Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Yet another story where a police officer tells one story on the police report -- after roughing up a motorist he'd pulled over, knocking him to the ground -- and the dashboard video tells the opposite story. And of course, the police fought like hell to prevent the dashboard video from being released -- because when you're lying, it's best to double down and add a cover up your crimes.
Shomari B. Staten of Carrollton finally obtained the police car dashboard video of the February 2009 incident after a Dallas County judge ordered that Carrollton release the video in November. Staten had requested the video under the state's open records act, but Carrollton city officials refused.In the video, a white officer stands over Staten, who is black, and pulls him to the ground.
Then Staten is slammed into a parked vehicle before hitting the ground...
Staten filed a complaint and an open records request to get the video of the incident. Three weeks later, when Staten went to check on the open records request, he said, he was taken to a room and asked if he really wanted to pursue it. Then he was jailed on suspicion of resisting arrest and failure to display a concealed-handgun license.
And here's the story the cop told:
On the video, Staten tells the officer he has a license for a concealed handgun. Staten was carrying a .38-caliber handgun at the time of the incident.Under the state handgun laws at the time, when someone was approached by police for identification, he was required to show the concealed-handgun license.
That portion of the law was eliminated as of September 2009, said Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
According to a police incident report, "instead of producing any ID, [Staten] said, 'Why do you need to see an ID?' "
Tatom observed Staten "suddenly get out of the car and stood up with his left hand in his jacket," the report said.
Tatom approached Staten and "trapped his hand inside of the jacket which was over a pistol in his front left waist band. Tatom then felt the pistol and grabbed it," according to the police report.
Once Staten was on the ground, he said he had a concealed-handgun permit, according to the police report.
In the video, Staten said he had a concealed-gun permit before he was thrown against the car.
What they did was assault, plain and simple. Then they lied about it, then they tried to cover it up. Put the cops in jail. For a very, very long time.
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Five Camden, NJ cops were just arrested for corruption resulting in the release of over a hundred presumed innocent victims convicted and jailed by the work of these police.
The message the force tried to give was that all police should not be judged by the 5 but there are so many examples it get harder to ignore the pattern of crappy law enforcement.
Posted by: MikeMa | March 20, 2010 9:33 AM
Just how dumb does someone have to be to break the law and lie about it when they know it's on video?
Posted by: SimonG | March 20, 2010 10:42 AM
Not very, if he knows that someone's got his back. Stonewall, destroy the video, threaten the person requesting it, ...
Pretty good bet by the odds.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | March 20, 2010 10:53 AM
As much as the police hate that citizens have the right to bare arms, they can't deny this sort of abuse by a government official is one of the strongest arguments justifying the right.
Posted by: gski | March 20, 2010 11:13 AM
Oh sure, let's examine that for a moment. Cops are abusive so we're supposed to... shoot cops? Yeah, that will work out just fine.
Our best protection is the video, the FOIA, and electing leaders who will hold the cops to account. If we keep electing "get tough" leaders who appeal to the base instincts of authoritarianism, we won't stand a chance. Remember that practically every family in Iraq under Saddam owned a freaking Kalashnikov, for all the good it did them.
Posted by: george.w | March 20, 2010 11:40 AM
As much as the police hate that citizens have the right to bare arms, they can't deny this sort of abuse by a government official is one of the strongest arguments justifying the right.
Not all police. A lot of them support concealed carry, though there are exceptions. But yes, law enforcement should be held to the minimum level of power necessary to uphold public order. This certainly includes robust protections for citizen photography and videography, and automatic access to police video.
Posted by: Matt | March 20, 2010 11:43 AM
D.C @3, actually you do have to be pretty stupid, given that such videos almost always wind up getting released eventually. It's not like most states can claim National Security, so usually the most they can do is delay the inevitable.
Before the 2008 DNC here in Denver, I heard one Deputy Police Chief tell her officers "Assume anything you do will be on YouTube 5 minutes after you do it." Good advice.
Posted by: WSfield | March 20, 2010 1:32 PM
We have the technology, nowadays, to both spot and prosecute nearly every instance of on-duty abuse by law enforcement. Officers of the law should be recorded (audio and video) at all times while on duty, with the video fed directly to at least two locations, one of which is NOT under the control of the agency employing the officers. This video should be routinely reviewed (it would be fine to watch it at high speed to skip all the boring driving around and filing paperwork bits) at random for evaluation, and intensively examined whenever there is any allegation of abuse by an officer. The footage (with audio, if relevant--I am not interested in prying into officers' personal conversations unless it is relevant to a crime) should be subpoenable in court cases as evidence for or against officers or suspects.
But police officers will never support en masse a move which would take away their authority to act like dickholes and deny people their Constitutional rights when it's convenient for them.
Posted by: Uncephalized | March 20, 2010 1:38 PM
@#5: The point is not to fight cops, it's to reduce the need for them. Bringing some sanity to the drug war, for instance, would accomplish something similar.
Posted by: Matt Springer | March 20, 2010 1:45 PM
gski #4:
What do they have against T-shirts?
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Posted by: Zmidponk | March 20, 2010 3:21 PM
Once the officer spots the concealed weapon, he probably isn't aware of anything else until the threat is neutralized. I can't do a fine analysis of the video, but the officer may very well believe that he didn't hear about a license until the man was on the ground. In any event, the indefensibly high incidence of police misconduct should not prejudice the interpretation of the treatment of a person with a concealed firearm who got out of his car without being asked to and reached toward that weapon.
Posted by: dcotler | March 20, 2010 5:19 PM
@#9: because of course, a bunch of citizen dickholes with guns will make mes safer.
I'm a gun owner. The last thing I want is many of the 'tards I see at the range packing in public. The only way to get more people to carry is to make it easier and simpler to get the license and that would be a very bad idea. Enough 'tards already pack their surrogate dongs as is.
Posted by: Ian | March 20, 2010 8:07 PM
Here in Providence, RI one detective has been indicted for beating a restrained subject. Ayuh, that one was caught on video and it wasn't a police video but the one watching a public parking lot.
Then of course we have the 3 officers arrested for drug running, with the potential for more. I hear the narcotics unit at PPD is getting mighty nervous.
Then of course we have the State Police Superintendent spouting about how legalizing marijuana will lead to all sorts of doom and gloom scenarios, especially those involving the children.
I wrote the good Colonel and told him that maybe we should drug test EVERY COP IN THE STATE. But then I told him that he might get a nasty surprise if he pushed for that. I know a lot of former cops. If the stories are true, a lot of cops do weed.
Posted by: Tony P | March 20, 2010 8:21 PM
Do you have any statistics to back up that "most?" I suspect without data that there's some pretty serious response bias here since the only ones we hear about are those where the video does get released.
I also suspect that at some point those departments which don't adopt pretty open policies on video records are going to do the same thing that corporations do to avoid electronic discovery: adopt data-retention policies that flush recordings after a day or so unless there's an active investigation that requires them.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | March 20, 2010 8:39 PM
Followup on 14: Peter Watts was convicted of assaulting an officer (the original story is at BoingBoing). It all came down to his word versus the border guard's so the outcome wasn't hard to predict.
Now, isn't it remarkable that there aren't any video cameras covering a high-security point like a border crossing? Hmmm.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | March 20, 2010 9:19 PM
@D. C. Sessions:
Not quite, he was convicted on obstruction for not following an order fast enough after having been punched in the face. Jurors have come forward saying that they didn't like even having to come to that verdict, and that they would have liked to have been trying the guards rather than Dr. Watts.
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1186
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1193
Posted by: Rick Pikul | March 20, 2010 10:07 PM
It's a cop, what do we expect anymore -- the only thing they "protect" and "serve" is their own asses, at the expense of EVERY ONE OF US.
Posted by: WMDKitty | March 21, 2010 4:28 AM
@#4 - Shooting cops would be pretty counter-productive. It's better to expose their collective thuggery to the rest of the world. As Judge Napolitano says, "The camera is the new gun"
Checkout this video:
Santa Fe Police Confront Man for Open Carring Legally
I have an account at Qik.com where I can video events with my phone and stream it real-time to the internet. So if there is a situation where there is abuse, I can have an immediate record of it.
Posted by: Dean | March 21, 2010 10:14 AM
@D. C. Sessions
In addition, they did manage to get video footage to show in court. However, the prosecutors wanted to show an edited version, in which everything was slowed down and the timestamp edited out. They managed get the raw footage instead.
While the initial charges were for assault, given the case against him boiled down to whether or not he complied with an order fast enough, a slow-motion video seems like a deliberate attempt to stack the deck against him.
Posted by: mds | March 21, 2010 10:43 AM
As pointed out by T P and others, Texas is hardly the only state. Here are some comments on the "culture of corruption" in the New Orleans Police Department over a shooting incident in the aftermath of Katrina. http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/03/danziger_bridge_details.html
Posted by: j a higginbotham | March 22, 2010 2:48 AM
@16
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised Ed hasn't said anything about this, considering the trial was in Michigan and it sounds like something that would pique his interest. If Watts' comments about the lack of balanced media coverage are accurate, I think it would be good to have a newspaper up there do a story where they actually talked to people like the jury members and the person accused(now convicted).
Posted by: john | March 25, 2010 4:03 AM
i was wrongfully impounded by Washington State Patrol trooper Dustin Drout Badge# 433. Today 01/14/11 i had court to get impound fee back and he came out and lied Under Oath about my distance from DNR Gate which i hunt. i was at least 17 yards(i checked exactly after court) from gate out of way BUT he, the dirt bag that he is said i was less then 15ft from it.
i heard about Pigs lying under oath BUT i finally experienced it personally.
Posted by: Taras | February 26, 2011 11:52 PM