The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

He needs to be registered as a sex offender. Thinks he can just flash that 3 year old pee pee anywhere he wants. That officer needs a commendation.

A 3 year old lacks the legal capacity to be charged with a crime, misdemeanor or felony.

Or dropped for lack of evidence.

The TW is now reporting that the kid's mother was ticketed. I wonder what legal theory makes her criminally responsible for her 3 year old taking a leak. Just goofy.

PIEDMONT, Oklahoma - Piedmont police have fired the officer who ticketed a mom $2,500 after her son urinated in their front yard.

After allegedly being harassed by this officer, the Warden family got justice. The $2,500 ticket was dropped, the police chief personally apologized, and the officer was disciplined.

Both the mayor and the police chief said the officer should have used better judgment. Veteran officer Ken Qualls was suspended on Tuesday, and he was fired on Friday.

"I can't say that I am happy for that, but I am happy that it was looked into and perhaps his judgment was in question. I don't know the particulars of the hearing," said Jennifer Warden, the toddler's grandmother.

In fact no one does, both the mayor and police chief refused to comment, stating it was a personnel matter.

"We did feel like he was out of line, but we never intended to cost him his job," Warden said.

The officer appealed the dismissal to the personnel board.

The mayor did give us a statement Monday night,

"Embarrassment and humor aside, Piedmont had no choice but to look quite seriously at the lack of judgment in this incident."

Oklahoma Waitress Fired Over Facebook Post

OKLAHOMA CITY - A Piedmont, Okla. waitress is causing a national uproar over a picture and comment she posted about some Oklahoma sheriff's deputies.

Ashley Warden posted the picture on her Facebook page Thursday along with the comment "Stupid Cops."
Warden's Facebook post quickly went viral on law enforcement sites, reported Oklahoma City TV station KWTV, and Chili's was barraged with calls demanding that she be fired.

Somewhat impressively, this isn't Warden's first claim to local fame. She's the same woman who made headlines last November when she contested a $2,500 ticket given to her 3-year-old son for public urination, according to Oklahoma News 9.

The officer responsible was ultimately fired, and Warden was issued an apology, but that apparently was not enough to curb her antipathy toward the police.
Said Piedmont Police Chief Alex Oblein of Warden's firing: “I guess that left a bad taste in her mouth for law enforcement in general."

It took them six months to get even...

Traffic violator sues over colonoscopy search.

The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming.  According to a federal lawsuit,
Eckert didn't make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law enforcement.     

Eckert's attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the vehicle, he
appeared to be clenching his buttocks.  Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in
his anal cavity.  While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.
Other responding officers used a drug dog to sniff Eckert’s vehicle, which allegedly alerted to drugs, and then seized the car.   

The lawsuit claims that Deming Police tried taking Eckert to an emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the
anal cavity search citing it was "unethical."
But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City agreed to perform the procedure and a few hours later, Eckert was
admitted.

What Happened

While there, Eckert was subjected to repeated and humiliating forced medical procedures.  A review of Eckert's medical records, which
he released to KOB, and details in the lawsuit show the following happened:

1. Eckert's abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found. 

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found. 

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers.  Eckert
watched as doctors searched his stool.  No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a second time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police
officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool.  No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a third time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police
officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool.  No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found. 

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into
Eckert's anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines.  No narcotics were found. 

Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these
medical procedures.  The hospital did bill Eckert for the procedures, though.

"If the officers in Hidalgo County and the City of Deming are seeking warrants for anal cavity searches based on how they're standing
and the warrant allows doctors at the Gila Hospital of Horrors to go in and do enemas and colonoscopies without consent, then anyone
can be seized and that's why the public needs to know about this," Kennedy said. 

Search Warrant Concerns

There are major concerns about the way the search warrant was carried out.  Kennedy argues that the search warrant was overly broad and
lacked probable cause.  But beyond that, the warrant was only valid in Luna County, where Deming is located.  The Gila Regional Medical
Center is in Grant County.  That means all of the medical procedures were performed illegally and the doctors who performed the
procedures did so with no legal basis and no consent from the patient. 

In addition, even if the search warrant was executed in the correct New Mexico county, the warrant expired at 10 p.m.  Medical records
show the prepping for the colonoscopy started at 1 a.m. the following day, three hours after the warrant expired.
"This is like something out of a science fiction film, anal probing by government officials and public employees," Kennedy said.

No Comment

KOB reached out to the attorneys representing the defendants in the lawsuit and all declined to comment on the situation.  The
attorneys said it's their personal policy not comment on pending litigation. 

4 On Your Side Investigative Reporter Chris Ramirez cornered Deming Police Chief Brandon Gigante. 
"As the police chief what reassurances could you give people when they come through your town that they won't be violated or abused by
your police officers?" Ramirez asked Chief Gigante.

"We follow the law in every aspect and we follow policies and protocols that we have in place," Chief Gigante replied.
"Do you think those officers in this particular case did that?" Ramirez asked.
Gigante didn't answer, instead he referred Ramirez to his attorney.

David Eckert is suing The City of Deming and Deming Police Officers Bobby Orosco, Robert Chavez and Officer Hernandez.
Eckert is also suing Hidalgo County Hidalgo County Deputies David Arredondo, Robert Rodriguez and Patrick Green.
Eckert is also suing Deputy District Attorney Daniel Dougherty and the Gila Regional Medical Center including Robert Wilcox, M.D and
Okay Odocha, M.D.
http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S3209305.shtml?cat=500


Cops, Doctors Repeatedly Probe Man's Anus In Worst Traffic Stop Ever
http://jalopnik.com/cops-doctors-repeatedly-probe-mans-anus-in-worst-traf-1458841658


Traffic stop brings 3 enemas, 2 X-rays and 1 colonoscopy in cops’ fruitless drug search, suit says
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/traffic_stop_brings_3_enemas_2_x-rays_and_1_colonoscopy_in_cops_fruitless_d/

Got nothing. Just nothing. ****walking away shaking head like Aflac duck after talking to Yogi Berra****

Hope the County has real good insurance.  Quick background check:

County population in 2012: 4,794

County owner-occupied with a mortgage or a loan houses and condos in 2010: 587

County owner-occupied free and clear houses and condos in 2010: 719

Residents with income below the poverty level in 2009:
This county:   27.3%

& WHY EVEN HAVE 3-COPS?

Crime in 2004 (reported by the sheriff's office or county police, not the county total):
Murders: 0
Rapes: 0
Robberies: 0
Assaults: 3
Burglaries: 5
Thefts: 4
Auto thefts: 18

GUESS THEY WERE BORED.

http://www.city-data.com/county/Hidalgo_County-NM.html

& he got billed by the hospital!

My brother lives real close to this area and owns the big pawn shop in Silver City. He has to deal with the law enforcement personnel almost daily.

I can't tell any of his stories here. They are listening.

Rape by Instrumentation under Color Of Law ought to have some consequences.  Just sayin.

New Mexico police fired three shots into the back of a minivan that they knew had five kids inside after the mother resisted a traffic stop.
The disturbing dashcam video below shows what went down on October 28 near Taos, NM:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myqwv1xxkv4[/youtube]
Cop Opens Fire at Minivan Full of Kids

Oriana Ferrell, the mom in the video, was pulled for driving at 71 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone. She argued with the officer and then, when he went back to his car to write her ticket, she attempted to drive off. The officer immediately pulled her over again.

The officer then started pulling her out of the car, upon which her 14-year-old son got out of the car to defend his mom. The cop got out his taser and the son retreated, and then a brief scuffle ensued. Then backup arrived and one officer broke a van window with his baton. Another cop fired three shots into the back of the minivan, which contained five children aged 6 to 18.

Ferrell then pulled away - perhaps understandably, given that police had just fired shots at her kids - and led police on a ten-minute car chase. She finally pulled into a hotel parking lot and was arrested. The district court later charged her with child endangerment, resisting arrest and reckless driving.

Former FBI assistant director John Miller was very critical of the officers. "In many departments, it's against policy to fire at a moving vehicle," Miller said. "Now, the officer later said he was trying to shoot the tires out. The problem is, when you're trying to shoot at a moving car, it's inherently ineffective. You almost never stop the car, and it's also dangerous. If you're firing on a car with five children, you're firing in the direction of two other officers who are in front of the car so, I think, for police, the biggest problem is going to be justifying the use of firearms in what is a traffic stop that's spinning out of control."

New Mexico police have recently come in for a lot of outrage after three different stories of unwarranted, forced rectal exams emerged.

Miller continued: "There's a few problems with the woman's actions here. She's a mom in a minivan with five kids. This is like the picture of a soccer mom. She's getting a speeding ticket and not for going 100 miles an hour, it's 71 in a 55. I don't know anybody who is not doing 70 in a 55 today, but instead...she gets the summons. The cop wants her to pay it right there or go back to court and settle this now, and she drives off, so her first mistake is not dealing with it, and dealing with the officer right there, but driving away."

The mom deserves a fair amount of blame for a situation that she could have avoided, but for her actions, Miller said. However, the blame is not hers alone.
"Then you get to the police officers, Miller said. "These are trained professionals. When he is smashing out that window with the baton, remembering this is a speeding ticket here. Rather than lose control of this incident, a trained officer is supposed to be slowing this down, not speeding it up, looking to say, 'I've got five kids in the car, what's at stake here? A speeding ticket. How do I de-escalate this?' And one way to do that is call for backup and get better control of the situation, yet when they get there, it seems to have the opposite effect.

... Even when she flees, in this chase, she's not fleeing to get away from the police, she goes straight to a hotel. She's apparently looking for a populated area with people around because at this point she and her children are fearful of the officers.

The case against the woman is likely to go nowhere in court, Miller said. She's been released on $10,000 unsecured bond, and her son's been released. However the case against the state police on the civil side probably has some legs here.

Police turn routine traffic stops into cavity searches


Timothy Young had just turned into a gas station in the small US town of Lorsburg, New Mexico, and was about to fill up his pickup truck when several police cars pulled up behind him.
The officers from the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office accused him of failing to use his indicator, and asked him whether he was using or carrying drugs.

According to a complaint filed in the federal court in New Mexico, what happened next in the October 2012 incident was nothing short of a six-hour nightmare.

Young, 31, was forced to strip from the waist down in a public carpark and then submit his body to an X-ray and anal penetration at a nearby hospital, all under the supervision of peace officers searching for contraband.
The invasive search that Young alleges he was subjected to is not an isolated incident, his lawyers say, and is part of a larger pattern of cops, eager to make drug busts, crossing the line in order to try to uncover drugs and money at all costs.

“They’re really pushing the envelope on these types of searches of people,” said Joe Kennedy, an Albuquerque lawyer who is representing Young.
Complaints about police conducting public full-body cavity and strip searches, sometimes without warrants, have popped up in Texas, Wisconsin and Kansas in recent months, alarming civil rights attorneys and advocates.

In Young’s case, the officers searched his truck with a drug dog, which "alerted" them that it had detected drugs in the driver’s seat. The police couldn’t find any drugs in the truck, so they ordered Young to drop his pants and underwear in the public parking lot to search him. Then, at 2am, they got a warrant for a body search at the local hospital, where Young was digitally penetrated and X-rayed, according to the complaint.

He was discharged at 4:30am, after cops failed to find contraband in his truck or hidden in his body. Later, Gila Medical Centre sent him a bill for $600.

Just a few months after Young’s encounter, some of the same officers stopped another man, David Eckert, in a Wal-Mart parking lot for failing to yield at a stop sign. The officers searched his car with a drug dog that alerted them to the smell of drugs. But they couldn’t find any contraband on Eckert or in his vehicle, so they obtained a warrant for a search of his body.

Over the course of 12 hours last January, Eckert was forced to receive an X-ray, CT scan, digital rectal exam, three enemas and a colonoscopy under anesthesia, according to his complaint filed in federal court this week. Eckert says the officers laughed at him at times while he was undergoing the procedures at Gila Regional Medical Centre, the same hospital where Young was taken.

Like Young, Eckert was also billed for the procedures — this time for $6,000.
“That’s unbelievable to me,” Kennedy, Eckert’s lawyer, told Yahoo News. Young had no criminal record whatsoever, the lawyer added.

Young and Eckert are suing the officers and the county for violating their constitutional rights, including the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures under the Fourth Amendment. They argue in a complaint filed in a federal court that Young was “raped under the color of law” and that the officers’ conduct “shocks the conscience.”

The Hidalgo County Sherriff’s Office declined to comment on the cases, referring Yahoo News to the county’s attorney who did not return a request for comment.
“It’s something we’re quite concerned and often quite horrified at,” said Ezekial Edwards of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s hard to imagine when it would ever be appropriate, absent some personal threat of safety to the officer, for a court to allow these kinds of intrusions like anal cavity searches.”

Edwards linked the searches to the war on drugs and the nation’s record-breaking high incarceration rate, which he says leads some police into a mentality of trying to lock people up even when it means bending the rules.

Policies of “stop and frisk” in large metro areas like New York City have gained in popularity in recent years, meaning police are searching and stopping more people than ever before. The opportunities for abuse, then, are higher.

“You see an increase not to just stops and frisks but the lengths to which law enforcement will go to uncover 'evidence' of drugs,” Edwards said.

In the Eckert and Young cases, police did obtain a warrant to search their bodies, though Kennedy maintains the warrant would, at most, allow them to do a “squat and cough” type anal cavity search, not an X-ray, digital search or colonoscopy.

Laws on strip and body cavity searches vary state by state, but typically a judge must sign off on a warrant for a cavity search to take place. Medical professionals, not police, generally perform them, and they’re usually confined to prison settings, legal experts say. Guards can request a warrant for a cavity search if they have probable cause to believe a prisoner is smuggling contraband into the jail, for example.

But these laws haven’t stopped flagrant abuses.

Last July in Texas, Angel and Ashley Dobbs were stopped by a state trooper while on a road trip to Oklahoma, allegedly for littering. The cops then "thought they smelled marijuana" in the car, and subjected both women to a genital search on the side of the road. The trooper, who’s since lost her job, did not even change the latex glove she was wearing in between searching the genitals of the women, the women allege. The Dobbs, an aunt and niece, settled the case for $185,000.

“It’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating,” said Scott Palmer, the Dobbs’ attorney. “I was proud of them, they didn’t use pseudonyms, but now their names are forever known as victims of this very intimate, nasty search and it happened on video and it’s all over the world.”

The shame associated with the searches may prevent more victims from coming forward, Palmer said.

Six weeks earlier, two other Texas women say they were genitally probed by state troopers near Houston after they were pulled over for speeding and told there was "a marijuana smell" in their car. Texas’ Department of Public Safety says troopers are prohibited from these types of searches and that there is no policy encouraging them.

Meanwhile, the city of Milwaukee is still defending itself against lawsuits from people who accuse eight officers of illegally searching their genitals and rectum to find drugs and other contraband, going back as far as 2009. At least four officers have lost their jobs in the case, and civil cases are pending. One of the victims was only 15 when he was illegally anally probed by an officer.

Tim Lynch, who runs the Project on Criminal Justice for the libertarian Cato Institute, said people who feel they are being searched illegally by officers should be clear that they are not consenting.
“When you’re in the situation all you can do is make it absolutely crystal clear that you’re not consenting to these types of invasive procedures,” he said.

Oh I really hope there is something else, doubtful it could justify the officer's actions, but at least give some kind of insight of why he's picking on that family.  That's just terrible!!  I'll have to remember to see what happens with this story.  Sad!