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Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

579 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

pipermerriam 11y ago
This is an honest question. Realistically, how do we dismantle the police state. It seems like the NSA, FBI, and some not insignificant percentage of the police forces have gone entirely rogue or lost track of their mission entirely. It feels hopeless. So much outrage but so little actual ever changes. Does anyone have any ideas because I'd love to hear them.
- bcoates 11y ago
  The police are as much members of society as anyone else, and they require the active cooperation of you and the rest of society to survive. You can be part of the solution by depriving them this support: Do not cooperate with them in their job. Do not call them. Decline to speak with them if they contact you. Do not associate with them officially or socially. Do not permit them to shop at your place of employment, do business with you, or join your social organizations. Do not permit their children to be friends with yours.
  - saiya-jin 11y ago
    very narrow-minded suggestions, some outright illegal. if "non-significant" part of police force is actually gone "rogue", it means rest is +- still OK normal human beings. These actions will alienate also these, fostering "us vs them" mentality. Good job, you just proposed how to make things even worse.
  - tempodox 11y ago
    > Do not permit their children to be friends with yours. Seriously?
cheez 11y ago
Thank god for whistle blowers.
- kingkawn 11y ago
  Aka people with souls
- vcdimension 11y ago
  We need to ensure that these whistle blower police officers receive praise and reward for their good work, so that they and others are encouraged to do the right thing. They may not get the same treatment from other police officers who might not trust them in future.
gravypod 11y ago
I hope that there will be an investigation into who has been effected by this. I look forward to seeing the details from the future court dates that result from these findings.
banku_brougham 11y ago
If this story is not picked up in the larger media I will be disgusted, but I'm happy to see this come to light. Trust is a huge part of the police/citizen relationship, and it's in a bad state.
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Anecdotally, this is blowing up on my Facebook feed. My guess is it will get coverage.
- NN88 11y ago
  it seems to be going viral...I hope it is
cygnus_a 11y ago
Another reason to decriminalize drugs in favor of self-help programs.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Another reason to decriminalize drugs in favor of self-help programs. Decriminalizing drugs may change which crimes are available to use to frame members of a disfavored group, but it is unlikely to change whether bigots in power seek to frame members of their disfavored groups for crimes.
  - sophacles 11y ago
    While I agree with this statement - I would like to point out that drug possession is particularly easy to frame someone for, and it has a high payout (that is, long and severe punishment, easy to re-frame someone, etc) compared to other crimes. Making drugs legal would put a huge dent in a lot of problems.
- KirinDave 11y ago
  Um, if it wasn't drugs it'd be something else. Stolen firearms, maybe? This is a racist domestic terror group using their position of power to target a minority. Please don't shift the focus of this to some other vaguely related issue. The important part: a racist cabal formed a conspiracy to put young black men in jail. Because they hate them.
  - jMyles 11y ago
    It's not "vaguely related" - drug laws are, simply put, the current form of jim crow. Drug laws were made for this purpose, and openly so. And it's ludicrous to say that "if it wasn't for drugs it'd be something else." So then abolish all criminal laws which prohibit common, consensual, adult behavior. But drug laws are the whale here, not anything else.
    - simoncion 11y ago
dragonwriter 11y ago
Note that as well as the DA being complicit, the involved supervising officers are the current department chief and the state Director of Homeland Security.
hackuser 11y ago
It seems like there is a smoking gun in this case (though I didn't review the evidence thoroughly). Widespread availability of video recording and distribution has provided many more smoking guns. Certainly, there are many more incidents where no smoking gun evidence is available. For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. It was and is a grave error - I can't imagine how many victims there are. This raises critical questions: 1) Why did our society make this error? 2) How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? 3) About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Also: What do we do about the legions of victims? Ignoring them yet again would be a crime.
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  > What do we do about the legions of victims? Financial compensation and putting those that caused the injustice in prison equaling the total of all of the terms served by all of those affected. That is as close to justice as could be had. As for preventing corruption- there's no way to do this as long as there are people that can be corrupted. You can add oversight. You could replace the entire force with minorities. But if there are people that are corruptible, these efforts will fail. The best that you can do is to (1) promote ethics education in schools and flag students that reject it/scoff at it as they may need much more help and (2) don't divorce government and schools from religion which is an additional force for peer-pressure and community support against corruption.
  - salgernon 11y ago
    Which religion? Which denomination of that religion? What if that religion has reprehensible beliefs?
    - purpled_haze 11y ago
      Do you disagree that religion in any form can be used as a force against corruption? If you work to exclude religion as a whole because some religions or those practicing them have certain beliefs you may find reprehensible, you also exclude other moral and ethical beliefs, peer pressure, and community support that would combat corruption.
NN88 11y ago
This is explosive. The white supremacist implications here are undeniable. Director of AL homeland security? Good god This is LITERALLY as bad as it looks. The evidence is astounding.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- mintplant 11y ago
  > Once the examiner has an adequate series of charts to evaluate, he will begin the scoring process. This is done most often using a numerical scoring method which evaluates the subject's physiological responses to the Relevant and Control questions. The computer polygraph may also use an algorithm developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory or other researchers to score the examination. The examiner can use this algorithm to independently score the examination or for quality control purposes to verify his own determination. http://www.lawofficer.com/articles/2008/12/understanding-polygraph.html http://www.lawofficer.com/articles/2008/12/understanding-pol... If you look closely, you'll notice that that's a copyright notice for a piece of software evaluating the results. The test isn't necessarily being run by JHU APL, but the software was developed there. See also: http://www.jhuapl.edu/ott/technologies/technology/articles/P01178.asp http://www.jhuapl.edu/ott/technologies/technology/articles/P...
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    It's still an ugly involvement. Evaluation software isn't going to redeem "lie detectors' as anything other than voodoo. It just gets the stink of that voodoo on JHU.
  - oneJob 11y ago
    JHU APL does tons, well primarily, highly sensitive defense contracting work. For instance, you can actually head on over right now to Linkedin and apply for their "Combat Systems Kill Chain Engineer" position. [1] Security is thus a big requirement. From Wikipedia: "APL is primarily a defense contractor. It serves as a technical resource for the Department of Defense, NASA, and other government agencies." There is a very strained relationship with some parts of the JHU community due to this. At the offices where they control the Hubble Space Telescope for instance there is a deli with a tip jar for, tongue in cheek, COINTELPRO. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/70728662?trk=jobs_jserp_job_listing_text https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/70728662?trk=jobs_jserp_...
dzhiurgis 11y ago
After the collapse of Soviet Union, in my country there was explosion of mafia. Police were incapable and this is exactly how police dealt with them. Draconian drug laws meant that cops could easily put gangsters to jail for a long time. Basically if thugs play dirty, cops are playing dirty as well.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Are you suggesting that the hundreds of black men falsely convicted and imprisoned by corrupt white supremacist police and prosecutors were culpable because they are “thugs playing dirty”? WTF?
  - dzhiurgis 11y ago
    I was stating the fact that happened in my country ruled by gangsters who were extorting innocent people. Why you are reading something that is not there?
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      Your three-sentence story was about police battling the “explosion of mafia” using underhanded tactics, and makes no mention of innocent people. The case under discussion is police planting drugs and guns on people who were wrongly arrested and who had no prior criminal record or connection to gangsters, because the police were hateful racists. Since those two scenarios seem completely unrelated, my inference was that either (a) your comment is totally off topic, or else (b) you are trying to suggest that the situations are similar. Option (b) seems more likely considering your statement “basically if thugs play dirty, cops are playing dirty as well” is in a separate paragraph, and the obvious implication is that it applies to both your first paragraph and to the original article. Hence my question.
      - dzhiurgis 11y ago
        Rather than inferring that all thugs are black, you should have inferred that mafia isn't there to help people. Anyhow, sorry if my story isn't interesting.
cjslep 11y ago
Is it bad that this honestly doesn't surprise me? In 2005 my 15 year old self was passing through Northern Georgia to see grandparents, and we hit traffic at the only town stoplight because a Grand Wizard and lots of KKK members were rallying in the streets celebrating running the last minority out of the county. As a white middle class guy, that was quite the contemporarty class on race relations. Racism is alive and well in the South, and it is slow to change because the communities are small and not super interested in the internet justice movements.
- calstad 11y ago
  Yep racism is only a problem in the South
  - epistasis 11y ago
    That's not what he said, nor is it even implied by the comment.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      OP could have mentioned visiting the grandparents without mentioning which state that was. Yes the South has a problem, but drawing lines like this is a way for the rest of us to pretend that we don't. I seem to recall that some issues have arisen in some Midwestern cities recently?
      - cjslep 11y ago
        Sorry if my comment drew lines, that was not my intention. I just wanted to highlight a particularly vivid memory I had at a very impressionable age which has helped contribute to my desensitized reaction to this - the lack of which I am a little worried about.
- bcook 11y ago
  Can you remember the town? I am from NE Georgia, and while racism is undoubtedly alive, public racism like what you saw is something I have never heard of in my 30 year life-span.
dre85 11y ago
I just read the title and it immediately reminded me of Dave Chapelle..."just sprinkle some crack on them and leave".
rewqfdsa 11y ago
> black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved Black Americans commit a wildly disproportionate amount of crime. Black men make up 1 million out of 2.3 million people in prison. 4.7% of all black men* are in prison. A black man has a 70% chance of being in prison at some point in his life. Are you suggesting the police are framing all of these people? While police conduct exists and is deplorable, my sense as an observer is that the majority of black anti-police activism is about somehow pinning the criminality of the black community on society at large. While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer. Look: if we're going to have a productive public conversation, we need to acknowledge that black arrest rates are in part a result of elevated black criminality and not pin the entire problem on the police. Downvote me all you want: it won't change the facts. Ignoring facts and making policy according to utopian fantasy has never led to human progress, but it has led to a great deal of misery.
- Retra 11y ago
  If police officers can be made corrupt just by doing their jobs, then we really need to change how that system works.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Well, it's not exactly the black people's fault that the police decided to be corrupt. So now they've made their own bed and they'll have to lie in it: if they could have categorically said 'this does not happen' they would have had a strong position. Now everybody that gets in trouble with the police can muddy the waters by saying that the evidence was planted. And in some of those cases that will be the truth. These officers have all but destroyed the reputation of their force and that's something that they're not going to recover easily - if at all. So, let's have a productive public conversation: How will guarantees be provided that something like this can never happen again, how will the people affected by this be properly compensated for the crimes done to them, how will everybody involved in these affairs be charged, tried and punished, from high to low and how will the police force change it's inner culture so that if there is another instance of such a thing it will be immediately and swiftly dealt with before another culture like the current one can take root? All that has nothing to do with the arrest rates of blacks, elevated black criminality and the black community at large, this is a police problem, and only a police problem, the people evidence was planted on are called victims and you don't get to blame those for any misconduct of the other party. I'm assuming that if they plant evidence they plant evidence where-ever they feel like and if they want to arrest people for no good reason that they'll do that too to whoever they feel like. If they do that more often to blacks than to others then there are yet more problems but these are significant enough by themselves to be extremely damaging. > While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer. I can't. If you can't stand the heat stay the fuck out of the kitchen. Good police officers can not function if their not-so-good colleagues spoil the reputation of the whole department like this. To those that downvoted this comment: feel free to explain your reasons.
datashovel 11y ago
Keep the leaks coming world! The joke is that anyone who is truly qualified to run for office doesn't want the job. I hope that the more leaks like this that come out, more qualified people will realize they can't just stand by idly thinking the system will just fix itself. I imagine Snowden leaks alone have gotten far more "qualified" people engaged in civic activities than we'll ever truly comprehend, and have taken a bit of the "fear of rebellion" out of those who might not have spoken up in the past.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > I imagine Snowden leaks alone have gotten far more "qualified" people engaged in civic activities than we'll ever truly comprehend, and have taken a bit of the "fear of rebellion" out of those who might not have spoken up in the past. You wish. The reactions vary from 'oh, I knew that all along' to 'well, no matter what I do, the spying will continue' and a whole bunch of shades in between. Then there are those that see Snowden as the great evil (yes, let's shoot that messenger) and would like to see him suffer. On the whole the effect of Snowden's revelation is a big disappointment, I thought far more would happen because of them but maybe I'm just too impatient.
  - cinquemb 11y ago
    >On the whole the effect of Snowden's revelation is a big disappointment, I thought far more would happen because of them but maybe I'm just too impatient. I have similar sentiments for similar reasons you list. I also tend to find the battle that people seem to create of "privacy vs security" to be sucking up all the air in the room of plausible ideas that can change the status quo and bring upon more effective societies, with namely corporate sponsors and individuals within governments reaping the benefits (effectively status quo) with most individuals in a given society mostly being taken on a ride with no true internalization of how any of it will enrich their life at best or end up dead from mostly being a function of where they happened to be born at worst. I guess in saying that, it's not too surprising that I see that using technology to subvert our present collective individual behaviors that takes advantage of how we operate today could break the apparent deadlock in a way we might not expect to unfold (with the ethics in mind of how some ways of going about such could just enable more of the same).
xexers 11y ago
Is there a better source for this story?
inthewoods 11y ago
I can't see the article when I click through - anybody got a mirror?
- tslug 11y ago
  I also get nothing. Was it taken down?
  - pmh 11y ago
    It's working fine for me (and I have ad blocking + noscript on). Perhaps try the Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahenrycountyreport.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F12%2F01%2Fleaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahenry...
Zigurd 11y ago
At some point the limits of immunity have to be tested. Can a DA operate with such malintent and get away with it? The cops? At what point can they be stripped of immunity and pursued by their former employer for creating a huge liability?
Kinnard 11y ago
I hope everyone who has heard the cry of a victim claiming to have been framed and ignored it reflects on having done so.
cryoshon 11y ago
Systemic severe racism over the course of 20 years? A cover up by the police? Par for the course in the USA, and it's disgusting. The justice system in this town has been an injustice system for as long as some of the people who live there can remember. There may be riots because of this. They will be justified.
krapp 11y ago
Huh. I see someone posted an article about police corruption to Hacker News... - declaration that the US is a police state? Check. - assertion that all police are criminals? Check. - call for the repeal of all drug laws? Check. - argument about whether or not black people are genetically predisposed to violence and criminality? check. Now all this thread needs is a tangential discussion about the Second Amendment and I'll have bingo.
idibidiart 11y ago
Bring the motherblowers down!
anvil_jones 11y ago
What is the Alabama Justice Project. 99% reliability on a POLYGRAPH test? I wish I could read more of the article since it seems to be down and google webcache isn't the best. How come none of these cases have been covered by any other organization? Wouldn't a pending lawsuit against the police organization be news? Surely there is corruption/racism in the police department. But is this article valid?
- rrego 11y ago
  Also to consider is the ridiculous police letter. Which is probably the second most farcical part of this article. I do hope this story is true. It is going to drive the narrative of police corruption for a while, since it's big enough. I do have doubts about its authenticity however.
policestate101 11y ago
America is a police state, ruled by a corrupt elite Willing to break laws, rewrite them if possible, create secret ones when needed, they will torture, murder, commit war crimes, this the country Americans reside in, only they do not want to except this increasingly glaring truth. What happens instead is people who speak out are ignored, derided, and silenced.
- gscott 11y ago
  There should be an upvote by 1k arrow.
- jensen123 11y ago
  America is a democracy, where a majority of the population supports the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism etc.
  - ionised 11y ago
    America was never a democracy. It was founded as an oligarchy in the guise of a constitutional republic.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  actually, what stroke me hard when I went from Europe to US in 2003 for summer student work was how much more repressive the whole system felt. For example coworkers (in central Hollywood) openly afraid of cop cars going in opposite direction, because they had forgotten an unscrewed bottle of alcohol which was not in the trunk. It might very well be we'll be in similar place in 10 years here, but it was quite a shock to experience back then.
  - hsod 11y ago
    Maybe it's just my American blinders, but I don't see how "you can get arrested for driving with an open container of alcohol" is particularly repressive.
icewater0 11y ago
Hmm. I cannot reach the site.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
agf 11y ago
Dan Quan, a co-worker of mine, spoke about his experience as a police officer, and the mentality he saw from other officers, in his talk at Rocky Mountain Ruby, "Policing and Pairing: An Unlikely Preparation" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGaO92oIGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGaO92oIGg). While not the main subject of the talk, it's an interesting first-person perspective.
aagha 11y ago
A ton of the comments below are about how cops are abusing their power. The other group that seems beyond the reach of justice are district attorneys. The system is setup so that DA's watch out for cops' backs and the cops for the DA's. Cops would be less likely to engage in bad behavior if they knew that DA's were less willing to support it. Oh, and then there's the private prison system...
fencepost 11y ago
(reposting a comment I put elsewhere with direct links to exhibit documents) The Internet Wayback Machine has it from today Archive.org has https://web.archive.org/web/20151202021559/http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151202021559/http://henrycount... , this is just one of the versions they picked up today. The article links to a variety of scanned documents hosted elsewhere, which look like excerpts from a full document dump. Exhibits 8 & 9 do not appear to be linked from the Henry County Report page. https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-1 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-complaint-exhibit-2 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-3 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-polygraph-test-exhibit-4 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-5 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-6 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-officer-s-letter-to-city-commissioner-don-clements-exhibit-7 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-letter-to-city-manager-exhibit-10 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-deposition-exhibit-11 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-officers-handwritten-letters-to-us-attorney-exhibit-12-14 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-offic... (edit: note that the documents numbered 144484-144489 are unrelated, mostly Italian?)
williamle8300 11y ago
The website was down. Here's the wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20151201191638/http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151201191638/http://henrycount...
NN88 11y ago
Here are the documents referred to as evidence in case the site goes down: https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-1 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-complaint-exhibit-2 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-3 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-5 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-6 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-officer-s-letter-to-city-commissioner-don-clements-exhibit-7 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-letter-to-city-manager-exhibit-10 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-officers-handwritten-letters-to-us-attorney-exhibit-12-14 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-offic... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-polygraph-test-exhibit-4 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-deposition-exhibit-11 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief...
lectrick 11y ago
Someone whose very job demands a high standard of integrity, acting in this fashion... This is what a horrible human is. Michael Magrino, cited in that article many times, seems to be the person behind http://mandmprivateeye.com/ http://mandmprivateeye.com/ so perhaps he's already moved on from straight-up police work to private investigations.
NN88 11y ago
Heres all the documents: http://imgur.com/a/ODRMh http://imgur.com/a/ODRMh
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rdlecler1 11y ago
This is terrible and it undermines The entire justice system. This is treason against the constitution.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Try googling "Alabama Justice Project", which is the group responsible for this release. I got three news items, 2 from today. One empty blog set up months ago. Poking around some more, I get Jon Carroll, the author of "The Henry County Report", breaking the story from the Alabama Justice Project, which he is also involved in. I see the Southern Poverty Law Center mentioned in a couple of the dozens of copy-links from this story, but nothing on their site. I'm not saying this report is fake, or even trying to discredit Carroll. But you gotta admit this is a really weird way to break a story of such huge magnitude. Sure would be nice to have some other outlet check the facts on this. There are a lot of people implicated in this article, and the author uses phrases such as "slam shut case" which leads me to think he has an agenda. Combine that with the weird provenance? I get uneasy. We got one lone wolf and 47-thousand mainstream news outlets copying what he's putting out. News ain't what it used to be.
tptacek 11y ago
The SPLC has retracted their links to this story amidst doubts about its veracity. https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/672466511886422018 https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/672466511886422018
markman 11y ago
I'm reading these comments somewhat in disbelief. Put the torches down people. You know it took me the better part of 40 years to realize that if one is the greatest guy in the world 95% of the time and a complete asshole 5% of the time guess what that makes you? A complete asshole. Especially ally to the people that only see you during that 5%. Well the same holds true for the police. These travesty could and probably is only perpetrated by a tiny percentage of officers yet Now with the release of this story(has anyone -confirmed it's legitimacy?) at least those commenting have already confirmed judged and condemned the bulk of every police department in the nation as shoot to kill monstrous overlords. I'm sorry but that's just not the case.

579 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

This is an honest question. Realistically, how do we dismantle the police state. It seems like the NSA, FBI, and some not insignificant percentage of the police forces have gone entirely rogue or lost track of their mission entirely. It feels hopeless. So much outrage but so little actual ever changes. Does anyone have any ideas because I'd love to hear them.

bcoates 11y ago
The police are as much members of society as anyone else, and they require the active cooperation of you and the rest of society to survive. You can be part of the solution by depriving them this support: Do not cooperate with them in their job. Do not call them. Decline to speak with them if they contact you. Do not associate with them officially or socially. Do not permit them to shop at your place of employment, do business with you, or join your social organizations. Do not permit their children to be friends with yours.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  very narrow-minded suggestions, some outright illegal. if "non-significant" part of police force is actually gone "rogue", it means rest is +- still OK normal human beings. These actions will alienate also these, fostering "us vs them" mentality. Good job, you just proposed how to make things even worse.
- tempodox 11y ago
  > Do not permit their children to be friends with yours. Seriously?

cheez 11y ago

Thank god for whistle blowers.

kingkawn 11y ago
Aka people with souls
vcdimension 11y ago
We need to ensure that these whistle blower police officers receive praise and reward for their good work, so that they and others are encouraged to do the right thing. They may not get the same treatment from other police officers who might not trust them in future.

gravypod 11y ago

I hope that there will be an investigation into who has been effected by this. I look forward to seeing the details from the future court dates that result from these findings.

banku_brougham 11y ago

If this story is not picked up in the larger media I will be disgusted, but I'm happy to see this come to light. Trust is a huge part of the police/citizen relationship, and it's in a bad state.

umanwizard 11y ago
Anecdotally, this is blowing up on my Facebook feed. My guess is it will get coverage.
NN88 11y ago
it seems to be going viral...I hope it is

cygnus_a 11y ago

Another reason to decriminalize drugs in favor of self-help programs.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Another reason to decriminalize drugs in favor of self-help programs. Decriminalizing drugs may change which crimes are available to use to frame members of a disfavored group, but it is unlikely to change whether bigots in power seek to frame members of their disfavored groups for crimes.
- sophacles 11y ago
  While I agree with this statement - I would like to point out that drug possession is particularly easy to frame someone for, and it has a high payout (that is, long and severe punishment, easy to re-frame someone, etc) compared to other crimes. Making drugs legal would put a huge dent in a lot of problems.
KirinDave 11y ago
Um, if it wasn't drugs it'd be something else. Stolen firearms, maybe? This is a racist domestic terror group using their position of power to target a minority. Please don't shift the focus of this to some other vaguely related issue. The important part: a racist cabal formed a conspiracy to put young black men in jail. Because they hate them.
- jMyles 11y ago
  It's not "vaguely related" - drug laws are, simply put, the current form of jim crow. Drug laws were made for this purpose, and openly so. And it's ludicrous to say that "if it wasn't for drugs it'd be something else." So then abolish all criminal laws which prohibit common, consensual, adult behavior. But drug laws are the whale here, not anything else.
  - simoncion 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago

Note that as well as the DA being complicit, the involved supervising officers are the current department chief and the state Director of Homeland Security.

hackuser 11y ago

It seems like there is a smoking gun in this case (though I didn't review the evidence thoroughly). Widespread availability of video recording and distribution has provided many more smoking guns. Certainly, there are many more incidents where no smoking gun evidence is available. For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. It was and is a grave error - I can't imagine how many victims there are. This raises critical questions: 1) Why did our society make this error? 2) How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues? 3) About what issues are we making the same mistake right now? Also: What do we do about the legions of victims? Ignoring them yet again would be a crime.

purpled_haze 11y ago
> What do we do about the legions of victims? Financial compensation and putting those that caused the injustice in prison equaling the total of all of the terms served by all of those affected. That is as close to justice as could be had. As for preventing corruption- there's no way to do this as long as there are people that can be corrupted. You can add oversight. You could replace the entire force with minorities. But if there are people that are corruptible, these efforts will fail. The best that you can do is to (1) promote ethics education in schools and flag students that reject it/scoff at it as they may need much more help and (2) don't divorce government and schools from religion which is an additional force for peer-pressure and community support against corruption.
- salgernon 11y ago
  Which religion? Which denomination of that religion? What if that religion has reprehensible beliefs?
  - purpled_haze 11y ago
    Do you disagree that religion in any form can be used as a force against corruption? If you work to exclude religion as a whole because some religions or those practicing them have certain beliefs you may find reprehensible, you also exclude other moral and ethical beliefs, peer pressure, and community support that would combat corruption.

NN88 11y ago

This is explosive. The white supremacist implications here are undeniable. Director of AL homeland security? Good god This is LITERALLY as bad as it looks. The evidence is astounding.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mintplant 11y ago
> Once the examiner has an adequate series of charts to evaluate, he will begin the scoring process. This is done most often using a numerical scoring method which evaluates the subject's physiological responses to the Relevant and Control questions. The computer polygraph may also use an algorithm developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory or other researchers to score the examination. The examiner can use this algorithm to independently score the examination or for quality control purposes to verify his own determination. http://www.lawofficer.com/articles/2008/12/understanding-polygraph.html http://www.lawofficer.com/articles/2008/12/understanding-pol... If you look closely, you'll notice that that's a copyright notice for a piece of software evaluating the results. The test isn't necessarily being run by JHU APL, but the software was developed there. See also: http://www.jhuapl.edu/ott/technologies/technology/articles/P01178.asp http://www.jhuapl.edu/ott/technologies/technology/articles/P...
- Zigurd 11y ago
  It's still an ugly involvement. Evaluation software isn't going to redeem "lie detectors' as anything other than voodoo. It just gets the stink of that voodoo on JHU.
- oneJob 11y ago
  JHU APL does tons, well primarily, highly sensitive defense contracting work. For instance, you can actually head on over right now to Linkedin and apply for their "Combat Systems Kill Chain Engineer" position. [1] Security is thus a big requirement. From Wikipedia: "APL is primarily a defense contractor. It serves as a technical resource for the Department of Defense, NASA, and other government agencies." There is a very strained relationship with some parts of the JHU community due to this. At the offices where they control the Hubble Space Telescope for instance there is a deli with a tip jar for, tongue in cheek, COINTELPRO. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/70728662?trk=jobs_jserp_job_listing_text https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/70728662?trk=jobs_jserp_...

dzhiurgis 11y ago

After the collapse of Soviet Union, in my country there was explosion of mafia. Police were incapable and this is exactly how police dealt with them. Draconian drug laws meant that cops could easily put gangsters to jail for a long time. Basically if thugs play dirty, cops are playing dirty as well.

jacobolus 11y ago
Are you suggesting that the hundreds of black men falsely convicted and imprisoned by corrupt white supremacist police and prosecutors were culpable because they are “thugs playing dirty”? WTF?
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  I was stating the fact that happened in my country ruled by gangsters who were extorting innocent people. Why you are reading something that is not there?
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    Your three-sentence story was about police battling the “explosion of mafia” using underhanded tactics, and makes no mention of innocent people. The case under discussion is police planting drugs and guns on people who were wrongly arrested and who had no prior criminal record or connection to gangsters, because the police were hateful racists. Since those two scenarios seem completely unrelated, my inference was that either (a) your comment is totally off topic, or else (b) you are trying to suggest that the situations are similar. Option (b) seems more likely considering your statement “basically if thugs play dirty, cops are playing dirty as well” is in a separate paragraph, and the obvious implication is that it applies to both your first paragraph and to the original article. Hence my question.
    - dzhiurgis 11y ago
      Rather than inferring that all thugs are black, you should have inferred that mafia isn't there to help people. Anyhow, sorry if my story isn't interesting.

cjslep 11y ago

Is it bad that this honestly doesn't surprise me? In 2005 my 15 year old self was passing through Northern Georgia to see grandparents, and we hit traffic at the only town stoplight because a Grand Wizard and lots of KKK members were rallying in the streets celebrating running the last minority out of the county. As a white middle class guy, that was quite the contemporarty class on race relations. Racism is alive and well in the South, and it is slow to change because the communities are small and not super interested in the internet justice movements.

calstad 11y ago
Yep racism is only a problem in the South
- epistasis 11y ago
  That's not what he said, nor is it even implied by the comment.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    OP could have mentioned visiting the grandparents without mentioning which state that was. Yes the South has a problem, but drawing lines like this is a way for the rest of us to pretend that we don't. I seem to recall that some issues have arisen in some Midwestern cities recently?
    - cjslep 11y ago
      Sorry if my comment drew lines, that was not my intention. I just wanted to highlight a particularly vivid memory I had at a very impressionable age which has helped contribute to my desensitized reaction to this - the lack of which I am a little worried about.
bcook 11y ago
Can you remember the town? I am from NE Georgia, and while racism is undoubtedly alive, public racism like what you saw is something I have never heard of in my 30 year life-span.

dre85 11y ago

I just read the title and it immediately reminded me of Dave Chapelle..."just sprinkle some crack on them and leave".

rewqfdsa 11y ago

> black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved Black Americans commit a wildly disproportionate amount of crime. Black men make up 1 million out of 2.3 million people in prison. 4.7% of all black men* are in prison. A black man has a 70% chance of being in prison at some point in his life. Are you suggesting the police are framing all of these people? While police conduct exists and is deplorable, my sense as an observer is that the majority of black anti-police activism is about somehow pinning the criminality of the black community on society at large. While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer. Look: if we're going to have a productive public conversation, we need to acknowledge that black arrest rates are in part a result of elevated black criminality and not pin the entire problem on the police. Downvote me all you want: it won't change the facts. Ignoring facts and making policy according to utopian fantasy has never led to human progress, but it has led to a great deal of misery.

Retra 11y ago
If police officers can be made corrupt just by doing their jobs, then we really need to change how that system works.
jacquesm 11y ago
Well, it's not exactly the black people's fault that the police decided to be corrupt. So now they've made their own bed and they'll have to lie in it: if they could have categorically said 'this does not happen' they would have had a strong position. Now everybody that gets in trouble with the police can muddy the waters by saying that the evidence was planted. And in some of those cases that will be the truth. These officers have all but destroyed the reputation of their force and that's something that they're not going to recover easily - if at all. So, let's have a productive public conversation: How will guarantees be provided that something like this can never happen again, how will the people affected by this be properly compensated for the crimes done to them, how will everybody involved in these affairs be charged, tried and punished, from high to low and how will the police force change it's inner culture so that if there is another instance of such a thing it will be immediately and swiftly dealt with before another culture like the current one can take root? All that has nothing to do with the arrest rates of blacks, elevated black criminality and the black community at large, this is a police problem, and only a police problem, the people evidence was planted on are called victims and you don't get to blame those for any misconduct of the other party. I'm assuming that if they plant evidence they plant evidence where-ever they feel like and if they want to arrest people for no good reason that they'll do that too to whoever they feel like. If they do that more often to blacks than to others then there are yet more problems but these are significant enough by themselves to be extremely damaging. > While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer. I can't. If you can't stand the heat stay the fuck out of the kitchen. Good police officers can not function if their not-so-good colleagues spoil the reputation of the whole department like this. To those that downvoted this comment: feel free to explain your reasons.

datashovel 11y ago

Keep the leaks coming world! The joke is that anyone who is truly qualified to run for office doesn't want the job. I hope that the more leaks like this that come out, more qualified people will realize they can't just stand by idly thinking the system will just fix itself. I imagine Snowden leaks alone have gotten far more "qualified" people engaged in civic activities than we'll ever truly comprehend, and have taken a bit of the "fear of rebellion" out of those who might not have spoken up in the past.

jacquesm 11y ago
> I imagine Snowden leaks alone have gotten far more "qualified" people engaged in civic activities than we'll ever truly comprehend, and have taken a bit of the "fear of rebellion" out of those who might not have spoken up in the past. You wish. The reactions vary from 'oh, I knew that all along' to 'well, no matter what I do, the spying will continue' and a whole bunch of shades in between. Then there are those that see Snowden as the great evil (yes, let's shoot that messenger) and would like to see him suffer. On the whole the effect of Snowden's revelation is a big disappointment, I thought far more would happen because of them but maybe I'm just too impatient.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  >On the whole the effect of Snowden's revelation is a big disappointment, I thought far more would happen because of them but maybe I'm just too impatient. I have similar sentiments for similar reasons you list. I also tend to find the battle that people seem to create of "privacy vs security" to be sucking up all the air in the room of plausible ideas that can change the status quo and bring upon more effective societies, with namely corporate sponsors and individuals within governments reaping the benefits (effectively status quo) with most individuals in a given society mostly being taken on a ride with no true internalization of how any of it will enrich their life at best or end up dead from mostly being a function of where they happened to be born at worst. I guess in saying that, it's not too surprising that I see that using technology to subvert our present collective individual behaviors that takes advantage of how we operate today could break the apparent deadlock in a way we might not expect to unfold (with the ethics in mind of how some ways of going about such could just enable more of the same).

xexers 11y ago

Is there a better source for this story?

inthewoods 11y ago

I can't see the article when I click through - anybody got a mirror?

tslug 11y ago
I also get nothing. Was it taken down?
- pmh 11y ago
  It's working fine for me (and I have ad blocking + noscript on). Perhaps try the Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahenrycountyreport.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F12%2F01%2Fleaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahenry...

Zigurd 11y ago

At some point the limits of immunity have to be tested. Can a DA operate with such malintent and get away with it? The cops? At what point can they be stripped of immunity and pursued by their former employer for creating a huge liability?

Kinnard 11y ago

I hope everyone who has heard the cry of a victim claiming to have been framed and ignored it reflects on having done so.

cryoshon 11y ago

Systemic severe racism over the course of 20 years? A cover up by the police? Par for the course in the USA, and it's disgusting. The justice system in this town has been an injustice system for as long as some of the people who live there can remember. There may be riots because of this. They will be justified.

krapp 11y ago

Huh. I see someone posted an article about police corruption to Hacker News... - declaration that the US is a police state? Check. - assertion that all police are criminals? Check. - call for the repeal of all drug laws? Check. - argument about whether or not black people are genetically predisposed to violence and criminality? check. Now all this thread needs is a tangential discussion about the Second Amendment and I'll have bingo.

idibidiart 11y ago

Bring the motherblowers down!

anvil_jones 11y ago

What is the Alabama Justice Project. 99% reliability on a POLYGRAPH test? I wish I could read more of the article since it seems to be down and google webcache isn't the best. How come none of these cases have been covered by any other organization? Wouldn't a pending lawsuit against the police organization be news? Surely there is corruption/racism in the police department. But is this article valid?

rrego 11y ago
Also to consider is the ridiculous police letter. Which is probably the second most farcical part of this article. I do hope this story is true. It is going to drive the narrative of police corruption for a while, since it's big enough. I do have doubts about its authenticity however.

policestate101 11y ago

America is a police state, ruled by a corrupt elite Willing to break laws, rewrite them if possible, create secret ones when needed, they will torture, murder, commit war crimes, this the country Americans reside in, only they do not want to except this increasingly glaring truth. What happens instead is people who speak out are ignored, derided, and silenced.

gscott 11y ago
There should be an upvote by 1k arrow.
jensen123 11y ago
America is a democracy, where a majority of the population supports the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism etc.
- ionised 11y ago
  America was never a democracy. It was founded as an oligarchy in the guise of a constitutional republic.
saiya-jin 11y ago
actually, what stroke me hard when I went from Europe to US in 2003 for summer student work was how much more repressive the whole system felt. For example coworkers (in central Hollywood) openly afraid of cop cars going in opposite direction, because they had forgotten an unscrewed bottle of alcohol which was not in the trunk. It might very well be we'll be in similar place in 10 years here, but it was quite a shock to experience back then.
- hsod 11y ago
  Maybe it's just my American blinders, but I don't see how "you can get arrested for driving with an open container of alcohol" is particularly repressive.

icewater0 11y ago

Hmm. I cannot reach the site.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

agf 11y ago

Dan Quan, a co-worker of mine, spoke about his experience as a police officer, and the mentality he saw from other officers, in his talk at Rocky Mountain Ruby, "Policing and Pairing: An Unlikely Preparation" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGaO92oIGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGaO92oIGg). While not the main subject of the talk, it's an interesting first-person perspective.

aagha 11y ago

A ton of the comments below are about how cops are abusing their power. The other group that seems beyond the reach of justice are district attorneys. The system is setup so that DA's watch out for cops' backs and the cops for the DA's. Cops would be less likely to engage in bad behavior if they knew that DA's were less willing to support it. Oh, and then there's the private prison system...

fencepost 11y ago

(reposting a comment I put elsewhere with direct links to exhibit documents) The Internet Wayback Machine has it from today Archive.org has https://web.archive.org/web/20151202021559/http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151202021559/http://henrycount... , this is just one of the versions they picked up today. The article links to a variety of scanned documents hosted elsewhere, which look like excerpts from a full document dump. Exhibits 8 & 9 do not appear to be linked from the Henry County Report page. https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-1 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-complaint-exhibit-2 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-3 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-polygraph-test-exhibit-4 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-5 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-6 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-officer-s-letter-to-city-commissioner-don-clements-exhibit-7 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-letter-to-city-manager-exhibit-10 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-deposition-exhibit-11 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-officers-handwritten-letters-to-us-attorney-exhibit-12-14 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-offic... (edit: note that the documents numbered 144484-144489 are unrelated, mostly Italian?)

williamle8300 11y ago

The website was down. Here's the wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20151201191638/http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151201191638/http://henrycount...

NN88 11y ago

Here are the documents referred to as evidence in case the site goes down: https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-1 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144475/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-department-internal-affairs-complaint-exhibit-2 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144476/dothan-police-depar... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-memo-exhibit-3 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144477/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-5 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144479/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-report-exhibit-6 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144480/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-officer-s-letter-to-city-commissioner-don-clements-exhibit-7 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144481/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-letter-to-city-manager-exhibit-10 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144482/dothan-police-chief... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-officers-handwritten-letters-to-us-attorney-exhibit-12-14 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144490/dothan-police-offic... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-internal-affairs-polygraph-test-exhibit-4 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144478/dothan-police-dept-... https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief-john-white-s-deposition-exhibit-11 https://www.hashdoc.com/documents/144483/dothan-police-chief...

lectrick 11y ago

Someone whose very job demands a high standard of integrity, acting in this fashion... This is what a horrible human is. Michael Magrino, cited in that article many times, seems to be the person behind http://mandmprivateeye.com/ http://mandmprivateeye.com/ so perhaps he's already moved on from straight-up police work to private investigations.

NN88 11y ago

Heres all the documents: http://imgur.com/a/ODRMh http://imgur.com/a/ODRMh

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rdlecler1 11y ago

This is terrible and it undermines The entire justice system. This is treason against the constitution.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Try googling "Alabama Justice Project", which is the group responsible for this release. I got three news items, 2 from today. One empty blog set up months ago. Poking around some more, I get Jon Carroll, the author of "The Henry County Report", breaking the story from the Alabama Justice Project, which he is also involved in. I see the Southern Poverty Law Center mentioned in a couple of the dozens of copy-links from this story, but nothing on their site. I'm not saying this report is fake, or even trying to discredit Carroll. But you gotta admit this is a really weird way to break a story of such huge magnitude. Sure would be nice to have some other outlet check the facts on this. There are a lot of people implicated in this article, and the author uses phrases such as "slam shut case" which leads me to think he has an agenda. Combine that with the weird provenance? I get uneasy. We got one lone wolf and 47-thousand mainstream news outlets copying what he's putting out. News ain't what it used to be.

tptacek 11y ago

The SPLC has retracted their links to this story amidst doubts about its veracity. https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/672466511886422018 https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/672466511886422018

markman 11y ago

I'm reading these comments somewhat in disbelief. Put the torches down people. You know it took me the better part of 40 years to realize that if one is the greatest guy in the world 95% of the time and a complete asshole 5% of the time guess what that makes you? A complete asshole. Especially ally to the people that only see you during that 5%. Well the same holds true for the police. These travesty could and probably is only perpetrated by a tiny percentage of officers yet Now with the release of this story(has anyone -confirmed it's legitimacy?) at least those commenting have already confirmed judged and condemned the bulk of every police department in the nation as shoot to kill monstrous overlords. I'm sorry but that's just not the case.