children how to properly submit to revenue collection and privacy invasion is chilling. We can rest assured that the individual’s rights will take a back seat to what these students are taught.
It seems the state has finally figured out how to combat future resistance to their tyranny — teach the children that it is the norm. You must be robbed at gunpoint to protect your freedom.


Will the fact that police officers are allowed to legally lie to you to trick you into confessing to a crime be taught? Will the fact that cops can steal your property and never charge you with a crime through the process known as civil asset forfeiture be taught? Will students be taught that they are criminals for forgetting to put on their seatbelt or having window tint that is ‘too dark’?

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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 M @Matt Agorist on Twitter and now on Steemit

Computer error erases over 2,200 Seattle police dashcam videos

SEATTLE - For two days last month recording systems inside more than 200 Seattle policed cars did their job just fine, but major problems developed when it came to uploading the data onto a storage server.

"Ultimately what happened was we had a failure we tried to retrieve the videos," said Seattle Police Department spokesman Sean Whitcomb.

From mid-July when the technical problems occurred and Tuesday when police announced what happened, the department and city tech officials have been frantically trying to retrieve lost video.

"We had to work through all of the technology aspects of this incident," Whitcomb said.

More than 3,300 videos were recovered, but nearly 2,300 are gone. Police say less than 25 percent of the lost footage showed arrests, crisis calls or traffic citations. The bulk of the missing video, the department says, show officers doing system checks at the start of their shifts.

The lost videos do include 89 arrests, 138 traffic citations, 95 oral warnings, 35 police shakedown-style contacts or "Terry stops," 60 crisis contacts and five incidents involving low-level uses of force, police said in a prepared statement.

Any of the cases that involve criminal charges will go forward, Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole said.

But O'Toole says the lost footage includes so-called "type one use of force." Type one is the least use of force and can include an officer's pointing a gun at someone or putting them in a wrist lock.

O'Toole said in a phone interview that the department acted quickly once the problem was recognized.

"This is a technology glitch here. We want people to know there's nothing sinister about this." .

"Ultimately any loss of video is unacceptable," Brian Maxey, chief operating officer of the Seattle Police Department, told reporters in a conference call.

The city of Seattle is implementing additional technical and procedural controls and safeguards to ensure that data loss of this type is not repeated, officials said.

The problems will not delay the use of body cameras, which starts with bicycle officers later this year, officials said.

:rolls eyes:

Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester

The ACLU of Connecticut is suing state police for fabricating retaliatory criminal charges against a protester after troopers were recorded discussing how to trump up charges against him. In what seems like an unlikely stroke of cosmic karma, the recording came about after a camera belonging to the protester, Michael Picard, was illegally seized by a trooper who didn’t know that it was recording and carried it back to his patrol car, where it then captured the troopers’ plotting.

“Let’s give him something,” one trooper declared. Another suggested, “we can hit him with creating a public disturbance.” “Gotta cover our ass,” remarked a third.

ACLU affiliates around the country have done a lot of cases defending the right to record in public places, but this case (press release, complaint) is particularly striking. I spoke to ACLU of Connecticut Legal Director Dan Barrett, and he told me about how the incident came about:

Our client is a guy who is very concerned with privacy, and who protests DUI checkpoints around the capital region here in Hartford, Connecticut. He feels they’re both unconstitutional and a waste of money. He has done public records investigations, for example, and recently found that for every two man hours put into a check point, it yields just one minor traffic citation—almost always for defective equipment. He was well known to the police, who also knew that he is a peaceful privacy and open-carry gun rights activist.

more here

NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers
Despite multimillion dollar evidence system, NYPD have no idea how much cash they seize.

he New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would "lead to system crashes."

The system, the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), was built on top of SAP's enterprise resource planning software platform and IBM's DB2 database by Capgemini in 2012, and was used as a flagship case study by the company.
[ame]https://www.se.capgemini.com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/nypd_successfully_implements_property_and_evidence_tracking_system_0.pdf[/ame]
PETS replaced the long-established paper-based evidence logging system used by the department, and was supposed to revolutionize evidence and property tracking. It was even submitted for the 2012 Computerworld Honors, an awards program honoring "those who use Information Technology to benefit society."
[ame]http://www.cwhonors.org/case_studies/2012finalists/innovation/3000.pdf[/ame]


more here

Joseph Mann, 50, died after police shot him at least 14 times
Footage shows that before police shot him they tried to hit him with car
The two officers appeared to attempt to hit Mann twice during pursuit
Mann was able to dodge the police cruiser both time, video shows
Officers Randy Lozoya and John Tennis then pursued Mann on foot
In shocking video, at least 14 gunshots can be heard coming from police


Sacramento police tried to run over man before shooting him, recordings reveal | The Sacramento Bee

Massachusetts Cop’s Wife Busted for Pinning Fake Home-Invasion Robbery on Black Lives Matter


Maria Daly called police to report someone had robbed her home while she was sleeping and then spray-painted her home with BLM for Black Lives Matter then posted about it on social media.

The wife of a Millbury cop admitted to police she made up an elaborate story about her house being ransacked by someone who stole $10,000 in jewelry and then spray-painted a Black Lives Matter insignia on the house, police officials said yesterday.

Millbury police Chief Donald Desorcy told the Herald that Maria Daly, the wife of Millbury K-9 officer Daniel Daly, reported an early morning break-in Oct. 17 during which she claimed someone made off with thousands of dollars worth of valuables and spray-painted “BLM” on the outside of their house.

But while the theft was under investigation, Maria Daly admitted she fabricated the break-in and robbery story, Desorcy said, and confessed that the valuables she said were stolen from the house had been recovered.

Police said they believe Daly’s financial troubles motivated the hoax. She is facing charges in Worcester District Court of filing a false police report and misleading a police investigation. She will be summoned to court, Desorcy said.

Maria Daly’s husband was not involved in the hoax and is not facing charges in connection with the incident, Desorcy said.

uhuh ok sure

insert @BUTCHER 206 quote "he dint do nuffin"

Killer Cops, By The Numbers

Current Civilian Death Toll (2016): 925

Highest Race/ Ethnicity Killed By Cops (2016): Native American (7.6 people per million)

Highest Death Total by State (2016): California by a long shot (135 killings); Texas is 2nd w/ 79

Top 3 Cities: LA (18), Phoenix (14), Houston (10)

see interactive map

These numbers will get worse under a Trump presidency, no?

Inaccurate drug test lands Draper couple in jail for two and a half months



KUTV) Gale Griffin and her husband Wendell Harvey are truck drivers who have been transporting explosives for the military for years.

They have top security clearance, and they’ve never been in trouble with the law. So in May, while driving through Arkansas, they weren't concerned when police stopped them in Fort Chaffee.

"We have no relationship with anyone who deals drugs,” said Harvey, who is a former police officer.

Harvey watched as the police pulled three baggies filled with baking soda out of the cab of the truck.

“I told them, ‘That’s baking soda,’” Harvey said.

The police then tested the substance.

“We tested it three different times,” said Chuck Bowen with Fort Chaffee Police. “We got a positive conclusion each time we tested.”

With that, police informed the couple they were in legal trouble.

"He said, ‘You have over $3,000 in cocaine,’” Griffin said.

“I told him, 'I've never had two nickels to rub together, are you crazy?'" Griffin said. "Then [the police officer] said, 'I’ve never had two nickels to rub together either, but now I’m the owner of your truck.”

He went on to say the police confiscated their truck, put them behind bars and held the couple on $10,000 bail.

“I felt cut off from reality; it felt very strange — someplace that doesn’t feel like America to me,” Harvey said.

The couple spent two-and-a-half months in jail, unable to make bail.

“It was just crawling with bugs — it was unbelievably cold, blasting, blasting cold air,” Griffin said.

She said she was only allowed out of her cell for an hour a day and the conditions where horrible.

“For the first three or four weeks, I just shivered. I didn’t have any socks,” Griffin said.

Eventually, the state of Arkansas tested the substance at the insistence of the Arkansas Public Defender’s office. All the test came back negative, meaning the white powdery substance was not cocaine.

How could this happen? In part, it is due to the field test that most law enforcement across the country uses.

The test for cocaine is called the Scott Reagent Field test, costs $2 each and it is used by almost all law enforcement agencies, including those in Utah.

“They are not infallible; they are subject to misreading,” said Greg Parrish with the Arkansas Public Defender’s Office.

Data appears to back that up.

In Las Vegas, authorities reexamined a sampling of field tests conducted from 2010 to 2013 and found that 33 percent of them had resulted in false positives. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement says 21 percent of evidence they believed to be meth, was, after further testing, not meth at all.

Studies also show that more than 100,000 people are convicted or plead guilty to drug charges based on these tests each year.

Most Utah law enforcement agencies uses some form of these tests.

“I’m not saying it doesn’t happen — it’s just I’m not aware of a case we’ve dealt with where that is the case,” said Sgt. Spencer Cannon with the Utah County Sheriff’s office.

He said his agency uses the test as a way to get probable cause, and he feels they are reasonably accurate.

After Cannon showed 2News' Chris Jones how to use one of the substance tests, Jones went online and purchased the same test police use.

Using household items like Comet, aspirin, cold medicine and chocolate, four of the 10 items resulted in a false positive.

Salt Lake County Prosecutor Sim Gill said that if there are problems with the test that is concerning — or if the District Attorney’s office takes a drug case to trial — the evidence must undergo a more accurate laboratory test.

“If the prosecution is going to move forward, we are going to insist on that it has a lab test or a [toxicology] review is done that will actually confirm that the substance in the field is what the officer believed it to be,” Gill said.

As for Harvey and Griffin, they only recently got their truck back from Arkansas authorities. But they say the truck has major damage that requires repairs.

The couple also said they have not worked since they were released from jail. They said they are still trying to get their security clearance reinstated, and that they are running out of money.

Harvey said what is especially concerning to him and his wife is the fact that other people may have been victimized by this test.

“If they did what they did to us, you know — two law abiding citizens, there’s no telling how many mistakes they’ve made.”

Affidavit: ABQ police have illegally deleted, altered videos of shootings

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3222215-Chavez-Affidavit-Public.html

APD officials have altered and, in some cases, deleted videos that showed several controversial incidents, including at least two police shootings, alleged in a sworn affidavit.

Three officers’ body camera videos that captured events surrounding the fatal shooting of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014 were either altered or partially deleted.

Also alleged is that surveillance camera video from a salon showing APD officers shooting Jeremy Robertson, an informant and suspected probation violator, in June 2014 bore “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

Chavez also said that ‘SD cards’ from cameras were easy to disappear, and he witnessed Assist. Chief Robert Huntsman say ‘we can make this disappear’ when discussing a particular police camera with an SD card in it.

Chavez goes on in the sworn testimony to say officers in multiple APD divisions, including those involved in police shootings and assigned to specialized units, were instructed to not write reports until video review. If the videos had no images considered harmful to the department, the officers were permitted to write in their reports that “they had recorded a given incident.” But if images deemed “problematic” for the department were found, officers were instructed not to mention a recording in the report or to write “the recording equipment had malfunctioned.”

When officers already had written reports that described recordings, “the video would be altered or corrupted if it was damaging to the police department.”

Chavez says he reported to APD that altering or deleting video evidence was “illegal and unlawful.” He says he was told by then-deputy city attorney Kathy Levy “she was handling the situation.”

Levy, who retired from the city last year, said Chavez’s allegation that she told him she was handling the situation is “absolutely not true.”

“We never had any such conversation,” Levy said.

Chavez swore out the affidavit as part of the Hawkes family’s civil rights lawsuit against the city of Albuquerque, APD and Jeremy Dear, the officer who shot her. The family has sued the city under the Inspection of Public Records Act for access to audit logs to show who altered or deleted videos. The city has refused to turn those records over, and the family’s attorneys attached Chavez’s affidavit to a motion to compel release of the logs filed in state District Court on Thursday.

Chavez was placed on leave in April 2015 as APD investigated unprofessional conduct in the records division, which he led. Ultimately he was fired. In a whistleblower lawsuit he filed against the city in January, Chavez claims he was fired for raising concerns about department higher-ups’ unlawful orders that forced him to deny public records requests in high-profile cases. The city denies those claims.

His new allegations have spurred fresh inquiries in a police shooting that led to murder charges against Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, who were APD officers in March 2014 when they shot homeless camper James Boyd. The case ended in a mistrial.

Sandy testified at trial that he believed he had turned on his Scorpion brand body camera before the shooting, only to learn later that no video was recorded.

Memory cards from Scorpion cameras were often “bleached,” deleted or altered at APD, Chavez alleges. He mentions the Boyd shooting and alleges that he was ordered to “deny, withhold, obstruct, conceal, or even destroy records” related to that case and others.

Special prosecutor Randi McGinn offered Sandy a deal after the mistrial: plead guilty to a fourth-degree felony count of conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and agree never to work as a police officer again, and charges would be dismissed against Perez. In a letter to Sandy’s lawyer, Sam Bregman, dated Nov. 9, McGinn wrote: “In evaluating this plea offer, please be advised that we have been informed of some disturbing allegations about APD erasing, altering and corrupting lapel camera video in police shooting cases, particularly those involving Scorpion lapel camera SD cards. Investigation of these new allegations will be part of any ongoing prosecution in this case.”

Sandy rejected the deal.

“These are extremely concerning allegations,” Brandenburg said. “This throws everything into question. As prosecutors we have to rely on what we get and the integrity of everyone in the process. These kinds of allegations raise so many questions.”

APD shelved most of the Scorpion cameras in 2013 in favor of newer models manufactured by Taser International, Inc. With the Taser cameras came a five-year subscription to the company’s cloud-based storage system, Evidence.com.

Evidence.com allowed Chavez and a handful of others at APD to “edit lapel camera video in any number of ways,” according to the affidavit, including by “inserting or blurring images on the videos or by removing images from the video.”

“I was able to see, via the Evidence.com audit trail, that people had in fact deleted and/or altered lapel camera video,” he says in his affidavit. Furthermore, Chavez says that APD employees uploaded video from other sources, such as cellphones and surveillance cameras, to Evidence.com and altered those as well.

Also, Detective Christopher Whigham trained the department’s public information officers, command staff and officers in specialized units on how to delete and alter videos, according to Chavez.

Chavez accuses Detective Frank Pezzano of deleting and altering videos, and his affidavit says an APD lieutenant identified only by the last name of Aragon allowed Pezzano to do this.

[ame]http://public.evidence.com/help/pdfs/latest/EVIDENCE.com+Administrator+Reference+Guide.pdf[/ame]

A manual for Evidence.com published online last month by Taser supports many of Chavez’s claims about the process for editing or deleting videos.

Anyone with administrator privileges at an agency can delete videos. Clips remain in a queue for seven days. Administrators can “mask” entire videos or portions of them using four different “blur levels.”

APD has released videos that have been heavily blurred in spots, including in a case in which an officer ran a fleeing suspect down with his truck, and another in which officers stormed a legal syringe exchange in search of two drug trafficking suspects.

Dear fatally shot Mary Hawkes in April 2014, suspected of stealing a truck. Dear says Hawkes turned to face him, then pointed a gun at him. A forensics analysis conducted by the Hawkes family’s expert shows she was turning away from him and falling to the ground when he shot her in the back of the head.

Dear’s camera was functioning on the night of the shooting, but APD has said it did not record any video. Dear has since been fired from APD for insubordination and other alleged infractions, and he is fighting to get his job back. In a deposition for the civil rights lawsuit, he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent more than 130 times.

But three other officers’ cameras captured some of the events of that night. According to Chavez’s affidavit, one officer’s video was “altered by changing the gradient of the resolution on the video.” Twenty seconds were deleted from another officer’s video. And officer Tanner Tixier’s video, which shows the shooting from a distance, “has been altered by using the functionalities within Evidence.com where you can make the slides the video blurry or unclear.”

None of the three videos from the Hawkes shooting appears to be blurred at the same level as videos APD has released from past incidents.

Officers Anthony Sedler and Ramon Ornelas fatally shot Jeremy Robertson in July 2014. According to a lawsuit filed by his family, Robertson was an informant wanted on a warrant for violating his probation on the day he was shot.

APD has released surveillance video that shows Sedler and Ornelas firing shots from behind a Dumpster and other videos from the day of the shooting. According to Chavez’s affidavit, portions of a video from a salon’s surveillance camera that showed the shooting have been deleted.

Chavez’s allegations mark the second time claims of deleted videos have arisen against APD. For years, individual officers had the option to delete videos from their Scorpion cameras and, later, from Evidence.com. No allegations have surfaced until now of videos being deleted or altered in specific cases.

APD struggles to comply with a court-enforced settlement agreement between APD and the DOJ aimed at fixing a “culture of aggression.”

After a 16-month investigation, the DOJ ssued a searing set of findings against APD. Among its many criticisms, the DOJ found that “officers have consistently failed to follow the department’s lapel camera policy and have failed to record critical encounters.”

Michigan Cops Strap Black Man To A Chair As One Officer Severely Beats Him Until He Is Blind In One Eye

A black resident of Eastpointe, Michigan has filed suit against local police after they tied him to a chair and beat him so severely that he permanently lost the vision in one eye. The station’s surveillance cameras caught officers carrying Frankie Taylor to a chair and restraining him, then threatening to tase him. Another officer entered the frame, donned a pair of gloves and began to beat Taylor savagely until he lost consciousness. Within days he was admitted to Detroit Receiving Hospital for surgery, but it was too late to save his eye.

read more: FOX2DETROIT

School-to-Prison Pipeline: New Law Makes Schoolyard Fights a Felony


IMPORTANT PLEASE READ: New Missouri Statute

Dear Parents/Guardians:

We want to make you aware of a few new State Statutes that will go into effect on January 1, 2017, which may have a drastic impact on how incidents are handled in area school districts.

The way the new statue reads, if a person commits the offense of an assault in the third degree this will now be classified as a Class E Felony, rather than a misdemeanor. If he or she knowingly causes physical injury to another person (hits someone or has a fight with another individual and an injury occurs) – one or both participants may be charged with a Felony.

What does this mean for students?

For example, if two students are fighting and one child is injured, the student who caused the injury may be charged with a felony. Student(s) who are caught fighting in school, bus or on school grounds may now be charged with a felony (no matter the age or grade level), if this assault is witnessed by one of the School Resource Officers/police officers (SRO) or if the SRO/local law enforcement officials have to intervene.



Beginning in 2017



Assault in the third degree. http://www.moga.mo.gov/mostatutes/stathtml/56500000541.html

Statue 565.054.1 -- A person commits the crime of assault in the third degree, if:

-- A person commits the offense of assault in the third degree if he or she knowingly causes physical injury to another person.



The offense of assault in the third degree is a class E felony, unless the victim of such assault is a special victim, as the term "special victim" is defined under section002, in which case it is a class D felony.



Assault in the fourth degree. http://www.moga.mo.gov/mostatutes/stathtml/56500000561.html



Statue 565.056. 1. -- A person commits the offense of assault in the fourth degree, if:

(1) The person attempts to cause or recklessly causes physical injury, physical pain, or illness to another person;

(2) With criminal negligence the person causes physical injury to another person by means of a firearm;

(3) The person purposely places another person in apprehension of immediate physical injury;

(4) The person recklessly engages in conduct, which creates a substantial risk of death or serious physical injury to another person;

(5) The person knowingly causes or attempts to cause physical contact with a person with a disability, which a reasonable person, who does not have a disability, would consider offensive or provocative; or

(6) The person knowingly causes physical contact with another person knowing the other person will regard the contact as offensive or provocative.

Except as provided in subsection 3 of this section, assault in the fourth degree is a class A misdemeanor.
Violation of the provisions of subdivision (3) or (6) of subsection 1 of this section is a class C misdemeanor unless the victim is a special victim, as the term "special victim" is defined under section565.002, in which case a violation of such provisions is a class A misdemeanor.

Officers Possessions to Be Auctioned to Pay Man Shot and Paralyzed for Riding a Bicycle





A Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Sergeant's personal property is now in the hands of the federal government, waiting to be auctioned to begin paying Dontrell Stephens, 23. In 2013, Stephens was shot and paralyzed by Sergeant Adam Lin after he was stopped for riding his bicycle into traffic.

A jury verdict awarded Stephens 22.4 million dollars in a civil suit to be paid by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Since PBSO is a government entity, any damages over 200,000 dollars has to be approved by the state legislature. Stephens' attorney found another way to start payment of the minimum amount in the suit, by auctioning off Lin's assets.

"This case cries out for compassion. There's no doubt Dontrell Stephens, for the rest of his life will spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair," said Stuart Kaplan, former FBI special agent.

Kaplan says the move by a federal judge, even when the 22.4 million dollar jury verdict is up for appeal, speaks to the need to start getting money to Stephens.

read more