A former Viterbo University student has been charged with one misdemeanor count of negligent handling of burning materials after police say she set a fire inside her dorm in April for “attention purposes.”
Victoria Unanka, if convicted, faces a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine or nine months in prison, or both, according to the criminal complaint.
Unanka, through her attorney, entered a not guilty plea at a court hearing on Wednesday, the La Crosse Tribune reports.
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Ramped-up security during the three weeks of Derek Chauvin’s trial cost taxpayers nearly $3 million, the Minneapolis Police Department said Thursday.
Citing unexpected costs, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo asked the Minneapolis City Council for an additional $5 million.
The MPD has 632 sworn officers, down from 845 one year ago — a 25% drop — to protect the 425,000-person city that’s fighting spiking violent crime.
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Brooklyn Center, Minnesota implemented new changes to policing in a 4-1 vote in the city council meeting, following the death of Daunte Wright in April. The changes include a new department of public safety that will have unarmed officers to conduct traffic stops and a mental health division.
Daunte Wright was shot and killed by former Brooklyn Park Police Officer Kim Potter, after it was discovered he had a warrant out for his arrest. Wright did not follow police instructions and reentered his vehicle while the officers were attempting to arrest him.
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The brother of Winston Smith, a wanted man who was shot and killed in an officer involved shooting incident after he pulled a gun on police, has spoken out about the need for police. He feels his brother’s death was an injustice but wants to work together with police to improve the justice system.
Winston Smith’s brother, Kidale Smith, was seen shaking hands and hugging police officers who were out on the streets monitoring the protests that had been taking place since his brother’s death. He reported that he felt like maybe the police officers needed a voice too.
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Texas officials said Thursday they’re worried about dramatic spikes in drug overdose deaths in some areas of the state as illegal border crossings and drug trafficking have picked up since President Joe Biden took office.
Gov. Greg Abbott joined Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McCraw and Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn on Thursday in Fort Worthto provide an update on the border crisis.
“We’re heading for a 50 percent increase in overdose deaths in Tarrant County alone,” Waybourn warned, noting that the amount of drugs flooding into Tarrant County has skyrocketed even with DPS intervention.
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An apparent drive-by shooting at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis was caught live by news cameras Tuesday morning, as Black Lives Matter supporters gathered to observe the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death in police hands.
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A St. Paul public safety committee recently called for a slew of operations to be moved out of the police department and into non-law enforcement divisions.
The St. Paul “Community-First Public Safety Commission” advised the city to “rethink” its response to certain service calls and provided specific measures to implement in traffic-stop scenarios. The commission was appointed by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and is headed by the Citizens League, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization.
The commission’s recommendations call for ending the practice of pulling people over for “motor vehicle repair notices” and “other moving violations.” Instead, police should “utilize a mailed citation,” according to the commission. Repair notices include broken lights, turn-signal malfunctions, and expired tabs, to name a few.
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Over 200 police officers have left, are in the process of leaving, or are on extended leave from the Minneapolis Police Department.
Several police officers explained it is due to lack of support and the feeling that they had to defend themselves throughout the course of the riots that plagued the city last summer, according to a report from WCCO in Minneapolis.
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An adjunct professor berated a student in her class after he expressed support for law enforcement.
Cypress College student Braden Ellis delivered a presentation about cancel culture during a Zoom communications class. In a phone interview with Campus Reform, Ellis affirmed The Daily Wire’s report that he had been discussing the attempted cancellation of “Paw Patrol” during the presentation.
“So you brought up the police in your speech a few times. So, what is your main concern?” asked the adjunct professor. “Since, I mean, honestly… the issue is systemic. Because the whole reason we have police departments in the first place, where does it stem from? What’s our history? Going back to what [another classmate] was talking about, what does it stem from? It stems from people in the south wanting to capture runaway slaves.”
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Multiple police departments told the Daily Caller News Foundation that recruiting officers is not an issue, but budget constraints have limited their ability to increase manpower.
Almost a year after George Floyd died during an arrest where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes resulting in nationwide civil unrest and the defund the police movement, most police departments say they still have a sufficient number of candidates but lack the funding to recruit them.
“The Minneapolis Police Department, like every department, has seen a drop in application numbers over the last several years,” Minneapolis Police Department Spokesperson John Elder told the DCNF. “Whereas we have seen a reduction in applications, we still have ample qualified candidates who wish to be Minneapolis Police Officers and Cadets [and the department’s] recruitment efforts are ongoing.”
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Michigan police forces appear to be faring better than those in Minnesota’s largest metro areas after a year troubled by controversial and tragic police encounters ending in death.
In many metropolitan cities across the United States, violent crime increased in 2020. In Detroit, there were 327 murders, up 19% from 2019, and 1,173 non-fatal shootings, up 53%, Michigan Public Radio reported.
Michigan State Police (MSP) spokeswoman Shanon Banner said the state police tracks enlistment numbers by fiscal year, but it’s difficult to conclude whether retirements are “up” or “down” from year to year because retirements are largely based on when recruits become eligible for retirement.
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Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris asking them to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
The cartels are bringing terror into Texas communities, Abbott said in his fourth letter to the administration about the border crisis.
The cartels “smuggle narcotics and weapons into the United States to fund their illegal enterprises,” Abbott writes. “They force women and children into human and sex trafficking – enriching themselves on the misery and enslavement of immigrants. They murder innocent people, including women and children. These Mexican drug cartels are foreign terrorist organizations, and it is time for the federal government to designate them as such.”
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Calls to defund the police have once again been thrust into the national spotlight after a string of high profile police shootings, but data show the rallying cry for police reformers may not hold water.
After the death of Daunte Wright at the hands of police in Minnesota, U.S. Rep. Rashida Talib, D-Mich., made headlines this week for posting on Twitter: “No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”
Later in the week, Senate lawmakers blasted President Joe Biden’s Justice Department Civil Rights Division nominee Kristen Clarke after reports that she wrote an op-ed calling for defunding the police. Clarke pushed back, arguing that was not the point of her writing.
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The Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to settle George Floyd’s wrongful death lawsuit for a record $27 million.
The settlement was announced on Friday.
In a viral May 2020 video, former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, causing police brutality protests worldwide. Floyd died later that night. By the end of the week, the three officers involved were fired.
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The House of Representatives passed the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021” this week, the bill’s proponents rightly decry pernicious stereotyping and generalizing based on race.
Yet many of those who rightly condemn such dangerous biases, and the lies they are built upon, make misleading claims of their own to advance another reckless bigotry — anti-police bias.
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On Friday, the Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to ban facial recognition technology for police use.
The determination prohibits every city department from acquiring, obtaining, or using facial recognition technology or information derived from the technology.
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Just a few short years ago, the newly appointed deputy spokesperson for the Biden State Department wrote that the police posed the largest national security threat in America—greater than that of ISIS or Russia—because they were committing “genocide” against Black Americans.
In a 2016 Facebook post, uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon, Jalina Porter wrote: “The largest threat to US national security are US cops. Not ISIS, not Russian hackers, not anyone or anything else. If ya’ll don’t wake up and rise up to this truth, the genocide against Blacks in America will continue until we are near extinct. That’s not the world I seek to live in or create for myself and those around me.”
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State Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) on Wednesday filed SB 29 which would allow first responders to live where they choose, the Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus said in a statement.
Kelsey posted on the caucus’ Facebook page, “This is a public safety bill. It will enable us to hire more police officers, which will help us fight our rising crime rates.”
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After another violent weekend with a number of homicides and shootings in the city, the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) called out Police Commissioner Michael Harrison Tuesday morning, saying more officers have left the department than have been hired during his tenure, leaving the police department 500 officers short.
WJZ reported there were seven non-fatal shootings and five murders over the weekend in Mayor Brandon Scott’s (D) Baltimore, and another fatal shooting in broad daylight Monday, bringing the homicide total to 325 so far this year.
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Officials in Detroit sued a prominent activist group and several Black Lives Matter demonstrators for damages following allegations of riots, violence and a “civil conspiracy” to defame local authorities.
The suit was filed against multiple individuals and an organization called Detroit Will Breathe, which indicates on its webpage that it plans to use “militant resistance” to enact “meaningful change” for people of color. City leaders allege that the group was part of a conspiracy to damage property, attack law enforcement and incite riot activity, the lawsuit read.
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A professional association of police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country announced more than 2,000 law enforcement officers were injured in the first weeks of protests that erupted over the summer following the police killing of George Floyd, according to a report released in October.
The Major Cities Chiefs Association, comprised of local law enforcement heads from the 69 largest police agencies in the United States and nine in Canada, revealed compiled data from protests between May 25 and July 31 in the association’s member cities.
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Portland State University announced in August its plan to disarm campus police officers by replacing their firearms with tasers, but those plans have been put on a temporary hold.
The plan to disarm officers was announced earlier in 2020 after rallies and protesters at PSU called for justice for Jason Washington, who was killed by officers in 2018. Campus Reform reported on the efforts of PSU students and staff to disarm officers in 2019.
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Protesters in Portland late Thursday set fire to plywood attached to the front door of a police union building in Oregon’s largest city and clashed with officers, who made 14 arrests, police said in a statement.
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A Florida High School has reportedly banned their football team from waving a flag meant to memorialize a police officer after critics said the display is racist.
The Fletcher High School football team had been running onto the field with the pro-law enforcement sign since last year to honor one of the player’s late father, a former cop who died suddenly in August 2019 after 29 years on the job. However the display was stopped this week after complaints, News4Jax reported.
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In the last four months the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University has repeatedly removed pro-police related items after students and activists cried foul.
In June, the school rescinded a job offer to the new dean of its journalism school, Sonya Forte Duhé, after students accused her of past microaggressions and other insensitive comments. Mostly notably, Duhé had recently tweeted support for “good police officers who keep us safe.”
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A New York assistant principal has been placed on administrative leave after he recorded himself at Rochester protests screaming “F-k the police,” video shows.
Ninth-grade Advanced Placement school teacher Steven Lysenko attended Rochester protests where he took a Facebook Live video of himself screaming about police while wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt in a video, the New York Post reported. Lysenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Democrats have always been the party that coddled criminals. It is now the party that canonizes them. While Democrat-run cities burn across the country, Biden concerns himself with masks and Hatch Act violations. He strains at the gnat and swallows the camel.
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An assignment given to students at a Texas school included a political cartoon comparing police officers to slave owners and Klu Klux Klan members, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
The cartoon reportedly depicted five scenes, allegedly starting with a slave ship officer who was kneeling on a black man’s neck and ended with a police officer kneeling on a black man’s neck with text saying “I can’t breathe,” the Star-tribune reported.
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The Democratic National Convention on Tuesday featured a panelist who identifies as a “nonbinary/gender transcendent mermaid Queen-King” and who called for the abolition of the police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prisons.
According to the panelist’s Wake Forest University bio, J Mai is a “Black-Vietnamese, transgender nonbinary/gender transcendent mermaid Queen-King,” who recently became a “licensed minister in the Progressive National Baptist Church.”
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A recent study of collectively bargained deals negotiated by police unions nationwide found these deals often scale back accountability and shield police from disciplinary action.
Before this year, public-sector collective bargaining was banned in Virginia. But after Democrats won control of the House and Senate, party leaders were able to pass legislation to end that prohibition, and Gov. Ralph Northam signed it into law. The law will go into effect in May 2021.
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According to recently released NYPD complaint data, less than 13% of excessive use of force complaints filed against New York Police Department officers is substantiated.
The raw data was published by ProPublica, which obtained it from the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). The database includes every complaint against active-duty officers who’ve had at least one complaint substantiated.
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It is former Vice President Joe Biden, and not President Donald Trump, who has a political problem due to ongoing riots in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd as public backlash against the political left has begun seeping into public attitudes concerning the race for president in 2020.
On July 28, as attention was focused on attempts by radical leftist mobs led by Antifa to burn a federal courthouse in Portland, Oreg. to the ground, Biden issued a weak statement unbelievably blaming President Donald Trump and federal law enforcement for the riots.
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A recent New York Times article by Jeremy W. Peters claims it is a “fact” “that black people suffer disproportionately from police brutality.” He also asserts that President Trump’s rejection of this accusation is “racially inflammatory” and “racially divisive.” To the contrary, comprehensive facts show that this allegation against police is false. Furthermore, this deception has stoked racial divides and driven people to despise and even murder police officers.
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More than 60% of Americans support allowing people to sue police officers for using excessive force against assailants, even if such a move makes the job of police work more difficult, according to a survey published Thursday.
Two-thirds of the public believe civilians should be able to level lawsuits if police officers are engaging in misconduct, a Pew Research Center survey showed. Law enforcement officers are protected through qualified immunity, a doctrine protecting them from civil liability unless they commit clear violations of law.
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The hue and cry for a police-less society is serious stuff. For some advocates, the term “defund the police” refers simply to making victimless crimes (drug use, etc.) the responsibility of social workers rather than police officers. But to others it means eliminating law enforcement entirely.
Is such a condition possible? Can a society function without any law enforcement agents?
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Minneapolis has spent $63,000 on private security for three council members who want to abolish the city’s police department.
Council Member Phillipe Cunningham confirmed the report in a statement released on Twitter Friday night.
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There is a disparity between how Americans view policing countrywide and how they view policing in their own communities, a national poll found.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents said they approved of how their local police did their job, according to the Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. Debate over police reform has been heating up in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis police custody May 25 after an officer knelt on his neck, video showed. Floyd’s death has been the catalyst for protests and riots across the country.
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At least seven Minneapolis police officers have quit and another seven are in the process of resigning, citing a lack of support from department and city leaders as protests over George Floyd’s death escalated.
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As Minneapolis prepares to “abolish” its police force, a recent survey found that most truck drivers won’t deliver to cities with defunded or disbanded police departments.
According to a survey from CDLLife, a resource site for the trucking industry, 79 percent of truck drivers said they will refuse to deliver freight to cities with defunded police departments.
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A majority of Americans disagree with the call to defund the police and the proposed reallocation of funding, a national poll taken amid demonstrations for George Floyd found.
Almost two-thirds of Americans are against defunding law enforcement while 34% agree with the movement, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday. When asked about reducing the police budget to put resources toward other health and social programs, 60% of Americans opposed the idea while 39% supported it.
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America is on the brink.
In the wake of the murder and manslaughter of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, and in the nationwide protests and sometime riots that have already claimed 21 lives, there is a growing movement to defund or even to abolish the police in municipalities across America in pursuit of “alternatives” to public safety.
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An Air Force sergeant and leader in an elite military security force was armed with homemade bombs, an AR-15 rifle and other weapons and had a desire to harm police when he launched a deadly attack on unsuspecting officers, a Northern California sheriff said Monday.
Gunfire and explosives rained down from a hillside Saturday afternoon as Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo fired from the high ground onto police who scrambled to find cover and defend themselves, Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said.
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George Floyd’s death has given new life to a leftist movement to abolish the police, an idea with broad support among the Minneapolis City Council and the progressive wing of the DFL Party.
Just a day after Floyd’s death, state Rep. Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis) released a nearly 500-word statement on “why we talk about police abolition.”
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Support for abolishing or defunding the police is quickly gaining support among left-wingers.
Prominent liberal figures are increasingly embracing the radical idea amid the nationwide protests and violence following the death of George Floyd.
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An increasing number of cities are rethinking the presence of school resource officers as they respond to the concerns of thousands of demonstrators — many of them young — who have filled the streets night after night to protest the death of George Floyd.
Portland Public Schools, Oregon’s largest school district, on Thursday cut its ties with the Portland Police Bureau, joining other urban districts from Minneapolis to Denver that are mulling the fate of such programs. Protesters in some cities, including Portland, have demanded the removal of the officers from schools.
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Minneapolis agreed Friday to ban chokeholds by police and to require officers to try to stop any other officers they see using improper force, in the first concrete steps to remake the city’s police department since George Floyd’s death.
The changes are part of a stipulation between the city and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which launched a civil rights investigation this week in response to the death of Floyd. The City Council approved the agreement 12-0.
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A new poll finds a racial divide among Americans when asked about trust in law enforcement and fears surrounding coronavirus.
When asked if they trusted local police, 77% of white Americans said yes, while only 36% of black Americans agreed, according to an Axios/Ipsos poll.
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Minneapolis Council Member Steve Fletcher said Tuesday that he and his colleagues are looking into “what it would take to disband” the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and “start fresh.”
In a lengthy statement posted to Twitter, Fletcher said the behavior of Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis President Bob Kroll demonstrates that “the department is irredeemably beyond reform.” Kroll was widely condemned this week after a letter to his fellow officers was leaked to the press. In the letter, Kroll said the officers involved in the death of George Floyd were fired “without due process.”
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A New Jersey woman was cited by police for organizing a protest against the state’s stay at home order.
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A working group on police-involved shootings convened by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has recommended implicit bias training for all of the state’s law enforcement officers.
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