How Chicago Police Condemned the Innocent: a Trail of Coerced Confessions

 

The notoriously abusive Chicago police officer Jon Burge (top) was released on Friday. When Dana Feitler was found dead in 1989, Richard Zuley (top left) went looking for answers – with money to offer, and then a confession. ‘I never signed anything,’ Lee Harris (right) told the Guardian from prison. (illustration: Nate Kitch/Guardian UK)

Spencer Ackerman | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | February 22, 2015

Shackled by his wrist to the wall and by his ankle to the floor, Lathierial Boyd waited for the detective to return to the Chicago police station. In what he considered a sign he had nothing to hide, the 24-year-old Boyd had given the white detective permission to search his swank loft. It would be clear, he thought, that Boyd was no murderer.

Evidence from Chicago detective’s cases re-examined for multiple exonerations

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Yes, Boyd had sold drugs when he was younger. But he had turned a corner with his life, and the contents of his briefcase, which Boyd had also handed over, could prove where his money came from. His business papers were in order: contracts for his real-estate business, tax documents, the forgettable dealings of a successful man – hardly what a killer might carry. As soon as Detective Richard Zuley came back, Boyd thought, he’d be free.

A quarter-century later, Boyd remembered Zuley’s words when the detective returned from his well-heeled home: “No nigger is supposed to live like this.”

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Police Corruption Exposed

Margaret Kimberley | Black Agenda Report  | Truthout | January 11, 2015

The false narrative about the need for hyper policing has come crashing down and police themselves destroyed the well-cultivated propaganda. The awful truth which black people were well aware of is now out in the open for all to see. Police departments in the United States exist for the purpose of maintaining white people’s prerogatives as the group in control of everyone else. Enhancing public safety is a secondary consideration.

Under the Michael Bloomberg administration the New York City police department (NYPD) was infamous for its stop and frisk policies. Up to 575,000 people, almost all of them black or Latino, were stopped by police annually at the height of the stop and frisk program. A mysterious designation such as “furtive movement” was a reason for any person of color to be searched and harassed. Precinct commanders were pressured to meet quotas for stops, summonses, and arrests while also lying about the real crime rate in order to make the mayor and the NYPD look good.

All of that changed in the past two weeks. The NYPD have all but ceased writing summonses and making arrests and they have done so with the same zeal they once used in acting as the modern day slave patrol. The police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) ordered the slowdown in order to punish current mayor Bill de Blasio. The behavior seems odd because the mayor reappointed as commissioner the architect of stop and frisk, William Bratton. Despite this and other pro-police actions, de Blasio doesn’t meet enough of the police terrorism threshold to please New York’s “finest.”

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Police altered video showing what happened before cops shot WV man 23 times: lawsuit

Reuters | Raw Story | August 29, 2014

Police in a West Virginia city altered video evidence in the death of a mentally ill black man who was shot and killed last year during a confrontation with officers, a lawyer for the victim’s family said on Thursday.

Sherman L. Lambert Sr., an attorney representing the estate of Wayne A. Jones, filed a legal motion on Wednesday in a $200 million lawsuit against five Martinsburg police officers. The lawsuit accuses the officers of using excessive force in the March 2013 shooting.

The officers were cleared of wrongdoing in a report from West Virginia State Police investigators in April. Last October, a grand jury found their actions to be justified.

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Writer Who Investigated Local Michigan Police Corruption Has Warrant Out For Her Arrest

WWMT-TV Newschannel 3 | Reader Supported News | August 21, 2014

writer, who has been a strong voice behind corruption allegations within the Battle Creek Police Department, now has a warrant out for her arrest.

Battle Creek Police Chief Jim Blocker confirmed to Newshcannel 3 that on Tuesday, the Calhoun County court approved a warrant to arrest Autumn Smith for false reporting of a crime to a 9-1-1 operator.

He says Smith called 9-1-1 in June to accuse then-Interim Chief Blocker of assaulting her before a City Commission meeting.

Smith is a contributor for the website PaleoRadio.us.

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