Milwaukee police fail to follow dept. policy

"An investigation by the Orlando Sentinel found that police cars in Florida are crashing at the astonishing rate of 20 a day, resulting, over a five-year period, in thousands of injuries and more than 100 deaths. The findings led to a three-part series, “Collision With the Law,” which began Sunday, Feb. 12."

"Rene Stutzman and Scott Powers used Florida crash data to identify more than 37,000 police car crashes from 2006-2010. The data, crash reports, traffic homicide files and interviews helped reveal officers were at least partly at fault a quarter of the time, but rarely faced tickets or prosecutions."

"A three-month investigation by the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale found almost 800 cops from a dozen agencies driving 90 to 130 mph on Florida’s highways.
The inquiry, using toll records, found that many officers weren't on duty but commuting to and from work in their take-home patrol cars." Following the Sentinel's report, many police agencies have started internal investigations.

In a three-part, eight-story series, The Post, found that underage drinkers on Ohio University's campus were safer drinking at the bars than they were at a house party. It also broke down a three-year Ohio Liquor Control Commission oversight; allowing a bar to remain open for three-years under an intended suspension. The series also looks at drinking in dorms, which are the location of the most underage drinking citations.

"The call it "piling on": Police officers, looking to pad their paychecks with overtime, add their names to arrest reports and other investigative paperwork, no matter how minor their role. Then, when a case arises in court, they get called to testify - and possibly paid overtime."

The Philadelphia Inquirer has learned that this could have been the case for former Philadelphia Police Lt. Richard Brown. According to Internal Affairs investigators, Brown stretched the truth on paperwork to "rack up nearly $17,000 in court compensation that he wasn't entitled to between 2006 and 2009."

"In the wake of two controversial officer-involved shooting deaths in the summer of 2010, the Las Vegas Review-Journal analyzed two decades of shootings by officers with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

The newspaper found an insular police department that is slow to weed out problem cops and slower still to adopt policies and procedures that protect both its own officers and the citizens they serve. It is an agency that celebrates a hard-charging police culture while often failing to learn from its mistakes."

"The Lens reports that the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office runs a lucrative program hiring out deputies for private security work frequently at far higher pay than their commissioned duties – but it’s not just the deputies who are bringing in a tidy sum. The program provides Sheriff Marlin Gusman with a regular supply of discretionary money. Deputies working on moonlight shifts pay $1 into what’s called the Sheriff’s Detail Fund.

Gusman has used these funds to buy alcohol for parties and gifts for his employees, according to records obtained under the state’s Public Records Act. The state Attorney General has said such spending is an illegal use of public money."

In a recent analysis of 46,000 traffic stops, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Ben Poston found that black resident drivers are "seven times as likely to be stopped by city police as a white resident driver." Additionally, the study found that "Milwaukee police pulled over Hispanic city motorists nearly five times as often as white drivers."

Poston also reports that "the disparities found in Milwaukee are greater than other large metro police departments where traffic stop data is collected, including Charlotte, Kansas City, Raleigh and St. Louis."

"In a multi-day project, Anthony Cormier and Matthew Doig of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigate why law enforcement agencies around Florida employ officers despite cases of serious misconduct in their past, involving everything from violence and perjury to drugs and sexual assault. Many more cases stay hidden because agencies fail to thoroughly investigate or report complaints."

Cormier and Doig used DocumentCloud to embed the source documents, internal affairs investigations, they obtained.