He started an investigation for impersonation of an officer. During the investigation he verified the information Merchant gave him during the meeting. He also verified that certain citizen employees of the n Prince George’s County Department of Corrections, including Merchant, were entitled to carry a badge. However, he continued the investigation. He discussed his findings with a deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney who told him he had a good case and he reviewed case law on the matter. Then he went to a magistrate and got a warrant. Merchant was arrested. But at trial the court threw the case out finding that there was no evidence to support the charges.

Merchant sued. Bauer claimed qualified immunity. The District Court denied the claim. In order to find that the officer had qualified immunity the court must find that there was no violation of a constitutional right or the right was not clearly established at the time of the incident. . The constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. The need for probable cause to arrest a person was well known at the time of Merchant’s arrest and no reasonable person would have thought that probable cause existed based upon the information known to Bauer. As a result the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the denial of qualified immunity.

The incident is not particularly unusual. Many jurisdictions have laws against wiretapping and they are being used by police to harass those who attempt to video cases of excessive force, In Illinois Michael Allison was facing 75 years in prison for taping conversations he had with the police and the court proceedings on the wiretapping charge before the law was found to be unconstitutional. In Maryland, Anthony Graber, a motorcyclist was riding down the highway with a camera attached to his helmet. He was stopped and given a ticket. He then put the video on You Tube, He was then indicted by the grand jury and arrested for violating the state’s wiretapping law.

Videotaping of officers has led to the arrest of officers in the Rodney King affair and the conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the killing of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland. Luckily most of the arrests for videoing police officers have not led to convictions or the convictions have been reversed on appeal.

It is perhaps ironic that at the same time police are arresting people for videotaping arrests the trend in police procedure is for the police to videotape their own arrests. The videotaping of arrests not only helps to keep the police honest but it protects them from false claims of excessive force. And of course they help to prove guilt or innocence of the arrestee.

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Now it turns out in a new Federal indictment that Butler apparently bribed Tanabe with a gun and cocaine in exchange for making the arrests. This is the same police department that allowed Phillip and Nancy Garrido to live in their midst with kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and her daughters put away in a back yard shack

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There is no evidence that any of the sixteen received any money for any of their actions. Primarily they were getting tickets removed from court files for friends and relatives. The general pattern was that an officer would be approached by a friend. Then the officer would call an officer who had access to the court files or to an officer who knew someone who had access to the files and would ask that the ticket be removed.

The investigation uncovered 800 fixed tickets. The DA charged 300. Many cases included a number of officers. Officer Eugene P. O’Reilly was charged in 250 cases and other officers were charges in over 100 cases.

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They are accused of smuggling 20 firearms including three M-16 rifles, a shotgun and 16 handguns across state lines from New Jersey to New York. Most of the weapons had obliterated or altered serial numbers.

In addition the officers are charged with interstate transportation of stolen cigarettes and slot machines. The street value of the smuggled goods exceeded one million dollars.

The officers got the merchandise from an undercover officer in New Jersey. Prior to giving the guns to the officers the FBI made them inoperable but the officers did not know that.

New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg is leading a nationwide movement to remove illegal guns from the streets. It is called Mayors Against Illegal Guns and 600 mayors have joined the effort.

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He was fired and convicted on 44 counts in Federal Court. Among the charges were violations of conspiracy to deprive another of their civil rights under the color of law, deprivation of civil rights under the color of law, and robbery and extortion under the color of official right interfering with interstate commerce. He was sentence to life plus 255 years ¹.

Well established constitutional law states that when considering the constitutionality of a search or an arrest under the Fourth Amendment you do not consider the intent of the police officers. (See Whren v. United States) Sease had the chutzpa to argue that because the drug deal which he set up was illegal, it made no difference whether his taking of the drugs and the money was for legal reasons or for illegal reasons. If there was no constitutional violation he could not be convicted of depriving the drug dealers of their civil rights.

The Sixth Circuit held that “[u]nlike the officers in Whren, Sease and his co-conspirators were not engaging in bona fide law enforcement activities. Instead, they were using the appearance of law enforcement activities as an element of their conspiracy.”

The issue in Whren involved the exclusionary rule where officers have to make snap decisions in difficult situations. Here there were no snap decisions, Sease had everything planned out. Furthermore the deprivation of rights statutes require that the court consider the intent of the officer. To obtain a conviction the government must show that the defendant “acted with a corrupt, personal, and pecuniary purpose.” As a result the court upheld the conviction and Sease is going to spend the rest of his life in prison. ²

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Young sued Wells and the County of Los Angeles claiming excessive use of force and false imprisonment. The trial court granted Well’s motion for summary judgement. Young appealed. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the grant of summary judgement as to the false imprisonment claim but it granted the appeal as to the excessive use of force claim.

Considering the relatively minor offenses Young was accused of (failing to use his seat belt and interfering with a peace officer) and the lack of danger to the officer or others the appellate court found that the use of pepper spray and the baton was excessive.

On the other hand the court found that the arrest of Young was legitimate since he failed to comply with Wells’ order to get into the truck and therefore the summary judgement as to the false imprisonment was appropriate.

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Over 700 police departments in the United States now use the small cameras which can be attached to the officers’ uniforms or to the dashboard of the police car.

If used properly, the body cameras serve many purposes. They help to exonerate the innocent and force guilty pleas from the guilty. They are often used in police disciplinary actions either to support disciplinary actions or to justify an officer’s actions. In DUI’s they are provide valuable “testimony” in the form of a video of sobriety tests or driving behavior.

But to be helpful they must be used properly. They must be turned on at the beginning of an incident and left on until they are no longer needed. They must be download promptly and they must not be manipulated.

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Boy, these cops must count for half of the crime in Contra Costa County.

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Also accused of narcotics and weapons violations was another former Antioch police, officer, Stephen Tanabe, who was working for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. As the story went Butler represented women seeking divorces from their husbands. He would arrange for good looking women to get the husband drunk at a local bar. Then Tanabe would arrest the husbands for DUI’s in order to dirty them in the divorce proceedings.

I suspected at the time that Tanabe was being paid by Butler for his services. However I did not have any evidence of such I still don’t have any evidence but apparently the Contra Costa County District Attorney does. They filed charges alleging three counts of obstruction of justice, making false arrests and selling steroids. They say that on at least one occasion Tanabe received money from Butler for making an arrest.

As a result of the investigation fifteen cases have been dismissed and five cases have not been charged, either because the charges were no longer credible or because Wielsch and Tanabe are unavailable to testify.

Tanabe has resigned from the Sheriff’s Department and is fighting the charges. If he is guilty it is hard to think of a more corrupt way to tarnish his former badge than taking money to arrest people who have been set up for private gain. ¹

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