Taxpayers are paying former police officer Dave Orlowski $53,063 a year of tax-free disability payments, though he’s fit enough to compete in several triathlons a year. An old court decision permits Orlowski to refuse desk work after since he injured his shoulder in 1999. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (h/t W.J.)]
Posts Tagged ‘police’
Oakland: “Suspect shot by cops sues”
“A drug suspect who was shot and critically wounded after he crashed his car into another vehicle and struck a police officer at the end of a chase in East Oakland is suing the city for $1.5 million.” [Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle]
“Are Cameras the New Guns?”
“In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.” [Gizmodo]
Did cops push him off a roof?
A Brooklyn jury found his story believable enough to award him $1 million, but an appellate court wasn’t having it. [John Hochfelder, New York Injury Cases Blog]
U.K.: “Police criticized for staging mock burglaries”
From the city of Exeter, great moments in community outreach: “police were under fire today after admitting they had been sneaking into people’s homes through open doors and windows and gathering up their valuables into ‘swag’ bags.” The idea was to prod careless owners into improving their security efforts, but “not all residents were happy and a criminal lawyer suggested that the police may have been guilty of trespass.” [The Guardian] Earlier, and nearly as outrageous: Sept. 2 (cops in London borough “remove valuables from unlocked cars to teach the owners about safety”). More: Dueling Barstools on the differences between U.K. and U.S. law, constitutional and otherwise, on this sort of thing.
Update: $4.5 million for NYC cop who fell off chair, shot self
We covered this case a little more than a year ago, and now it’s slated for the city’s appeal, per an update last fall by John Hochfelder at New York Injury Cases. Jury Verdict Review has a version with some details redacted for nonsubscribers.
Boston cops arrest people who videotape their actions
They’re invoking laws against wiretapping, which you might naively think were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa, [Boston Globe/Daniel Rowinski, New England Center for Investigative Reporting; Radley Balko, Reason “Hit and Run”] Now lawyer Simon Glik, who was arrested for recording an arrest, is suing three cops and the city [NLJ]
“Cleveland police no more grasp the 4th Amendment than they do the Rule Against Perpetuities”
Russ Bensing reports on the Ohio criminal-law scene.
NYC’s unfireable “rubber room” teachers
How bad do these stories get? This bad. More: Radley Balko on a Hoboken cop; and commenter VMS criticizes the linked New York Post report.
“We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you’ll get if you have no screening process?”
So asks Charlie Roberts, who ran the testing division for the Chicago Police Department from 1995 to 1999, upon learning that the city is simply going to give up on testing because of the threat of lawsuits. (Fran Spielman and Frank Main, “Police may scrap entrance exam”, Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 6.) The problem is exacerbated by the EEOC’s Four-Fifths Rule—of dubious constitutionality after Ricci—which holds that any selection process that results in a selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group less than four-fifths of the most successful group is “adverse impact” that “constitutes discrimination unless justified.” 41 CFR § 60-3.