Showing posts with label War on Drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War on Drugs. Show all posts

Friday, February 15, 2019

HOUSTON POLICE LIE to GET SEARCH WARRANT and PROCEED TO MURDER FAMILY DOG and HOMEOWNERS


RTR Truth Media 
Tom Lacovara-Stewart
HOUSTON — A man survives Vietnam only to be murdered by American Stasi. In a bombshell development, the undercover cop who led a drug raid that ended with a deadly shootout last month is now the target of a criminal investigation. 
The narcotics officer lied in the search warrant affidavit about a drug buy that never happened, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo confirmed Friday. The only problem with the Chief's "You lie you die" comment is that he too has some "inconsistencies" to explain also.
If what appears to be the case here pans out, this officer should be charged with murder, and anyone involved should also be charged under the RICO statutes. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. I would say at this point using a government or municipal corporation to commit crimes equates to a corrupt criminal organization. 

The following articles by Reason magazine cover this story very well. Prohibition and the war on drugs coupled with the militarization of American Law Enforcement is the single greatest threat to our freedom in this century.



Leaked Affidavit on Houston Police that Lied to Get Drug House Warrant which Lead to 2 People and Dog Being Killed




Houston Police Attorney General Letter to Withhold Body Cam of Fatal Police Shooting




A fatal Houston drug raid is a familiar story of needless violence, death and destruction


By Radley Balko
Opinion writer

On Jan. 28th, a Houston narcotics team conducted a no-knock raid on the home of Dennis Tuttle, 59, and Rhogena Nicholas, 58. The police claimed to have received an anonymous tip that the two were selling drugs. They also claim they sent an informant to the house to attempt a controlled buy, and that informant returned with heroin.

According to the police account, as they broke down the door, a dog charged them, and they shot it. They say Tuttle then charged at them with a handgun, wounding multiple officers. After the police opened fire, he retreated to a backroom. The police say Nicholas then charged a wounded officer and attempted to grab his shotgun. They opened fire again, killing her. They say Tuttle then reemerged, firing his gun, at which point they killed him, too. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo initially claimed the house was “hardened,” or fortified, possibly with surveillance cameras. He also claimed that the police arrived with their sirens and flashers activated, inferring that the couple should have known they were being raided by law enforcement. In the end, the story went, five cops put their lives on the line to get a heroin-dealing couple off the street. (My colleagues here at The Post published an editorial praising Acevedo for using the incident to call for gun-control laws that might keep firearms out of the hands of criminals.)

But since then, the official story has started to unravel. It’s increasingly looking as though something went horribly wrong on Harding Street, and that Tuttle and Nicholas were not hardened drug dealers, but at most recreational drug dealers who were invaded, shot and killed in their own home. Here’s a quick rundown of what we now know:

· The Houston Chronicle reported Friday morning that an Houston Police Department officer has been “relieved of duty” due to “ongoing questions” about his involvement in the raid.

· The police obtained a no-knock warrant. That would seem to contradict Acevedo’s claim that the officers arrived with their sirens and flashers on. The entire purpose of a no-knock raid is to take suspects by surprise. That surprise is spoiled pretty quickly if you provide notice of your arrival.

· Tuttle and Nicholas had lived at the same house in the 7800 block of Harding Street for 20 years. The police apparently didn’t bother to do much investigating, because they didn’t even know the names of either of the home’s occupants when they broke down the door.

· According to police, the informant claimed to have seen lots of plastic baggies filled with black tar heroin and a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. The raid didn’t turn up either. They did apparently find a small amount of pot, a revolver and a small quantity of powder that might have been cocaine (or might not).


· Acevedo initially claimed that after the raid, “The neighborhood thanked our officers because it was a drug house. They described it as a problem location.” Yet in the days that followed, neighbors and family of the couple came forward, stating that they were shocked to hear the allegations of drug dealing. They described the couple as “easygoing,” and said they rarely saw visitors. The neighbors’ testimonials seem particularly troubling, since it was allegedly a neighbor’s anonymous tip that sparked the initial investigation.

· Neither suspect had a significant criminal record. The only criminal history for either was a decade-old bad check charge against Nicholas that was dismissed about a month after it was filed.

· Despite what the police department claimed early on, the house was not fortified, nor did it have surveillance cameras. One local police watchdog group pointed out on YouTube that while the targeted home on Harding Street didn’t appear to be either fortified or equipped with surveillance, a separate home with the same street number on Hardy Street was both fortified and equipped with extensive surveillance gear. During a news conference after the raid, Acevedo himself used both “Hardy” and “Harding" in describing the street where the raid went down.


· Acevedo initially claimed that the officers were met with gunfire immediately upon entering the house. Later, he said the police fired first, killing Tuttle’s dog.

By last week, activists began to speak out, noting these inconsistencies in the official narrative and questioning why the police needed to use such violent tactics in the first place. Some even began to question whether the police were telling the truth about what happened. This sparked a backlash from law enforcement. Acevedo dismissed what he called “crazy conspiracy theories,” adding, “I guarantee you we got the right house.” Police union president Joe Gamaldi blamed the shooting on “anti-police rhetoric,” then issued what sounded an awful lot like a threat: “If you’re the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, just know we’ve all got your number now, we’re going to be keeping track of all of y’all, and we’re going to make sure that we hold you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.” To his credit, Acevedo criticized Gamaldi’s remarks.

But Gamaldi may soon need to spend more time defending his dues-paying members than tracking and threatening police critics. The Chronicle’s report notes that the officer’s punishment comes “amid a probe into questions over whether the sworn affidavit used to justify the no-knock warrant may have contained false information.” Acevedo told the paper, “I know that in addition to the officer-involved shooting itself, many have questions regarding the circumstances surrounding the search warrant. All of these questions are part of our ongoing criminal and administrative investigations." Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg says she’s also looking into the matter.


Drug cops often face a lot of pressure to raid houses, seize illicit drugs and rack up arrests. We saw this in Atlanta in the Kathryn Johnston case, where the police got a tip about a stash house, and instead of waiting to find an informant, conducting a controlled buy, and requesting a warrant, they skipped the first two steps. They made up the drug buy, lied to a judge, got their warrant and killed an innocent 92-year-old woman in her own home. They then tried to cover it all up. Just a few months ago I reported that drug cops and Little Rock had lied about a controlled buy to a judge, then conducted an extraordinarily violent no-knock raid on a man who happened to be innocent. (Acevedo said his department serves more than 1,700 search warrants per year — more than 4.5 per day. It seems safe to assume that the vast majority of those are drug warrants.)

I’ve been writing about these tactics for more than 15 years now. And while there has been some movement on the margins — groups such as the National Tactical Officers Association now recommend that when it comes to serving drug warrants, police attempt apprehend suspects outside their homes instead of attempting “dynamic entry” — the raids haven’t stopped, and the pile of dead bodies keeps growing.

The arguments against these raids are self-evident. They create violence and confrontation where there was none before. They sow confusion and chaos, and thus have a very thin margin for error. By design, they inflict punishment on people who have yet to even be charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. They also inflict punishment on any innocent people who might be inside. They subject everyone — cops and suspects — to unnecessary risk. Combine all of that with a drug war that by necessity operates on dirty information from shady informants and anonymous tips, and you have a recipe for needless death and destruction. And there’s little evidence that these tactics make the community any safer.


I could write a book of examples. But here are just a handful from the past several years:

· Even as the drama continues to play out in Houston, in another part of Texas, Marvin Guyis about to be tried on murder charges in the killing of a police officer during a 2014 no-knock drug raid. The police first broke a window, causing Guy to reach for his gun. They then broke down Guy’s door, at which time he allegedly shot and killed Officer Charles Dinwiddie. The police found no drugs in Guy’s home. He’s facing a possible death sentence if convicted. (I’ll have more about Guy in a post next week.)

· The same year as the raid on Guy, another Texas man, Henry Magee, shot and killed Deputy Adam Sowders during a raid on Magee’s home. Unlike Guy, Magee did have illicit drugs in his home — marijuana plants. Magee maintained the shooting was done in self-defense, and a grand jury declined to charge him in Sowders’s death. It’s worth noting that Guy is black, and Magee is white.


· The same year as those raids, Jason Wescott of Tampa was shot and killed during a police raid on his home. An informant claimed to have bought some pot from Wescott. The same informant later said he had lied about the purchase — at the encouragement of Tampa police.

· In yet another case from Texas, in 2016 a jury in Corpus Christi acquitted Ray Rosas for shooting at police during a no-knock drug raid on his home. The police were looking for his nephew. Rosas had good reason to be afraid — he had once testified against a gang member.

· Last year, a jury in Austin (where Acevedo was previously the chief of police) convicted 18-year-old Tyler Harrell of assault for shooting at police during a no-knock raid on his home. Harrell and his mother said they had no idea the raiding officers were law enforcement. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.


And the beat goes on. Just days after the deadly raid in Houston, a state trooper and a suspect were both killed during a raid in Virginia.

Police officials like to have it both ways. They want to use tactics designed to confuse and disorient people — to take people by surprise. But when someone in the midst of that chaos mistakes police for armed intruders and tries to defend himself, officials say they should have known that the armed intruders were law enforcement. Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum notes that there was a good reason Tuttle and Nicholas may have believed otherwise: There has been a rash of recent incidents in Houston in which armed criminals have posed as police.

On top of all of that, there’s a huge double standard at play here. Police who mistakenly shoot unarmed or innocent people in these raids are inevitably forgiven by police chiefs, prosecutors and judges, owing to the volatility of the circumstances. Of course, the police created those circumstances. And yet the targets of these raids — the people the tactics are designed to confuse — are rarely afforded that sort of leniency. The Magee case notwithstanding, if you shoot at the police as they raid your home, you’re almost certainly looking at criminal charges that will put you in prison for a long time — provided you live through the raid itself.

Read more by Radley Balko:

How Little Rock’s illegal police raids validate the Exclusionary Rule

Little Rock’s dangerous and illegal drug war

Related :
KPRC2 / Click2Houston Breaking Report 2/15/2019
https://www.facebook.com/KPRC2/videos/373679176757056/

Did the Couple Killed by Houston Narcs Know Who the Armed Intruders Were?
https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/01/did-the-couple-killed-by-houston-narcs-k

HPD Chief Art Acevedo on new details of raid
https://www.khou.com/video/news/local/hpd-chief-art-acevedo-on-new-details-of-raid/285-9bb54598-4d34-4013-88bb-c234267ef932

HPD undercover cop's story about deadly raid, drug buy not adding up, affidavit alleges
https://www.khou.com/video/news/crime/hpd-undercover-cops-story-about-deadly-raid-drug-buy-not-adding-up-affidavit-alleges/285-0b1cc2cd-ac8c-4543-b5e5-2581d86380a7

Houston Police Attorney General Letter to Withhold Body Cam of Fatal Police Shooting
https://www.scribd.com/document/399731193/Houston-Police-Attorney-General-Letter-to-Withhold-Body-Cam-of-Fatal-Police-Shooting

'You lie, you die' | HPD undercover cop lied about drug buy that led to deadly raid, Chief Acevedo says as he continues to lie by the way....
https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/you-lie-you-die-hpd-undercover-cop-lied-about-drug-buy-that-led-to-deadly-raid-chief-acevedo-says/285-54ca0bb4-ba03-4e9d-ab6e-7d40bab2b356

A South Carolina anti-drug police unit admitted it conducts illegal no-knock raids

Sunday, July 8, 2018

POLICE ATTACK KID WITH AUTISM in HIS OWN YARD SUSPECTING DRUG USE as HE BEGGED for HIS MAMA



Graham, TX — Officers with the Graham police department are currently under investigation by the Texas Rangers after they handcuffed a teen with autism and then tasered him outside of his home. Cops reportedly mistook his autism for drug use.
According to police, the incident happened on June 26 when officers were responding to a call about a teenager throwing rocks at a fence. Michael Moore, 19, was the teenager and the fence was his own.
When officers arrived, they did not recognize his behavior as a person with autism. Instead they “investigated” whether he “might be under the influence of a controlled substance,” Graham police Chief Tony Widner said.
Widner said that the teen resisted being placed in handcuffs—as most children with autism would do—so they brought out the taser and began shocking the teen. Only after they had attacked, tasered, and handcuffed the teen did the police realize Moore “might have a mental impairment,” said Widner.
Tracie Moore, the teen’s mom called the incident “outrageous” and was heartbroken to find her son being treated in such a horrific manner, especially considering the town has only 9,000 residents and everyone knows her son.
“I have been a resident my whole life. And Michael has too. This is where he born and raised,” said Tracie.
According to WFAA, the Moore family has met with police several times since the incident, including on Monday afternoon, but Tracie said she is still upset, and no one has apologized for her son’s treatment.
“I was in tears,” she said. “And now I’m angry. I watched the body cam footage. He told them, ‘My mama is inside. Let me get my mama.”‘
Although the body camera footage shows the entire interaction, police are refusing to release it to the public. This is in spite of a Freedom of Information Act Request made by WFAA.
Although police claimed that Moore was running when they arrived, she said her son actually approached officers in an area that is essentially the family’s backyard.
“It really doesn’t take long conversing with him to figure out he has a disability,” said Tracie. “Now, he has a busted blood vessel in his eye. He had scratches and abrasions on both sides of his face.”
Police, however, were apparently untrained in how to identify someone with autism and the only thing that came to their minds was this guy is high. According to police account, Michael was “sweating, breathing heavily, having difficulties focusing and acting paranoid.”
Police even went so far as to force the teen to perform a field sobriety test—for his autism.
When another officer arrived, Michael was so frightened and stressed out that he could not perform the sobriety test “based on his erratic movements, behavior, and statements,” Widner said. One of the officers then tried to put handcuffs on “for everyone’s safety until they could determine what was occurring.”
According to the police news release, after they put one of his hands in the cuffs, the teen then pulled away, “backing into the second officer, and all three went to the ground.”
Police then feared for their lives that Michael may try to use the other end of the handcuffs as a weapon—which he did not—and then they began tasering him.
According to Tracie, who watched the body camera footage, the incident unfolded quite differently.
“They ask him to put his hands behind his back, once again he turns and points to the house and says, ‘I live here, can I get my mama?’” she said. “They grab his arm, put a choke hold on him and throw him to the ground. At that point, the body cameras fall off and all you can see is sky but you can still hear the audio. The first time I saw the video, it was at that point the officer told me, ‘This is where they stunned him twice.’ Up until that point, we had no knowledge of the use of a stun gun.”
As WFAA reports, Tracie says as this was all happening, she was in the front of the house unaware that anything had happened. Finally, after Michael was handcuffed and in a police unit, an officer went to the front door and knocked.
“It could’ve all been avoided,” she said. “We’re just all in complete and sheer utter disbelief this could happen to him.”
“The Graham Police Department feels that it is important that this be investigated and the truth of what occurred revealed,” Widner said in the news release. “At that point, whatever measures deemed necessary will be taken.”
As for why the body camera hasn’t been released, Michael’s grandfather, Gene Williams—who has seen it—says its too damning to the cops.
“The video really is that inflammatory even if you don’t know Michael. They can’t let a jury see it. Legally they could post in on this website right now,” Williams said. “But YOU will never see it. There would be citizens storming City Hall.”
If you’d like to peacefully express your concern over the officers’ treatment of an autistic teenager, you can do so on their Facebook Page, here.
Sadly, police officers mistaking autism for drug use is not an isolated incident. Just last month, TFTP reported on the national outcry surrounding the violent takedown of an autistic boy by Officer David Grossman, and just like the Graham police department is doing, the Buckeye Police Department began conducting damage control. As the world lashed out at the department for mistreating Connor Leibel, an innocent autistic boy, in such a violent and callous manner, the parents simply asked for an apology—one that would never come. And now, because the police refused to apologize, the taxpayers are going to be held liable.
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Contributed by Matt Agorist of thefreethoughtproject.com.
The Free Thought Project is dedicated to holding those who claim authority over our lives accountable.
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RTR TRUTH MEDIA - Resurrect the Republic

The absolute disgust I feel at this situation is deep. I have friends who are police officers and I can tell you that I am 100% positive that none of them would ever resort to this type of behavior. So, if it isn't the general character of these men, one must ask, who in the hell is training these people? 
And another question.... what type of individual resorts to this level of abuse on someone who hasn't harmed anyone else or anyone else's property? 

We intend to ask those questions. 
We intend to find out the answers to these questions and a few more.
We will also be filing a FOIA for a copy of the body-cam footage. 

Tom Lacovara-Stewart
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