Poor Mojo's Newswire

OAKLAND (AP) -- Two police officers should be fired and another 42 officers disciplined or reprimanded for misconduct during the Occupy Oakland protests that turned violent late last year and in January, city leaders said Friday. The early findings come from a police internal affairs investigation triggered by more than 1,100 complaints issued against officers following the three major protests, police Chief Howard Jordan said. An internal affairs investigation has found that 44 officers committed some sort of misconduct, ranging from use of excessive force to failing to turn on their tiny video cameras attached to their uniforms, Jordan said. Jordan recommended that the two officers be fired, another one demoted and 15 others suspended. Another 23 officers were given written reprimands and three others were ordered to undergo counseling and training, Jordan said. "I've taken action to hold them accountable," he said at a briefing for several reporters. "Because in the end, I want our officers to exercise good constitutional policing." In June, an independent study reported that police were ill-equipped to handle a violent protest on Oct. 25 because of inadequate staffing, poor planning and training. The protest came hours after officers cleared Occupy Oakland's encampment in front of City Hall. Police fired tear gas canisters and beanbag projectiles and some demonstrators threw glass and other objects. . . .

The New Star-Ledger’s Bamboozled column has the story of a woman whose license was suspended by authorities in New Jersey for a red-light ticket, even though the car in the photo is clearly not hers — oh, and she hadn’t even been in the Garden State in more than a year when the violation occurred. Eighteen months before receiving the ticket, the woman had moved from NJ to Colorado for work. But when she called up the Edison Township, NJ, police to tell them that she couldn’t possibly have run a red light from thousands of miles away, the person on the other end of the call was not terribly understanding. “I dealt with one of the most rude individuals ever,” she recalls. “She laughed at me and said that I need to pay and it’s not that much money and to stop lying to her. It ended in her actually yelling at me and hanging up on me.” So she filled in the paperwork disputing the ticket and mailed it off before her court date. When she didn’t hear back, she assumed it was because the matter had been resolved by people who understand things like time and distance. But then a year later, the Motor Vehicle Commission tells her that even though she now had a Colorado license, her driving privileges had been revoked nationwide for failing to appear in court, and if she wants her license back, she needs to pay $100 on top of the ticket. . . .

As my grandma used to say, honesty is the best policy. But you know what else is a pretty good policy? Giving traffic tickets only to people who are actually alive. The cop fired by the New York Police Department says he was issuing summonses to deceased people, but only because he had to fill monthly quotas the NYPD says don't exist. He was already writing more than 125 to 150, reports the New York Post, but he says in a lawsuit filed this week against the NYPD that he was told to amp up that effort. “Specifically, [the cop] was told that he needed to start issuing more summonses for red-light and seat-belt violations” and was warned he would be moved “if he did not issue the increased number of summonses,” the suit says. Instead of handing out tickets to people who didn't deserve them, the cop figured he could just issue summonses to dead people because hey, they can't complain. He went ahead and “prepared summonses by taking information from legitimate summonses that he had issued in the past. But he prepared the summonses in such a way that [they] would not impact any motorists,” the lawsuit explains. This is what I'd like to call the "Hey, I'm The Good Guy Here" defense. The whole thing fell apart last July when his coworkers noticed he never had to testify about any of his tickets. Other cops say he wasn't trying to help people out, just pad his pockets with the overtime involved in writing the tickets. . . .