[Qualified Immunity] Case law justifies entering a house without a warrant.

 Series of indictments nearly wipes out Llano Police Department

"The cases that were indicted recently in Llano County involve complicated constitutional and legal principles that lawyers, judges and constitutional scholars cannot even agree on…When you start prosecuting police officers for official oppression based on grey or unsettled areas of law; they are not taught that law in the academy or subsequent training, or there are no policies or procedures available you are soon going to run into a situation where officers will hesitate to act - this will result in an innocent victim or Officer being seriously injured or worse." - Travis Williamson, Officer Grant Harden's Attorney"
...
"Chief Ratliff guilty of all three counts against him in the Nutt case. The jury determined Ratliff omitted the facts related to Nutt's case. The chief had originally pleaded not guilty to the charges. He was then sentenced to six months in jail but the judge probated his sentence for a year so he won't have to serve any jail time.

“My attorney is working on an appeal now, so I can’t say anything just yet,” Ratliff told KXAN when contacted this week. “When it’s all said and done, I have a lot to tell. There’s case law that justifies what we did."

"1st amendment Auditors"

 Leon Valley hit with lawsuit over ‘auditor’ arrests

“It’s not about the First Amendment, not about weapons or open carry,” Salvaggio said. “This is all about money. These people make money posting videos to YouTube or suing local government. They have Go Fund Me and PayPal sites. They’re all anarchists.

“Put some faith and trust in our authority figures”

Fraternal Order of Police director: “Put some faith and trust in our authority figures
Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police,

“There’s no chain of custody with these videos,” Pasco says. “How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.”
“You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens. I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report,” Pasco says. “Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”

Police Dash Cam, Police and Jail surveillance video videos should only be used to protect Police, not as a internal affairs “gotcha-head hunter” tool.

Letter to Editor of NY Post

By Patrick J. Lynch

Manhattan: Your editorial “Body cam blackout” (May 15) got it wrong. Neither the appellate judge’s ruling nor the existing law governing the release of body-cam footage would “bury the videos forever.” Instead, they will force the NYPD and City Hall to follow a clear process before releasing the videos, one that protects the rights of everybody involved. The current law allows a judge to release videos after hearing from and considering the rights of all interested parties, including both police officers’ safety and the public’s undeniable right to privacy in many situations. Police video sometimes captures New Yorkers’ most embarrassing or painful moments — should they or their family be forced to relive those moments over and over?

The federal court ruling mandating the NYPD’s body-worn camera pilot program said nothing whatsoever about the public release of videos. But the NYPD and City Hall, in their rush to roll out the cameras ahead of the federal monitor’s study, have treated the program as a political and public relations tool, ignoring the law and arbitrarily releasing videos to suit their own ends. Nobody should feel comfortable with that approach, especially when a clear and fair process already exists in law.

Patrick J. Lynch, president, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assoc.

Someone should mind his own business.

Police officer who "unlawfully" entered a man's mobile home, tased then arrested a man who told him to "fuck off."for parking his cruiser in the man's parking spot being sentenced to 27 months after saying "I don't need no warrant".
The courts mistakenly rule he very, very clearly did

After Two Decades of Abuse, P.O. Matthew Corder Finally Convicted

Cop are Demigods.

Texas House candidate: Post about “bloody cops” was only targeting “bad cops”

police unions ... insist that their members have special “bills of rights” that shield them from accountability for misconduct.

As is their Right.

Law-Enforcement Unions Have Too Much Power 

by Theodore Kupfer February 2, 2018 4:00 AM

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@theodorekupfer

In serving the interests of cops and prison guards, they hinder criminal-justice reform and encourage irresponsible public spending.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the City of New York, the largest union representing NYPD officers, took a bold step toward reform this week: It cut the number of “courtesy cards” members can give to their friends and family from 30 to 20. If you’ve never heard of these cards, you’re not alone. They allow their bearers to skate on speeding tickets or other low-level offenses, and they’re something of a closely guarded trade secret among officers, perhaps because of the petty corruption they obviously evince. Unsurprisingly, not all PBA members were pleased that this particular privilege was curtailed: “They are treating active members like sh**,” a retired cop told the New York Post.
Public-sector employees who belong to unions are used to special treatment, and police officers, apparently, are no different. There are little or no private alternatives to the services schoolteachers, air-traffic controllers, police officers, and prison guards provide. Their unions negotiate directly with politicians, and can demand policies that benefit them — if not the taxpayers who foot the bill — because no elected official wants to risk a catastrophic strike. The result is a tacit, unsavory bargain in which politicians and civil servants join together to direct public funding and exclusive privileges to the most favored of all interest groups: politicians and civil servants.

Republicans typically cite these arguments to justify their efforts to dismantle such unions. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made this the centerpiece of his career, and prevailed over counter-campaigns by Madison’s public sector and its political allies. But support for law enforcement has become a polarized culture-war issue, and Republicans — Walker among them — tend to leave unions representing criminal-justice workers alone as a result.

This is a shame. Law-enforcement unions shape our criminal-justice policies for the worse and encourage irresponsible public spending to achieve their own ends. “Take prison guards,” says John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School who researches criminal justice. “They’re always going to fight efforts to decarcerate, because if you start emptying out prisons, you’re going to get demands to close facilities.” In New York, for example, the prison population fell by more than 20 percent in recent years, yet the state struggled to close any prisons, wary of putting unionized corrections officers out of work.
These unions also support the laws that contribute to incarceration in the first place. California’s correctional-officers union is infamous for having wielded its political clout on behalf of the state’s three-strikes law. To a certain kind of conservative, that law was a triumph at the time, but in the long term it fueled government’s growth at the expense of defendants.

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Nor are police unions supportive of reform. They insist that their members have special “bills of rights” that shield them from accountability for misconduct. With a voting base that traditionally respects first responders, such concessions can be a political winner for Republicans. But they also have pernicious effects which ought to worry conservatives not comfortable with increasing the power of the state at the expense of the citizenry. According to a police-union-watchdog group, at least 50 cities and 13 states have union contracts that delay interrogations of police officers accused of wrongdoing. Forty-three cities, meanwhile, have contracts with local police-union chapters to erase officers’ misconduct records. Researchers at the University of Chicago have even found that allowing law-enforcement officials collective-bargaining rights increases the risk of misconduct.

Citizens must recognize the insidious influence these unions wield.

So there’s a compelling case that the negative effects of police unions extend beyond bloated spending and criminal-justice policy. As Cato’s Julian Sanchez argues, union courtesy cards, “bills of rights,” and other such contractual handouts reflect and reify a view among public officials “that the law — or at least, some ill-defined subset of it — isn’t a body of rules binding on all of us, but something we impose on others.” In unionizing, police officers and prison guards send a message that they have interests separate from those of the body politic, especially when the demands they make conflict with market realities or policies backed by democratically elected leaders.
A push for criminal-justice reform is reportedly in the works at Jared Kushner’s Office for American Innovation, and there are a few ideas the federal government could consider to weaken the grip of these unions. Pfaff points to a policy in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo offered upstate counties millions of dollars in aid to offset the jobs they would lose by closing their prisons. Providing subsidies to states that decarcerate in order to help prison guards find work is “the kind of thing the federal government could look at,” Pfaff says.
But it would be foolish to suggest that federal policies can solve what is ultimately a local problem. “It’s hard for the federal government to have a big impact on incarceration,” Pfaff points out, because the criminal-justice system is really an amalgamation of disparate state and local policies. Changing those policies would be more effective in weakening the power of law-enforcement unions. But first, citizens must recognize the insidious influence these unions wield. So don’t be too hard on the officers of the New York PBA for letting slip that they expect special treatment: They may just have done Americans an unintentional favor.