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Don't these cops have any REAL criminals to arrest!!!! We are paying these cops $25/hour to $50/hour to bust high school kids for drinking beer and smoking pot!!! I guess the cops love the job. The pay is very good, and it doesn't involve the danger of hunting down real criminals like robbers and rapists!!! http://eastvalleytribune.com/local/mesa/article_9eac3a70-4bf7-11e3-9337-0019bb2963f4.html Party Patrols find, stop underage drinking Posted: Friday, November 15, 2013 8:15 am By Katie Mayer/Special to Tribune Mesa police Sgt. Rob Scantlebury and his squad spend most of their time in plain clothes, quietly working cases involving street drug dealers, prostitutes and thieves. Many times the community doesn’t see them, and isn’t aware of the work they’re doing behind the scenes. But on certain nights each year, they shift their attention to a more visible problem disrupting neighborhoods in Mesa — parties. As co-chair of the Mesa Prevention Alliance, a nonprofit group which aims to combat underage drinking, Scantlebury and a group of five or six officers take to the streets on specific nights about eight times each year for a special enforcement initiative, called “Party Patrols.” The goal of the patrols is to find and stop parties, ensure kids return home safely, cite youth and adults for committing crimes and provide education, said Karen Frias-Long, executive director of the Mesa Prevention Alliance. The Party Patrols are funded by grants from the Office of National Drug Control Policy and Magellan Health Services. Frias-Long often rides with police during Party Patrols and has seen everything from teens passed out from alcohol poisoning to youth with guns at parties. During one party, she saw 200 kids crammed inside one house. “Underage drinking is hard on the youth and it hurts our resources, like our hospitals and our police departments, and it has a domino effect for all of us,” Frias-Long said. On a recent Friday night Party Patrol, Frias-Long said police issued nine citations in connection with a party hosted jointly by a father and his teen daughter. In the backyard, police found teens and young adults drinking alcohol, ingesting Jell-O prepared with hard liquor, and even an 18-year-old with Viagra and condoms in his pocket. “This kind of behavior is a recipe for disaster,” Frias-Long said. But what also worries police and alliance members is that — in this case — the parent was the person who provided the alcohol to the teens. And incidents like this have become more common, experts say. Mesa Prevention Alliance members who track data have learned that about 20 percent of high school seniors in Mesa acquire alcohol from a parent or responsible adult. Because of this trend, the alliance has placed an increasing focus on educating adults and holding offenders responsible. “At the party, one neighbor over in the yard said, ‘I’m just a neighbor, can I leave?’” Scantlebury said. “I told him, ‘It’s your job as a neighbor to be responsible. You as adults are responsible for the youth in your neighborhood.’” Scantlebury said that in some cases, it can take officers up to four hours to return a teen safely to his or her parents, which can be draining on regular police resources. It’s also time-consuming for police officers to administer portable Breathalyzer tests, identify and search youth, issue citations and provide education and resources. The Party Patrols allow officers to focus solely on all of these tasks, rather than responding to other calls for service. “It frees other officers up to do their regular work,” Scantlebury said. Since the start of the fiscal year in July, the Mesa Prevention Alliance has had three Party Patrols that have resulted in 31 citations. Two of these were given to adults suspected of providing alcohol to youth or allowing them to consume alcohol, and the rest were related to underage drinking, Frias-Long said. In the city of Mesa, police handed out 164 citations for suspected underage drinking from the start of this year through the end of September, according to public records. In 2012, police cited 256 youth in connection with underage drinking. But beyond the numbers, Scantlebury really wants the community to understand that adults who purchase alcohol for youth can ruin their careers and hurt their children, and youth who consume alcohol can ruin their lives. “We’ve had to take seven kids to the hospital,” Scantlebury said. Gilbert father Barry Adkins knows firsthand the dangers that underage drinking and parties pose to youth. He lost his son, Kevin, in 2005, after the 18-year-old accidentally drank himself to death at a party where a 28-year-old man lived and allowed teens to drink. “It all starts with prevention at home,” Adkins said. “And if it can’t happen at home, then the schools really need to step up and do it.” Adkins, who wrote the book, “Kevin’s Last Walk,” about his experience walking from Arizona to Montana with his son’s ashes in his backpack, speaks to parents and youth across the country about his loss in hopes of helping other families. “The issue is that there’s this perception in society that we’ve got to go out and drink, but not only are we going to drink ... we’re going to get hammered,” Adkins said. The most important message Adkins said he gives parents is that their children will make a lot of important decisions during their teen years — such as decisions about college, employment and managing money — but the two most important ones are about drugs and alcohol. “You make a bad decision about one of those, and lives with a lot of opportunity can be down the drain in a hurry,” Adkins said. “All other decisions your child is going to make pale in comparison to this one.” The next Party Patrols enforcement in Mesa is scheduled for December. For more information, visit www.mesapreventionalliance.org.
Cops shoot first ask questions later??? "police departments .. train officers to shoot first and ask questions later" In this Mesa shooting the cop used his own mistake of tripping to justify the murder: "Then the detective’s foot slipped. Fearful that Trisoliere would fire while he was out of position, the Mesa detective fired a single shot toward the truck’s back window" http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20131118arizona-officer-involved-shootings-up.html Arizona officer-involved shootings up in 2013 By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Nov 23, 2013 10:47 PM The end was near for fugitive Travis Trisoliere as soon as he hopped in a pickup truck parked in front of an east Mesa home last spring, unwittingly joining a man who was cooperating with police. State and local officers had been searching for Trisoliere, 33, for weeks since he reportedly pulled a gun on a bounty hunter who tracked him down to an Apache Junction trailer. Trisoliere had squeezed the trigger as he stepped out of the closet, but the gun didn’t fire and he ran, according to police records. By the time police caught up with him in late April, Trisoliere’s armed-and-dangerous reputation was solidified, and officers believed it when his friends and his probation officer said Trisoliere would sooner die in a shootout with police than spend a day in jail. Trisoliere died on an Apache Junction street April 20 after police fired on him 76 times in what was the third officer-involved shooting in the Valley that day. More than 50 officer-involved shootings have occurred in Maricopa County as of early November, according to the County Attorney’s Office, making 2013 one of the most violent for officers and suspects in the Valley. There were 47 officer-involved shootings in all of 2012, a mark police passed this year by late September. Nearly all the suspects police shot this year were armed — some with BB guns, some with cars and trucks that made police feel threatened, some with knives, and one with a wooden table leg. [Cops almost always claim the person they shot was armed, and always claim that the cop thought his life was in danger. Of course that's because that line is the only excuse a cop can use to legally justify the shooting.] Arizona law justifies the use of deadly force when an officer fears imminent death or serious physical injury. To date, no criminal charges have been filed against any police officers involved in shootings in 2013, though several cases have pending reviews. Tracking exact data on officer-involved shootings is difficult. Police agencies collect and publish data on most crimes, including when officers are the victims of assault, and the results are distributed annually through the FBI. But there is no similar clearinghouse for officer-involved shootings. The spike in incidents this year in Maricopa County, some say, is because career criminals put behind bars during successful crime-fighting campaigns are beginning to cycle out of the prison system. Critics counter that the trend is further evidence of the militarization of police departments, which train officers to shoot first and ask questions later. Arizona assaults are up The number of officers assaulted on the job has steadily declined nationwide for the past five years, from more than 58,000 in 2008 to about 53,000 in 2012. Data for Arizona tells a different story. Officers here have seen both the number of assaults and rate of assaults increase since 2008, a trend that David Gonzales, U.S. marshal for Arizona, attributes in part to a cycle of criminals who are emerging from prison. “U.S. law enforcement did a very good job of getting career criminals off the street the last few years. But in 2012 and this year, some of those people are back on the streets,” Gonzales said. “I think a lot of that is career criminals who have nothing to lose anymore. They know they are facing long prison sentences (if caught again) so they balance the odds.” More officers in ArizonFa were assaulted with a firearm in 2012 than at any point in the last five years, according to federal data, and suspects had guns in at least half of the shootings in the Valley this year, not including those armed with knives, pellet guns, machetes, Tasers and vehicles that made officers feel threatened. The U.S. Marshals Service, which operates a violent-fugitive task force that includes officers from agencies throughout the Valley, recognized the possibility that agents could be facing lethal force more frequently after a string of shootings in 2011 left nine task-force officers around the nation dead in a matter of months. The federal agency immediately took steps to improve equipment and revamp training so that marshals and their local partners were all operating with the same objectives, Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Hershey said. “It’s bringing us back in as an agency, including our task-force partners, and getting us all on the same sheet of music — focused on officer safety, making sure that our personnel have the best equipment they can have,” Hershey said. “We turned that tragedy into taking our agency to the next level.” Officers and agents working on fugitive-apprehension teams have two key advantages not available to the typical patrol officer, Hershey said: time and information. The task forces, including the U.S. Marshals team that took down Trisoliere, can take weeks to conduct surveillance and work up detailed profiles of their targets, including whether they are armed or have committed violent acts in the past. The information investigators developed about Trisoliere being armed and dangerous led a group of heavily armed state and federal officers to stop a white Chevy truck Trisoliere was riding in near a trailer park in Apache Junction on April 20. One Mesa police officer was standing on the side of his truck with one foot on the open door and the other planted on the truck’s frame. “Police! Let me see your hands!” the detective shouted as he trained his AR-15 on Trisoliere in the passenger seat. “Travis looked back at him, quickly lifted himself up, arched his back, and reached both hands down towards his waist or down out of his view towards the floor,” police reports said. Then the detective’s foot slipped. Fearful that Trisoliere would fire while he was out of position, the Mesa detective fired a single shot toward the truck’s back window. Seventy-five more shots were fired within the next few seconds, spraying the back of the truck with bullet holes and, at some point, killing Trisoliere. No one saw Trisoliere with a weapon, nor would they, according to reports from the shooting, but everyone involved believed he had a gun and was willing to use it. So, the Mesa police detective, fearful that Trisoliere would shoot a weapon no one had seen, fired a single shot. Investigators learned later that Trisoliere had a pistol with him in the truck, with a single, unfired bullet in the chamber, according to police reports. ‘Militarization of police’ In contrast, patrol officers responding to domestic-violence calls or conducting traffic stops are armed with scant information available from a dispatcher and the equipment on their belts and in their cars. But whether officers have months to work up a dossier on a suspect or are reacting to threats that present themselves at a moment’s notice, police are better equipped now than ever before, a trend critics have labeled as the “militarization of the police.” The term could easily be based on visual cues the public takes when they see armored vehicles executing search warrants and officers with ballistic vests and semiautomatic rifles surrounding cars and homes, Hershey said, but those are part of the safety precautions many agencies employ to ensure everyone goes home alive. “It’s just safer,” he said. “If we would have had those tools 20 years ago, we would have used them.” The emphasis on equipment and training has spread into more esoteric areas, as well, that police hope can be used to de-escalate situations and prevent use of force. Phoenix police, for example, coordinate several annual critical-incident training sessions for local, state and federal officers across Arizona, where they engage in role-playing activities and interact with former suspects with mental illness who share stories of how officers who try to communicate with them can cut through the chaos to help avoid violent encounters. But the dozens of officers who successfully complete that training each year are a fraction of the 13,000 sworn police working statewide, many of whom rely too frequently on the tools in their belts to solve problems, said Joel Robbins, a Phoenix attorney who has represented families in wrongful-death lawsuits against law-enforcement agencies in Arizona. “If an officer’s life is truly in danger, he has a right to use a gun in order to protect his family and protect his life,” Robbins said. “But I think that there’s been overall a militarization of the police where they’re no longer perceived as citizens who have a gun to keep the peace; they seem to be warriors in a war against crime,” Robbins said. “They don’t really help people to deal with problems by talking and taking time. They tend to get solved more quickly with bullets, which is not how policing was designed to be.” The public response There has been little public outcry related to the police shootings this year in the Valley. Trisoliere’s shooting in Apache Junction generated some outrage from residents of a nearby trailer park whose homes were struck by some of the 76 bullets agents shot that afternoon, but there was little reaction to the death of a 33-year-old with a dozen prior arrests. Trent Trisoliere said police were so focused on his brother’s reputation and statements he might have made about dying before he went back to jail that he never had a chance to survive his truck ride on April 20. “Travis wouldn’t hurt anybody — he would hurt himself, but he’d never hurt anyone else,” he said. “If you look at his history, he never hurt anybody. He’s a druggie, he stole stuff, but he wasn’t a violent person.” The case that could have the biggest impact on the way local agencies respond to police shootings involves a West Valley incident that garnered little attention and left an officer with a gunshot wound to the face. Police said R.T. McGinty, 27, was riding his bicycle near Third Street and Rose Lane in Avondale on a Saturday afternoon in September when two officers approached him and McGinty began firing. McGinty, who was released from prison in March after a forgery conviction, fired a bullet into an officer’s face before another Avondale police officer shot and killed McGinty, police said. Following the shooting, Ervin Cutright, president of the Northwest Black History Committee, and six other people met with Avondale’s mayor, city manager and acting police chief, who agreed to explore the idea of forming a public-safety citizens review board, among other measures. Cutright said the meeting highlighted steps both sides can take to ease tensions between police and members of the community. “One of the things I talked about was we need to teach kids how to talk to police,” Cutright said. “It’s our responsibility as parents and citizens to teach these kids how to confront police officers. The police are trained — our kids are not trained.”
Departments Are Slow To Police Their Own Abusers http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/police-domestic-abuse/ Departments Are Slow To Police Their Own Abusers By Sarah Cohen, Rebecca R. Ruiz and Sarah Childress John McGauley for The New York TimesDottie Davis, a former deputy police chief of Fort Wayne, Ind., said she was battered by her domestic partner, also an officer. When the police chief in Tacoma, Wash., shot and killed his wife in a parking lot after years of abusing her, the shock from that event 10 years ago mobilized national support for a more aggressive response to domestic violence in police households. While police officers today are more aware of the problem, the following is also true: In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse. In the wake of the Tacoma killing, the International Association of Chiefs of Police strengthened its efforts to persuade departments to adopt a set of model rules on domestic violence in their own ranks. Responding to concerns that domestic violence had long been treated more leniently than other forms of misconduct, the organization called for zero tolerance for abusers, tougher pre-employment screening and a separate set of procedures to ensure rigorous investigation of every accusation. But police departments have been slow to adopt the rules. And while most officials say they treat domestic abuse by officers as they would any other form of misconduct, interviews and disciplinary records indicate that, in fact, punishment is often light and job loss uncommon. Only a quarter of the 56 largest city and county police departments that responded to a recent survey have a distinct policy for domestic violence involving officers. And only one, Nashville, has adopted the entire model policy, according to the survey, conducted by The New York Times and the PBS investigative news program “Frontline.” Three others — Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; and Columbus, Ohio — follow most of its provisions. “Why is it that we’ve taken violence against women and separated that from other crimes?” said Mark Wynn, a former Nashville police lieutenant who advises departments worldwide on the model rules. “Whenever you are aware of a crime and you don’t hold someone accountable, then you are colluding with a criminal. Is that what we want in the ranks of law enforcement?” Experts believe domestic abuse to be the most commonly unreported crime. Police officers can be particularly dangerous because of their access to guns and special training in fighting and controlling those who challenge them. Yet their victims often do not report abuse because they fear retaliation and they believe that their abuser’s colleagues, as well as prosecutors, will not take their complaints seriously. “It’s been covered up since the beginning of time,” said Penny Harrington, a former police chief in Portland, Ore. Ms. Harrington said that even when accusations are reported, prosecutors may be reluctant to pursue them because they need officers to testify in other cases and do not wish to create ill will. What’s more, it is not always clear what happened. One example is the case of Michelle O’Connell, a young woman killed with a gun belonging to her boyfriend, a deputy sheriff in St. Johns County, Fla. After the local authorities ruled that she had shot herself, a state investigative agency disagreed, suggesting that her death was a result of domestic violence. Ultimately, a special prosecutor closed the case without bringing charges. With no central reporting system and little definitive research, there is no accurate way to measure the problem — how often officers abuse their domestic partners and how severely abusers are punished. In some instances, researchers have resorted to asking officers to confess how often they had committed abuse. One such study, published in 2000, said one in 10 officers at seven police agencies admitted that they had “slapped, punched or otherwise injured” a spouse or domestic partner. A broader view emerges in Florida, which has one of the nation’s most robust open records laws. An analysis by The Times of more than 29,000 credible complaints of misconduct against police and corrections officers there strongly suggests that domestic abuse had been underreported to the state for years. After reporting requirements were tightened in 2007, requiring fingerprints of arrested officers to be automatically reported to the agency that licenses them, the number of domestic abuse cases more than doubled — from 293 in the previous five years to 775 over the next five. The analysis also found that complaints of domestic violence lead to job loss less often than most other accusations of misconduct. The cases reported to the state are the most serious ones — usually resulting in arrests. Even so, nearly 30 percent of the officers accused of domestic violence were still working in the same agency a year later, compared with 1 percent of those who failed drug tests and 7 percent of those accused of theft. Among major offenses tracked by the state, only driving under the influence was less likely to lead to a job loss.
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