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The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has released a major report on the Chicago Police Departments 'pattern' of violations of civil rights and federal laws in recent decades.

"Chicago Police Department (CPD) engages in a pattern or practice of using force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution," the DOJ said in a statement.

READ MORE: Chicago cops shoot at someone every 5 days

CPD does not give its officers the training they need to do their jobs safely, effectively, and lawfully. It fails to properly collect and analyze data, including data on misconduct complaints and training deficiencies," said Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.

"And it does not adequately review use of force incidents to determine whether force was appropriate or lawful, or whether the use of force could have been avoided altogether."

The report stated that Chicago police unfairly targeted minorities and used unreasonable force on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, causing a break in police-community trust.

The probe found that Chicago accountability forces are broken and its promotional systems aren't transparent, saidPrincipal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

The city fails to investigate the majority of cases it is required to investigate by law, the DOJ said. It pointed out that, even if the investigation is launched, it is aimed at eliciting information favorable to the officer."

The DOJlaunched the probe into the 12,000-officer force one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country after a police video showing thefatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was released in December 2015. The footage, which shows a white police officer firing 16 shots at a black teenager in October 2014, caused public outcry and protests, and led to calls for an investigation.

READ MORE: Chicago police shootings down since Laquan McDonald's death, but gun & drug violence remain high

The video contradicted the accounts given by Officer Jason Van Dyke, who was involved in shooting, and other police officers on the scene, who stated that McDonald had had a small knife with its blade folded, and thus posed a threat to the officers life. Van Dyke wascharged with first-degree murder earlier in the day the video was made public.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has initiatedseveral police department reforms since the investigation began, includingissuing body cameras to officers on patrol.

Original post:
Chicago police used excessive force and violated rights for decades DOJ - RT

Jan 18, 2017

This week, Note to Self gets in our time machine, back to the court cases that brought privacy from the founding fathers to Google Docs. Stories of bookies on the Sunset Strip, microphones taped to phone booths, and a 1975 Monte Carlo. And where the Fourth Amendment needs to go, now that were living in the future.

The amendmentdoesnt mention privacy once. But those 54 little words, written more than 200 years ago, are a crucial battleground in todays fight over our digital rights. That one sentenceis why the government cant listen to your phone calls without a warrant. And its why they dont need one to find out who youre calling.

But now, we share our deepest thoughts with Google, through what we search for and what we email. And we share our most intimate conversations with Alexa, when we talk in its vicinity. So how does the Fourth Amendment apply when were surrounded by technology the Founding Fathers could never dream of?

With Laura Donohue, director of Georgetowns Center on Privacy and Technology. Supreme Court audio from the wonderful Oyez.org, under a Creative Commons license.

If you want to visit a phone booth, there are four leftin New York City. They're all on West End Avenue, and there's even a kids bookabout them.

The tech show about being human. Hosted by Manoush Zomorodi. Produced by WNYC.

View original post here:
The Bookie, The Phone Booth, and The FBI - WNYC

Our Constitutions Fourth Amendment reads as follows: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As with nigh all the rest of our Constitution, the federal government has long been ignoring the Fourth. Likely the most notorious example is the National Security Administration (NSA)s bulk data collection. Which is the Feds: (S)toring the online metadata of millions of internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency.

The NSA has been amassing so much data on persons notof interest that it built a $1.2 billion data center thats seven times larger than the Pentagon. (If youre questioning whether the Fourth Amendments papers protection applies to digital data imagine hitting Print.)

Let me guess what youre wondering now: How could the NSA possibly be issued this sort of mass, blanket warrant, under the auspices of the Fourth Amendment if millions of these persons are notof interest? I.e. totally devoid of any probable cause? A very reasonable question.

The NSA laid claim to the authority to do this under the auspices of the Patriot Act. Which is not how things are supposed to work. Congress cant pass laws that eviscerate Constitutional protections they must amend the Constitution to eviscerate said protection. So, of course, the poorly written Patriot Act is trumped (no pun intended) by the Constitution.

The Senate has long been ignoring another Constitutional charge to properly vet federal judges prior to confirmation. So our judiciary is addled throughout by men and women in black gowns who shouldnt be. Because they impose their personal policy preferences rather than rule within the confines of the Constitution.

Even under these conditions, we do occasionally get good legal decisions. In May 2015, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the NSAs build data collection is unconstitutional. In response, President Barack Obamas Attorney General Loretta Lynch said: she was unaware of privacy violations under its existing program.

Madame Attorney Generals blissful ignorance is emblematic of the Washington, D.C.-wide problem. (As, too, was her being confirmed AG by a yet-again-too-compliant Senate.)

And, of course, the Feds arent just massively overreaching on domestic data they are overreaching overseas as well.

Under the auspices of the now-woefully-outdated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Feds obtained a warrant against tech giant Microsoft. With which they tried to collect data stored on servers Microsoft has outside of the United States (in this instance, in Dublin, Ireland).

This would be horrendously bad precedent as tin horn dictators the world over could and would start looking to get at data contained within our borders. To allow the Feds to do this to Microsoft would be to allow one of the worst genies ever out of its bottle.

Thankfully, the very same Second Court of Appeals that dumped the NSAs bulk data collection agreed and unanimously told the Feds they couldnt have access to Microsofts overseas servers. (God bless them.)

The very same Attorney General Lynch still bathing in her blissful ignorance has filed to reopen the case. Which brings us to Congress Fourth Amendment reminder we mentioned at the outset. Which would stop Madame Attorney Generals abuse here and a whole lot of abuses elsewhere.

The (Senate) bill is called the International Communications Privacy Act (ICPA). It is, amongst other things, a DC unicorn it is bipartisan. And bi-cameral as members of the House have joined in its crafting.

And it will rein in an overreaching federal government that is forcing companies to violate the laws of other countries in which they operate to give the U.S. government data to which it really shouldnt have access.

Because the Fourth Amendment (and the rest of the Constitution) is limited to our territorial bounds. Else wed better start invading a whole lot of places in which all sorts of our Constitutional rights are being routinely violated in their jurisdictions.

Obviously, the Feds need a reminder of this fact. ICPA is that reminder. It is pathetic that you need a Congressional backstop to a Constitutional right but were dealing with DC here, so we are oft dealing in things pathetic.

I am on the record as being nigh always against lame duck Congressional action. I dont like officials We the People just said should no longer be voting on legislation voting on legislation. But ICPA is a perfectly reasonable exception that proves this rule.

You can almost certainly pass ICPA just with people who will again be here in the next Congress. And ICPA has been languishing for more than two years all the while (and going back years and years before) the Feds have been vastly exceeding their Constitutional bounds. And in the Microsoft case are looking to do so yet again.

So the overreaches must be ended. ICPA ends them. So lets pass ICPA.

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Unfortunately, Congress Needs to Pass This Fourth Amendment ...

Placing a video camera on a utility pole and conducting surveillance can be a useful law enforcement tool to gather information without requiring an in-person presence by officers at all times. But this tool may be subject to the Fourth Amendment restrictions. This post reviews the evolving case law, particularly since the United States Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012).

Jeff Welty in a 2013 post reviewed video surveillance generally, not just pole cameras, and discussed Jones and the few cases decided in light of its ruling. This post, after reviewing Jones, will discuss a few pole camera cases decided in federal courts since his post and whether officers should seek approval from a court before conducting pole camera surveillance.

United States v. Jones. Officers installed a GPS device without a valid search warrant on a suspected drug-traffickers vehicle and then tracked the vehicles movements for about four weeks. The holding of Jones was that the installation of the GPS tracking device on a suspects vehicle was a Fourth Amendment search because it involved a physical intrusion (a trespass) into the vehicle for the purpose of obtaining information. In addition, five Justices (the four who joined Justice Alitos concurrence in the judgment plus Justice Sotomayor, who also had joined the Courts opinion) expressed the view that prolonged GPS monitoring intrudes upon a suspects reasonable expectation of privacy and is a search under the Fourth Amendment. These Justices reasoned that although short-term monitoring of a suspects movement on the public roads may not intrude upon a reasonable expectation of privacy, long-term monitoring generates so much information about a suspects movements and activities that the aggregate effect is an invasion of privacy.

Although Jones involved tracking a suspects movements, it could be used to support a broader argument about long-term electronic surveillance. One could contend that under Jones, while officers are free to observe a suspects residence from the public streets or a neighbors property to see who comes and goes, permanent round-the-clock video surveillance is substantially more intrusive and constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.

Post-Jones cases on pole camera surveillance. The Jones ruling revived the trespass theory in Fourth Amendment analysis concerning what constitutes a search, so the trespass theory and the separate reasonable expectation of privacy theory both must be considered in appropriate cases.

Trespass theory. All the cases that have considered the issue have rejected a defendants argument based on the trespass theory that the installation of the camera was a trespass under Jones, because in most cases the utility pole is not on the defendants property or, even it is located there, the utility had an easement to access the pole as needed. United States v. Nowka, 2012 WL 6610879 (N.D. Ala. 2012); United States v. Root, 2014 WL 4715874 (E.D. Wash. 2014); United States v. Wymer, 40 F. Supp.3d 933 (N.D. Ohio 2014).

Reasonable expectation of privacy theory. I have found one post-Jones cases that ruled that warrantless pole camera surveillance violated the Fourth Amendment under the reasonable expectation of privacy theory. That case is Shafer v. City of Boulder, 896 F. Supp. 915 (D. Nev. 2012), where a pole camera surveilled the defendants backyard without a search warrant for 24 hours a day for 56 days, and the camera was long-range, infrared, and waterproof. The defendants backyard was protected by a solid fence and within the homes curtilage. The court cited two pre-Jones cases in support of its ruling, but not Jones, probably because it was unnecessary to do so based on the facts.

Most of the cases have ruled that warrantless pole camera surveillance did not violate the Fourth Amendment under the reasonable expectation of privacy theory. For example, a recent federal appellate case, United States v. Houston, 813 F.3d 282 (6th Cir. 2016), found that ten weeks surveillance with a camera installed on a utility pole about 200 yards from a trailer used as a residence on a farm did not violate a residents reasonable expectation of privacy because the camera recorded the same view of the residence as that enjoyed by people on nearby public roads. The court believed that the Jones case did not require a different result. Interestingly, a concurring opinion in Houston believed that Jones required the officers to obtain a search warrant.

A few case have upheld surveillance with reservations, being bound by prior pre-Jones precedents. See, e.g., United States v. Garcia-Gonzalez, 2015 WL 5145537 (D. Mass. 2015).

There have been no North Carolina appellate court or United States Supreme Court cases on pole camera surveillance since Jones.

Advice to officers. Nothing in Jones or lower court cases after Jones calls into question the use of surveillance cameras that are focused on public streets, parks, and other public areas. For example, if drug activity is commonplace at a particular intersection, the Fourth Amendment does not preclude placing a surveillance camera on a light pole facing that intersection.

It would not be surprising if in the relatively near future the United States Supreme Court decides a case on pole camera surveillance, and there is a reasonable probability that the Court might rule that extensive video surveillance of a residence requires a search warrant or its functional equivalent, such as a court order. Of course, predicting future Court rulings is highly speculative and subject to reasonable disagreement.

In the meantime, a cautious officer may wish to seek a court order authorizing the use of a pole camera directed at a residence or at least consult with the officers agencys legal advisor or a prosecutor before deciding not to do so. No case or statute sets out the proper procedure for obtaining such an order, but it likely would be similar to obtaining a search warrant or other investigative court order that could be sought ex parte and would need to be supported by an affidavit establishing probable cause. If a court order is sought, the order might limit pole camera surveillance to a relatively short period, such as 30 days, and apply again if additional surveillance is needed.

See more here:
Pole Camera Surveillance Under the Fourth Amendment ...

Legal Topics > Government > Constitutional Law > Constitutional Laws

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects individual privacy interests by preventing unreasonable searches and seizures. An individual's privacy interests are referred to as a person's reasonable expectation of privacy. The Fourth Amendment protects this interest by limiting when and how police can conduct a search of a citizen's house, papers, effects, or physical person.

However, the Fourth Amendment only protects people against "unreasonable" searches. "Reasonable" searches can override a person's Fourth Amendment privacy concerns. Generally, the police need two things before they can invade a persons reasonable expectation of privacy:

Under certain circumstances however, the police can conduct searches without a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment only applies to searches that violate a person's reasonable expectation of privacy. If no reasonable expectation of privacy exists, then the Fourth Amendment cannot protect that search. Courts ask two questions when determining whether a person had a reasonable expectation of privacy:

A search warrant is an order authorizing police officers to search for specific objects or materials at a specific time and location. Police obtain these warrants by showing a judge that they have probable cause to believe that criminal activity is taking place and that illegal contraband will be found at the place to be searched.

The Fourth Amendment does not define probable cause; it is a term developed by judges and lawyers to assist in determining the reasonableness of a search. Probable cause occurs where the facts and circumstances of a situation combined with a police officer's knowledge and experience lead him to believe that criminal activity is occurring. Thus, probable cause is somewhere above a mere suspicion but less than beyond a reasonable doubt.

Generally, in cases where a police officer seeks a search warrant, and his probable cause is mistaken but made in good faith, the search can still be considered valid and reasonable.

A lawyer can help you navigate through the complex legal system and restore your privacy rights. If a search is unreasonable, the police cannot use any evidence obtained in the search. Therefore, it is important to discuss the search with a criminal defense attorney who can evaluate the search procedure.

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Originally posted here:
Privacy Protection - 4th Amendment Legal Issues ...